3 ways IoT security concerns are taken out of context

This Saturday was like most every other day for me.  I opened my  RSS Internet of Things (IoT) news feed and there were three more articles telling me that consumers don’t trust IoT security.  IoT security alerts have been so frequent and regular for so long now that just like a “check engine light” in an old car I am beginning to ignore them.  Recently I have seen a slight pivot in the stream of warnings in the form of survey data:  Data is good.  More than once I have heard “In God we trust” all others bring data.  But data requires analysis so let’s look at a few recent figures:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 career-killing conversations to avoid at work

No matter how progressive, open and casual your workplace, there are some conversations that should be off-limits no matter what. A new study from corporate and leadership education and training firm VitalSmarts found that of 775 respondents to a recent VitalSmarts survey on workplace behavior, 83 percent of employees witnessed their colleagues say something that has had catastrophic results on their careers, reputations and businesses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WordPress.com turns on default encryption for hosted domains

Website hosting platform Wordpress.com will automatically enable HTTPS for all the custom domain names that its users have associated with their websites.Run by Automattic, WordPress.com allows users to easily create and manage websites based on the hugely popular WordPress content management system. Users of the free service get a subdomain under wordpress.com to use as an address for their website, but paid plans allow hosting a custom domain.Implementing HTTPS for wordpress.com subdomains was fairly easy and Automattic did this in 2014. However, turning on encryption for hosted websites with custom domain names requires individual certificates for each of those domains, which posed management and cost-related problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WordPress.com turns on default encryption for hosted domains

Website hosting platform Wordpress.com will automatically enable HTTPS for all the custom domain names that its users have associated with their websites.Run by Automattic, WordPress.com allows users to easily create and manage websites based on the hugely popular WordPress content management system. Users of the free service get a subdomain under wordpress.com to use as an address for their website, but paid plans allow hosting a custom domain.Implementing HTTPS for wordpress.com subdomains was fairly easy and Automattic did this in 2014. However, turning on encryption for hosted websites with custom domain names requires individual certificates for each of those domains, which posed management and cost-related problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open source code is common, potentially dangerous, in enterprise apps

The Open Source Vulnerability Database shut down this week posed yet another security challenge for developers who routinely inject massive amounts of free off-the-shelf code into new software.As the name suggests, OSVD was a resource where non-commercial developers could look – free - for patches to known vulnerabilities.+More on Network World: 10 best cloud SLA practices+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open source code is common, potentially dangerous, in enterprise apps

The Open Source Vulnerability Database shut down this week posed yet another security challenge for developers who routinely inject massive amounts of free off-the-shelf code into new software.As the name suggests, OSVD was a resource where non-commercial developers could look – free - for patches to known vulnerabilities.+More on Network World: 10 best cloud SLA practices+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Geek-themed Meme of the Week: biometric been there

Continuing what should be but hasn’t been our weekly series highlighting the better tech-related memes … Reddit Having used the thumbprint reader on my iPhone for some time now, it has become a habit of the muscle-memory variety, meaning that I quite regularly have unlocked my phone before I have completed reading an alert that had caught my attention. So, too, a user of Reddit who submitted the above meme.I am guessing that there’s probably an easy solution. But since this certainly must be among the most First World of First World Problems ever encountered, I’ve yet to invest the time to search it out. Meanwhile, it’s oddly comforting to know that I am not alone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The curious case of slow downloads

Some time ago we discovered that certain very slow downloads were getting abruptly terminated and began investigating whether that was a client (i.e. web browser) or server (i.e. us) problem.

Some users were unable to download a binary file a few megabytes in length. The story was simple—the download connection was abruptly terminated even though the file was in the process of being downloaded. After a brief investigation we confirmed the problem: somewhere in our stack there was a bug.

Describing the problem was simple, reproducing the problem was easy with a single curl command, but fixing it took surprising amount of effort.

CC BY 2.0 image by jojo nicdao

In this article I'll describe the symptoms we saw, how we reproduced it and how we fixed it. Hopefully, by sharing our experiences we will save others from the tedious debugging we went through.

