Smart City Challenge: 7 proposals for the future of transportation

Self-driving vehicles, traffic lights that adjust based on vehicle flow, bike sharing and smart pavement that provides public Wi-Fi access—those are just a few of the ideas for making cities smarter. Not only have municipalities embraced the smart city concept—using technology to manage a city’s assets, improve the efficiency of services, reduce consumption of resources, reduce costs and improve the quality of life—but many are making it a reality. The U.S. Department of Transportation has joined in to help cities implement smart city ideas, and it is offering a $40 million grant to the winner of its Smart Cities Challenge. The prize will go to the city that has the best plan for integrating innovative technologies such as self-driving cars, connected vehicles and smart sensors into their transportation network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Troubleshooting Cisco IOS FTP Error Code

The Cloud Malware Threat

Complexity Sells

A blog post on Packet Pushers contained a quote by E. W. Dijkstra (of the SPF fame) and while trying to figure out whether that quote was real I stumbled upon his keynote address from a 1984 ACM conference (original). Not surprisingly, nothing has changed in the last 30+ years…

Samsung to acquire US cloud services firm Joyent

Samsung Electronics is acquiring U.S. cloud services company Joyent as it builds its services business around mobile devices and the Internet of Things.The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Joyent will operate as a standalone subsidiary under the new dispensation and continue providing cloud infrastructure and software services to its customers.Samsung said Thursday the acquisition would give the smartphone maker access to its own cloud platform to support it in the areas of mobile, IoT and cloud-based software and services.The South Korean company said it had evaluated a number of providers of public and private cloud infrastructure but zeroed in on Joyent in San Francisco as it saw “an experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology validated by some of the largest Fortune 500 customers.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s Project Bletchley will let companies add middleware to blockchains

Microsoft is extending blockchain technology with a new set of tools designed to make it possible to build a new ecosystem of enterprise applications on top of it.On Wednesday, the company unveiled Project Bletchley, its term for a pair of tools to expand the potential uses of blockchains. It plans to get more utility out of the distributed ledger technology by using the new secure middleware.The first tool, known as "Cryptlets," is a set of services that let companies bring in data from outside a blockchain system without breaking the security of that system. Cryptlets can be written in any programming language and run within a secure, trusted container.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Random Notes From My Third CPOC

I know it's cliche and I know I'm biased because I have an @cisco.com email address, but I've truthfully never seen anything like CPOC before. And the customer's I've worked with at CPOC haven't either. It's extremely gratifying to take something you built “on paper” and prove that it works; to take it to the next level and work those final kinks out that the paper design just didn't account for.

If you want more information about CPOC, get in touch with me or leave a comment below. Or ask your Cisco SE (and if they don't know, have them get in touch with me).

Anyways, on to the point of this post. When I was building the topology for the customer, I kept notes about random things I ran into that I wanted to remember later or those “oh duh!” moments that I probably should've known the answer to but had forgotten or overlooked at the time. This post is just a tidy-up of those notes, in no particular order.

Configuring Linux Policy Routing using Ansible

In this post, I’m going to talk about using Ansible to configure policy routing on Linux. If you’re not familiar with Linux policy routing, have a look at this post, and also review this post for one potential use case (I’m sure there are a number of other quite valuable use cases).

As you may recall from the policy routing introductory post, there are three steps involved in configuring policy routing:

1. You must define the new routing table in /etc/iproute2/rt_tables
2. You must add routes to the new routing tables
3. You must define rules for when the new routing table is consulted

All three of these tasks can be handled via Ansible.

To address step #1, you can use Ansible’s “lineinfile” module to add a reference to the new routing table in /etc/iproute2/rt_tables. For example, consider this Ansible task:

- lineinfile: dest=/etc/iproute2/rt_tables line="200 eth1"

This snippet of Ansible code would add the line “200 eth1” to the end of the etc/iproute2/rt_tables file (if the line does not already exist). This takes care of task #1.

