Weekend Reads: The Relay Box Attack

West Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBCWest Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBC

There’s rising worry that corporations are taking over America. But after reviewing a slew of the bids by cities and states wooing Amazon’s massive second headquarters, I don’t think “takeover” quite captures what’s going on. More like “surrender.” Last month Amazon announced it got 238 offers for its new, proposed 50,000-employee HQ2. I set out to see what’s in them, but only about 30 have been released so far under public-record acts. @The Seattle Times

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Carpenter v. United States on November Continue reading

Verizon Says its Intelligent Edge Will Reduce Network Costs

Putting compute and storage at the edge reduces latency.

SDxCentral’s Weekly Roundup — December 8, 2017

ETSI launches AR group; Canonical and Rancher Labs build joint platform; VeloCloud extends to AWS.

Church

Cisco to Buy Cmpute.io, Acquiring Yet Another Cloud Cost Comparison Tool

CloudCenter also compares costs of running applications in public and private clouds.

Arista’s Got its Eye on the Router Market With Its EOS 4.20

The Extensible Operating System runs across all of Arista’s products.

Worth Reading: Are you a genius or a fraud?

One time, when I was a small child, I saw Hank Aaron go to bat. He had already hit his 500th home run. I was looking forward to seeing this genius do his thing. I was devastated when he struck out. Some genius, I recall thinking. As an eight-year-old, my first thought was that I could have done exactly what he did. Of course, Hank knew something that I, at the time, did not. Genius is about averages, not every time at bat. If every time you strike out, you imagine that you might be a fraud, you will make yourself insane. —Jeffery Tucker @ The Stream

Building a new IMDB: Internet Mince Pie Database

CC-BY-SA 2.0 image by Phil! Gold

Since joining Cloudflare I’ve always known that as we grew, incredible things would be possible. It’s been a long held ambition to work in an organisation with the scale to answer a very controversial and difficult question. To do so would require a collection of individuals with a depth of experience, passion, dedication & above all collaborative spirit.

As Cloudflare’s London office has grown in the last 4 years I believe 2017 is the year we reach the tipping point where this is possible. A paradigm-shift in the type of challenges Cloudflare is able to tackle. We could finally sample every commercially available mince pie in existence before the 1st of December. In doing so, we would know conclusively which mince pie we should all be buying over Christmas to share with our friends & families.

What is a mince pie?

For the uninitiated, a Mince Pie is “a sweet pie of British origin, filled with a mixture of dried fruits and spices called mincemeat, that is traditionally served during the Christmas season in the English world.” - Wikipedia for Mince Pie

The original Mince Pie was typically filled with a mixture Continue reading

Network Visibility with Barefoot Deep Insight

As you may have heard this week, Barefoot Networks is back in the news with the release of their newest product, Barefoot Deep Insight. Choosing to go down the road of naming a thing after what it actually does, Barefoot has created a solution to finding out why network packets are behaving the way they are.

Observer Problem

It’s no secret that modern network monitoring is coming out of the Dark Ages. ping, traceroute, and SNMP aren’t exactly the best tools to be giving any kind of real information about things. They were designed for a different time with much less packet flow. Even Netflow can’t keep up with modern networks running at multi-gigabit speeds. And even if it could, it’s still missing in-flight data about network paths and packet delays.

Imagine standing outside of the Holland Tunnel. You know that a car entered at a specific time. And you see the car exit. But you don’t know what happened to the car in between. If the car takes 5 minutes to traverse the tunnel you have no way of knowing if that’s normal or not. Likewise, if a car is delayed and takes 7-8 minutes to exit Continue reading

The variability of Internet Traffic

The post The variability of Internet Traffic appeared first on Noction.

Aerohive SD-WAN solution simplifies management of multi networks

Most people think of Aerohive Networks as a Wi-Fi vendor, which makes sense given most of the company’s revenue comes from selling wireless access points into businesses. In actuality, Aerohive is a cloud management vendor that has applied its expertise in that area to wireless LANs. About year ago, the company introduced its software-defined LAN (SD-LAN) solution that includes wireless APs and wired switches, enabling its customers to manage the entire campus network from the cloud.This week, Aerohive extended its reach into the WAN with the release of its SD-WAN solution that can be managed through HiveManager, the same cloud management tool used for its SD-LAN products, giving customers a single console for managing the WAN, wired network and wireless APs.To read this article in full, please click here

Aerohive SD-WAN solution simplifies management of multi networks

Most people think of Aerohive Networks as a Wi-Fi vendor, which makes sense given most of the company’s revenue comes from selling wireless access points into businesses. In actuality, Aerohive is a cloud management vendor that has applied its expertise in that area to wireless LANs. About year ago, the company introduced its software-defined LAN (SD-LAN) solution that includes wireless APs and wired switches, enabling its customers to manage the entire campus network from the cloud.This week, Aerohive extended its reach into the WAN with the release of its SD-WAN solution that can be managed through HiveManager, the same cloud management tool used for its SD-LAN products, giving customers a single console for managing the WAN, wired network and wireless APs.To read this article in full, please click here

Software-Defined Data Centers: VMware Designs

Video: Switch Buffer Architectures

A while ago (in the time of big-versus-small buffers brouhaha) I asked JR Rivers to do a short presentation focusing on buffering requirements of data center switches. He started by describing typical buffer architectures you might find in data center switches.

