55% off Akface Smart Wifi Power Plug – Deal Alert

This smart plug from Akface allows you to remotely turn appliances and electronics on or off from anywhere in the world. Perfect for household appliances, lamps, window a/c units, and more. After connecting this plug to your house's wifi, you can easily control on/off, program the plug to follow an on/off schedule, and more. Currently averaging 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews), the typical list price of $50.99 has been reduced 55% to $22.89. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When your government hacks you

There was a time when Cisco routers were unstoppable, and their deviations into proprietary protocols and constructions were accepted because Cisco could do no wrong. They were the smartest kids in networking protocols.But there is a crack in their armor, a glitch in the Teflon. Cisco may not be the only networking infrastructure vendor to now face an attack ostensibly from their own government, just the largest.Just as the U.S. government has taken Huwaei to task for an accusation of hidden code benefiting the Chinese government, other governments across the planet now know that their Cisco infrastructure can be cracked open—and no, it’s not easy, and requires an additional step of having hacked in from some place else.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When your government hacks you

There was a time when Cisco routers were unstoppable, and their deviations into proprietary protocols and constructions were accepted because Cisco could do no wrong. They were the smartest kids in networking protocols.But there is a crack in their armor, a glitch in the Teflon. Cisco may not be the only networking infrastructure vendor to now face an attack ostensibly from their own government, just the largest.Just as the U.S. government has taken Huwaei to task for an accusation of hidden code benefiting the Chinese government, other governments across the planet now know that their Cisco infrastructure can be cracked open—and no, it’s not easy, and requires an additional step of having hacked in from some place else.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: One old guy’s advice

Having grown in my career since college, I have learned many lessons. I started out in computers back in 1986, at the precipice of the “Clone” era. I cut my teeth and my hands by installing chips on memory cards and motherboards, replacing 5.25” floppy discs, and dealing with the jumble of cables on Dual 5MB Winchester hard drives that cost and weighed an arm and a leg. —virtually tied to my desktop

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Cisco vs. Arista: Shades of Gray

Yesterday was D-Day for Arista in their fight with Cisco over the SysDB patent. I’ve covered this a bit for Network Computing in the past, but I wanted to cover some new things here and put a bit more opinion into my thoughts.

Cisco Designates The Competition

As the great Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) says, you always have to punch above your weight. When you are a large company, any attempt to pick on the “little guy” looks bad. When you’re at the top of the market it’s even tougher. If you attempt to fight back against anyone you’re going to legitimize them in the eye of everyone else wanting to take a shot at you.

Cisco has effectively designated Arista as their number one competitor by way of this lawsuit. Arista represents a larger threat that HPE, Brocade, or Juniper. Yes, I agree that it is easy to argue that the infringement constituted a material problem to their business. But at the same time, Cisco very publicly just said that Arista is causing a problem for Cisco. Enough of a problem that Cisco is going to take them to court. Not make Arista license the patent. That’s telling.

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Google is using AI to compress images better than JPEG

Small is beautiful, as the old saying goes, and nowhere is that more true than in media files. Compressed images are considerably easier to transmit and store than uncompressed ones are, and now Google is using neural networks to beat JPEG at the compression game.Google began by taking a random sample of 6 million 1280×720 images on the web. It then broke those down into nonoverlapping 32×32 tiles and zeroed in on 100 of those with the worst compression ratios. The goal there, essentially, was to focus on improving performance on the "hardest-to-compress" data, because it's bound to be easier to succeed on the rest.The researchers then used the TensorFlow machine-learning system Google open-sourced last year to train a set of experimental neural network architectures. They used one million steps to train them and then collected a series of technical metrics to find which training models produced the best-compressed results.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Platform9 & ZeroStack Make OpenStack a Little More VMware-Friendly

High availability is highly desirable.

Hackers tap vBulletin vulnerability to break into 27 million more accounts

A vulnerability in a widely-used internet forum software is becoming a go-to method for hackers to steal data.Hackers recently targeted 11 different sites, many of them from Russia, and stole information from more 27 million Internet accounts, according to LeakedSource, a repository for data breaches.  About 25 million accounts of those accounts were from cfire.mail.ru, parapa.mail.ru, and tanks.mail.ru, all of them Russian language games. Another 1 million were tied to gaming titles from Funcom, including The Secret World and Age of Conan. The stolen data includes email addresses and hashed passwords that can be easily cracked.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers tap vBulletin vulnerability to break into 27 million more accounts

A vulnerability in a widely-used internet forum software is becoming a go-to method for hackers to steal data.Hackers recently targeted 11 different sites, many of them from Russia, and stole information from more 27 million Internet accounts, according to LeakedSource, a repository for data breaches.  About 25 million accounts of those accounts were from cfire.mail.ru, parapa.mail.ru, and tanks.mail.ru, all of them Russian language games. Another 1 million were tied to gaming titles from Funcom, including The Secret World and Age of Conan. The stolen data includes email addresses and hashed passwords that can be easily cracked.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

71% off Venstar Bicycle Waterproof Sport Bluetooth Speaker with Remote Control – Deal Alert

The Venstar Waterproof Sport Bluetooth Speaker has been designed for bicycling and outdoor sports. Enjoy music when you are riding on road or climbing a mountain.  Excellent TPU material provides shockproof capability. The companion remote conrtol allows you to control the volume, skip to the next track or answer a call at the press of a button.  This bicycle speaker currently receives 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews). Amazon indicates that it's typical list price of $159.99 has been reduced 71% to $45.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft reveals the chip behind HoloLens

