In the classic holiday story The Nutcracker, toy soldiers under command of a nutcracker spring to life to fight an army of evil mice. With the growth of smart toys, armies made up of toy “soldiers” could soon become reality. Using the same features that make them “smart,” smart toys can be taken over by outside actors and forced to do their bidding.
But rather than being led by a nutcracker to fight off evil rodents, real armies of toys could be led by criminals to attack you or me.
“Smart toys” (Internet or Bluetooth-enabled toys) are some of the most popular toys this holiday season. Internet or Bluetooth functionality enables smart toys to have amazing features. There are:
Smart toys can do incredible things. Yet, if left unsecured, they not only present real privacy risks to the children and families who use them, but also security risks to everyone who relies on or uses the Internet.
Any Internet-connected device, be it a computer, connected thermostat, or smart toy, is at risk of being Continue reading
In this episode of History of Networking, Jeff Tantsura (Chair of the IETF Routing Area Working Group and Consulting VP of Network Architecture at Futurewei) joins Network Collective to discuss the origins and history of Segment Routing.
Episode Links:
Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
The post History Of Networking – Jeff Tantsura – Segment Routing appeared first on Network Collective.
Big Data. I believe that one phrase could get millions in venture capital funding. I don’t even have to put a product with it. Just say it. And make no mistake about it: the rest of the world thinks so too. Data is “the new oil”. At least, according to some pundits. It’s a great headline making analogy that describes how data is driving business and controlling it can lead to an empire. But, data isn’t really oil. It’s nuclear power.
Crude oil is a popular resource. Prized for a variety of uses, it is traded and sold as a commodity and refined into plastics, gasoline, and other essential items of modern convenience. Oil creates empires and causes global commerce to hinge on every turn of the market. Living in a state that is a big oil producer, the exploration and refining of oil has a big impact.
However, when compared to Big Data, oil isn’t the right metaphor. Much like oil, data needs to be refined before use. But oil can be refined into many different distinct things. Data can only be turned into information. Oil burns up when consumed. Aside from some smoke and Continue reading
LightStep cofounder Ben Sigelman briefed Ethan Banks on their SaaS performance monitoring product with microsecond resolution for cloud native apps.
The post BiB 021: LightStep Performance Monitoring For Cloud Native Applications appeared first on Packet Pushers.
HDDs face a bleak future as solid-state drives go mainstream in the data center.
Media watchdogs, increasingly criticized, threatened and attacked by corporate interests and global governments, are also among the prominent victims of falling public trust in the wake of the proliferation of so-called ‘fake’ news.
Despite some self-inflicted problems, such as those highlighted by the Leveson inquiry in the United Kingdom five years ago, news media and responsible journalism remain of critical importance to democracy.
The Internet Society’s 2017 Global Internet Report reveals how media is intricately entwined with society and it will become more so as more people and services go online. The Internet has grown from 400 million users in 2000 to 3.5 billion users today and as access expands further the media have countless new opportunities to increase their reach and better inform their audiences.
But “going online” also introduces unique challenges for the media. In the next five to seven years, the Internet will continue to fundamentally impact society and the media. According to Reporters without Borders, media freedom violations – impacting particularly anonymity, privacy and free expression – have increased by 14 percent in the past five years, for example.
As the Internet and news media become more converged, it is relatively easy to identify Continue reading
In December 2017 IETF published RFC 8273 created by the v6ops working group (which means there must have been significant consensus within the working group that we need the solution and that it makes at least marginal sense).
The RFC specifies a mechanism by which the first-hop router allocates a unique /64 IPv6 prefix for every host attached to a subnet and uses unicast and multicast RA responses sent to unicast MAC addresses to give every host the impression that it’s the sole host on its own subnet.
The first thought of anyone even vaguely familiar with how complex IPv6 already is should be “WTF???” Unfortunately, there are good reasons we need this monstrosity.
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Fig 1.1- Multi-Chassis Ether-Channel with DSLAM in MPLS and VPLS environment |
Data Gravity is a concept first coined by Dave McCrory to describe the tendency of data to attract more data, applications and services. As you may have guessed from the name, this principle has many parallels to Newton’s Theory of Universal Gravitation.
The basic premise is that a singular piece of data isn’t meaningful but with more data (metadata as it’s generally called) additional context (and therefore more meaning) can be derived. When all that data is bundled with more applications and services, one can harness a considerable amount of power as evidenced by today’s trends towards data and analytics.
For example, let’s take this piece of data: 0. Although we know what zero means conceptually, we don’t have any way to determine how we should feel about it. Without any context just knowing the number 0 is essentially worthless. If, for instance you were to know the additional data of “inventory of toy Elmos” + [insert where you live] you’d know that you need to make an only order and ASAP.
Data for larger institutions is just like this, except the concept of “friction” plays a larger role. Data Friction Continue reading
It’s easy to see that open source is changing the way people think about infrastructure. However, as the saying goes: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. As is normal, there will always be pockets of IT where active involvement in open source will just take some more time.
I’ve worked on open source for a few years now, and I have always wanted to publish a post that focuses on a few key ideas that I wish I could tell every new entrant into the world of open source. I feel like going in with the right expectations can really help any efforts here go much more smoothly. So if you’re accustomed to getting most if not all of your technology stack from a vendor, and you’re wondering about the open source craze, and trying to make sense of it all, this is for you. My goal with this post is to empower you to start getting out there and exploring the various communities behind the projects you may already have your eyes on.
Before some practical tips, I want to spend some time on expectations. This is crucially important Continue reading