Network Programmability Basics

Samsung to buy Viv Labs to challenge Google Assistant

Samsung Electronics has agreed to buy Viv Labs, an artificial intelligence startup created by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham.You may not have heard of Kittlaus, Cheyer or Brigham, but if you own an iPhone you've probably spoken with one of their creations, Siri. Apple bought their first startup, a spinoff from SRI International, in 2010. A couple of years later, they left to create Viv.Samsung's move into AI could be seen as a reaction to Google's launch of a new AI assistant on its Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones on Tuesday.Like Google Assistant, Viv is designed to answer natural language queries by integrating with a variety of web services. But where Google already has a range of in-house services -- Maps, Gmail, search -- from which to gather context, Viv aims to build an open ecosystem. Many of the useful functions will be delivered by third party developers, a model similar to the one Amazon.com is pursuing for its Echo devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4chan finally feels the weight of economic reality

4chan, the wretched hive of scum and villainy that has caused more disruptions on the internet and in real life than any other single website, is in financial trouble and facing the harsh reality that success and traffic are useless without income.The site went live in 2003 when then-15-year-old Christopher "moot" Poole set it up as a copy of a Japanese board called 2chan. The site is the ultimate in bare bones. No login or account is required; everyone is anonymous. Poole, a fan of Japanese pop culture, wanted to create an American equivalent of 2chan, where people shared images of anime and manga.It rapidly grew beyond that, with the /b/ board, Random, becoming a hive of all sorts of insanity. For a while, it was the home base of the hacktivist group Anonymous. 4chan users became notorious for both good deeds and bad, both online and in the real world, resulting in profiles of the site by the Washington Post, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. A book has been written about Anonymous and its 4chan connection, and the site was even the subject of an MIT research paper (PDF). To read Continue reading

Fujitsu considers selling its PC business to Lenovo

Lenovo may be about to grow its share of the shrinking PC business again: Japanese IT conglomerate Fujitsu is considering selling its PC manufacturing business, and Lenovo may be the buyer, Fujitsu said Thursday.As part of a strategy to focus on core activities, in February Fujitsu spun out its PC business as an independent operating unit. Such spin-outs are usually a prelude to a sale.On Wednesday, Japanese media reported that the company was in talks to sell the PC business to Lenovo."These reports are not based on any official announcement made by Fujitsu," the company said Thursday, adding that it "is currently considering various possibilities, including what is being reported, but a decision has not yet been made."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using DNS Names in Firewall Rulesets

My friend Matthias Luft sent me an interesting tweet a while ago:

@ioshints What’s your take on firewall rule sets & IP addresses vs. hostnames?

— Matthias Luft (@uchi_mata) August 16, 2016

All I could say in 160 characters was “it depends”. Here’s a longer answer.

Report: VMware Is Adding AWS as a Cloud Partner

If you can't beat 'em...

Yahoo’s secret email scans helped the FBI probe terrorists

What Yahoo was looking for with its alleged email scanning program may have been signs of code used by a foreign terrorist group. The company was searching for a digital "signature" of a communication method used by a state-sponsored terrorist group, according to a new report from The New York Times that provided more details on Yahoo's email scanning.  The report on Wednesday report didn't identify the signature or say if it involved any cryptographic computer code. But the article said it was the U.S. Department of Justice, and not the National Security Agency, that had obtained a court order forcing Yahoo to comply. A Reuters report on Tuesday wasn't clear about what agencies were involved in the probe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo’s secret email scans helped the FBI probe terrorists

What Yahoo was looking for with its alleged email scanning program may have been signs of code used by a foreign terrorist group. The company was searching for a digital "signature" of a communication method used by a state-sponsored terrorist group, according to a new report from The New York Times that provided more details on Yahoo's email scanning.  The report on Wednesday report didn't identify the signature or say if it involved any cryptographic computer code. But the article said it was the U.S. Department of Justice, and not the National Security Agency, that had obtained a court order forcing Yahoo to comply. A Reuters report on Tuesday wasn't clear about what agencies were involved in the probe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Phishing still fools people, but at least more are cautious

While people still have a really hard time telling the difference between legit and phishing emails, at least there is enough awareness of the phishing threat that many people will err on the side of caution when it comes to clicking on links.This was one finding from Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab in a study titled "Quantifying Phishing Susceptibility for Detection and Behavior Decisions" that published recently in the journal Human Factors.MORE: New tech can help catch spearphishing attacksTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Phishing still fools people, but at least more are cautious

While people still have a really hard time telling the difference between legit and phishing emails, at least there is enough awareness of the phishing threat that many people will err on the side of caution when it comes to clicking on links.This was one finding from Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab in a study titled "Quantifying Phishing Susceptibility for Detection and Behavior Decisions" that published recently in the journal Human Factors.MORE: New tech can help catch spearphishing attacksTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia buys small semiconductor company to land 5G tech

