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Category Archives for "Networking"

802.11ad is the fastest Wi-Fi that you might not ever use

Millimeter-wave Wi-Fi technology, better known as 802.11ad, is a powerful new wireless standard, for which products are just beginning to hit the market – a router from TP-Link and a laptop from Acer are the only ones so far. 802.11ad is based on very high-frequency radio waves – where today’s 802.11n and 802.11ac standards use 5GHz frequencies, ad uses 60GHz. That means that it’s both capable of handling a lot more data than earlier standards, and a lot more short-ranged, since higher frequency signals dissipate much faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Many vMotion Events Can You Expect in a Data Center?

One of my friends sent me this question:

How many VM moves do you see in a medium and how many in a large data center environment per second and per minute? What would be a reasonable maximum?

Obviously the answer to the first part is it depends (please share your experience in the comments), so we’ll focus on the second one. It’s time for another Fermi estimate.

Read more ...

Trump hotel chain fined over data breaches

Trump Hotel Collection has arrived at a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman over hacks that are said to have led to the exposure of over 70,000 credit card numbers and other personal data.The hotel chain, one of the businesses of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, has agreed to pay US$50,000 in penalties and promised to take measures to beef up its data security practices, according to the attorney general’s office.The chain is one of many hotels and retailers that have been hit recently by malware that skimmed payment card information.The key charges apparently against Trump Hotel Collection (THC) are that it didn’t have adequate protection and even after the attacks became known, did not quickly inform the people affected, in breach of New York law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump hotel chain fined over data breaches

Trump Hotel Collection has arrived at a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman over hacks that are said to have led to the exposure of over 70,000 credit card numbers and other personal data.The hotel chain, one of the businesses of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, has agreed to pay US$50,000 in penalties and promised to take measures to beef up its data security practices, according to the attorney general’s office.The chain is one of many hotels and retailers that have been hit recently by malware that skimmed payment card information.The key charges apparently against Trump Hotel Collection (THC) are that it didn’t have adequate protection and even after the attacks became known, did not quickly inform the people affected, in breach of New York law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to keep terrifying medical device hacks from becoming reality

While some of the scariest IoT hacks envisioned – those involving hijacked medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps – have yet to surface in the real world, those in the medical and IT security fields are not letting down their guard. They’ve seen enough ransomware and other attacks on healthcare outfits of late to know they are major cyberattack targets.The reality is that more medical devices are becoming connected ones, and that’s increasing the security threat surface, said panelists this past week at the Security of Things Forum in Cambridge, Mass.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to keep terrifying medical device hacks from becoming reality

While some of the scariest IoT hacks envisioned – those involving hijacked medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps – have yet to surface in the real world, those in the medical and IT security fields are not letting down their guard. They’ve seen enough ransomware and other attacks on healthcare outfits of late to know they are major cyberattack targets.The reality is that more medical devices are becoming connected ones, and that’s increasing the security threat surface, said panelists this past week at the Security of Things Forum in Cambridge, Mass.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Podium Data wants to offer a complete data wrangling platform

News today from quiet 2-year-old startup Podium Data, which has raised $9.5 million by way of a series A funding round. The round comes from a syndicate of investors led by Malibu Ventures. The company was founded back in 2014, and since then it has quietly been going about building its offering.The founding team has broad experience within the big data industry, having wrangled data warehousing, advanced high-performance computing, systems integrations, business intelligence and database systems within Fortune 100 companies.+ Also on Network World: Data lakes: A better way to analyze customer data +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Podium Data wants to offer a complete data wrangling platform

News today from quiet 2-year-old startup Podium Data, which has raised $9.5 million by way of a series A funding round. The round comes from a syndicate of investors led by Malibu Ventures. The company was founded back in 2014, and since then it has quietly been going about building its offering.The founding team has broad experience within the big data industry, having wrangled data warehousing, advanced high-performance computing, systems integrations, business intelligence and database systems within Fortune 100 companies.+ Also on Network World: Data lakes: A better way to analyze customer data +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When the IPv6 Data Changes, so Should Your Opinion

Sky UK recently completed their rollout of IPv6. The uptake statistics are quite remarkable. If you think that people don’t have IPv6-capable devices, or that their home routers can’t handle IPv6…you really need to look at the data, and re-think your opinion.

