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Category Archives for "Networking"

Walled Gardens and Other Overlay Networks

Russ White wonders if the resurgence of Walled Gardens on the Internet is bad or a good thing. The long-term rise of Facebook, WeChat, Snapchat and other applications seems to be a sustaining trend. Overlay Network Previous walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe have been composting for many years. Their unique value was that they […]

The post Walled Gardens and Other Overlay Networks appeared first on EtherealMind.

How Did You Learn So Much About Networking?

One of my readers sent me a heartfelt email that teleported me 35 years down the memory lane. He wrote:

I only recently stumbled upon your blog and, well, it hurt. It's incredible the amount of topics you are able to talk about extensively and how you can dissect and find interesting stuff in even the most basic concepts.
May I humble ask how on earth can you know all of the things you know, with such attention to detail? Have you been gifted with an excellent memory, magical diet, or is it just magic?

Short answer: hard work and compound interest.

Read more ...

IDG Contributor Network: Why every business needs a WISP

If you don't have a written information security program (WISP) in place for your business, then you could be risking data theft, legal action, and punitive fines. The law in many states now dictates that you must take steps to safeguard personal information. They vary in strictness, but there are nearly 50 different regulations you need to cater for if you're doing business across the United States.You can't afford to bury your head in the sand and assume it will never happen to you. Research from the Identity Theft Resource Center (PDF) shows an alarming rise in incidences of personal data theft every year since they started recording. They report 783 breaches last year, compared to just 157 in 2005.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

8 new threat intelligence products to make you bulletproof

Threat intelligence + big data = real securityImage by ThinkstockThreat Intelligence and the use of data to flag critical security indicators were popular topics in Las Vegas at the Black Hat conference in early in August –and for good reason. As enterprises struggle to understand their network vulnerabilities, they have to consider the many layers of defense needed to secure their most valuable data. Security teams are inundated with threat data and overburdened by the need to allot countless man-hours to the task of weeding out the noise from the real threats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How the tech industry is greening its data centers

Data centers don't just suck down energy. They guzzle it. According to the National Resources Defense Council, data centers are one of the largest and fastest growing consumers of electricity in the United States. In 2013, U.S. data centers used 91 billion kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to power New York City households twice. The NRDC expects that demand to grow to 140 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020.While companies like Amazon have been a target of campaigns from nonprofits like Green America, the NRDC says that larger server farms operated by well-known Internet companies are paragons of ultra-efficiency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft issues out-of-band patch for critical Internet Explorer flaw

Wikimedia A dangerous flaw in Internet Explorer has prompted Microsoft to issue a patch outside its regularly scheduled monthly security updates in order to head off a known exploit of the vulnerability.The company has issued a security bulletin that describes how users who are lured to specially crafted webpages could have attackers take over control of their computers with the same rights as the user who logged into the machine.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introducing a Powerful Way to Purge Cache on CloudFlare: Purge by Cache-Tag

Today CloudFlare is introducing a new way to purge the cache using Cache-Tags. Cache-Tags are assigned to cached content via a Cache-Tag response header, and are stored as metadata with cached objects so that global purges take only seconds, targeting a granular, finite set of cached objects.

For example, an e-commerce website can use Cache-Tags to purge all of their catalog images at once, without affecting any of their other assets. A blog can use Cache-Tags to update their JavaScript files in cache, without forcing a cache miss on their CSS. A business can use Cache-Tags to purge cache of all four hundred pages of their blog without purging any of the pages from their core platform.

The CloudFlare Cache

With 42 data centers around the world, web pages served directly from CloudFlare’s cache are guaranteed to be just a few hops away from any visitor, anywhere. With a little bit of fine tuning, many websites succeed in delivering most of their content from cache, saving a majority of bandwidth on their origin servers. One website even managed to reduce their AWS bill by 96% when they started caching assets behind CloudFlare.

CloudFlare’s cache is powerful, but when a Continue reading

From Windows to Linux

I recently moved from Windows to Linux on my personal laptop and thought I might share my experience. This isn’t directly network related, but hopefully of interest to some portion of the large and diverse PP audience, especially considering recent events in the Microsoft realm. Ignoring that, using Linux ‘at home’ is a great way to learn about […]

The post From Windows to Linux appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Adobe patches important flaw in LiveCycle Data Services

Adobe Systems released a security patch for LiveCycle Data Services, a development tool used by businesses to synchronize data between back-end servers and rich Internet applications built with Adobe Flex or AIR. The hotfix is available for LiveCycle Data Services 3.0.0, 4.5.1, 4.6.2 and 4.7.0 and addresses a vulnerability that could lead to information disclosure. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2015-3269 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database and is rated important by Adobe. The issue is associated with parsing crafted XML entities and falls into a class of vulnerabilities known as XML External Entity (XXE).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Adblock Plus could work as malware protection

Last week I discussed one of the pros of ad blockers – how they could significantly reduce the amount of network traffic consumed by pesky advertising, especially auto-playing videos.As I said then and will repeat now, it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I don't blame users of ad blockers, now numbering close to 200 million worldwide. Ads are obnoxious. They aren't content to just be there, they have to grab you, oftentimes rudely. See also: Adblock Plus could improve network performance, too At the same time, Network World and every other tech news site lives and dies by ads, so I and everyone else published here (plus those folks behind the scenes) need you to see and click on those ads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft issues emergency patch for zero-day IE flaw being exploited in the wild

Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band security update on Tuesday to address a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer. All supported versions of Internet Explorer need to be patched as the remote code execution vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild. While some publications have reported the hole is not being exploited, Microsoft listed "yes" under "exploited."MS15-093 is rated critical for Internet Explorer 7 to 11, which happen to be all supported versions of IE on Windows clients; it's rated moderate for Windows servers. The patch addresses the vulnerability by modifying how IE handles objects in memory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

F5 iRules – What is a Program?

When I’m not working (boring right now), reading Everyday Feminism (fascinating*) or spending time with the family (awesome) I’m writing. I’ve three book projects on the go, two of which are taking far too long and rapidly become a chore. The third is the third edition of my F5 iRules book (I’m not shilling – […]

The post F5 iRules – What is a Program? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Are Walled Gardens the Future of the ‘net?

From the very beginning, the walled garden has been the opposite of what those who work on and around the ‘net have wanted. The IETF, and the protocols it has developed over the years, have always been about free and open access to anyone who wants to learn networking, coding, or even just what the latest baseball score for their favorite team. Of course, a number of tech giants (remember Compuserve?) fought to build walled gardens using the tools of the Internet. A user would dial into a modem pool, and access the world through a small portal that would provide a consistent and controlled interface for their entire experience, from email to news to chat to…

The same battle rages in recent times, as well. Phone makers, mobile providers, and even social media networks would desperately like to make your only interface into the global Internet a single O/S or app. From this one app, you’ll be able to talk to your friends, pay your bills, save all your data, and, in general, live your entire life. And for those times when you can’t get to what you want outside the app or social network, they will gladly Continue reading

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