A small semiconductor company based in Cambridge, Mass., was acquired today by Nokia, in a move to make the Finnish giant’s base station technology more energy-efficient.Eta Devices’ technology and institutional expertise appear to be at the heart of the acquisition, for which terms and pricing were not disclosed. Eta has 20 employees, located in Cambridge and at an R&D office in Stockholm, Sweden.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Satya Nadella's comp package slips 3% to $17.7M + Happy 25th once again to Linux, 'the little OS that definitely could'To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia buys small semiconductor company to land 5G tech

A small semiconductor company based in Cambridge, Mass., was acquired today by Nokia, in a move to make the Finnish giant’s base station technology more energy-efficient.Eta Devices’ technology and institutional expertise appear to be at the heart of the acquisition, for which terms and pricing were not disclosed. Eta has 20 employees, located in Cambridge and at an R&D office in Stockholm, Sweden.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Satya Nadella's comp package slips 3% to $17.7M + Happy 25th once again to Linux, 'the little OS that definitely could'To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Daisy-chaining APIs makes serverless sense

Enterprise and startups are moving to cloud-based infrastructure to create an API-enabled value chain for new products and workflows. With this has emerged the idea of serverless infrastructure: running functions and applications completely in cloud-based servers where the hosting provider handles all of the sysadmin requirements.This is a new frontier in how business is leveraging cloud, and it is set to explode, especially amongst system integrators and consultants, as more data from sensors and machines are incorporated and as traditional businesses move even more of their IT infrastructure to the cloud.But to take advantage of this opportunity, businesses need to have their services and data accessible via application programming interfaces (API), which for most businesses is still just an emerging trend.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T jumps into SD-WAN market; partners with IBM

AT&T today jumped headfirst into the fast-growing software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) market with a new offering it hopes to bring to market next year based on technology from SD-WAN startup VeloCloud.SD-WAN is gaining steam thanks to its ability to bring software-defined networking (SDN) controls to the wide area network. SD-WANs allow customers to integrate multiple network connection types and let software intelligently route traffic based on application profiles and available network types. Gartner has estimated that SD-WAN can save customers significant costs compared to traditional WAN architectures too. IDC predicts SD-WAN will be a $6 billion market by 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T jumps into SD-WAN market; partners with IBM

AT&T today jumped headfirst into the fast-growing software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) market with a new offering it hopes to bring to market next year based on technology from SD-WAN startup VeloCloud.SD-WAN is gaining steam thanks to its ability to bring software-defined networking (SDN) controls to the wide area network. SD-WANs allow customers to integrate multiple network connection types and let software intelligently route traffic based on application profiles and available network types. Gartner has estimated that SD-WAN can save customers significant costs compared to traditional WAN architectures too. IDC predicts SD-WAN will be a $6 billion market by 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Government lawyers don’t understand the internet

Last year, the FBI nearly destroyed the life of an innocent physicist. In May 2015, agents arrested Xi Xiaoxing, the chairman of Temple University’s physics department, and charged that he was sneaking Chinese scientists details about a piece of restricted research equipment known as a “pocket heater.” An illustrious career seemed suddenly to implode. A few months later, though, the Justice Department dropped all the charges and made an embarrassing admission: It hadn’t actually understood Xi’s work. After defense experts examined his supposed “leaks,” they pointed out that what he’d shared with Chinese colleagues wasn’t a restricted engineering design but in fact a schematic for an altogether different type of device. —Washington Post

The post Worth Reading: Government lawyers don’t understand the internet appeared first on 'net work.

The Business Value of Carrier-Grade NFV Infrastructure

A new ACG Research paper focuses on topics covering carrier-grade NFVi solutions, performance, and availability advantages over enterprise-grade versions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 will be unveiled later this month

Microsoft will kick off its Dynamic Communities’ Summit 16 event on Oct. 11 in Tampa Bay, Florida—hurricane notwithstanding—with the introduction of Dynamics 365, the main suite in its line-of-business applications.Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft, will lead the keynote, which will include live demos of the software and panel discussions for deep dives on what's new. The Summit is entirely devoted to Microsoft's Dynamics line-of-business apps, which includes Dynamics AX, CRM, GP and NAV.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI arrests an NSA contractor suspected of stealing hacking tools

The FBI has arrested a U.S. government contractor for allegedly stealing classified documents, possibly including hacking tools.Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, has been charged with stealing government materials, including top secret information, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.Martin, who held a top-secret national security clearance, allegedly took six classified documents produced in 2014."These documents were produced through sensitive government sources, methods, and capabilities, which are critical to a wide variety of national security issues," the DOJ said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI arrests an NSA contractor suspected of stealing hacking tools

The FBI has arrested a U.S. government contractor for allegedly stealing classified documents, possibly including hacking tools.Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, has been charged with stealing government materials, including top secret information, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.Martin, who held a top-secret national security clearance, allegedly took six classified documents produced in 2014."These documents were produced through sensitive government sources, methods, and capabilities, which are critical to a wide variety of national security issues," the DOJ said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here