APNIC has a long-running program collecting data on IPv6 client capability/preference by country and ASN. This graph shows the data for Great Britain:

ipv6_gb

So a year ago we had ~5% takeup, and now it’s 20-25%. And here’s the reason for that big jump from April this year – this graph shows the data for AS5607, BSkyB:

ipv6_bskyb

So > 80% of clients on the BSkyB network are IPv6-capable.

If someone tells you that people don’t have IPv6-capable devices, or routers: the data does not back that up. A few years ago that may have been true, but people don’t access the Internet using Windows XP desktops anymore: They use iOS and Android mobile devices. These have short replacement lifecycles, so people tend to be running newer versions. These are capable of using IPv6, and will prefer it if it is available.

The other related trend is that people have more wireless devices at home, and they have Continue reading

When the IPv6 Data Changes, so Should Your Opinion

Sky UK recently completed their rollout of IPv6. The uptake statistics are quite remarkable. If you think that people don’t have IPv6-capable devices, or that their home routers can’t handle IPv6…you really need to look at the data, and re-think your opinion.

APNIC has a long-running program collecting data on IPv6 client capability/preference by country and ASN. This graph shows the data for Great Britain:

ipv6_gb

So a year ago we had ~5% takeup, and now it’s 20-25%. And here’s the reason for that big jump from April this year - this graph shows the data for AS5607, BSkyB:

ipv6_bskyb

So > 80% of clients on the BSkyB network are IPv6-capable.

If someone tells you that people don’t have IPv6-capable devices, or routers: the data does not back that up. A few years ago that may have been true, but people don’t access the Internet using Windows XP desktops anymore: They use iOS and Android mobile devices. These have short replacement lifecycles, so people tend to be running newer versions. These are capable of using IPv6, and will prefer it if it is available.

The other related trend is that people have more wireless devices at home, and they have Continue reading

Managing Digital Racket

I read this article, long by today’s standards of fleeting attention. TL;DR. Information bombardment addicted the author with negative effects on his life. And while he’s not done making changes in his life, he has broken the cycle.

I’ve had similar challenges to him, and continue to hone my approach to managing digital racket. I know I’ve written about this before, but the art is evolving for me. Chronicling progress, however minor, is cathartic.

I mute nearly all notifications. This cuts down tremendously on mental intrusions, improving my focus and reducing FOMO. While you’d think turning off notifications would increase FOMO, you realize over time that you aren’t actually missing anything substantial. Once you believe this, the anxiety borne of FOMO fades away.

The only notifications I currently receive are as follows.

  1. Phone calls. I don’t get many, and most of them are directly related to my business.
  2. Direct messages from my immediate family.
  3. Direct messages from my three co-workers and a few close collaborators.

I have deleted most social media apps from my phone. I have a few for the sake of convenience when abroad, but rarely access them. With notifications turned off, the temptation is practically nil. Twitter is my greatest temptation, and therefore do not Continue reading

KrebsOnSecurity moves to Project Shield for protection against DDoS attack censorship

Unless you are a bad guy intent upon nefarious schemes to exploit technology in order to make money, then you probably have a great amount of respect for security reporter Brian Krebs. The crimes, breaches and attacks he has exposed have been so stunning that it boggles the mind. If cyber thugs have a “most wanted” list, then Krebs is likely at, or very near, the top. Yet what kind of messed up world do we live in if criminals can exploit horribly insecure internet-of-things devices with such success that it can silence the voice of a journalist like Krebs?He most recently ticked off allies of vDOS; Krebs wrote about the DDoS-for-hire company and the two teenagers allegedly behind it were arrested. Although it’s nothing new for his site, KrebsOnSecurity, to come under attack, like it did after his vDOS exposé, nearly two weeks later, Krebs’ site was hit “with the largest DDoS the internet has ever seen. 665 Gbps” (gigabits per second). Some of the POST request attacks included the string “freeapplej4ck,” referring to one of the alleged teenage owners of vDOS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

KrebsOnSecurity moves to Project Shield for protection against DDoS attack censorship