Juniper: Send in the Bots for Network Peering, Testing

Telefónica is already testing the AppFormix Health Bot.

IDG Contributor Network: 5 top data challenges that are changing the face of data centers

Data is clearly not what it used to be! Organizations of all types are finding new uses for data as part of their digital transformations. Examples abound in every industry, from jet engines to grocery stores, for data becoming key to competitive advantage. I call this new data because it is very different from the financial and ERP data that we are most familiar with. That old data was mostly transactional, and privately captured from internal sources, which drove the client/server revolution. New data is both transactional and unstructured, publicly available and privately collected, and its value is derived from the ability to aggregate and analyze it. Loosely speaking we can divide this new data into two categories: big data – large aggregated data sets used for batch analytics – and fast data – data collected from many sources that is used to drive immediate decision making. The big data–fast data paradigm is driving a completely new architecture for data centers (both public and private).To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 5 top data challenges that are changing the face of data centers

Data is clearly not what it used to be! Organizations of all types are finding new uses for data as part of their digital transformations. Examples abound in every industry, from jet engines to grocery stores, for data becoming key to competitive advantage. I call this new data because it is very different from the financial and ERP data that we are most familiar with. That old data was mostly transactional, and privately captured from internal sources, which drove the client/server revolution. New data is both transactional and unstructured, publicly available and privately collected, and its value is derived from the ability to aggregate and analyze it. Loosely speaking we can divide this new data into two categories: big data – large aggregated data sets used for batch analytics – and fast data – data collected from many sources that is used to drive immediate decision making. The big data–fast data paradigm is driving a completely new architecture for data centers (both public and private).To read this article in full, please click here

On the Leading Edge – Cloudflare named a leader in The Forrester Wave: DDoS Mitigation Solutions

Cloudflare has been recognized as a leader in the “Forrester Wave^TM: DDoS Mitigation Solutions, Q4 2017.”

The DDoS landscape continues to evolve. The increase in sophistication, frequency, and range of targets of DDoS attacks has placed greater demands on DDoS providers, many of which were evaluated in the report.

This year, Cloudflare received the highest scores possible in 15 criteria, including:

• Length of Implementation
• Layers 3 and 4 Attacks Mitigation
• DNS Attack Mitigation
• IoT Botnets
• Multi-Vector Attacks
• Filtering Deployment
• Secure Socket Layer Investigation
• Mitigation Capacity
• Pricing Model

We believe that Cloudflare’s position as a leader in the report stems from the following:

• An architecture designed to address high-volume attacks. This post written in October 2016 provides some insight into how Cloudflare’s architecture scales to meet the most advanced DDoS attacks differently than legacy scrubbing centers.

• In September 2017, due to the size and effectiveness of our network, we announced the elimination of “surge pricing” commonly found in other DDoS vendors by offering unmetered mitigation. Regardless of what Cloudflare plan a customer is on—Free, Pro, Business, or Enterprise—we will never terminate a customer or charge more based on the size of an attack.

• Because we protect over 7 Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Future is Conversational Systems

It’d be difficult to downplay the impact Amazon Web Services has had on the computing industry over the past decade. Since launching in 2006, Amazon’s cloud computing division has become the set the pace in the public cloud market, rapidly growing out its capabilities from the first service – Simple Storage Service (S3) – it rolled out to now offering thousands of services that touch on everything from compute instances to databases, storage, application development and emerging technologies like machine learning and data analytics. —Jeffery Burt @ The Next Platform

IDG Contributor Network: ROI linked to later stages of Industrial IoT

When most people think about the adoption of the IoT, they think about smart cities, autonomous vehicles, or the latest consumer tech and wearables. However, some of the most amazing technology applications are taking place within industrial verticals such as manufacturing, oil and gas (O&G), and transportation. Unfortunately, when asked about the state of IoT adoption within these markets, we’re often left relying on basic information about connected endpoints, instead of truly understanding how businesses are progressing through IoT maturity within the industrial field. To help answer these questions (and get a bit more in the weeds on the topic) my company, Bsquare, recently conducted its first Annual Industrial IoT (IIoT) Maturity Study. We polled 300 respondents at companies with annual revenues in excess of $250 million. Participants were evenly divided among three industry groups (manufacturing, transportation and O&G) and titles covered a wide spectrum of senior-level personnel with operational responsibilities, most of whom had spent an average of six years in their organizations.To read this article in full, please click here