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Category Archives for "Networking"

GPU malware can also affect Windows PCs, possibly Macs

A team of anonymous developers who recently created a Linux rootkit that runs on graphics cards has released a new proof-of-concept malware program that does the same on Windows. A Mac OS X implementation is also in the works.The developers are trying to raise awareness that malware can infect GPUs and that the security industry is not ready for it. Their goal isn’t to tip off malicious hackers, but the source code they released, while incomplete and buggy by design, could potentially be built upon and used for illegal purposes.The problem the developers are trying to highlight lies not with the operating systems, such as Windows or Linux, nor with the GPU (graphics processor unit) vendors, but rather with existing security tools, which aren’t designed to scan the random access memory (RAM) used by GPUs for malware code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

General Howe’s Dog

The morning after a battle — one of the first won by the American army in its battle for freedom from the British Empire — if you happened to be on the scene, you might see an American soldier, under a white flag of truce, struggling with something small he is carrying between the lines. Approaching, you can see the package is, in fact, a small terrier — a dog. If you could read the note the carrier is holding there in his scrip, you would find it says —

General Washington’s compliments to General Howe, does himself the pleasure to return to him a Dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on his collar, appears to belong to General Howe… October 6th, 1777

So — in the midst of a war that cut people down from their young lives, we find a singular scene of a man carrying a dog across a field to return it to the enemy’s commander. What has any of this to do with the life of an engineer? Perhaps more than you think.

Let me return to a much younger time in my technical life, a time when I was Continue reading

Don’t panic! How to fix 5 common PC emergencies

Your PC may not be as essential to you as your smartphone, but chances are it’s still pretty damn important. So it’s completely understandable if your first reaction is to freeze and freak out when you run into a PC emergency, such as a broken screen, accidentally-deleted important file, or a virus. But panicking is counter-productive, because time is often of the essence.Don’t worry. While you can’t call 9-1-1, here’s what you can do to fix five common PC emergencies.Broken laptop screen A few months ago, I was working on my MacBook Air next to my French bulldog, Blanka. For some unexplained dog reason, Blanka suddenly decided he needed to be in my lap, so he jumped on me—and landed on my laptop’s screen. A laptop screen is no match for a 27-pound Frenchie, so, needless to say, my screen was toast.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Galaxy S6 edge an impressive enterprise phone — with one big exception

Samsung, one of the largest and most popular Android partners, has slowly been making inroads in enterprise. Last month, the company released its two new flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge, which are identical except for the GS6 edge's curved display and slightly larger battery.Due to the popularity of Samsung's Galaxy S devices, it's easy to find GS6 reviews, but our evaluation is written specifically for business users — and the IT staffers who need to support them. I've been using both devices regularly for almost two months, though I gravitated to the GS6 edge. As such this evaluation is focused on the GS6 edge, though most of conclusions apply to both phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, May 11

China’s smartphone market slows downThe world’s largest smartphone market may be losing its appetite: first quarter shipments of the devices in China dropped by 4 percent year over year, according to IDC. It’s the first time in six years that China’s smartphone market has contracted.IBM’s slimmed down Power servers aim at cloud, in-memory databaseIBM has brought out another round of Power8 servers, targeting private, public and hybrid clouds as well as in-memory database applications and analytics. The multipurpose servers include the four-socket Power E850 and the more powerful Power E880.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, May 11

China’s smartphone market slows downThe world’s largest smartphone market may be losing its appetite: first quarter shipments of the devices in China dropped by 4 percent year over year, according to IDC. It’s the first time in six years that China’s smartphone market has contracted.IBM’s slimmed down Power servers aim at cloud, in-memory databaseIBM has brought out another round of Power8 servers, targeting private, public and hybrid clouds as well as in-memory database applications and analytics. The multipurpose servers include the four-socket Power E850 and the more powerful Power E880.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare “Interview Questions”

For quite some time we've been grilling our candidates about dirty corners of TCP/IP stack. Every engineer here must prove his/her comprehensive understanding of the full network stack. For example: what are the differences in checksumming algorithms between IPv4 and IPv6 stacks?

I'm joking of course, but in the spirit of the old TCP/IP pub game I want to share some of the amusing TCP/IP quirks I've bumped into over the last few months while working on CloudFlare's automatic attack mitigation systems.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Daan Berg

Don't worry if you don't know the correct answer: you may always come up with a funny one!

Some of the questions are fairly obvious, some don't have a direct answer and are supposed to provoke a longer discussion. The goal is to encourage our readers to review the dusty RFCs, get interested in the inner workings of the network stack and generally spread the knowledge about the protocols we rely on so much.

Don't forget to add a comment below if you want to share a response!

You think you know all about TCP/IP? Let's find out.

Archaeology

1) What is the lowest TCP port number?

2) The TCP Continue reading

Geneve

One of the various problems we face in the data networking world is the absolute plethora of tunneling technologies we have available. Going way back to the beginning, there was SNA, GRE, IP-in-IP, and a host of others. In the midterm was have MPLS (though some will argue this isn’t a tunneling protocol — but […]

Author information

Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, LinkedIn, and his author page on Amazon.

The post Geneve appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

New products of the week 05.11.15

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.Barracuda NG Firewall on AzureKey features – Barracuda NG Firewall now supports new routing functionality in Azure with User Defined Routes and also works with ExpressRoute providing additional security, redundancy, and application aware traffic routing. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 05.11.15

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.Barracuda NG Firewall on AzureKey features – Barracuda NG Firewall now supports new routing functionality in Azure with User Defined Routes and also works with ExpressRoute providing additional security, redundancy, and application aware traffic routing. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Old-school anti-virus vendors learn new tricks

In an era when businesses are scrambling to defend against sophisticated advanced persistent threats, old school anti-virus may seem like a relic. But traditional anti-virus companies are changing with the times, delivering defense-in-depth for a BYOD world.In this review, we looked at products from seven of the original anti-virus vendors, each dating back to at least the 1990s: AVG, ESET, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Panda Software and Trend Micro. We focused on ease of installation and management, ease of use, plus the protection each suite offered beyond traditional signature-based anti-virus. Special emphasis was placed on the software’s ability to also protect mobile devices running both iOS and Android. (Read an analysis of the antivirus market.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Chinese smartphone market shows rare shipment decline

The world’s largest smartphone market, China, isn’t so hungry for the products anymore.First quarter smartphone shipments there dropped by 4 percent year over year, according to research firm IDC. It’s the first time in six years that China’s smartphone market has contracted, signifying that the country’s appetite for the handsets is reaching its limit.The number of shipments to China was still high, at 98.8 million units. IDC expects the market to remain flat for the rest of the year. To drive future growth vendors in the country will have to convince existing users to upgrade to newer phones, IDC said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP AIGP

In this post we will look at something which is relatively new but not as cool as my previous post on Segment Routing. We will take a look at a new BGP feature called “Accumulated IGP, metric of path to prefix” (RFC 7311 AIGP)  which is an optional non-transitive attribute . A new AIGP TLV was created for this which contains […]

Author information

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh

Diptanshu Singh,(3xCCIE,CCDE) is a Sr. Engineer mostly focused on service providers , data center and security. He is a network enthusiast passionate about network technologies so not only is it his profession, but something of a hobby as well.

The post BGP AIGP appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.