Network Automation Online Course: a Vendor Perspective

A few days after I published the blog post describing why it might make sense to attend the Building Network Automation Solutions course even when you’re already using a $vendor network management system/platform, I got a surprising email from one of my friends working for a major networking vendor:

Automating Cisco Nexus Switches with Ansible

For the past several years, the open source [network] community has been rallying around Ansible as a platform for network automation. Just over a year ago, Ansible recognized the importance of embracing the network community and since then, has made significant additions to offer network automation out of the box. In this post, we’ll look at two distinct models you can use when automating network devices with Ansible, specifically focusing on Cisco Nexus switches. I’ll refer to these models as CLI-Driven and Abstraction-Driven Automation.

Note: We’ll see in later posts how we can use these models and a third model to accomplish intent-driven automation as well.

For this post, we’ve chosen to highlight Nexus as there are more Nexus Ansible modules than any other network operating system as of Ansible 2.2 making it extremely easy to highlight these two models.

CLI-Driven Automation

The first way to manage network devices with Ansible is to use the Ansible modules that are supported by a diverse number of operating systems including NX-OS, EOS, Junos, IOS, IOS-XR, and many more. These modules can be considered the lowest common denominator as they work the same way across operating systems requiring you to define the Continue reading

Pastor: Toyota salesman stole wife’s nude photos from phone, sent pics to swingers’ site

Have you ever handed your phone over to someone you didn’t know so that he or she could verify data you have saved in an app? A minister and his wife did and their story is a disturbing cautionary tale as to why you shouldn’t hand your phone over to anyone.The following information comes from a lawsuit (pdf) against Toyota and a specific dealership as well as a Dallas Morning News report.Pastor Tim Gautreaux and his wife, Claire, were interested in buying a Prius from Texas Toyota of Grapevine. They had taken the dealership’s advice and used an app to get pre-approved for financing via Capital One Financial Corporation. An internet car salesman claimed he needed to show the pre-approved financing information in the app to his manager. The pastor unlocked his phone and handed it over.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pastor: Toyota salesman stole wife’s nude photos from phone, sent pics to swingers’ site

Have you ever handed your phone over to someone you didn’t know so that he or she could verify data you have saved in an app? A minister and his wife did and their story is a disturbing cautionary tale as to why you shouldn’t hand your phone over to anyone.The following information comes from a lawsuit (pdf) against Toyota and a specific dealership as well as a Dallas Morning News report.Pastor Tim Gautreaux and his wife, Claire, were interested in buying a Prius from Texas Toyota of Grapevine. They had taken the dealership’s advice and used an app to get pre-approved for financing via Capital One Financial Corporation. An internet car salesman claimed he needed to show the pre-approved financing information in the app to his manager. The pastor unlocked his phone and handed it over.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Artificial intelligence, instrumental convergence, and photos of cats

In the awards winning short story, Cat Pictures Please, by Naomi Kitzer, an artificial intelligence with a predilection for cats photos inhabiting some unspecified system has taken to manipulating people to see if it can change their lives for the better. It’s a clever story that raises several interesting issues about what the nature of an A.I. might be and one of the biggest concerns the A.I.’s fondness for pictures of cats. This fondness is understandable as cats can be very entertaining. Consider this video …  Wasn’t that cute? Anyway, in Kitzer’s story, cat pictures are the A.I.’s source of pleasure in a manner that isn’t fully articulated, something that’s fine for the purposes of fiction. On the other hand, in the real world, such an interest by an A.I. could have very different consequences due to something called instrumental convergence, which is defined on Wikipedia as:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Will autocrats ever learn? – The Internet Blackout in Gambia

On Wednesday afternoon, Cloudflare and other Internet companies noticed that the West African country of The Gambia had dropped off the Internet - the day before the presidential election that was planned to be held there on Thursday, December 1st. This is not unprecedented. The Ugandan government blocked access to Facebook and WhatsApp during its recent election. Internet blocking by governments has also been seen in Gabon. Even Ghana toyed with the idea earlier this year.

Gambia has a population of 1.8 million people, and according to World Internet Stats, Internet penetration is growing fast and is almost 20%. The latest statistics indicate that at least ten percent of Gambians are using Facebook. As shown in the graph below, on Thursday, the Gambian government cut off access to the global Internet and for 39 hours hundreds of thousands of Gambians were unable to use online services on which they rely every day.

All the networks in Gambia disappeared from the global routing tables. This could have been caused by a soft reconfiguration of Internet routers; or by a physical powering down of telecommunications equipment. At this point, we do not know. What we do know is that we Continue reading

Folks, Let’s Not Forget About the Original Use of SDN, Says Nokia

Carrier SDN can drive 25% more revenue generating services.

