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Category Archives for "Networking"

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, June 23

Privacy group wants Uber probed for data collectionThe Electronic Privacy Information Center has complained to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about Uber’s new data collection policy: it comes into effect next month and allows the company to access a customer’s location even when the smartphone app is not actively in use, and to access the information from users’ phone address books and send out promotional materials to contacts listed there. The changes “ignore past bad practices of the company involving the misuse of location data, pose a direct risk of consumer harm, and constitute an unfair and deceptive trade practice,” EPIC said in its request for an FTC investigation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s 60Tbps Pacific cable welcomed with champagne in Japan

With bottles of bubbly and a purification ceremony, a Google-backed undersea cable was given a warm welcome on a beach in Japan last week, a critical step in building the highest capacity data link in the Pacific ever created.The 9,000-kilometer FASTER cable will have a peak capacity of 60 terabytes per second (Tbps) when it enters operation next year, joining Japan with Oregon on the West Coast of the U.S.Apart from Google, the project is backed by telecom carriers KDDI of Japan, SingTel of Singapore, Global Transit of Malaysia, China Mobile International and China Telecom Global.At the landing site in Shima, Mie Prefecture, east of Osaka, a machine pulled the cable onto the beach from an offshore cable-laying ship while stacks of armored pipes, which shield the link from anchors near the shore, were piled nearby.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Game Changer in Cloud Networking

The networking market is at an exciting pivot point, evolving away from legacy enterprise networking to the cloud. While the public cloud providers (“titans”) may take a “do it yourself” approach to engineering cloud network designs, mainstream enterprises demand a “cloudified” turnkey solution and want to emulate cloud operators. The increasingly massive scale of address tables, devices, flooding, broadcast traffic from discovery protocols, subnets and routing protocols have accelerated the need for disruption in networking workflows, making Arista a unique and welcome pioneer for customers ready to make SDN a reality.

Software Driven Cloud Networking Trends

To appreciate the need for SDN and cloud solutions one must step back and understand why the cloud network is dramatically different from legacy networking.

First, in a cloud, everything is dynamic. Resources become available and go off-line, users are logging in and out, and workloads are going up or down depending on compute needs. This is a fundamental difference of cloud versus static computing in enterprises.

Second, cloud data centers are much larger than typical enterprise datacenters and can contain tens, even hundreds of thousands of servers. Legacy management practices and policies that are used in smaller datacenters don’t apply to clouds since Continue reading

Alibaba sells off 11Main US e-commerce site to focus on China

Alibaba Group has decided to sell off its 11Main e-commerce site in the U.S., as part of its focus on attracting foreign brands to its China business.OpenSky, a U.S.-based online retail company, will be taking over 11Main. “This joining of forces will help drive sales worldwide,” Alibaba said on Tuesday.As part of the deal, Alibaba has also sold its Auctiva and Vendio properties to OpenSky, in exchange for a minority stake of 37.6 percent in the U.S. company.11Main, which launched last year, represented an Alibaba foray into the U.S. market. The site was, however, a small operation and offered goods from boutique merchants, rather than competing head-on with Amazon or eBay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RubyGems DNS flaw now patched after second try

A revised patch has been released for a flaw in the distribution platform for Ruby applications, RubyGems, which could be used to deliver malware to someone trying to download a program.RubyGems lets people search for a “gem,” which is a packaging format for Ruby applications and code libraries. Ruby developers publish a gem when an application is ready.Security researchers from Trustwave found a problem with the platform. When people search for a gem, RubyGems uses a DNS (Domain Name System) SRV record request to find a server hosting a particular gem.The request, however, “does not require that DNS replies come from the same security domain as the original gem source,” according to a writeup, which Trustwave plans to release on its blog on Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Networking Books Up For Auction – Good Stuff Cheap

I've put several of my networking books up for auction on eBay. Lots of CiscoPress titles, but several others as well. Many design guides. Routing protocol coverage such as OSPF, including an OSPF vs ISIS guide by Jeff Doyle. Some are older, what I consider classics. Some are fairly new. Some are targeted at certification seekers. I need to clear some space here in my home library, and would like to move these titles along. Far too many books in my collection, and I've gotten what I can from these. Good luck!