For tasks #2 and #3, you can use a Jinja2 template. Because the creation of the policy routing rule and the routing table entries can Continue reading

Hacker claims credit for DNC breach, posts files online

A hacker claiming responsibility for the recent data breach of the Democractic National Committee apparently has posted the stolen files online.The hacker, who goes by the name Guccifer 2.0, leaked the files on Wednesday following a breach of DNC computers that has been blamed on Russian hackers.  The posted files include a 231-page dossier containing opposition research on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They also include documents concerning expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s election strategy, items on U.S. foreign policy, and donor lists.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hacker claims credit for DNC breach, posts files online

A hacker claiming responsibility for the recent data breach of the Democractic National Committee apparently has posted the stolen files online.The hacker, who goes by the name Guccifer 2.0, leaked the files on Wednesday following a breach of DNC computers that has been blamed on Russian hackers.  The posted files include a 231-page dossier containing opposition research on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They also include documents concerning expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s election strategy, items on U.S. foreign policy, and donor lists.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Unfurls its Tetration Data Center Analytics Platform

David Goeckeler is now GM of the Networking and Security Business Group at Cisco.

Companies pay out billions to fake-CEO email scams

Email scammers, often pretending to be CEOs, have duped businesses into giving away at least $3.1 billion, according to new data from the FBI.The email schemes, which trick companies into wiring funds to the hacker, continue to bedevil companies across the world, the FBI warned in a posting on Tuesday.The amount of money they've tried to steal has grown by 1,300 percent since January 2015, it said.In the U.S. alone, victims have lost $960 million to the schemes over approximately the past three years, FBI figures show. That figure reaches $3.1 billion when global data from international law enforcement and financial groups is included. The number of victims: 22,143.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Companies pay out billions to fake-CEO email scams

Email scammers, often pretending to be CEOs, have duped businesses into giving away at least $3.1 billion, according to new data from the FBI.The email schemes, which trick companies into wiring funds to the hacker, continue to bedevil companies across the world, the FBI warned in a posting on Tuesday.The amount of money they've tried to steal has grown by 1,300 percent since January 2015, it said.In the U.S. alone, victims have lost $960 million to the schemes over approximately the past three years, FBI figures show. That figure reaches $3.1 billion when global data from international law enforcement and financial groups is included. The number of victims: 22,143.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech culture still pushing out women, study finds

Social dynamics and “culture fit” are a big reason that female engineers tend to stay in the profession at a lower rate than their male counterparts, according to a study released today by authors at MIT, University of California – Irvine, Michigan, and McGill.The research was conducted by having more than 40 undergraduate engineering students keep bi-monthly diaries, providing the study with more than 3,000 entries to analyze.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Chef’s open source tool lets applications automate infrastructure provisioning + This startup may have built the world's fastest networking switch chipTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

34% off Jabra Freeway Bluetooth Car Speakerphone – Deal Alert

The Freeway speakerphone from Jabra is designed for the car, clipping neatly to your sun visor. It has 3 built-in speakers and virtual surround sound technology to deliver rich crisp sound while driving, and Blackout extreme noise reduction ensures your callers will hear clearly as well. You can use your voice to make and take calls, and the speaker can also be used to stream music or podcasts from your Bluetooth-enabled device. The Freeway even announces the name of the incoming caller. Battery life is 14 hours in-use and up to 40 days standby. It currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,600 customers (read reviews) and with the current 34% discount, its typical list price of $82.97 has been reduced to $54.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Use Office 365 or Outlook.com? X.ai’s ‘Amy’ bot is ready to assist

Ever since its beta launch two years ago, x.ai's "Amy Ingram" virtual assistant has been scheduling meetings through Google Calendar. Now, the bot -- along with her gender opposite, Andrew Ingram -- can work with Office 365 and Outlook.com, bringing the promise of automated scheduling to a vastly broader audience.“We knew from the start that enabling Amy and Andrew to work across the Outlook.com and Office 365 calendars would be one of the first things we did once we had trained the machine to schedule meetings nearly autonomously,” said Dennis Mortensen, x.ai's founder and CEO.The wider reach means x.ai can now target its beta service at a potential 90 million U.S. knowledge workers, the company reckons, who schedule roughly 10 billion meetings a year. The technology is due out of beta this fall. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quick look: Cisco Tetration Analytics

Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quick look: Cisco Tetration Analytics

Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quick look: Cisco Tetration Analytics

Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Apple’s Photos announcement should offend you

The new Apple Photos now labels photos based on facial recognition and content such as landscapes and objects so that users can search and sort photos. Apple copied what Google announced last year. This is good news for Apple users. No one wants to deny iPhone users a better experience organizing their photos. But any of them with a lick of sense about scientific research should also be offended.Apple stood on the shoulders of giants to produce Photos. Photo labeling isn’t new. It was one of the first areas of machine learning research to be tackled by machine learning researchers after character recognition. Almost all the software or concepts used to do this could be open source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here