Microsoft has talked up its well-regarded virtual reality headset called HoloLens, but has been a little stingy on some technical details, such as what's powering the device.However, it finally took the wraps off that mystery at an appropriate show. Microsoft detailed for the first time its custom CPU for HoloLens at Hot Chips, an annual semiconductor conference held at Stanford University every August.Hot Chips is a great show, and I miss attending it even more than IDF, since a variety of chip vendors show up to talk. Between the extreme technical detail from Ph.D. engineers and some brutal accents, it requires your full attention, but that's not a hard thing to do because the insights are often fascinating.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: IPv6 performance (again)

Every so often I hear the claim that some service or other has deliberately chosen not to support IPv6, and the reason cited is not because of some technical issue, or some cost or business issue, but simply because the service operator is of the view that IPv6 offers an inferior level service as compared to IPv4, and by offering the service over IPv6 they would be exposing their clients to an inferior level of performance of the service. But is this really the case? Is IPv6 an inferior cousin of IPv4 in terms of service performance? —CircleID

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On the ‘net: I2RS on Packet Pushers

While Greg was at the IETF in Berlin, Sue Hares and I—the two current co-chairs of the I2RS working group—had a general discussion around what the big idea is and where the working group is headed. You can listen to the recording at Packet Pushers.

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How Moto Mods went from concept to product

The Moto Z and Moto Mods announcement last month caught the attention of everyone who has followed modular phone designs like Google Project ARA. The intriguing Moto Mods are the most viable modular design yet because consumers can add features to their phones, simply and cleanly without stressing them with a complex interconnection procedure or having to wait for the phone to reboot. The magnetic interface intuitively explains how it works and guides the user the first time a Mod is added to the Moto Z.I sat down with Paul Fordham, lead mechanical architect on the Moto Mods design team at Motorola, to talk about how Moto Mods were conceived and developed into a product. Interviewing software and electrical engineers can be tedious because of the high level of abstraction in their work. It was a pleasure to talk with Fordham, however, because mechanical engineers, like physicists, are tethered to the physical world, making for a very enjoyable and tangible conversation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nuage Birthed its SD-WAN in the Data Center

It nurtured SD-WAN from a different perspective.

Telegram’s encryption stymies French police but pleases their bosses

French government officials have been revealed as fervent users of Telegram, a messaging app that is frustrating their interior minister with its end-to-end encryption.Telegram's fans include the current head of the French judicial police, Christian Sainte, and his predecessor, Frédéric Péchenard. The app's security has also won over a number of legislators, including the French finance minister, who encourages his team to use it, according to Wednesday's edition of French newspaper Le Canard Enchainé.Telegram claims over 100 million monthly users of its secure messaging app, but it was the action of just one of them -- Normandy church attacker Adel Kermiche -- that prompted French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve to call on Tuesday for investigators to be allowed to eavesdrop on Telegram users' conversations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Telegram’s encryption stymies French police but pleases their bosses

French government officials have been revealed as fervent users of Telegram, a messaging app that is frustrating their interior minister with its end-to-end encryption.Telegram's fans include the current head of the French judicial police, Christian Sainte, and his predecessor, Frédéric Péchenard. The app's security has also won over a number of legislators, including the French finance minister, who encourages his team to use it, according to Wednesday's edition of French newspaper Le Canard Enchainé.Telegram claims over 100 million monthly users of its secure messaging app, but it was the action of just one of them -- Normandy church attacker Adel Kermiche -- that prompted French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve to call on Tuesday for investigators to be allowed to eavesdrop on Telegram users' conversations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When it comes to the iPhone’s headphone jack: I’m with Woz!

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak may be a beloved figure in Silicon Valley, but he hasn’t had a big voice in Apple product decisions in a long, long time. And right now, that seems like a shame, as Woz is absolutely right to object to Apple’s widely reported plans to eliminate the headphone jack in the next model iPhone.+ Also on Network World: iPhone 7: Why abandoning the headphone jack makes sense +Wozniak told the Australian Financial Review this week, that if the iPhone 7 is “missing the 3.5mm earphone jack, that's going to tick off a lot of people.” And Wozniak doesn’t believe Bluetooth wireless connections—which work with a wide variety of devices—are the answer, claiming Bluetooth doesn’t sound as good as a wired connection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French submarine builder’s documents leak: A case of hacking for economic espionage?

DCNS, a French submarine builder, has allegedly been hacked – potentially for economic espionage reasons – and 22,400 pages of “secret” documents pertaining to its Scorpene-class submarine have been leaked.The Australian published redacted portions of the leaked documents, claiming to have seen thousands of pages outlining highly sensitive details about systems, sensors, specifications, tech manuals, stealth capabilities, antennae models, electromagnetic and infrared data, conditions under which the periscope can be used and more. The leaked documents reportedly detail “the entire secret combat capability of the six Scorpene-class submarines that French shipbuilder DCNS has designed for the Indian Navy.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French submarine builder’s documents leak: A case of hacking for economic espionage?

DCNS, a French submarine builder, has allegedly been hacked – potentially for economic espionage reasons – and 22,400 pages of “secret” documents pertaining to its Scorpene-class submarine have been leaked.The Australian published redacted portions of the leaked documents, claiming to have seen thousands of pages outlining highly sensitive details about systems, sensors, specifications, tech manuals, stealth capabilities, antennae models, electromagnetic and infrared data, conditions under which the periscope can be used and more. The leaked documents reportedly detail “the entire secret combat capability of the six Scorpene-class submarines that French shipbuilder DCNS has designed for the Indian Navy.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here