Russia claims it foiled a cyber attack from a foreign spy service

The Russian government claims to have foiled a "large-scale" cyber attack from foreign intelligence services meant to destabilize the country’s financial system.The government’s Federal Security Service made the statement on Friday without blaming a specific country, but said the attack was meant to be carried out on Dec. 5 against a number of major Russian banks.The hack would have also included the use of social media and SMS text messages to circulate posts claiming a crisis in Russia’s financial system. Several dozen cities in the country had been targeted, the Federal Security Service claimed, stating it had already neutralized the threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russia claims it foiled a cyber attack from a foreign spy service

The Russian government claims to have foiled a "large-scale" cyber attack from foreign intelligence services meant to destabilize the country’s financial system.The government’s Federal Security Service made the statement on Friday without blaming a specific country, but said the attack was meant to be carried out on Dec. 5 against a number of major Russian banks.The hack would have also included the use of social media and SMS text messages to circulate posts claiming a crisis in Russia’s financial system. Several dozen cities in the country had been targeted, the Federal Security Service claimed, stating it had already neutralized the threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s silence on Optane SSDs raises questions about launch and focus

There's a lot of excitement about Intel's superfast Optane SSDs, but products won't be on shelves this year as the chipmaker had earlier promised.Intel is currently making Optane in a factory in China, and production will "ramp" up next year, said Stacy Smith, executive vice president of manufacturing, operations, and sales at Intel.Smith declined to comment on when Optane products will hit the market, maintaining a consistent pattern of silence among Intel executives on the topic. He spoke at the Credit Suisse 20th Annual Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Scottsdale, Arizona this week.Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said sample Optane products will ship to more testers next year, and that "it’s really a 2018 ramp for that product," according to a transcript of an October earnings call, posted on Seeking Alpha.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The NSA and Skilz: Turning spying on you into a video game

What could possibly be creepier than a government organization (such as the NSA) having nearly unlimited access to your private, personal information (including access to your webcam)? Turns out, the answer is: when it gets turned into a video game. And it appears, they have done this. On Dec. 1, 2016, Wikileaks released a collection of documents relating to the German parliament inquiry of the cooperation between the German foreign intelligence agency (the BND) and the United States’ NSA. One particular document (pdf) within that collection caught my attention. It appears to be a report from an official at the European Cryptologic Center (ECC) from April 13, 2012, detailing how they can improve usage of Xkeyscore (XKS) to collect information about people. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The NSA and Skilz: Turning spying on you into a video game

What could possibly be creepier than a government organization (such as the NSA) having nearly unlimited access to your private, personal information (including access to your webcam)? Turns out, the answer is: when it gets turned into a video game. And it appears, they have done this. On Dec. 1, 2016, Wikileaks released a collection of documents relating to the German parliament inquiry of the cooperation between the German foreign intelligence agency (the BND) and the United States’ NSA. One particular document (pdf) within that collection caught my attention. It appears to be a report from an official at the European Cryptologic Center (ECC) from April 13, 2012, detailing how they can improve usage of Xkeyscore (XKS) to collect information about people. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Containers & Serverless Functions Have Their Day on AWS

AWS goes open source with Blox and seriously revs up Lambda.

Get Trained on the AWS Cloud

Date: 6 December 2016
Time: 10am – 1.30pm IST
Location: Online

IDG Contributor Network: Solution to JIT-ROP cyber attacks: Scramble code quickly

A new software development technique promises to end destructive exploits from hackers. The concept is to continually, and repeatedly, rearrange the program’s code while it’s running—and do it very quickly. Doing that shuts down the hacker’s “window of opportunity” because he doesn’t know where to find bugs to hit with his poisonous attack. The scrambling occurs over milliseconds.Code reuse attacks are the kind of harmful exploits that can be stopped dead in their tracks, researchers say in an article on Columbia University’s website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Solution to JIT-ROP cyber attacks: Scramble code quickly

A new software development technique promises to end destructive exploits from hackers. The concept is to continually, and repeatedly, rearrange the program’s code while it’s running—and do it very quickly. Doing that shuts down the hacker’s “window of opportunity” because he doesn’t know where to find bugs to hit with his poisonous attack. The scrambling occurs over milliseconds.Code reuse attacks are the kind of harmful exploits that can be stopped dead in their tracks, researchers say in an article on Columbia University’s website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDxCentral Weekly News Roundup — December 2, 2016

Kevin Johnson (ex-Juniper) gets a promotion; American Airlines picks IBM Cloud.

Butterfly

The post Butterfly appeared first on 'net work.

Researchers find a way bypass the iOS activation lock

Two researchers claim to have found a way to bypass the activation lock feature in iOS that's supposed to prevent anyone from using an iPhone or iPad marked as lost by its owner.The first report came Sunday from an Indian security researcher named Hemanth Joseph, who started investigating possible bypasses after being confronted with a locked iPad he acquired from eBay.The activation lock gets enabled automatically when users turn on the Find My iPhone feature via iCloud. It links the device to their Apple IDs and prevents anyone else from accessing the device without entering the associated password.One of the few things allowed from the activation lock screen is connecting the device to a Wi-Fi network, including manually configuring one. Hemanth had the idea of trying to crash the service that enforces the lock screen by entering very long strings of characters in the WPA2-Enterprise username and password fields.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers find a way bypass the iOS activation lock

Two researchers claim to have found a way to bypass the activation lock feature in iOS that's supposed to prevent anyone from using an iPhone or iPad marked as lost by its owner.The first report came Sunday from an Indian security researcher named Hemanth Joseph, who started investigating possible bypasses after being confronted with a locked iPad he acquired from eBay.The activation lock gets enabled automatically when users turn on the Find My iPhone feature via iCloud. It links the device to their Apple IDs and prevents anyone else from accessing the device without entering the associated password.One of the few things allowed from the activation lock screen is connecting the device to a Wi-Fi network, including manually configuring one. Hemanth had the idea of trying to crash the service that enforces the lock screen by entering very long strings of characters in the WPA2-Enterprise username and password fields.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here