Failing downloads

Two things caught our attention in the bug report. First, only users on mobile phones were experiencing the problem. Second, the asset causing issues—a binary file—was pretty large, at around 30MB.

After a fruitful session with tcpdump one of our engineers was able to prepare a test case that reproduced the Continue reading

Support for SQL Server 2005 ends Tuesday – are you ready?

Tuesday marks the end of support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and that means companies relying on it are just about out of time. There will be no more updates from Microsoft, so staying with the software could open you up to a host of risks.Microsoft encourages users to move to SQL Server 2014 or Azure SQL Database, but those aren't the only options. Either way, the transition is going to take some time. If you haven't already been working on it, the most important thing now is to act quickly to minimize the amount of time your company is left exposed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12 WiFi Vendors To Keep An Eye On

New products of the week 4.11.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow. ClearSlide for Gmail Key features: Available to all ClearSlide users, ClearSlide for Gmail is an easy-to-install Google Chrome app that is designed to increase salesperson productivity and improve the quality of CRM data by automatically logging all outbound emails, prospect views, and content engagement directly back to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.  More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 4.11.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow. ClearSlide for Gmail Key features: Available to all ClearSlide users, ClearSlide for Gmail is an easy-to-install Google Chrome app that is designed to increase salesperson productivity and improve the quality of CRM data by automatically logging all outbound emails, prospect views, and content engagement directly back to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.  More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 steps to biometric bliss

Every time you access your phone via fingerprint reader, you’re using biometric identification technology. So, while biometrics on the consumer side has become commonplace, a number of barriers have blocked widespread biometric adoption in the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

SSD shootout: PCI Express blows away SATA and M.2 in throughput testing

For the better part of a decade now, the traditional interface for hard drives has been Serial ATA (SATA). With the advent of the solid state drive (SSD), new interfaces have come into play designed to speed up throughput, because the SATA interface has rapidly become the bottleneck in drive speed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

SSD shootout: PCI Express blows away SATA and M.2 in throughput testing

For the better part of a decade now, the traditional interface for hard drives has been Serial ATA (SATA). With the advent of the solid state drive (SSD), new interfaces have come into play designed to speed up throughput, because the SATA interface has rapidly become the bottleneck in drive speed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Hybrid IT Requires Monitoring As A Discipline

China’s Alibaba Joins the OpenDaylight Project

China's e-commerce giant joins OpenDaylight to share its SDN experience.

VMware & Brocade Build an Aviation Network for SmartSky

SmartSky wants to avoid hardware as much as possible.

New Experiment: Interactive Online Course

After I told you that I’m not going to Interop, I got numerous emails along the lines of “but I was really looking forward to attending your workshop” so I started looking for a solution that would combine the best of online and classroom worlds.

Here’s my first attempt: an interactive online course combining topics from two of my Interop workshops. I’m still working on the detailed agenda and plan to have it ready around May 1st. In the meantime, I’d really appreciate your feedback – leave a comment or send me an email.

Cisco Live – News About the Customer Appreciation Event (CAE)

Cisco Live takes place in Las Vegas between the 10th and 14th of July this year. Every Live event, Cisco holds a customer appreciation event (CAE) in an arena close by the conference center. Last year we saw an amazing performance from Aerosmith hosted in San Diego. The year before that, Imagine Dragons put on a show in San Francisco.

This years event will be hosted at the T-Mobile Arena on the Las Vegas strip. This is a very new arena that opened on April, 6, just days ago. The pictures below show renderings of the arena.

T-Mobile Arena® will be the destination in Las Vegas for live events – from amazing music acts to thrilling sporting events – it will set a new standard for what entertainment means in the city that does it best. The 20,000-seat T-Mobile Arena ® will host exciting, world-class events with something for everyone – from UFC, boxing, hockey, basketball and professional bull riding to high-profile awards shows and top-name concerts.

Cisco is not only holding their CAE there. The arena also uses Cisco technology called Cisco StadiumVision which is an innovative digital content distribution system. The system is used to centrally manage and Continue reading