Here comes bare metal and NFV for the enterprise

Two hardware vendors this week unveiled products to bring commodity switching and network functions virtualization (NFV) to enterprises through service providers.Bare metal switch supplier Pica8 this week rolled out a Power-over-Ethernet switches to be sold into enterprises by service providers as managed service customer premises equipment (CPE). And Ciena announced availability of the 3938vi Service Virtualization Switch, an Ethernet CPE platform with virtualized network function (VNF) integration. Pica8 The offerings address a desire by service providers, like AT&T, to sell bare metal white box switches into the customer premises for cost, flexibility, performance and SDN programmability advantages, and to offer service as VNFs on that hardware. Pica8 says this market – bare metal as CPE – is six months old and that this week’s PoE offerings are merely the latest in an existing CPE portfolio to onboard enterprises to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IMT-2020 is the future of mobile — but you can keep calling it 5G

There’s finally something real to 5G: a name.The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has decided to call the next-generation cellular system IMT-2020. That name may have a hard time catching up with “5G,” a tag that’s been applied to just about every future mobile technology in the works: Googling “5G mobile” brings up 12.9 million results. But it’s a clear sign of progress toward the concrete. Where there’s a bureaucratic-sounding numeric acronym, can a formal standard be far behind?The ITU now has an answer to that question, too. It’s set a timeline that calls for the standard to be finished in 2020. Hence the name, which follows in the footsteps of IMT-2000 (3G) and IMT-Advanced (4G).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US, UK spies said to attack security software

Spies working for the U.S. National Security Agency and its British counterpart found anti-virus and security software a hindrance to their intelligence gathering processes, and worked to thwart it, according to a report Monday in The Intercept.The efforts, revealed through documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, focused on vendors including Moscow-based security software developer Kaspersky Labs, which claims over 400 million customers worldwide.The NSA and the U.K.-based Government Communications Headquarters monitored web and email traffic between Kasperksy’s software and its servers, the report said, and obtained sensitive customer information in the process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy group complains about Uber data collection

Uber Technologies’ new data collection policy, allowing the ride-hailing company to access a user’s location even when the smartphone app is not actively in use, violates the privacy rights and personal safety of U.S. customers, according to a complaint filed Monday by a privacy group.With upcoming changes to its privacy policy, Uber “will claim the right to collect personal contact information and detailed location data of American consumers, even when they are not using the service,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote in a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.EPIC also objected to Uber’s plans to access the information from users’ phones’ address books and send out promotional materials to contacts listed there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cavium wins ‘SDN Idol’ award at Open Networking Summit 2015

This week the fifth Open Networking Summit was held in Santa Clara, the heart of Silicon Valley. As in years past, the event held an "SDN Idol" competition where several vendors entered an SDN-related product for a set of judges to vote on to create a set of finalists. The four finalists then demonstrated their entries at the event and a final winner was chosen.In addition to myself, the judges included Jim Smith, GM of Mohr Davidow Ventures, Tom Anschutz, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff for AT&T, and Geng Lin, CTO of Corporate Networks for Google. The judging criteria involved understanding the business value, technology value, and differentiation against the competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twitter looking for a ‘full-time’ CEO, deflating Dorsey’s candidacy

A week and a half after Dick Costolo announced that he would be stepping down from the CEO role at Twitter, the company’s board of directors has sent a shot across the bow of one of the expected front-runner candidates to take the social network’s top job.The social micro-blogging company’s search committee will only consider CEO candidates “who are in a position to make a full-time commitment to Twitter,” the board said.That would seem to rule out Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder who currently works as the CEO of Square and will be filling in as interim CEO of Twitter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here