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Chinese hacker group among first to target networks isolated from Internet

An otherwise unremarkable hacking group likely aligned with China appears to be one of the first to have targeted so-called air-gapped networks that are not directly connected to the Internet, according to FireEye.The computer security firm released a 69-page technical report on Sunday on the group, which it calls APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 30, which targeted organizations in southeast Asia and India.FireEye picked up on it after some of the malware used by the group was found to have infected defense-related clients in the U.S., said Jen Weedon, manager of strategic analysis with FireEye.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 rumor rollup: May the Force Touch be with you

Perhaps because of this past week’s buzz about Apple Watch going on sale, the iPhone 7 rumor mill has spit out relatively little for Apple fans and the media to overreact about. About the biggest excitement has been figuring out if the next phone will be called the iPhone 6C, 6S or 7. Although the reason for that renaming is of interest. Namely, that Apple might be planning to fit its next iPhone with a variation of the Force Touch technology going into its Apple Watch and 12-inch Retina MacBook. Comments to this effect from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo made the rounds after he issued a note to clients and the note was quoted by MacRumors: “We believe that iPhone’s Force Touch sensor doesn’t directly detect the pressure applied by fingers. Instead, it monitors the contact area on which the finger touches the screen to decide how big the pressure is.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The oldest trick in the ASCII book

If you're old enough (or interested enough) to have spent a lot of time messing around with the ASCII table then you might have run into a strange fact: it's possible to uppercase ASCII text using just bitwise AND.

And it turns out that in some situations this isn't just a curiosity, but actually useful. Here are the ASCII characters 0x20 (space) to 0x7E (tilde).

     0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF
    +--------------------------------
0x20| !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
0x40|@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[]^_
0x60|`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

It's immediately obvious that each lowercase letter has an ASCII code 0x20 more than the corresponding uppercase letter. For example, lowercase m is 0x6D and uppercase M is 0x4D. And since 0x20 is a single bit then it's possible to uppercase an ASCII letter by taking its code and applying AND 0xDF (masking out the 0x20 bit).

Performing AND 0xDF has no effect on the first two rows above: they, including the uppercase letters, are unchanged. Only the third row is affected. There the lowercase letters get uppercased but there's some collateral damage: ` { | } ~ change to @ [ ] ^.

But if you know that a string has a limited character set then this trick can come in handy. Lots of old protocols Continue reading

Smarter Hosts Would Make A Simpler Network

(or Magical Things I Would Do if Hosts Weren’t Stupid) Introduction I’m a firm believer that many of the apparent problems in networking today are caused by stupid hosts.  The hosts are stupid and, we are told, cannot be fixed. Instead, we are forced to add on more and more “intelligence” to the network. This […]

Author information

Sam Stickland

Sam Stickland

Sam Stickland, CCIE #21455, is a software developer turned network engineer.

The post Smarter Hosts Would Make A Simpler Network appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Sam Stickland.

Network Break 35

Excerpt: Coffee, doughnuts and networking. A perfect combination with Brocade, CloudRouter, HP, PacketZoom, Pertino, Juniper and much more.

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

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The post Network Break 35 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Cisco NXAPI

Earlier, I had written about Cisco NXOS device configuration/monitoring using Python and OnePK. Recently, I came across NXAPI approach to configure and monitor NXOS  devices. NXAPI uses either http/https to connect to NXOS devices and talk using NXOS CLI. For configuration, CLI is encoded in XML/JSON. For monitoring, CLI is encoded in XML/JSON and the … Continue reading Cisco NXAPI →

Are your ESXi uplinks saturated?

Iwan Rahabok sent me a link to a nice vRealize setup he put together to measure maximum utilization across all uplinks of a VMware host. Pretty handy when the virtualization people start deploying servers with two 10GE uplinks with all sorts of traffic haphazardly assigned to one or both of them.

Oh, if the previous paragraph sounds like Latin, and you should know a bit about vSphere/ESXi, take a hefty dose of my vSphere 6 webinar ;)

The mobile-enabled enterprise: Are we there yet?

Modern mobile technology may have been born with the first iPhone, a quintessential consumer device, but it wasn’t long before the business possibilities began to emerge. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to find a company that hasn’t embraced phones and tablets for its employees to some degree.It’s not difficult to see why. After all, the potential is nothing if not compelling: an untethered workforce equipped with easy-to-use tools for workers to be productive no matter where they are and at any time of day.That allure, indeed, is surely part of the reason IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budgets to mobile application development, deployment and management by 2017, according to IDC. By that same year, in fact, the vast majority of line-of-business apps will be built for mobile-first consumption, IDC predicts—and for competitive necessity at least as often as for efficiency or productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The mobile-enabled enterprise: Are we there yet?

