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Winning the Blackbird Battle

Winning the Blackbird Battle
US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
Winning the Blackbird Battle

Frequent readers of the Cloudflare blog are aware of the efforts we’ve undertaken in response to our first encounter with a patent troll. We’re happy to report that on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion affirming a lower court decision dismissing the case brought by Blackbird Tech. This is the last step in the process 1, we’ve won.

Winning the Blackbird Battle

In addition to vigorously opposing this case in court, we created and sponsored Project Jengo to push back against the incentives that empower patent trolls like Blackbird Tech. Now that the case is over, we will be wrapping up Project Jengo and will report back with a summary of the Project’s successes in the near future.

But before we move on from the litigation, I want to share a few reflections on this case.

We noted from the very beginning: “The infringement claim is not a close one … if the ‘335 patent is read broadly enough to cover our system (which shouldn’t happen), it would also cover any system where electronic communications are examined and redacted or modified.”

Winning the Blackbird Battle

Our initial observation, which we Continue reading

Managing Automation – Fighting Fear of Job Justification

Dear Employees

 

We have decided to implement automation in our environment because robots and programs are way better than people. We will need you to justify your job in the next week or we will fire you and make you work in a really crappy job that doesn’t involve computers while we light cigars with dollar bills.

 

Sincerely, Management

The above letter is the interpretation of the professional staff of your organization when you send out the following email:

We are going to implement some automation concepts next week. What are some things you wish you could automate in your job?

Interpretations differ as to the intent of automation. Management likes the idea of their engineering staff being fully tasked and working on valuable projects. They want to know their people are doing something productive. And the people that aren’t doing productive stuff should either be finding something to do or finding a new job.

Professional staff likes being fully tasked and productive too. They want to be involved in jobs and tasks that do something cool or justify their existence to management. If their job doesn’t do that they get worried they won’t have it any longer.

Continue reading

We Are on This Road Together

Twenty-six-year-old software engineer Akah Harvey N L has fun building things and sharing his knowledge with local communities in Cameroon. While an undergraduate, Akah took part in the Google Summer of Code, giving him the opportunity to develop an application for one of the largest software organizations in the world. He is now a code reviewer for the online learning platform, Udacity, and leads software development training at Seven Academy in Cameroon. Akah is a 25 under 25 awardee and a cofounder of Traveler, a road safety and emergency app.

I am a software engineer and it’s hard to talk about anything I do without talking about the Internet. Beyond using the Internet for communication – reducing the distance between people with a speed that’s yet unrivaled – lies the gamut of useful services that help me accomplish my day-to-day tasks, like running client-server applications, downloading tools for my work, synchronizing software projects, collaborating on global impactful software projects with people I have never met, mentoring people online who are learning how to code on MOOC platforms, and even traveling the world. The ways in which the Internet simplifies peoples’ lives is difficult to accurately quantify. From social media Continue reading

IBM marries on-premises, private- and public-cloud data

IBM has taken the wraps off of a new multi-cloud integration platform it hopes will help customers manage, secure and integrate data no matter where it resides – in on-premise, private-cloud or public-cloud applications.Enterprise customers are faced with the daunting task of bridging legacy applications with latest cloud service, and many can’t just lift and shift, said Juan Carlos Soto, IBM vice president of Hybrid Cloud Integration. On top of that many businesses are already trying to manage five or more cloud environments, often from multiple vendors, and they can’t keep up, he said.To read this article in full, please click here

IoT providers need to take responsibility for performance

Last year saw the continued growth of enterprises adopting internet of things solutions, with companies harnessing the power of wireless data collection, analytics and connectivity to enhance productivity and efficiency in ways we could previously not imagine.Analysts expect corporate spending on IoT in the U.S. to approach $200B in 2019, with global spending exceeding $800B. As adoption has grown, privacy and security advocates have called for regulating IoT to enhance personal privacy and to strengthen the security of IoT devices and services.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

IoT providers need to take responsibility for performance

Last year saw the continued growth of enterprises adopting internet of things solutions, with companies harnessing the power of wireless data collection, analytics and connectivity to enhance productivity and efficiency in ways we could previously not imagine.Analysts expect corporate spending on IoT in the U.S. to approach $200B in 2019, with global spending exceeding $800B. As adoption has grown, privacy and security advocates have called for regulating IoT to enhance personal privacy and to strengthen the security of IoT devices and services.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Video: Automating Simple Reports

Network automation is scary when you start using it in a brownfield environment. After all, it’s pretty easy to propagate an error to all devices in your network. However, there’s one thing you can do that’s usually pretty harmless: collect data from network devices and create summary reports or graphs.

I collected several interesting solutions created by attendees of our Building Network Automation Solutions online course and described them in a short video.

Want to create something similar? No time to procrastinate – the registration for the Spring 2019 course ends tomorrow.

Watch the video

Check Point GAiA as Personal Firewall on Linux – Part2

This is the second part of the tutorial that aims to deploy Check Point Gaia as a personal firewall under Linux. Let' assume that we have created underlying network infrastructure with the scripts create_taps.sh and bridge_interfaces.sh in Part1. This part goes further and explains Gaia installation on QEMU virtual machine (VM).  We will use the same network topology depicted on the Picture 1.1 of the part 1. Let's start with the point 2.

Picture 1.1 Network Topology

2. Checkpoint Gaia Installation

First, we need to create an empty qcow VM disk with qemu-img utility as we want to install Gaia into this image.

$ /usr/local/bin/qemu-img create -f qcow2 checkpoint.img 100G

As we downloaded Gaia ISO image in the part1 of the tutorial, we can start Checkpoint Gaia VM machine with the ISO attached  to Qemu cdrom.

$ sudo /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4096M -enable-kvm -smp 2 \
-boot d -cdrom Check_Point_R80.10_T462_Gaia.iso checkpoint.img  \
-netdev tap,id=net0,ifname=tap0,script=no,downscript=no \
-device e1000,netdev=net0,mac=00:11:22:33:44:00 \
-netdev tap,id=net1,ifname=tap1,script=no,downscript=no \
-device e1000,netdev=net1,mac=00:11:22:33:44:01 \
-netdev tap,id=net2,ifname=tap2,script=no,downscript=no \
-device e1000,netdev=net2,mac=00:11:22:33:44:02

Below are the configuration options.

Select:
- Install Gaia on this system
- Proceed with the installation
- Keyboard - US
- Partition Continue reading

The Curious Case of the Garden State Imposter

The Curious Case of the Garden State Imposter
The Curious Case of the Garden State Imposter

Dealing with abuse complaints isn’t easy, for any Internet company. The variety of subject matters at issue, the various legal and regulatory requirements, and the uncertain intentions of complaining parties combine to create a ridiculously complex situation.  We often suggest to those who propose easy answers to this challenge that they spend a few hours tracking the terminal of a member of our Trust & Safety team to get a feel for how difficult it can be. Yet even we were a bit surprised by an unusual abuse report we’ve been dealing with recently.

Last week, we received what looked like a notable law enforcement request: a complaint from an entity that identified itself as the “New Jersey Office of the Attorney General” and claimed to be a notice Cloudflare was “serving files consisting of 3D printable firearms in violation of NJ Stat. Ann. § 2C:39-9 3(I)(2).”  The complaint further asked us to “delete all files described within 24 hours” and threatened “to press charges in order to preserve the safety of the citizens of New Jersey.”

Because we are generally not the host of information, and are unable to remove content from the Internet that we don’t Continue reading

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