Where SDN falls down

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises faster network deployment times and increased agility. Unfortunately, early SDN architectures focused only on solving connectivity challenges at layers 2 through 4 of the OSI model and largely ignored application-centric challenges at layer 4 to layer 7. Yet, layers 4 – 7 are where many of the services reside that ensure applications are fast, highly available and secure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARM fades from Windows PCs and tablets, but grows in Chromebooks

You win some, you lose some. Microsoft this week dropped support for ARM processors from its Surface tablets with the Surface 3, but adoption of the chip architecture in Chromebooks is growing.Chromebooks from little-known companies HiSense and Haier went on sale this week for US$149, and come with an ARM-based chip made by Rockchip. These are the least expensive Chromebooks, which usually cost $200 and up.Asus also announced a new ARM-based 10.1-inch Chromebook Flip hybrid, which can be a tablet and laptop and will ship in a few months starting at $249. Acer announced a Chromebase, a 21.5-inch all-in-one PC with Chrome OS and an ARM-based processor from Nvidia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Over 100,000 devices can be used to amplify DDoS attacks via multicast DNS

Over 100,000 devices have a misconfigured service called multicast DNS that accepts requests from the Internet and can potentially be abused to amplify distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.The multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) is a protocol that allows devices on a local network to discover each other and their services. It is used both by PCs and embedded devices like network attached storage (NAS) systems, printers and others.The mDNS protocol allows queries to be sent to a specific machine using its unicast address. However, the official specification recommends that when receiving such queries, the mDNS service should check before responding that the address that made the request is located in the same local subnet. If it’s not, the request should be ignored.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Edgewater Networks Featured Video: Mobility and Secure Video Conferencing

Mobility has made business more convenient for us, but is it opening us up to potential data theft? Watch Edgewater Networks’ featured video on the security challenges of mobile video conferencing to learn more.

Oracle bolsters Marketing Cloud to show CMOs the big picture

It’s a common theme that spans functional areas within the organization: data remains stuck in silos, making it all but impossible for decision-makers to get a glimpse at the big picture. Zeroing in on marketers’ experience of this problem, Oracle on Wednesday rolled out several enhancements to its Marketing Cloud designed to help companies develop a more holistic view of their customers.Among the new features unveiled at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience event this week in Las Vegas are Oracle ID Graph, Rapid Retargeter and AppCloud Connect.Oracle ID Graph is designed to help marketers connect the many identities a consumer may have across channels and devices and understand that they all belong to the same person.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Featured Interview: KulCloud CTO Sueng-Yong Park, Talks with Us About SOA

SDxCentral talks with KulCloud CTO Sueng-Yong Park about service-oriented architectures (SOA) and their SDN solutions for the enterprise & telecommunications markets.

Obama authorizes sanctions against hackers

U.S. President Barack Obama has signed an executive order authorizing the U.S. government to impose sanctions on people, organizations and governments that partake in “malicious cyber-enabled activities” that harm the country.“The same technologies that help keep our military strong are used by hackers in China and Russia to target our defense contractors and systems that support our troops,” Obama said in a statement.The sanctions would target activities that harm critical infrastructure, disrupt computer networks, expose personal information and trade secrets, and entities that profit from information stolen in cyberattacks. The administration will focus on threats from outside the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco to Acquire Embrane, Adding Layer 4-7 to ACI

Having helped fund Embrane, Cisco is ready to acquire the Layer 4-7 startup.

AWS targets interrupted sessions with virtual desktops upgrade

Amazon Web Services has made its WorkSpaces virtual desktops less annoying to use with a feature that resumes the previous session after it detects an interruption.Today, if users close a laptop lid or lose the network connection, their session will be interrupted and they may be disconnected and have to log back in. But thanks to the auto session resume feature, that’ll be a thing of the past.It might seem like a small upgrade. But if Amazon wants the use of its WorkSpaces to take off on a larger scale, it’s small things like that it has to get right. The default time for resuming a session is 20 minutes, but it can be extended to a maximum of four hours or disabled by the administrator.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare’s Buenos Aires data center now online

Che, ya estamos en Argentina! It is con placer that we announce our 32nd data center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our Buenos Aires data center is our 5th in Latin America following deployments in Santiago, São Paulo, Medellin, and Lima. As of this moment, CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away from nearly all of Latin America's 300 million Internet users.

Argentina may be better known as the land of bife and malbec, but it is also home to a thriving tech community, including several well known start-up accelerators such as Startup Buenos Aires, Wayra and NXTP Labs (a CloudFlare customer!). At CloudFlare, we know a thing or two about the challenges of building a technology company, and we're proud to support the fast delivery of Internet applications for users in Argentina, as well as those who create them.

