Innovative Licensing Approaches: Enabling Access in Hard-to-Reach Places Through Collaborative Partnerships

In the Republic of Georgia, high in the mountains of the Tusheti region, a community network has been built to bring faster Internet connectivity to those that did not have it. The story is compelling, not only for the determination of people to make sure that the Internet is available in one of the remotest places in the world, but also for their strong belief of what connecting to the Internet could bring to the people of Tusheti. “Tourism is a beacon of hope for us,” said Ia Buchaidze, who owns a local bakery, “and the Internet is very important for that.”

The project was a true collaborative partnership involving many parties: the Georgian Government, the Internet Society and its Georgia Chapter, the Small and Medium Telecom Operators Association of Georgia, LTD Freenet, and the Tusheti Development Fund (TDF). This network did not need a license, but it did need an authorization from the Georgian Government for it to be built and for the spectrum to be used. The objective was to provide access to a remote region through a locally-built and developed community network.

Similarly, in Mexico, a community network has been built in a remote and Continue reading

Fortanix Scores Partnerships with IBM Cloud and Equinix, Encrypts Data in Use

The encryption software only runs on Intel hardware now, but the startup isn’t ruling out support for other vendors in the future.

Contrail’s Founder Raises $25M for Volterra, a New Startup Focused on Business Use Cases

Ankur Singla says that solving business problems has more value than simply selling a technology.

Trump Intervenes in ZTE Drama to Get Company ‘Back in Business, Fast’

President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday that he and Chinese President Xi were in talks to resolve, or potentially lessen, the ban imposed on the Chinese firm last month.

Research: Bridging the Air Gap

Way back in the old days, the unit I worked at in the US Air Force had a room with a lot of equipment used for processing classified information. Among this equipment was a Zenith Z-250 with an odd sort of keyboard and a very low resolution screen. A fine metal mesh embedded in a semi-clear substrate was glued to the surface of the monitor. This was our TEMPEST rated computer, on which we could type up classified memos, read classified email, and the like. We normally connected it to the STU-3 through a modem (remember those) to send and receive various kinds of classified information.

Elovici, Mordechai Guri, Yuval. “Bridgeware: The Air-Gap Malware.” Accessed May 13, 2018. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226377-bridgeware/abstract.

The idea of TEMPEST begins way back in 1985, when a Dutch researcher demonstrated “reading” the screen of a computer using some relatively cheap, and easy to assemble, equipment, from several feet away. The paper I’m looking at today provides a good overview of the many ways which have been discovered since this initial demonstration to transfer data from one computer to another across what should be an “air gap.” For instance, the TEMPEST rated computer described Continue reading

Creating Infrastructure for Self-Sovereign Identity Online

Don’t get left behind: SDN, programmable networks change how network engineers work

The rise of programmable networks has changed the role of the network engineer, and accepting those changes is key to career advancement. Network engineers need to become software fluent and embrace automation, according to a panel of network professionals brought together by Cisco to discuss the future of networking careers.[ For more on SDN see where SDN is going and learn the difference between SDN and NFV. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “The whole concept of engineer re-skilling has become a pretty hot topic over the last four or five years. What’s notable to me is that the engineers themselves are now embracing it,” says Zeus Kerravala, founder of ZK Research, who moderated the panel. To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 184: Arista’s Core Switch Challenges Cisco; Qualcomm Reconsiders Servers

Worth Reading: Back to Basics?

We, as the stewards of networking, need to help this process along. We need to spend more time talking about design and theory. We need to dissect protocols and help people understand how to use the tools they have rather than hoping someone will build the best mousetrap ever to solve each piece of a complicated puzzle. We need to teach people to be thinkers and problem solvers. And, yes, that does mean a bit less complaining about things like vendor code quality and VAR behavior. —Tom @The Networking Nerd

EXFO Ontology’s Benedict Enweani on Service Assurance Automation

In this interview, Benedict Enweani, director of business development, systems and analytics at EXFO Ontology, discusses challenges in achieving effective and efficient service assurance in modern service provider networks, as well as the benefits of automation.

Tracking CDN Usage Through Historical DNS Data

End-to-End Segmentation with NSX SD-WAN and NSX Data Center

As you may have read earlier this month, NSX Data Center and NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud are part of the expanded VMware NSX portfolio to enable virtual cloud networking.  A Virtual Cloud Network provides end-to-end connectivity for applications and data, whether they reside in the data center, cloud or at the edge. I wanted to follow up, and walk through an example using NSX Data Center and NSX SD-WAN of how one could build an end to end segmentation model from the data center to the branch.

NSX SD-WAN Segmentation

Beyond lowering cost and increasing agility and simplicity of branch connectivity, one of the key values provided by NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud is enterprise segmentation, which provides isolated network segments across the entire enterprise, enabling data isolation or separation by user or line of business, support for overlapping IP addresses between VLANs and support for multiple tenants. NSX SD-WAN provides this segmentation using a VRF-like concept with simplified, per-segment topology insertion. This is accomplished by inserting a “Segment ID” into the SD-WAN Overlay header as traffic is carried from one NSX SD-WAN Edge device to another Edge. Networks on the LAN-side of an NSX SD-WAN Edge with different Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Artificial Intelligence Heads to the Final Frontier

Coming to a space station near you: Artificial intelligence is going to space – maybe not a space station, but a satellite – predicts an aerospace executive, quoted in SpaceNews.com. So-called geospatial intelligence, housed on satellites, will collect massive amounts of data in space and analyze it, she says.

