Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

Webinar: Can Consumers Trust Retailers’ Email? Findings from OTA’s Email Marketing & Unsubscribe Audit

Next Tuesday, 18 December, at 2PM ET (1900 UTC), we’ll be holding a webinar to discuss the results of the Online Trust Alliance’s 5th annual Email Marketing & Unsubscribe Audit.
Two Internet Society organization members from Yes Marketing and Endurance/Constant Contact will co-present with the Internet Society’s Jeff Wilbur, and it should be an interesting discussion that touches on various aspects of email authentication and best practices, online trust, and consumer confidence.
Please register at https://isoc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KQ5DzjOeTEGBF0kjNaff7A. It will be recorded if you can’t make it on Tuesday.
The fifth annual Email Marketing & Unsubscribe Audit analyzed the email marketing practices of 200 of North America’s top online retailers and offered advice on providing choice and control to their consumers as well as technical best practices for retailers and marketers to follow. You can read more about it in Kenneth Olmstead’s recap blog post or view the infographic with key findings.
As always, you can follow along with us on TwitterFacebook, or LinkedIn. We also have a Facebook event for this webinar at https://www.facebook.com/events/1741572979278130/.
I hope you’ll register and join us on Tuesday, and invite you to share this with anyone you think may be Continue reading

Developing Community Networks in Northern Brazil: Strengthening Marginalized Communities

Today’s guest author is Carlos Afonso, executive director of Instituto Nupef.

Our aim is to contribute to the growth and improvement of community networks policies and practices in Brazilian rural areas by strengthening marginalized movements and communities. Our project is supported by the Internet Society Beyond the Net Funding Programme and developed by the Brazil Chapter in partnership with the Instituto Nupef (Center of Research, Studies, and Learning) as well as the involvement of local communities.

Nupef’s role helps to build a statement of needs perceived by the communities involved and an evaluation of infrastructural conditions in the area.  It takes note of conditions for sustainable maintenance of the network; training for local people; constitution of a cooperative-like structure to operate, maintain, and further develop the network; as well as basic training on content development, user security, and privacy issues.

Although access to broadband Internet has been growing in Brazil, there is still a huge gap in marginalized regions and populations, especially in rural areas in the North and Northeast. This is the case of the Quilombola communities living in rural areas with very few telecommunications, and where over 300 thousand women make their living from gathering babaçu palm tree Continue reading

Investigator finds no evidence of spy chips on Super Micro motherboards

An investigation by an outside firm that specializes in all manner of corporate investigations has found no evidence that motherboards sold by Super Micro Computer but made in China had secret chips implanted in them for spying or backdoor access.Like every other OEM, Super Micro, based in San Jose, California, sources many of its components from China. There have been issues raised in the past about Chinese-owned hardware companies. IBM faced some initial resistance when it sold its x86 server business to Lenovo, especially since many government agencies — including the Defense Department — used IBM hardware.But Super Micro was rocked last October when Bloomberg BusinessWeek ran a lengthy feature article alleging that tiny chips were being secretly stashed on Super Micro motherboards for the purpose of providing backdoors for hackers to illegally access the servers.To read this article in full, please click here

Investigator finds no evidence of spy chips on Super Micro motherboards

An investigation by an outside firm that specializes in all manner of corporate investigations has found no evidence that motherboards sold by Super Micro Computer but made in China had secret chips implanted in them for spying or backdoor access.Like every other OEM, Super Micro, based in San Jose, California, sources many of its components from China. There have been issues raised in the past about Chinese-owned hardware companies. IBM faced some initial resistance when it sold its x86 server business to Lenovo, especially since many government agencies — including the Defense Department — used IBM hardware.But Super Micro was rocked last October when Bloomberg BusinessWeek ran a lengthy feature article alleging that tiny chips were being secretly stashed on Super Micro motherboards for the purpose of providing backdoors for hackers to illegally access the servers.To read this article in full, please click here

Traffic Acceleration with Cloudflare Mobile SDK

Traffic Acceleration with Cloudflare Mobile SDK

We’re excited to announce early access for Traffic Acceleration with Cloudflare Mobile SDK. Acceleration uses novel transport algorithms built into the SDK to accelerate apps beyond the performance they would see with TCP. Enabling Acceleration through the SDK reduces latency, increases throughput, and improves app user experiences.

A year ago, we launched Cloudflare Mobile SDK with a set of free features focused on measuring mobile app networking performance. Apps are dependent on network connectivity to deliver their app’s user experiences, but developers have limited visibility into how network connectivity is impacting app performance. Integrating the Mobile SDK allows developers to measure and improve the speed of their app’s network interactions.

How it works

Mobile applications interact with the Internet to do everything — to fetch the weather, your email, to step through a check out flow. Everything that makes a smartphone magical is powered by a service on the Internet. How quickly those network interactions happen is dictated by two things: how large the payloads are for the given request/response, and what the available link bandwidth is.

Payload size is mostly application specific: a shopping app is going to request product images and similar medium sized assets, while a stock Continue reading