We are all intimately familiar with the experience of “googling” a keyword(s) on a Web browser search engine to find related websites. For example, searching for “best French restaurant” in Google or Yahoo will return a list of many websites that are related to this topic. However, this key feature of the current Web will have to be fundamentally reworked for the new types of devices that are expected to join the Web as part of the Internet of Things (IoT). I mean, just how is it going to work when your fridge needs to do a search for something - and it will before too long?Traditional Web Search EnginesWhen thinking about any technology evolution, it is useful to first understand how the current generation of technology works before we try to predict what will happen in the future. So let’s briefly review how search engines work today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Political action committees aren’t the only entities attempting to influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Supposedly, Russia wants a say in who should lead the country. At least that’s the opinion you could form after reading the many news stories that allege Russia is behind the recent hacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.Attack attribution aside (I shared my thoughts on that topic in last month’s blog), these data breaches raise the question of whether attackers could actually impact an election’s outcome.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The last time I had the occasion to interview Linus Torvalds, it was 2004, and version 2.6 of the Linux kernel had been recently released. I was working on a feature titled “Linux v2.6 scales the enterprise.” The opening sentence was “If commercial Unix vendors weren’t already worried about Linux, they should be now.” How prophetic those words turned out to be.More than 12 years later -- several lifetimes in the computing world -- Linux can be found in every corner of the tech world. What started as a one-man project now involves thousands of developers. On this, its 25th anniversary, I once again reached out to Torvalds to see whether he had time to answer some questions regarding Linux’s origins and evolution, the pulse of Linux’s current development community, and how he sees operating systems and hardware changing in the future. He graciously agreed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four years ago, the New York Public Library began to move its web properties to the cloud.Today, the library system has all of its approximately 80 web sites in the cloud. The library has shrunk the number of on-premise servers by 40% and is running those web properties 95% more cheaply than if it had bought the hardware and software to do it all by itself.The library took a risk on the cloud, and on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it paid off."We've grown but we've grown in the cloud," said Jay Haque, director of DevOps and Enterprise Computing at the library. "Today, we're primarily focused on the digital identity of the NYPL. How our properties look. How they merge and integrate. How our patrons use the site … Without the cloud, we wouldn't have the time to focus on the customer experience."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A plan by the U.S. government to require some foreign travelers to provide their social media IDs on key travel documents is drawing outrage.People who responded to the government’s request for comment about the proposal spared little in their criticisms. They call it “ludicrous,” an “all-around bad idea,” “blatant overreach,” “desperate, paranoid heavy-handedness,” “preposterous,” “appalling,” and “un-American.”But the feds are most serious about it.The plan affects people traveling from “visa waiver” countries to the U.S., where a visa is not required. This includes most of Europe, Singapore, Chile, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand -- 38 countries in total.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As big data initiatives gain steam at organizations, many companies are creating “data lakes” to provide a large number of users with access to the data they need. And as with almost every type of new IT initiative, this comes with a variety of security risks that enterprises must address.Data lakes are storage repositories that hold huge volumes of raw data kept in its native format until it’s needed. They’re becoming more common as organizations gather enormous amounts of data from a variety of resources.The growing business demand for analytics is helping to fuel the move to large repositories of data. And data lakes are likely to take on even more significance with the growth of the internet of things (IoT), in which companies will gather data from and about countless networked objects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There is now a practical, relatively fast attack on 64-bit block ciphers that lets attackers recover authentication cookies and other credentials from HTTPS-protected sessions, a pair of French researchers said. Legacy ciphers Triple-DES and Blowfish need to go the way of the broken RC4 cipher: Deprecated and disabled everywhere.Dubbed Sweet32, researchers were able to take authentication cookies from HTTPS-protected traffic using triple-DES (3DES) and Blowfish and recover login credentials to be able to access victim accounts, said the researchers, Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaëtan Leurent of INRIA in France. The attack highlights why it is necessary for sites to stop using legacy ciphers and upgrade to modern, more secure ciphers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Skyhigh announced today that it has received a patent for its technology, which moves that encryption gateway into a hosted environment.Enterprises looking to protect sensitive data stored in cloud services can funnel user traffic through on-premises encryption gateways that allow them to keep control of their encryption keys. Moving the encryption process to Skyhigh's servers allows for easier access by remote employees, mobile users, business partners, or customers, said Rajiv Gupta, Skyhigh's CEO. He says the company offers these encryption gateways in various locations, allowing customers to comply with data residency and privacy laws.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google appears to finally be trying to clarify its strategies for communication and messaging. However, the company determined it needs more messaging apps — not fewer apps. By the end of this year, Google will maintain at least eight different messaging apps, including Hangouts, Google Messenger, Google Chat, Google Voice, the Jibe rich communication services (RCS) app for carriers, Allo, Duo and the Spaces group-sharing app. Following the early August release of Duo, a new one-to-one video calling app, and the complementary messaging app Allo, which is expected to launch before summer's end, Google says it plans to reposition Hangouts as an enterprise service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A momentous milestoneAug. 