Don't cry for me Argentina

Although not commonly known, the title of the famous song from the musical Evita originates from an epitaph on a plaque honoring Evita Peron, and roughly translates as: "Don't cry for me Argentina, I remain quite near to you." Unfortunately, when it comes to the Internet, there is plenty of Continue reading

Is it safe to use public Wi-Fi networks?

Wi-Fi has significantly changed the way we work and play, enabling us to interact with the digital world from anywhere in the physical world. Furthermore, free Wi-Fi access is on the rise, from local coffee shops to international restaurant chains. However, the convenience of free Wi-Fi comes with some real threats, from computer viruses to identity theft.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 7 reasons to deploy Wi-Fi security in Enterprise mode Wi-Fi is a type of wireless local area network (WLAN) technology that enables an electronic device such as a laptop or smartphone to exchange data or connect to the Internet using radio waves. The core technology behind Wi-Fi is a device called an access point, which acts like a bridge between the wired network and the Wi-Fi network. The access point, in turn, typically connects to the Internet via a network router.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is it safe to use public Wi-Fi networks?

SCP File To ASA

Need to do this a few times for some work. It looks like the ASA is a bit picky about how you specify the destination location when you try and do it from a UNIX box.

Enable SSH copy on the ASA

ssh scopy enable

Copy the ASA image from the local directory on your UNIX box to the device.

scp -v asa825-51-k8.bin username@IP_ADDRESS:disk0:asa825-51-k8.bin


If you don’t use this format the UNIX box will give you an error message along the lines of “lost connection”, though the transfer will seem to have completed.

How to monitor Wi-Fi traffic on Android devices

Monitoring or capturing Wi-Fi traffic on Android smartphones and tablets is possible. I’m not just talking about Wi-Fi stumblers or traffic usage apps, but full network sniffers that can capture and display the raw 802.11 network packets from the airwaves. Instead of having to run captures on your bulky laptop, you can walk around with your Android tablet or phone tucked away in your pocket.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

6 things Samsung Galaxy S6 does that iPhone 6 can’t

Samsung and Apple are the undisputed kings of the smartphone world, and both own right about 20 percent of the global market, according to recent research from IDC. Apple and the iPhone beat out Samsung and its seemingly endless array of handhelds in total sales to end users for the first time during the final quarter of last year, thanks in no small part to the white-hot market reception of both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 things iPhone 6 does that Samsung Galaxy S6 can’t

Samsung and Apple are the undisputed kings of the smartphone world, and both own right approximately 20 percent of the global market, according to recent research from IDC. Apple and the iPhone beat out Samsung and its seemingly endless array of handhelds in total sales to end users for the first time during the final quarter of last year, thanks in no small part to the white-hot market reception of both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Barcelona

Google cracks down on ad-injecting Chrome extensions

Google has identified and disabled 192 Chrome browser extensions that injected rogue ads into Web pages opened by users without being upfront about it. The company will scan for similar policy violations in future.The action followed a study that the company conducted together with researchers from University of California Berkeley and which found that more than five percent of Web users who accessed Google websites had an “ad injector” installed.The deceptive Chrome extensions were detected as part of that study, but the researchers also found ad injectors affecting browsers such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, on both Windows and Mac OS X.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Introduces Two New Cisco CCIE Logos

Thanks to my contacts in Cisco PR I’m really excited to be able to share the news that Cisco is introducing two new CCIE Logos for 2015, under the title of “CCIE ABL”. If you’re wondering what “ABL” is, it’s not another specialization track, but rather it signifies progress towards the ultimate goal of a CCIE number.

Phillip A. Prull is the Senior VP with the responsibility to oversee the valuable CCIE® brand for Cisco, and he explained to me why Cisco felt that they needed an additional logo:

“One of the things we recognized was that many engineers were working for many months – even years – towards passing our rigorous CCIE® lab exam, but until they finally achieved that success, many of them told us that they felt unable to demonstrate to potential employers that they had made progress towards that goal. In response, we have created a new logo – the Cisco CCIE® ABL™.

Beginning in April 2015, any candidate who has passed a CCIE qualification exam (aka the “written”) will be able to download the new CCIE® ABL™ logo from our Certification Tracking System, and use it on their resumés and business cards, subject to Continue reading

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, April 1

Amazon wants to try putting physical “buy now” buttons all over your houseBecause Jeff Bezos hasn’t yet figured how to wire your brain directly to Amazon’s warehouses, the company is experimenting with cluttering your home with special-purpose buttons in the name of e-commerce. Its new Dash Buttons can be put up anywhere—kitchen, bathroom drawer, broom closet—and programmed to put in a buy order for, say, laundry detergent, by syncing to the Amazon mobile app over the user’s home Wi-Fi network. The devices will go out to Prime customers by invitation only.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here