Apple Watch 4 represents an epic fail for smartwatches in business

Remember when we thought smartwatches and wearable technology were going to change the world — and the enterprise? That doesn't seem to be happening quite yet.According to much of the consumer tech press, the new Apple Watch Series 4 stole the show from the iPhones announced in Apple’s big fall press event. Reviews were generally positive for the new wearable device, and along with the new edge-to-edge display and other improvements, much of the love centered around new heart-health monitoring features, including an electrocardiogram (ECG), low heart rate detection, and atrial fibrillation (AFib) detection. There’s also a new fall-detection feature designed to automatically summon help if needed.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper Brings Contrail to the Edge, Works Closely With Red Hat

Distributed computing with Red Hat OpenStack Platform allows the Contrail Edge Cloud to remotely manage the lifecycle of compute nodes and virtual machines (VMs) from a centralized data center without requiring co-located OpenStack control plane functions in each of these remote edge sites.

Is Hype the Real 5G Use Case?

I lived through the 3G and 4G hype but I don’t remember the breadth of hype being quite as insane as it is for 5G.

On the ‘net: Too Many Tools

Carpenters always remember one simple piece of advice when they are working on a job: Measure twice, cut once. It’s a little different in networking, though. In our industry, my advice is the following: Measure many times, but never cut. @Search Networking

Nokia, Ericsson Maintain Heated 5G Rivalry

Both vendors have scored significant 5G deals with all of the major U.S. operators but are not afraid to throw shade at each other.

Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung Score Again With 5G 

South Korean operator SK Telecom picked these three equipment vendors for its 5G deployment. The company plans to launch 5G in the first half of 2019.

Scale Computing, APC Build Micro Data Center in a Box

The hyperconverged infrastructure system is designed for edge deployments. It includes automated virtualization, compute, storage, and power management resources, along with built-in redundancy.

Worth Reading: The Edge Computing Wedge

Like an amoeba the public cloud is extending fingerlike projections to the edge in a new kind of architecture that creates a world spanning distributed infrastructure under one centralized management, billing, and security domain. @High Scalability

Linux tricks that can save you time and trouble

Good Linux command line tricks don’t only save you time and trouble. They also help you remember and reuse complex commands, making it easier for you to focus on what you need to do, not how you should go about doing it. In this post, we’ll look at some handy command line tricks that you might come to appreciate.Editing your commands When making changes to a command that you're about to run on the command line, you can move your cursor to the beginning or the end of the command line to facilitate your changes using the ^a (control key plus “a”) and ^e (control key plus “e”) sequences.You can also fix and rerun a previously entered command with an easy text substitution by putting your before and after strings between ^ characters -- as in ^before^after^.To read this article in full, please click here

Linux tricks that even you can love

Good Linux command line tricks don’t only save you time and trouble. They also help you remember and reuse complex commands, making it easier for you to focus on what you need to do, not how you should go about doing it. In this post, we’ll look at some handy command line tricks that you might come to appreciate.Editing your commands When making changes to a command that you're about to run on the command line, you can move your cursor to the beginning or the end of the command line to facilitate your changes using the ^a (control key plus “a”) and ^e (control key plus “e”) sequences.You can also fix and rerun a previously entered command with an easy text substitution by putting your before and after strings between ^ characters -- as in ^before^after^.To read this article in full, please click here

End-to-End Integrity with IPFS

This post describes how to use Cloudflare's IPFS gateway to set up a website which is end-to-end secure, while maintaining the performance and reliability benefits of being served from Cloudflare’s edge network. If you'd rather read an introduction to the concepts behind IPFS first, you can find that in our announcement. Alternatively, you could skip straight to the developer docs to learn how to set up your own website.

By 'end-to-end security', I mean that neither the site owner nor users have to trust Cloudflare to serve the correct documents, like they do now. This is similar to how using HTTPS means you don't have to trust your ISP to not modify or inspect traffic.

CNAME Setup with Universal SSL

The first step is to choose a domain name for your website. Websites should be given their own domain name, rather than served directly from the gateway by root hash, so that they are considered a distinct origin by the browser. This is primarily to prevent cache poisoning, but there are several functional advantages as well. It gives websites their own instance of localStorage and their own cookie jar which are sandboxed from inspection and manipulation by malicious third-party documents. Continue reading

Cloudflare goes InterPlanetary – Introducing Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway

Today we’re excited to introduce Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway, an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) that doesn’t require installing and running any special software on your computer. We hope that our gateway, hosted at cloudflare-ipfs.com, will serve as the platform for many new highly-reliable and security-enhanced web applications. The IPFS Gateway is the first product to be released as part of our Distributed Web Gateway project, which will eventually encompass all of our efforts to support new distributed web technologies.

This post will provide a brief introduction to IPFS. We’ve also written an accompanying blog post describing what we’ve built on top of our gateway, as well as documentation on how to serve your own content through our gateway with your own custom hostname.

