IDG Contributor Network: Robots are malfunctioning, hurting people

A mounting list of robot-related accidents has experts questioning whether the devices will be prone to more dangerous malfunctions or even programmed attacks.Notable mishaps that have been documented include a robotic security guard knocking over a child at a California shopping mall, a demonstration robot smashing a window at a Chinese conference—it caused a bystander to get injured, and 144 deaths in the United States caused by robotic surgery. All this according to security firm IOActive.+ Also on Network World: How secure are home robots? + These incidents “clearly demonstrate the serious potential consequences of robot malfunctions,” the consultancy says in a white paper it recently published about existing robot security (PDF).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Which Linux distros should newbies use?

Easy or tough?Image by ThinkstockLinux has a bad rap as a daily driver – the programs aren’t written to run on Linux, it’s tricky to install stuff, and so on. But it might surprise people who think along those lines to learn that plenty of the distributions out there are actually quite simple to use. Here’s our latest appreciation of the desktop Linux landscape.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sigfox, Ingenu Aggressively Expand IoT Networks in Land Grab

Sigfox often deploys antennas on billboards to speed deployment.

EdgeConnex: The Tale of a Nimble Company Involved in Edge Computing

Its secret sauce has been its relationships with operators.

83% off TechMatte Air Vent Magnetic Universal Car Mount for Smartphones, 2 Pack – Deal Alert

The MagGrip Vent Car Mount is a sturdy, cradle-less device holding system focused on simplicity. Pop it onto your car's air vent, and magnets do all the work. Currently a 2-pack is discounted significantly to just $8 on Amazon, where the product averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 7,000 people. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CoDel and Active Queue Management

Buffering packets in a network is both good and bad. It is good because a buffer can hold packets from one stream while another stream’s packets are being processed, to take up and release short bursts of traffic, to hold and then release packets when there is a very short interruption on the wire (or during a route change), and in many other situations. However, queues are bad when there is a standing queue, which means a particular flow always has some number of packets in a particular queue along the path between the source and the destination. This normally occurs at the narrowest point along the path, or rather the link with the lowest bandwidth. In a previous post, I looked at BBR, a change to the way TCP computes its window sizes, that attempts to reduce the amount of traffic “in flight” between a sender and receiver to reduce the number of packets being held in a particular buffer along the way.

This post will consider another solution: CoDel. CoDel is essentially an improved tail drop mechanism that provides the correct signals to TCP to slow down its send rate, or rather to reduce the window size (and Continue reading

Headcount: The Latest in Hirings, Firings And Retirings for February 2017

Radcom carves out a CTO spot; Arista vet steps down.

Microsoft paying a bug bounty of $30,000

First off, I have to issue something of a correction regarding last week's blog post on Intel price cuts. As it turns out, I have been informed that Intel didn't cut the prices, Micro Center cut them as a loss leader, something it frequently does. It doesn't change the bargain prices, just the motivation. So, I wanted to set the record straight on that. Onward. Microsoft is looking for a few good bugs. And people who will keep it quiet. OK, so I have no evidence of direct causality, but it seems convenient. Over the past few weeks, Google has embarrassed Microsoft twice by publicly disclosing security vulnerabilities in Windows 10 that still have not been patched after 90 days. Google has no mercy with its Zero Day disclosures and plays no favorites. Any company that does not fix a bug by 90 days after Google informs them of it will be hung out to dry. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft paying a bug bounty of $30,000

First off, I have to issue something of a correction regarding last week's blog post on Intel price cuts. As it turns out, I have been informed that Intel didn't cut the prices, Micro Center cut them as a loss leader, something it frequently does. It doesn't change the bargain prices, just the motivation. So, I wanted to set the record straight on that. Onward. Microsoft is looking for a few good bugs. And people who will keep it quiet. OK, so I have no evidence of direct causality, but it seems convenient. Over the past few weeks, Google has embarrassed Microsoft twice by publicly disclosing security vulnerabilities in Windows 10 that still have not been patched after 90 days. Google has no mercy with its Zero Day disclosures and plays no favorites. Any company that does not fix a bug by 90 days after Google informs them of it will be hung out to dry. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM’s new Q program to include a 50-qubit quantum computer

Characters named Q in film and TV have been portrayed as being exceptional. Q in the James Bond movies served up futuristic gadgets, and Q in Star Trek was omnipotent.A new quantum computing program called Q at IBM will be remarkable in its own right. In a few years, IBM plans to create a quantum computer with more than 50 qubits, which should push conventional computers one step closer to the trash heap.IBM Q will deliver paid quantum computing consulting and services to users. It's much like IBM's Watson, which uses conventional computers, but Q uses quantum computers.The 50-qubit quantum computer will be 10 times larger than a 5-qubit system already housed by IBM. And the new system will be able to do things that conventional computers can't do. It will accelerate drug discovery and make scientific discoveries, IBM said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware Courts Telcos With vCloud NFV 2.0

VMware is taking telecom seriously.