Modern mobile technology may have been born with the first iPhone, a quintessential consumer device, but it wasn’t long before the business possibilities began to emerge. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to find a company that hasn’t embraced phones and tablets for its employees to some degree.It’s not difficult to see why. After all, the potential is nothing if not compelling: an untethered workforce equipped with easy-to-use tools for workers to be productive no matter where they are and at any time of day.That allure, indeed, is surely part of the reason IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budgets to mobile application development, deployment and management by 2017, according to IDC. By that same year, in fact, the vast majority of line-of-business apps will be built for mobile-first consumption, IDC predicts—and for competitive necessity at least as often as for efficiency or productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Catching up to other African nations, Zambia plans mobile infrastructure initiative

As an increasing number of people use mobile phones to access the Internet in Africa, Zambia is playing catch-up. To spur Internet and mobile phone connectivity throughout the country, the Zambian government has announced an initiative to build telecom infrastructure.The Zambian government says it will spend $65 million to erect new telecom towers across the country to be used by the country’s three mobile operators in the Southern African country.There’s little doubt than in many African countries, people depend on mobile phones for Internet access. The Mobile Africa 2015 study conducted by survey company GeoPoll and World Wide Worx, a technology analysis organization in South Africa, reports that Internet browsing via mobile phone is on the rise in the countries studied—South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Digital rights groups protest US ruling to block digital transmissions

A decision by a U.S. government agency prohibiting the transmission of 3D dental records into the U.S. could open the door to further content restrictions on the Internet, digital rights groups have said.The heart of the question is whether the U.S. International Trade Commission can block digital goods, in additional to physical ones, from being imported to the U.S. The Motion Picture Association of America has watched the agency’s decision closely, with an eye on using the USITC to block websites.The USITC’s decision concerns a patent dispute between two companies that make clear dental braces, but it could have larger consequences and is the wrong way to deal with infringement complaints, the rights groups said Friday in a letter to the agency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Apple Watch’s cure for notification overload? More notifications

Sometimes I just can't be positive about certain things. That I can't rejoice over the Apple Watch selling out makes me feel like misanthrope Melvin Udall, Jack Nicholson's character in the movie As Good as It Gets. In fact, I think Melvin's most memorable line may sum up the Apple Watch: "What if this is as good as it gets?" Melvin, of course, was referring to his life with obsessive compulsive disorder, and I'm referring to a consumer device that requires at least a Panglossian level of optimism to get excited about.But the Apple Watch will either fix wearables or finally put the category to rest. If the ultimate consumer wearable can't be made useful by the ultimate designer of consumer products, we can close the dresser draw and pull the shades on this product category.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—We’re Headed to HIMSS

Are you attending HIMSS 2015 in Chicago? We’ll be there with our newest partner! This week we announced our partnership with PSSC Labs. This partnership combines Plexxi’s SDN switching and control with PSSC’s high-performance compute and Cloudera enterprise. We’ll be showcasing the integrated solution, called the CloudOOP Big Data Pod, for the first time April 12 – 16 at HIMSS 2015. We’ll also be demonstrating how to effectively manage Big Data applications across a Hadoop cluster. Visit us at the PSSC Labs booth (#5284). We can’t wait to see you.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!

TechTarget: How SDN and SDS are shaping future clouds
By Jim O’Reilly
Tenants of clouds, whether public or hybrid, want the control mechanisms of a typical in-house data center. They don’t want to give up on virtual storage area networks and firewalls, access controls, governance and compliance and all the other security and control systems that go with ownership. But, at the same time, they want to see the promised agility, rapid scaling and cost effectiveness that brought them to the cloud in the first place.

Enterprise Networking Planet: The SDN-IoT Connection
Continue reading

Apple Watch already sold out of all models

If there was any doubt as to how consumers would take to the Apple Watch, I think we can put them to rest. Just six hours after the Apple Watch opened up for pre-orders, Apple's initial supply was completely sold out.What's more, even folks who were lucky enough to have their orders processed may see shipping times of 4 to 6 weeks. All in all, it's clear that demand for Apple's hotly anticipated wearable is extremely robust. While it remains to be seen just how revolutionary and game-changing a product the Apple Watch will or will not be, things are certainly off to a good start.As for current shipping times, MacRumors recently compiled this list which should provide a ballpark figure for which Apple Watch models might ship sooner than others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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