More blockchain believers: Tech giant Oracle plans to release its own blockchain software with a platform-as-a-service product coming this month and decentralized ledger-based applications coming next month, Bloomberg notes. Oracle is working with Banco de Chile to log inter-bank transactions on a hyperledger and with the government of Nigeria to document customs and import duties on blockchain.

Does blockchain even lift? Blockchain can help improve the sports and fitness industry by allowing instructors to securely stream workouts, allowing customers to avoid that annoying trip to the gym, Forbes suggests.

Social media eyes encryption: Facebook and Twitter are both looking at encrypting some user communications, according to news reports. Facebook has voiced support for end-to-end encryption on its blog, apparently in response to concerns it was moving to weaken encryption on its WhatsApp messaging service, BGR.com notes. However, Facebook hasn’t enabled encryption by default on it Messenger service, the story Continue reading

5 Campus Network Upgrade Planning Tips

10 Hot IoT startups to watch

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to make machines smarter, industrial processes more efficient and consumer devices more responsive to our needs. According to research firm Gartner, there will be more than 20 billion connected things in use worldwide by 2020.But these constrained devices often run on woefully out-of-date software that must be manually patched and upgraded; the market potential is enormous, but so are the risks.[ Click here to download a PDF bundle of five essential articles about IoT in the enterprise. ] Figuring out successful IoT business models is still a work in progress, and many are trying. We’ve looked at a large sampling of companies that have formed to work on these problems and pared the list down to 10 that warrant special attention. (See how we did it.)To read this article in full, please click here

How we chose 10 hot IoT startups to watch

The competition to find 10 hot IoT startups to watch began with 79 contenders, 14 of which were eliminated in round 1 for not really being IoT startups or for not following directions. (Pro tip: if you try the hard-to-get strategy - making us chase you down for the information we already asked for in my query – we won’t play that game. We just hit “delete” instead.)In Round 2, visitors to our website, Startup50.com, cast votes for their three favorite startups, with votes weighted at five points for a first-place vote, two points for a second-place vote and one point for a third-place vote. Only the top 20 startups moved into the final round.To read this article in full, please click here

What Is EVPN?

EVPN might be the next big thing in networking… or at least all the major networking vendors think so. It’s also a pretty complex technology still facing some interoperability challenges (I love to call it SIP of networking).

To make matters worse, EVPN can easily get even more confusing if you follow some convoluted designs propagated on the ‘net… and the best antidote to that is to invest time into understanding the fundamentals, and to slowly work through more complex scenarios after mastering the basics.

Tracing System CPU on Debian Stretch

This is a heavily truncated version of an internal blog post from August 2017. For more recent updates on Kafka, check out another blog post on compression, where we optimized throughput 4.5x for both disks and network.

Photo by Alex Povolyashko / Unsplash

Upgrading our systems to Debian Stretch

For quite some time we've been rolling out Debian Stretch, to the point where we have reached ~10% adoption in our core datacenters. As part of upgarding the underlying OS, we also evaluate the higher level software stack, e.g. taking a look at our ClickHouse and Kafka clusters.

During our upgrade of Kafka, we sucessfully migrated two smaller clusters, logs and dns, but ran into issues when attempting to upgrade one of our larger clusters, http.

Thankfully, we were able to roll back the http cluster upgrade relatively easily, due to heavy versioning of both the OS and the higher level software stack. If there's one takeaway from this blog post, it's to take advantage of consistent versioning.

High level differences

We upgraded one Kafka http node, and it did not go as planned:

Having 5x CPU usage was definitely an unexpected outcome. For control datapoints, we Continue reading

Networking With Fish: YouTube Channel

Blogging, originally, was my go to and preferred method for sharing information to others – teaching, sharing, etc.  For a few corner case type things I found video (YouTube) to be a better tool for those specific items.  Recently, however, I am finding about half of my ideas of things I want to “pass on” to others… would be best (in my opinion) via video.

I’ve been trying to figure out and think about how best to have the two sharing tools – this blog site and the YouTube channel – best compliment each other.  So I have been experimenting with this.  What I have come up with that I like and works for me is the following…..

• “Standalone Video” – If the YouTube is really a “standalone” and blogging with additional text around it here doesn’t “help” communicate what I’m trying to get across… then I won’t be blogging about it here.
• “Video Series” – There will be series that will be building on each other – like the videos in the playlist “BGP Show and Tell: Beginners” and the playlist “Label Swapping Fun”.   Video series, I believe, would definitely benefit from larger big Continue reading

Worth Reading: Cognitive Dissonance

I always wondered why it’s so hard to accept that someone might not find your preferred solution beautiful but would call it complex or even harmful (or from the other side, why someone could not possibly appreciate the beauty of your design)… and then stumbled upon this blog post by Scott Adams describing cognitive dissonance (the actual topic they’re discussing in the mentioned video doesn’t matter – look for the irrational behavior).

You might say “but we could politely agree to disagree” but unfortunately that implies that at least one of us is not fully rational due to Aumann’s Agreement Theorem.