Checklist for choosing a small cloud host or ISP

I’ve gone through a number of hosting companies. My NOC is at Expedient in Indianapolis (Carmel). They do a great job for my testing needs. They have a large, well-designed facility, lots of power and, most important, they know what they’re doing and do it 24/7.In my role as someone who knows the difference between UDP and TCP, I get asked a lot to recommend an ISP or cloud host for purposes of web and mail hosting for small businesses, organizations and even generic civilians. Over the years, I’ve found some common difficulties that can mean the difference between enjoyable experiences and long, drawn-out support problems with incumbent frustration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interdatacenter broadcast control – ARP Proxy in OTV and EVPN

When it comes to multi domain or Inter datacenter communication, minimizing the broadcast traffic between the datacenters is an important scaling requirement. Especially if you are dealing with millions of end hosts, localizing the broadcast traffic is critical to save resources on the network and the end hosts. Resources are bandwidth , CPU , memory […]

The post Interdatacenter broadcast control – ARP Proxy in OTV and EVPN appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Should police departments be able to have their own DNA databases?

DNA is supposed to be the answer for solving cold cases. For example, Wisconsin police have turned to DNA to help solve a 42-year-old cold case of “Baby Sarah.” Recently in Niagara Falls, cops found the man responsible for a smash and grab robbery committed 11 years ago, in 2006, via DNA which the man had been ordered to submit for unrelated offences. But it takes some state labs a year-and-a-half to process DNA, so some police departments are bypassing the state labs and creating their own DNA databases to track criminals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Should police departments be able to have their own DNA databases?

DNA is supposed to be the answer for solving cold cases. For example, Wisconsin police have turned to DNA to help solve a 42-year-old cold case of “Baby Sarah.” Recently in Niagara Falls, cops found the man responsible for a smash and grab robbery committed 11 years ago, in 2006, via DNA which the man had been ordered to submit for unrelated offences. But it takes some state labs a year-and-a-half to process DNA, so some police departments are bypassing the state labs and creating their own DNA databases to track criminals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Redliner

…due to the nature of rapid-growing web services like LinkedIn, we face big challenges when trying to measure service capacity limits. These challenges come from the constantly changing traffic shape, the heterogeneous infrastructure characteristics, and the evolving bottlenecks. In order to determine service capacity limits accurately and pinpoint capacity bottlenecks effectively, we need a solution that… —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

The post Worth Reading: Redliner appeared first on 'net work.

IDG Contributor Network: Why BPM is now taking a central role in digital transformation

Business Process Management (BPM) has always been one of those disciplines that sounded great on paper but was difficult to realize in practice. It made sense that documenting, analyzing and managing the entirety of an organization’s business processes would enable those organizations to increase operational efficiency. But for those brave organizations that gave it the "old college try"—particularly in the early days of BPM—the results were seldom spectacular.A new generation of BPM software, however, is changing this trajectory. Driven by the need for speed and agility, in addition to the traditional needs of efficiency and optimization, organizations are now turning to BPM as a key driver of digital transformation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IPAM and DNS with CNI

In the first post of this series we talked about some of the CNI basics.  We then followed that up with a second post showing a more real world example of how you could use CNI to network a container.  We’ve covered IPAM lightly at this point since CNI relies on it for IP allocation but we haven’t talked about what it’s doing or how it works.  In addition – DNS was discussed from a parameter perspective in the first post where we talked about the CNI spec but that’s about it.  The reason for that is that CNI doesn’t actually configure container DNS.  Confused?  I was too.  I mean why is it in the spec if I can’t configure it?

To answer these questions, and see how IPAM and DNS work with CNI, I think a deep dive into an actual CNI implementation would be helpful.  That is – let’s look at a tool that actually implements CNI to see how it uses it.  To do that we’re going to look at the container runtime from the folks at CoreOS – Rocket (rkt).  Rkt can be installed fairly easily using this set of commands…

wget https://github.com/coreos/rkt/releases/download/v1.25.0/rkt_1. Continue reading

Pardon the interruption: Here’s how your smartphone could be less of a noodge

Rutgers University researchers have examined the tolerance levels of different personality types for being interrupted by smartphone notifications in an effort that could help phone makers and app developers build offerings that are more useful and less annoying.The research, outlined in a paper titled "How Busy Are You? Predicting the Interruptibility Intensity of Mobile Users," will be presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Denver this May.In fact, this research will have plenty of company in terms of new insights into how technology intrudes on people's lives. Other papers being presented include: "'If a person is emailing you, it just doesn't make sense': Exploring Changing Consumer Behaviors in Email" and "Reducing Interruptions at Work: A Large-Scale Field Study of FlowLight."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Administravia 030417

Just a few notes on the blog site in general. I’ve rebuilt the sixty books pages without tables. I don’t know if this is better, but it does load a bit faster. I’ve also added links to my GoodReads and Feedly profiles just in case you’re interested in what I’m currently reading/read on a regular basis. I didn’t include all the RSS feeds I read in the shared Feedly profile, just general, culture, and technology.

The post Administravia 030417 appeared first on 'net work.