New Webinar: Automating Data Center Fabric Deployments

The next session of the Network Automation Use Cases series will take place on January 24th. Dinesh Dutt will explain describe how you can use Ansible and Jinja2 to automate data center fabric deployments, and I’ll have a few things to say about automating network security.

If you think that what Dinesh will talk about applies only to startups you’re totally wrong. UBS is using the exact same approach to roll out their new data centers; Thomas Wacker will share the details in his guest presentation in the next Building Next-Generation Data Centers online course.

WikiLeaks’ Assange confident of winning ‘any fair trial’ in the US

WikiLeaks said that its founder Julian Assange is confident of winning 'any fair trial' in the U.S. and indicated that the founder of the whistleblowing website would stand by all the promises he had made in return for clemency to Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. soldier who disclosed classified data relating to the Iraq War to the site.On Tuesday, Manning’s prison sentence was commuted by U.S. President Barack Obama raising questions whether Assange would keep his part of a deal he proposed online, and agree to extradition to the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WikiLeaks’ Assange confident of winning ‘any fair trial’ in the US

WikiLeaks said that its founder Julian Assange is confident of winning 'any fair trial' in the U.S. and indicated that the founder of the whistleblowing website would stand by all the promises he had made in return for clemency to Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. soldier who disclosed classified data relating to the Iraq War to the site.On Tuesday, Manning’s prison sentence was commuted by U.S. President Barack Obama raising questions whether Assange would keep his part of a deal he proposed online, and agree to extradition to the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FTC charges Qualcomm with anticompetitive chip tactics

Qualcomm strong-armed some phone makers into accepting unfavorable technology licensing terms while giving Apple a break in exchange for exclusivity, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has charged.The company used its dominance in baseband processors, which manage cellular communication in mobile devices, to force vendors to pay elevated royalties for Qualcomm technologies, the FTC charged in a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court.At the same time, Qualcomm gave Apple favorable terms so it could supply the baseband chips for all iPhones from 2011 to 2016, according to the FTC. Among other things, in 2007 it got Apple to agree not to use WiMax, the original 4G system used on Sprint’s network, in any iPhones, the complaint said. WiMax was promoted by Intel, Qualcomm’s archrival.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can a DDoS attack on Whitehouse.gov be a valid protest?

When Donald Trump is inaugurated as the U.S. President on Friday, Juan Soberanis intends to protest the event -- digitally.His San Francisco-based protest platform is calling on Americans to oppose Trump’s presidency by visiting the Whitehouse.gov site and overloading it with too much traffic. In effect, he’s proposing a distributed denial-of-service attack, an illegal act under federal law. But Soberanis doesn’t see it that way.“It’s the equivalent of someone marching on Washington, D.C,” he said on Monday. “Civil disobedience has been part of the American democratic process.”Soberanis’s call to action is raising eyebrows and highlights the isssue of whether DDoS attacks should be made a legitimate form of protest. Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, sending a command to a protected computer with the intent to cause damage can be judged a criminal offense. But that hasn’t stopped hacktivists and cyber criminals from using DDoS attacks to force websites offline.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can a DDoS attack on Whitehouse.gov be a valid protest?

When Donald Trump is inaugurated as the U.S. President on Friday, Juan Soberanis intends to protest the event -- digitally.His San Francisco-based protest platform is calling on Americans to oppose Trump’s presidency by visiting the Whitehouse.gov site and overloading it with too much traffic. In effect, he’s proposing a distributed denial-of-service attack, an illegal act under federal law. But Soberanis doesn’t see it that way.“It’s the equivalent of someone marching on Washington, D.C,” he said on Monday. “Civil disobedience has been part of the American democratic process.”Soberanis’s call to action is raising eyebrows and highlights the isssue of whether DDoS attacks should be made a legitimate form of protest. Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, sending a command to a protected computer with the intent to cause damage can be judged a criminal offense. But that hasn’t stopped hacktivists and cyber criminals from using DDoS attacks to force websites offline.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Running a Pelican Blog on Docker Cloud with Let’s Encrypt

It's 2017 and my blog was starting to look a little dated so I decided it was time for a face-lift. While I was at it, I overhauled the way I deploy my blog too.

Enabling an Apple MBP Wireless Adapter with Fedora 25

In this article, I want to share with you the steps I took to enable wireless networking on an older (mid-2011) 13” MacBook Pro running Fedora 25. This is driven by a continued need to evaluate Fedora 25, as I’ve run into a few potential roadblocks with Ubuntu 16.04 as my primary laptop OS. Using Fedora 25 instead may help resolve some of these issues, which primarily center around corporate collaboration.

First, you’ll want to enable the RPM Fusion repositories. This is pretty well documented on the RPM Fusion web site. This link will take you to the configuration page, which will provide links for graphical setup via your browser as well as CLI commands.