Unless you are a bad guy intent upon nefarious schemes to exploit technology in order to make money, then you probably have a great amount of respect for security reporter Brian Krebs. The crimes, breaches and attacks he has exposed have been so stunning that it boggles the mind. If cyber thugs have a “most wanted” list, then Krebs is likely at, or very near, the top. Yet what kind of messed up world do we live in if criminals can exploit horribly insecure internet-of-things devices with such success that it can silence the voice of a journalist like Krebs?He most recently ticked off allies of vDOS; Krebs wrote about the DDoS-for-hire company and the two teenagers allegedly behind it were arrested. Although it’s nothing new for his site, KrebsOnSecurity, to come under attack, like it did after his vDOS exposé, nearly two weeks later, Krebs’ site was hit “with the largest DDoS the internet has ever seen. 665 Gbps” (gigabits per second). Some of the POST request attacks included the string “freeapplej4ck,” referring to one of the alleged teenage owners of vDOS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Test-driving arbitrary data publishing over BGP

BGP is a routing protocol known for its strength in scaling and resilience. It is also flexible and extensible.  With its Multi-Protocol extension BGP can support distribution of various data types. Still to extend BGP for every new route data type  requires introduction of new address family(AFI/SAFI) and making BGP aware of the new data … Continue reading Test-driving arbitrary data publishing over BGP

How we brought HTTPS Everywhere to the cloud (part 1)

CloudFlare's mission is to make HTTPS accessible for all our customers. It provides security for their websites, improved ranking on search engines, better performance with HTTP/2, and access to browser features such as geolocation that are being deprecated for plaintext HTTP. With Universal SSL or similar features, a simple button click can now enable encryption for a website.

Unfortunately, as described in a previous blog post, this is only half of the problem. To make sure that a page is secure and can't be controlled or eavesdropped by third-parties, browsers must ensure that not only the page itself but also all its dependencies are loaded via secure channels. Page elements that don't fulfill this requirement are called mixed content and can either result in the entire page being reported as insecure or even completely blocked, thus breaking the page for the end user.

What can we do about it?

When we conceived the Automatic HTTPS Rewrites project, we aimed to automatically reduce the amount of mixed content on customers' web pages without breaking their websites and without any delay noticeable by end users while receiving a page that is being rewritten on the fly.

A naive way Continue reading

Companies say IoT matters but don’t agree how to secure it

A majority of enterprises say the internet of things is strategic to their business, but most still take a piecemeal approach to IoT security.Those results from a global IDC survey conducted in July and August reveal both the promise and the growing pains of IoT, a set of technologies that may help many industries but can’t simply be plugged in. The 27-country survey had more than 4,500 respondents, all from organizations with 100 or more employees.For 56 percent of enterprises, IoT is part of their strategic plans for the next two or three years, IDC analyst Carrie MacGillivray said on a webcast about the results. But the state of adoption varies widely among industries. Manufacturing companies are investing the most in the technology, with retail and financial services – especially insurance – also on the cutting edge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A robot fish is helping the Navy improve underwater movement

Oscar Curet is an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University. For the past couple of years, he's studied the movement of the Knifefish, an animal native to the Amazon River, that uses a long ribbon fin to propel itself through the water and navigate its complex environment.  "As a engineer, we try to solve problems, and nature has solved some of the problems that we are facing, and one of them is mobility," Curet said. Curet, along with other researchers from Florida Atlantic University (FAU), has created a robot fish to identify the differences between engineering systems and what occurs in nature. The prototype is composed of 3D-printed materials, 16 motors, and a number of sensors. The team also recently received a grant from the U.S. Navy to equip their prototype with a Volumetric Particle Image Velocity System, or PIV. The system, which uses four cameras synchronized with a laser light to capture currents in three dimensions, will help researchers measure how fluid dynamics interact with the flexible propulsors the team has developed to make underwater vehicles more maneuverable. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco, IBM may be interested in buying Imperva

Security vendor Imperva is shopping itself around and may be attractive to the likes of Cisco and IBM, according to Bloomberg.The Motley Fool reports that Imperva’s stock rose 20% today after Bloomberg’s report, which the Fool notes could actually drive buyers away because it would mean a more costly deal.Bloomberg named a number of other possible buyers including Forecpoint (owned by Raytheon and Vista Equity Partners), Akamai and Fortinet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here