25 marks the 25th anniversary of Linux, the free and open source operating system that's used around the globe in smarphones, tablets, desktop PCs, servers, supercomputers, and more. Though its beginnings were humble, Linux has become the world’s largest and most pervasive open source software project in history. How did it get here? Read on for a look at some of the notable events along the way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Founded back in 2013, Shippable is one of the cool kids in the continuous deployment (CD) space. For those unaware, CD is a movement in which development teams deploy code frequently instead of in irregular and widely spaced occurrences. It is a movement popularized by organizations such as Facebook, Google and Twitter that deploy code many, many times a day.Shippable, therefore builds a platform to reduce friction and therefore allow software development teams to not only ship code fast, but far more frequently as well. DevOps, the movement that brought together the development and operations side of IT departments, aims to increase this velocity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A panel of U.K. lawmakers has described as “alarming” that social networking companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube have teams of only a few hundred employees to monitor billions of accounts for extremist content.“These companies are hiding behind their supranational legal status to pass the parcel of responsibility and refusing to act responsibly in case they damage their brands,” said a report released early Thursday in the U.K. by the Home Affairs Committee appointed by the House of Commons.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Moto Z and Moto Mods announcement last month caught the attention of everyone who has followed modular phone designs like Google Project ARA. The intriguing Moto Mods are the most viable modular design yet because consumers can add features to their phones, simply and cleanly without stressing them with a complex interconnection procedure or having to wait for the phone to reboot. The magnetic interface intuitively explains how it works and guides the user the first time a Mod is added to the Moto Z.I sat down with Paul Fordham, lead mechanical architect on the Moto Mods design team at Motorola, to talk about how Moto Mods were conceived and developed into a product. Interviewing software and electrical engineers can be tedious because of the high level of abstraction in their work. It was a pleasure to talk with Fordham, however, because mechanical engineers, like physicists, are tethered to the physical world, making for a very enjoyable and tangible conversation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
French government officials have been revealed as fervent users of Telegram, a messaging app that is frustrating their interior minister with its end-to-end encryption.Telegram's fans include the current head of the French judicial police, Christian Sainte, and his predecessor, Frédéric Péchenard. The app's security has also won over a number of legislators, including the French finance minister, who encourages his team to use it, according to Wednesday's edition of French newspaper Le Canard Enchainé.Telegram claims over 100 million monthly users of its secure messaging app, but it was the action of just one of them -- Normandy church attacker Adel Kermiche -- that prompted French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve to call on Tuesday for investigators to be allowed to eavesdrop on Telegram users' conversations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak may be a beloved figure in Silicon Valley, but he hasn’t had a big voice in Apple product decisions in a long, long time. And right now, that seems like a shame, as Woz is absolutely right to object to Apple’s widely reported plans to eliminate the headphone jack in the next model iPhone.+ Also on Network World: iPhone 7: Why abandoning the headphone jack makes sense +Wozniak told the Australian Financial Review this week, that if the iPhone 7 is “missing the 3.5mm earphone jack, that's going to tick off a lot of people.” And Wozniak doesn’t believe Bluetooth wireless connections—which work with a wide variety of devices—are the answer, claiming Bluetooth doesn’t sound as good as a wired connection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
DCNS, a French submarine builder, has allegedly been hacked – potentially for economic espionage reasons – and 22,400 pages of “secret” documents pertaining to its Scorpene-class submarine have been leaked.The Australian published redacted portions of the leaked documents, claiming to have seen thousands of pages outlining highly sensitive details about systems, sensors, specifications, tech manuals, stealth capabilities, antennae models, electromagnetic and infrared data, conditions under which the periscope can be used and more. The leaked documents reportedly detail “the entire secret combat capability of the six Scorpene-class submarines that French shipbuilder DCNS has designed for the Indian Navy.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A pair of former defense industry cyber security contractors is launching IDVector, a service that creates encrypted connections through an anonymizing network to shield users’ locations and to protect their machines from internet-borne attacks.IDVector Network passes customer traffic through a multi-node encrypted path before dropping it onto the open internet at locations removed from customers’ actual geographical locations.That tunneling makes it difficult for eavesdroppers to snoop content and identify where customers are located, making it possible for customers to use public Wi-Fi safely, say the company’s founders, CEO Ben Baumgartner and CTO Andrew Boyce.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bose Sound Sport in-ear headphones deliver deep, clear sound for the music you love, with a durable design that stands up to the rigors of your day. Exclusive TriPort technology provides crisp highs and natural-sounding lows, while acoustic ports are positioned to resist sweat and weather, and hydrophobic cloth keeps moisture out. Proprietary Stay Hear tips conform to your ears' shape, so they stay comfortably in place all day long. The Bose Soundpsort earbuds currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from 1,200+ people (read reviews) and the Power Red model is currently discounted on Amazon from its its list price of $129.95 has been reduced to $99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco is pretty clear on what you might need to configure in their new Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 1 (ICND1) exam. When you look at the exam blueprint, they use the language configure, verify and troubleshoot as opposed to just describe.What does this list of possible configuration topics look like? Here you go!
IPv4 addressing
IPv6 addressing
Pv6 stateless address auto configuration
VLANs (normal range) spanning multiple switches
Interswitch connectivity
Layer 2 protocols (CDP, LLDP)
Port security
Inter-VLAN routingTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here