Quick Primer on IPFS

Usually, when you access a website from your browser, your browser tracks down the origin server (or servers) that are the ultimate, centralized repository for the website’s content. It then sends a request from your computer to that origin server, wherever it is in the world, and that server sends the content back to your computer. This system has served the Internet well for decades, Continue reading

Welcome to Crypto Week

The Internet is an amazing invention. We marvel at how it connects people, connects ideas, and makes the world smaller. But the Internet isn’t perfect. It was put together piecemeal through publicly funded research, private investment, and organic growth that has left us with an imperfect tapestry. It’s also evolving. People are constantly developing creative applications and finding new uses for existing Internet technology. Issues like privacy and security that were afterthoughts in the early days of the Internet are now supremely important. People are being tracked and monetized, websites and web services are being attacked in interesting new ways, and the fundamental system of trust the Internet is built on is showing signs of age. The Internet needs an upgrade, and one of the tools that can make things better, is cryptography.

Every day this week, Cloudflare will be announcing support for a new technology that uses cryptography to make the Internet better. Everything we are announcing this week is free to use and provides a meaningful step towards supporting a new capability or structural reinforcement. So why are we doing this? Because it’s good for the users and good for the Internet. Welcome to Crypto Week!

A more Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Facebook to Fact-Check Videos and Photos

Fight against fakes: Facebook plans to fact-check videos and photos posted on the social media platform in an effort to combat misinformation, reports the Associated Press on SeattleTimes.com. Fact-checkers will use several methods, including analyzing image metadata, to determine accuracy, and Facebook will label photos and videos that are fakes, the company said.

Regulating IoT: A controversial Internet of Things security bill has passed the California legislature, ZDNet reports. The bill requires IoT device makers to build in “reasonable security,” but the legislation is vague about what that might entail, critics say. Still, it’s the first bill passed in the U.S. that addresses IoT security.

Fake reports of fake news law’s demise: Malaysia’s opposition party has blocked efforts to repeal a controversial law that penalizes the spread of fake news, StraitsTimes.com reports. Critics say the law, which includes penalties of up to six years in prison for spreading misleading information, is an attack on free speech, but the Senate blocked the repeal in a challenge to the new government of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

Angry Birds tackles blockchain: We’ve talked about a lot of potential uses of blockchain technology here, but this is a new one. The Continue reading

Lumina Networks Snags Cisco, Ericsson Executives to Lead Its Engineering

The SDN company hired Cisco's Avinash Parwaney as VP of engineering.

Neat Cisco Nexus Features You Might Have Missed

Lenovo, NetApp team up vs. Dell EMC, HPE on storage

Lenovo and NetApp's storage alliance, joint venture in China, and new series of all-flash and hybrid flash products announced at Lenovo's Transform event, put them both in a much stronger position in the data center against rivals Dell EMC and HPE.The storage offerings include two familes, each subdivided into all-fash and hybrid -flash products, jointly developed by Lenovo and NetApp and available now worldwide. Several of the products support NVMe (non-volatile memory express), the extremely fast communications protocol and controller able to move data to and from SSDs via the PCIe-bus standard. NVMe SSDs are designed to provide two orders of magnitude speed improvement over prior SSDs.To read this article in full, please click here

Why banks didn’t ‘rip and replace’ their mainframes

Consumer demand for instant 24-hour access to personal bank data has taken the financial world in a new direction in less than one generation. Not only do bank IT departments now rival those of software development companies, but banking networks and infrastructure are at least as complex as a tech firm’s. Personal financial information has become one of the most protected and heavily regulated types of data in the world, and security measures and compliance programs consume the largest percentage of a financial institution’s IT budget.Knowing all this, it’s no wonder the “rip and replace” fad of the early 2000’s never materialized in the banking world. With everyone assuming the turn of the millennium meant “out with the old and in with the new,” companies were ready to rip the mainframes out of their infrastructure to prepare for whatever was next. But what came next never really materialized — or continued to prove inferior to the sheer processing power of the mainframe, which remains the only real choice for high-demand business computing.To read this article in full, please click here

Lenovo, NetApp team up vs. Dell EMC, HPE on storage

Lenovo and NetApp's storage alliance, joint venture in China, and new series of all-flash and hybrid flash products announced at Lenovo's Transform event, put them both in a much stronger position in the data center against rivals Dell EMC and HPE.The storage offerings include two familes, each subdivided into all-fash and hybrid -flash products, jointly developed by Lenovo and NetApp and available now worldwide. Several of the products support NVMe (non-volatile memory express), the extremely fast communications protocol and controller able to move data to and from SSDs via the PCIe-bus standard. NVMe SSDs are designed to provide two orders of magnitude speed improvement over prior SSDs.To read this article in full, please click here

Why banks didn’t ‘rip and replace’ their mainframes

Consumer demand for instant 24-hour access to personal bank data has taken the financial world in a new direction in less than one generation. Not only do bank IT departments now rival those of software development companies, but banking networks and infrastructure are at least as complex as a tech firm’s. Personal financial information has become one of the most protected and heavily regulated types of data in the world, and security measures and compliance programs consume the largest percentage of a financial institution’s IT budget.Knowing all this, it’s no wonder the “rip and replace” fad of the early 2000’s never materialized in the banking world. With everyone assuming the turn of the millennium meant “out with the old and in with the new,” companies were ready to rip the mainframes out of their infrastructure to prepare for whatever was next. But what came next never really materialized — or continued to prove inferior to the sheer processing power of the mainframe, which remains the only real choice for high-demand business computing.To read this article in full, please click here