Once the RPM Fusion repositories (both Free and Nonfree) repositories are enabled, then it’s just a matter of installing a few packages:

1. First, install the “kernel-devel” package appropriate for your current kernel. The command to use is:

    sudo dnf install "kernel-devel-uname-r == $(uname -r)"
   

   This could be user error on my part, but I’ve found that it’s necessary to use the full package (including version) instead of just “kernel-devel”. Otherwise, Fedora seems to have a tendency to install the latest package, which may not Continue reading

Obama commutes sentence for Manning, a WikiLeaks source

President Barack Obama has commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. soldier who disclosed classified data to WikiLeaks relating to the Iraq War.Manning was originally serving a 35-year sentence, but on Tuesday Obama reduced it. She’ll now be freed on May 17.Manning was convicted of leaking U.S. military and diplomatic information to WikiLeaks back in 2010 that included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with classified documents sent to the U.S. State Department. She was arrested and began serving jail time the same year.The data supplied by Manning helped put WikiLeaks on the map as source for secret government information but drew swift condemnation from U.S. officials.   To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Obama commutes sentence for Manning, a WikiLeaks source

President Barack Obama has commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. soldier who disclosed classified data to WikiLeaks relating to the Iraq War.Manning was originally serving a 35-year sentence, but on Tuesday Obama reduced it. She’ll now be freed on May 17.Manning was convicted of leaking U.S. military and diplomatic information to WikiLeaks back in 2010 that included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with classified documents sent to the U.S. State Department. She was arrested and began serving jail time the same year.The data supplied by Manning helped put WikiLeaks on the map as source for secret government information but drew swift condemnation from U.S. officials.   To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE Inks Deal For SimpliVity

HPE buying SimpliVity for $650 million to boost hyperconvergence

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to buy SimpliVity for US$650 million as expands its hyperconverged offerings, and analysts believe it's a great deal.SimpliVity makes management software that helps administrators gain control over data-center resources. The tools help enterprises make efficient use of server, storage and networking resources.The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.For months, HPE was rumored to be pursuing SimpliVity, which also offers convergence tools for servers from Dell, Lenovo and Huawei. Hyperconvergence companies are a hot commodity. Nutanix, a top player in the market, went public in September last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE buying SimpliVity for $650 million to boost hyperconvergence

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to buy SimpliVity for US$650 million as expands its hyperconverged offerings, and analysts believe it's a great deal.SimpliVity makes management software that helps administrators gain control over data-center resources. The tools help enterprises make efficient use of server, storage and networking resources.The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.For months, HPE was rumored to be pursuing SimpliVity, which also offers convergence tools for servers from Dell, Lenovo and Huawei. Hyperconvergence companies are a hot commodity. Nutanix, a top player in the market, went public in September last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle outlines plans to take on Amazon in cloud

Oracle executives today revealed the results of years’ worth of engineering and development efforts on its IaaS public cloud and announced a new bare metal cloud database service and an international geographic expansion. Oracle is typically not considered one of the top IaaS public cloud leaders, but the company has hopes of competing in the market by combining its infrastructure services – which focus on its core database services – with a suite of application development and software as a service offerings. At its Cloud World event in New York today, company executives laid out their vision of how they will take on competitors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce.com.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE to Acquire Hyperconverged Player SimpliVity for $650M

Not quite the price that was rumored.

Microsoft labels Windows 7 ‘outdated’ as it stumps for 10

Microsoft on Monday reminded customers running Windows 7 that they have just three years of support remaining, told them that the aged OS was "long outdated" and urged them to upgrade to Windows 10.Windows 7 will exit what Microsoft calls Extended Support on Jan. 14, 2020; at that point, the company will stop all security updates.Microsoft used the three-years-and-counting milestone to simultaneously denigrate Windows 7 and promote its successor. "Windows 7 is based on long-outdated security architectures," said Markus Nitschke, the head of Microsoft Germany, in a post to a German-language company blog, adding that the OS "does not meet the requirements of modern technology, nor the high security requirements of IT departments."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Free Software Foundation shakes up its list of priority projects

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation Tuesday announced a major rethinking of the software projects that it supports, putting top priority on a free mobile operating system, accessibility, and driver development, among other areas. The foundation has maintained the High Priority Projects list since 2005, when it contained just four free software projects. Today’s version mostly identifies priority areas, along with a few specific projects in key areas:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Open Baton MANO Group Pre-Dates OSM and Open-O

Open Baton may eventually contribute to other open source MANO groups.

7 really cool network and IT research projects

Researchers at top universities, backed by funding from federal and other outfits, are pumping out loads of research on network security, wireless networking and more. Here's a recap of 7 impressive projects from recent months.1. Not that you trust mobile apps in the first place… Carnegie Mellon University researchers took a deep dive into about 18,000 popular free apps on the Google Play store and found that not only about half of them lacked a privacy policy but a good number of those that have policies aren’t adhering to them. As many as 4 in 10 apps with policies could be collecting location information and nearly 1 in 5 could be sharing that data without getting your permission to do so, To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 really cool network and IT research projects

Researchers at top universities, backed by funding from federal and other outfits, are pumping out loads of research on network security, wireless networking and more. Here's a recap of 7 impressive projects from recent months.1. Not that you trust mobile apps in the first place… Carnegie Mellon University researchers took a deep dive into about 18,000 popular free apps on the Google Play store and found that not only about half of them lacked a privacy policy but a good number of those that have policies aren’t adhering to them. As many as 4 in 10 apps with policies could be collecting location information and nearly 1 in 5 could be sharing that data without getting your permission to do so, To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here