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IRS Banner Fail

So I go to the IRS Page that allows taxpayers to check status of a refund. This is under the number “3” at the following URL–

http://www.irs.gov/Refunds

The following banner pops up prior to setting a browser cookie.

I’m not a lawyer, so I have some questions regarding how to interpret this–

1. Should this be read as–
   1. Use of this system constitutes consent to monitoring, interception, recording, reading, copying or capturing by authorized personnel of all activities. (or)
   2. Use of this system constitutes consent to monitoring, interception, recording, reading, copying or capturing by authorized personnel of all activities.
2. And what does authorized personnel of all activities mean. If I use the system, I have to be authorized, or I’m breaking the law (as identified two sentences later–Unauthorized use is prohibited).
3. So based on #2 above (authorized user). When I use that definition of authorized user in #1, the IRS isn’t accepting responsibility if I somehow happened to perform the following on another user’s information –  monitoring, interception, recording, reading, copying or capturing. (doesn’t exclude my accountability, but it certainly alleviates the IRS accountability)
4. “There is no right to privacy in this system“?
   1. Continue reading

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Apple is said to recruit engineers for car development project

Apple’s automotive ambitions may extend beyond CarPlay, its vehicle dashboard software.Managers from the company’s iPhone unit are leading employees in automotive research projects at a secret Silicon Valley lab, according to a report in the Financial Times Friday.Apple designers have met with executives and engineers at auto makers and in some cases recruited them, including the head of Mercedes-Benz’s Silicon Valley research and development division, the report says.If Apple is indeed building a car it will quickly run into one of its biggest rivals—Google, which is far along in its development of an autonomous vehicle. Traditional automakers are also getting smarter about incorporating technology in their vehicles. Chevrolet’s cars can come with built-in LTE hotspots, and in January Audi ferried journalists from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas in a self-driving car.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Democratic Republic of Congo restores Internet throughout country

Internet connectivity and mobile communications throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been fully restored, but the country’s political turmoil is far from over.The government had moved to block communications in an attempt to quell public protests sparked by President Joseph Kabila’s political maneuvers to extend his tenure in office.The DRC government shut down Internet, social media and mobile phone communications on Jan. 19, restoring Internet service only to banks, government agencies and other corporate bodies 10 days later.People had been using text messages and social media networks to coordinate rallies to protest Kabila’s attempts to introduce an electoral bill and change the country’s constitution in order to continue his stay in office. The DRC government admitted that the debate over the bill would likely delay the next presidential election by at least one year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Obama pushes for more cyberthreat information sharing

U.S. businesses and government agencies need to work more closely together to combat the growing threat of cyberattacks, President Barack Obama said Friday.Calling on U.S. agencies and businesses to share more cyberthreat information, Obama said he had signed an executive order intended to encourage more cooperation.Protecting against cyberattacks “has to be a shared mission,” Obama said during a speech at Stanford University. “Government cannot do this alone, but the fact is, the private sector cannot do this alone either.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Apple’s Tim Cook warns that sacrificing privacy ‘risks our way of life’

Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned of “dire consequences” if tech companies can’t protect the privacy of those who use their products.Giving up our privacy to digital technologies exposes us to greater risks than just identity theft and financial losses—serious though those things are, Cook said in a brief speech at a cybersecurity summit in Silicon Valley on Friday.“History has shown us that sacrificing our right to privacy can have dire consequences,” Cook said.“We still live in a world where all people are not treated equally. Too many people do not feel free to practice their religion or express their opinion or love who they choose—or love who they choose,” he repeated for emphasis, “in a world in which that information can make the difference between life or death.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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US government courts Silicon Valley on cybersecurity

Senior U.S. government officials came to Silicon Valley on Friday to deliver a direct appeal to executives from major companies and the cybersecurity industry: work with us so the nation will be better protected from cyberattacks.The charm offensive, which includes a speech by President Barack Obama, comes as a new government agency is being formed to oversee preventive and reactive response to cyberattacks: the U.S. Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. That’s part of the government’s response to the growing number of cyberattacks on large corporations, like Target and Sony Pictures, but the cooperation of industry is not guaranteed.Lisa Monaco, a senior advisor to President Obama on homeland security and counterterrorism, said she worried that the type of cyberattack that targeted Sony could become the norm in the future if more isn’t done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Newsreel reveals that even 1946 debut of ENIAC was greeted with ‘1984’-ish suspicion

A “today in history” post from The Poynter Institute includes an old newsreel showing that ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, was also the first to raise the specter of government prying eyes ... or a least a look over your shoulder.Here’s that 20th Century Fox newsreel, with a transcript below for those who’d rather read: Transcript:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Apple bumps approved size for iOS apps, lets them eat twice the memory

