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Category Archives for "Networking"

AWS September roundup: EC2 changes, new France region, and more

The days may be getting shorter up in the northern hemisphere, but that hasn't slowed the pace of updates to AWS. Amazon has kept on updating its cloud platform with a handful of quality-of-life changes, plus some major tweaks to how it handles Reserved Instances. Here's the rundown:Major changes to EC2 Reserved Instances One of the ways for customers to get discounts on compute capacity with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud is to sign up for Reserved Instances. Then they pay a set amount of money for the benefit of getting deep discounts on compute. It's something that Amazon introduced 8 years ago and has been an important part of the company's cloud offering since. Now, they're making some pretty big changes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon may want a $1 billion discount on Yahoo

Verizon may be getting cold feet with its acquisition of Yahoo. Reportedly, it's asking for a $1 billion discount on the original $4.8 billion deal for the Internet company.Recent news about Yahoo's massive data breach and its alleged secret email scanning program has diminished the company's value in the eyes of Verizon, according to a Thursday report by the New York Post.Tim Armstrong, the head of AOL, which Verizon acquired in 2015, reportedly has met with Yahoo executives about reducing the acquisition price.  "He’s pretty upset about the lack of disclosure and he’s saying can we get out of this or can we reduce the price?" the report said, quoting what it called a source familiar with Verizon's thinking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon may want a $1 billion discount on Yahoo

Verizon may be getting cold feet with its acquisition of Yahoo. Reportedly, it's asking for a $1 billion discount on the original $4.8 billion deal for the Internet company.Recent news about Yahoo's massive data breach and its alleged secret email scanning program has diminished the company's value in the eyes of Verizon, according to a Thursday report by the New York Post.Tim Armstrong, the head of AOL, which Verizon acquired in 2015, reportedly has met with Yahoo executives about reducing the acquisition price.  "He’s pretty upset about the lack of disclosure and he’s saying can we get out of this or can we reduce the price?" the report said, quoting what it called a source familiar with Verizon's thinking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How companies can deal with insider data theft

To learn that your company's confidential data was stolen -- not by any hacker, but by an employee -- is a nightmare scenario that no one wants to face.But it's also a risk that's very real. The recent arrest of a former NSA contractor suspected of stealing classified government files is just the latest high-profile example, and security experts say all companies need to be on guard against potential insider threats.How serious is the threat? It's not every day that thieving employees take to the digital black market to sell their company's sensitive information, but it does happen, and incidents have been occurring more frequently, said Andrei Barysevich, a director at security firm Flashpoint.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How companies can deal with insider data theft

To learn that your company's confidential data was stolen -- not by any hacker, but by an employee -- is a nightmare scenario that no one wants to face.But it's also a risk that's very real. The recent arrest of a former NSA contractor suspected of stealing classified government files is just the latest high-profile example, and security experts say all companies need to be on guard against potential insider threats.How serious is the threat? It's not every day that thieving employees take to the digital black market to sell their company's sensitive information, but it does happen, and incidents have been occurring more frequently, said Andrei Barysevich, a director at security firm Flashpoint.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce takes another swing at Microsoft with chatbot building tools

Companies have another set of tools at their disposal to build chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has begun touting a new LiveMessage service that's aimed at connecting his company's Service Cloud with messaging services like Facebook Messenger and SMS.  Benioff is pitching the new service as a way to turn messaging apps into a user interface for Salesforce, in addition to serving as a tool for connecting people with their friends. It will power bots, in addition to direct communications between service representatives and customers. Right now, LiveMessage works with SMS, and it will be expanded to work on Facebook Messenger later this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper CEO: On the cusp of transforming economics of optical networking

Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim believes his company’s recent purchase of silicon-photonics vendor Aurrion may lead to a major cost reduction for high-speed networking gear.Rahim says he thinks “we are potentially on the cusp of a real breakthrough that will transform the economics of the optics in networking equipment, which obviously will be of great interest to anybody that is building a large, mission-critical network.”The big benefit for customers will be a better price per bit per second in Juniper’s high-speed networking gear, Rahim said in a phone interview during a break from the company’s NXTWORK 2016 (see highlights of the audio interview below). “It will also help Juniper in maintaining its long-term objective for growth margins of our products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper CEO: On the cusp of transforming economics of optical networking

Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim believes his company’s recent purchase of silicon-photonics vendor Aurrion may lead to a major cost reduction for high-speed networking gear.Rahim says he thinks “we are potentially on the cusp of a real breakthrough that will transform the economics of the optics in networking equipment, which obviously will be of great interest to anybody that is building a large, mission-critical network.”The big benefit for customers will be a better price per bit per second in Juniper’s high-speed networking gear, Rahim said in a phone interview during a break from the company’s NXTWORK 2016 (see highlights of the audio interview below). “It will also help Juniper in maintaining its long-term objective for growth margins of our products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenStack Newton serves up a heaping helping of scalability

The next release of OpenStack made its debut on Thursday with a raft of new features for better scalability and resiliency.Architectural and functional barriers can make it difficult for companies to scale their clouds up or down across platforms and geographies, but OpenStack's 14th release -- dubbed Newton -- does away with many of those limitations. The open source cloud-building software now includes improved scaling capabilities in its Nova, Horizon, and Swift components, its makers say.New improvements bolster the horizontal scale-out of Nova compute environments, while others add convergence by default in the Heat orchestration service as well as multi-tenancy improvements in Ironic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenStack Newton serves up a heaping helping of scalability

The next release of OpenStack made its debut on Thursday with a raft of new features for better scalability and resiliency.Architectural and functional barriers can make it difficult for companies to scale their clouds up or down across platforms and geographies, but OpenStack's 14th release -- dubbed Newton -- does away with many of those limitations. The open source cloud-building software now includes improved scaling capabilities in its Nova, Horizon, and Swift components, its makers say.New improvements bolster the horizontal scale-out of Nova compute environments, while others add convergence by default in the Heat orchestration service as well as multi-tenancy improvements in Ironic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Drones could help with disasters like Hurricane Matthew

Weather disasters like Hurricane Matthew are pushing wireless carriers to test drones and other unmanned aircraft that can act as wireless hot spots for 4G LTE connections to help emergency responders. Verizon announced Thursday it had just completed a simulation in Cape May, N.J., using unmanned planes to act as flying hot spots for 4G LTE connections. First responders could use those hot spots to communicate in remote places where wireless antennas were lost or unavailable. [Here's a video of the AT&T test.]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Spammers prefer Trump over Clinton, but are rapidly losing faith in Trump

Whatever difficulties Donald Trump may be having with white college-educated women, African Americans, Latinos, hawkish conservatives and the co-hosts of “Morning Joe,” he’s far and away the favorite presidential candidate of at least one demographic group: spammers. However, he seems to have lost significant support among that group as well. These conclusions are drawn from a year’s worth of data assembled by Network World Test Alliance member Joel Snyder, a senior partner at Opus One in Tucson, Ariz. Opus One has been testing anti-spam products for more than a decade, and, as the following chart shows, Trump-related spam has dwarfed Clinton-related spam over the past year … only less so as the campaign has worn on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What CSOs can learn from the Yahoo breach

In the latest episode of Security Sessions, CSO Editor-in-chief Joan Goodchild talks about the implications of the Yahoo data breach, in which up to 500 million accounts were hacked. Joining Goodchild in the discussion is Kevin O'Brien, CEO and founder of GreatHorn, who offers advice to CSOs and other IT security leaders on ways to learn from this particular breach.

FCC to vote on strict privacy rules for ISPs in late October

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will push forward with controversial privacy regulations that would require broadband providers to get customer permission before using and sharing geolocation, browsing histories, and other personal information.Broadband providers have complained the proposal puts stronger privacy rules in place for them than for internet companies like Google and Facebook. But FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has scheduled a final vote on the regulations for Oct. 27.Broadband customers should have the ability to make informed decisions about their privacy, and the rules are designed to help them, FCC officials said in a press briefing,To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here