People looking for richer mobile apps may cheer Apple’s decision to double the size limit of those approved for sale. But those whose iPhones and iPads have smaller amounts of memory will need to download carefully.On Thursday, Apple said it is bumping the maximum size of apps to 4GB from 2GB, marking the first time Apple has expanded the size limit since the App Store’s 2008 debut.Larger apps will be able to take advantage of the faster processors and improved screen resolutions found in iPhones and iPads. These hardware updates allow for apps with richer media experiences like high-resolution graphics—additional features that also mean bigger downloads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Questions I’m Asking Myself About SD-WAN Solutions

There’s a lot to SD-WAN technology, and there are a number of devils in the implementation details that have been nagging at me as I listen to briefings and record podcasts from vendors in the space. SD-WAN technology questions that bother me… What’s the impact to hosts on virtual machine based endpoints, i.e. how much CPU does […]

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PlexxiPulse—Leading the pack

This week, Facebook announced a new modular switch called the “6-pack,” which builds off of The Wedge (Facebook’s innovative piece of networking equipment announced last June.) The development of the “6-pack” comes on the heels of a relatively new white box movement within the networking industry where generic, off-the-shelf switching and routing hardware is used rather than custom-made infrastructure, making networks more manageable and easy to scale. Julie Bort covered this very topic earlier this week in her Cisco earnings roundup for Business Insider, and cited Plexxi as one of the startups leading the charge against complicated, legacy-type infrastructures like Cisco. Here at Plexxi, one of our top priorities is to provide our customers with the most efficient network possible and we’re proud to be recognized as an industry trailblazer.

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

Streetwise Journal: Cisco CEO: We Will Crush Facebook and Have Fun Beating VMware
By Larry Banks
On fire since a decent quarterly earnings report in which Cisco revenues rose by 7% and forecast 3 to 5% growth next quarter, the company CEO John Chambers was hugely confident Continue reading

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Fair-trade smartphone meant to last longer

Fairphone’s second smartphone will not only be built using conflict-free or fair trade minerals, but also offer better performance and be really easy to repair.After selling 60,000 units of its first phone, the Dutch company is now turning its attention to a new model that will go on sale in the latter half of the year. With the second phone, the goal is still to manufacture a smartphone that doesn’t use minerals from conflict zones, is recyclable and is made by workers who are treated well.Fairphone is also aiming to make product longevity a development goal. The longer a device lasts, the less waste it creates and the fewer resources it requires, founder and CEO Bas Van Abel said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Personal weather stations can expose your Wi-Fi network

In the latest Internet of Things security blunder, personal weather station devices made by Netatmo were found sending users’ Wi-Fi passwords back to the company over unencrypted connections.Netatmo weather stations can be used to monitor indoor and outdoor temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels and overall air quality. Users can see the data collected by their stations in real-time through an app installed on their phones, tablets or computers.The public weather map on Netatmo’s website shows that thousands of such devices are installed around the world.When the weather stations are first configured, users need to give them access to their Wi-Fi networks, so they can transmit sensor readings to the Netatmo cloud over the Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 2/13/2015

Please join us in congratulating the following iPexpert client’s who have passed their CCIE lab!

This Week’s CCIE Success Stories

• Steven Allspach, CCIE #46810 (Routing & Switching)
• Ahmed Hussain, CCIE #46833 (Routing & Switching)
• Oluwaseyi Bello, CCIE #46897 (Routing & Switching)
• Michael O’Nan, CCIE #46879 (Collaboration)
• Justin Lenhart, CCIE #46911 (Collaboration)
• Esteban Araya Paniagua, CCIE #46910 (Collaboration)
• Ade Adeoshun, CCIE #46959 (Collaboration)

This Week’s CCIE Testimonials

Steven Allspach, CCIE #46810
“To prepare for my lab, I used all of iPexpert’s videos and workbooks. I also took their 10-day onsite bootcamp (one of week technology focused labbing and the one-week lab experience). The bootcamp was by far the best decision I had made during my studies. The bootcamp allowed me to completely submerge myself in the CCIE technologies uninterrupted for 12 straight days 12-16 hours per day. I feel like I gained over 3-months of preparation in 12-days. I gained so much confidence after the bootcamp in November that I immediately scheduled my exam for February.

The OWLE bootamp prepared me in ways I never imagined. It gave me the practice of doing full 8-hour mock labs (TSHOOT/Diag/Config). Each day we would complete a Continue reading

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Basics: The Difference Between Bandwidth and Speed

A link in a network is determined by two factors, bandwidth and speed. These are usually the same but not always. Speed is bit rate of the circuit while bandwidth is the amount of “speed” available for use. As an example, a 500 Megabit Ethernet MPLS service which uses a 1 Gigabit Ethernet connection to site […]

The post Basics: The Difference Between Bandwidth and Speed appeared first on EtherealMind.

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EU air passenger surveillance system could be ready for take-off by year end

Despite privacy concerns and doubts over its usefulness, a plan to track passengers entering or leaving the European Union in a series of national databases is likely to become reality by the end of the year.The call to build national databases of so-called passenger name records (PNRs) has become louder since the recent terror attacks in Paris in which 17 people were killed. EU countries have argued that storing data about who has flown where, and when, would help law enforcement with the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of terrorist offenses and serious transnational crime.The plan is for airlines to send data collected during reservation and check-in procedures, including travel itineraries, ticket information and contact details, to an authority of the relevant country. That authority would be responsible for analyzing the data and sharing its analysis with other competent authorities, including those in other countries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Hands-On Tail-F Experience on Software Gone Wild

Tail-F NCS implements one of the most realistic approaches to service abstraction (the cornerstone of SDN – at least in my humble opinion) – an orchestration system that automates service provisioning on existing infrastructure.

Is the product really as good as everyone claims? How hard is it to use? How steep is the learning curve? Boštjan Šuštar and Marko Tišler from NIL Data Communications have months of hands-on experience and were willing to share it in Episode 22 of Software Gone Wild.

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HSRP AWARE PIM

In environments that require redundancy towards clients, HSRP will normally be running. HSRP is a proven protocol and it works but how do we handle when we have clients that need multicast? What triggers multicast to converge when the Active Router (AR) goes down? The following topology is used:

One thing to notice here is that R3 is the PIM DR even though R2 is the HSRP AR. The network has been setup with OSPF, PIM and R1 is the RP. Both R2 and R3 will receive IGMP reports but only R3 will send PIM Join, due to it being the PIM DR. R3 builds the (*,G) towards the RP:

R3#sh ip mroute 239.0.0.1
IP Multicast Routing Table
Flags: D - Dense, S - Sparse, B - Bidir Group, s - SSM Group, C - Connected,
       L - Local, P - Pruned, R - RP-bit set, F - Register flag,
       T - SPT-bit set, J - Join SPT, M - MSDP created entry, E - Extranet,
       X - Proxy Join Timer Running, A - Candidate for MSDP Advertisement,
       U - URD, I - Received Source Specific Host Report, 
       Z - Multicast Tunnel, z - MDT-data group sender, 
        Continue reading

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U.S. carriers meet voluntary deadline for unlocking mobile phones

Unlocking a mobile phone from a single U.S. carrier has caused consumers headaches in recent years, but seven major carriers on Wednesday met a voluntary, industry-created deadline to set conditions for unlocking to occur.Software locks on smartphones and other mobile phones prohibit users from using a device on another operator’s network, which makes it hard for someone to take a device loaded with apps to another carrier or to use the device when traveling abroad.Even though carriers have adhered to ways for consumers to get phones unlocked, the CTIA wireless industry group said that an unlocked phone isn’t necessarily an interoperable phone, since different carriers use different technologies and wireless spectrum bands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Why Microsoft’s HoloLens is the next big enterprise thing

If you had followed along on Twitter or gone straight to the source and listened to the live streaming version of the big Microsoft Windows 10 event on Jan. 21, you probably felt the excitement. That energy was not just about Windows 10: Yeah, that operating system seems nice, and the fit and finish will probably make it the next Windows 7 — you know, the version of the product that corporations land on and run for a decade or more because it is just solid, reliable, and compatible. Everyone who skipped Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 will certainly gravitate toward a major migration toward Windows 10, and Microsoft understands this. It looks like a solid release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Panasonic’s Toughbook 54 gets lighter, but stays strong

Panasonic’s Toughbooks are known for their strength and durability, but the company is trying to resolve some of the heft and size issues with its latest model.The Toughbook 54 14-inch laptop is just 1.9 kilograms (4.19 pounds), much lighter than its predecessor, the Toughbook 53, which was over 2.5 kilograms. Panasonic has also doubled memory capacity of the laptop to 16GB, and included a spare bay to improve storage capacity.The Toughbook isn’t going to compete on weight with laptops marketed as being super light, such as Dell’s XPS 13, which weights a bit more than 1 kilogram. But it is much tougher, thanks to a magnesium alloy chassis that can withstand drops of just under 1 meter. The Toughbook 54 has a handle, making it look much like a mini-suitcase.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here