The Week in Internet News: New York City Sued for Homework Gap
A virtual gap: Homeless advocates and legal groups have sued New York City for a lack of reliable Internet access in the city’s 27 homeless shelters, Reuters on WTVBam.com reports. Thousands of students living in the homeless shelters are struggling to keep up with virtual school during the COVID-19 pandemic, the plaintiffs say. The city has promised to install WiFi service in the shelters. New York City recently returned to virtual school after COVID-19 rates ticked up.
Repair it yourself: The European Parliament has voted to make it easier to repair electronic devices outside of the company that sold them, Euronews.com says. The legislation would allow independent repairs without hurting the value of the device during trade in, a move that’s a “major blow” to big device makers.
Device spying: The Singapore-based developer of smartphone application Muslim Pro, targeted at Muslim users, has denied allegations that it is selling the personal data to the U.S. military, The Straits Times reports. Developer Bitsmedia says it is immediately ending relationships with its data partners, however. Vice.com recently reported that the app was among several selling personal data to the U.S. military.
Facebook fined: The South Korean government Continue reading
Improving the Resiliency of Our Infrastructure DNS Zone
In this blog post we will discuss how we made our infrastructure DNS zone more reliable by using multiple primary nameservers to leverage our own DNS product running on our edge as well as a third-party DNS provider.
Authoritative Nameservers
You can think of an authoritative nameserver as the source of truth for the records of a given DNS zone. When a recursive resolver wants to look up a record, it will eventually need to talk to the authoritative nameserver(s) for the zone in question. If you’d like to read more on the topic, our learning center provides some additional information.
Here’s an example of our authoritative nameservers (replacing our actual domain with example.com):
~$ dig NS example.com +short
ns1.example.com.
ns2.example.com.
ns3.example.com.
As you can see, there are three nameservers listed. You’ll notice that the nameservers happen to reside in the same zone, but they don’t have to. Those three nameservers point to six anycasted IP addresses (3 x IPv4, 3 x IPv6) announced from our edge, comprising data centers from 200+ cities around the world.
The Problem
We store the hostnames for all of our machines, both the ones at the Continue reading
Internet Society Continues Strong Support for the IETF’s Critical Work on Open Standards
Open standards and the role they play are an important part of what makes the Internet the Internet. A fundamental building block of the Internet and everything it enables, open standards allow devices, services, and applications to work together across the interconnected networks that make up the Internet that we depend on every day.
In fact, every moment you are online, even just reading this blog post, you are relying on open standards such as DNS, HTTP, and TLS. They are a critical property of what we call the Internet Way of Networking.
Since its inception, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – a global community of thousands of engineers who are working each day to create and improve open standards to make the Internet work better – has been at the center of technical innovation for the global Internet. In addition to the standards themselves, the open processes and principles through which they are developed ensure the evolution of Internet technologies that meet the need of the growing number of devices and uses that empower people around the world to connect, share, learn, and more. This places the work of the IETF, and other groups focused on open Continue reading
The dark side of BGP community attributes
The post The dark side of BGP community attributes appeared first on Noction.
Worth Exploring: Pluginized Protocols
Remember my BGP route selection rules are a clear failure of intent-based networking paradigm blog post? I wrote it almost three years ago, so maybe you want to start by rereading it…
Making long story short: every large network is a unique snowflake, and every sufficiently convoluted network architect has unique ideas of how BGP route selection should work, resulting in all sorts of crazy extended BGP communities, dozens if not hundreds of nerd knobs, and 2000+ pages of BGP documentation for a recent network operating system (no, unfortunately I’m not joking).
The New Normal Requires a New Enterprise Security Framework
Managing network architecture while moving to SASE requires pragmatic, secure access solutions for existing hybrid infrastructures that are future-compatible.2020….A Year of So Much Change
In some ways it feels like just yesterday I was in Barcelona for CiscoLive. The convention center filled with people and energy… and all of that energy and life spilling out into everything around it…. from La Rambla to the... Read More ›
The post 2020….A Year of So Much Change appeared first on Networking with FISH.
A Thanksgiving 2020 Reading List
While our colleagues in the US are celebrating Thanksgiving this week and taking a long weekend off, there is a lot going on at Cloudflare. The EMEA team is having a full day on CloudflareTV with a series of live shows celebrating #CloudflareCareersDay.
So if you want to relax in an active and learning way this weekend, here are some of the topics we’ve covered on the Cloudflare blog this past week that you may find interesting.
Improving Performance and Search Rankings with Cloudflare for Fun and Profit
Making things fast is one of the things we do at Cloudflare. More responsive websites, apps, APIs, and networks directly translate into improved conversion and user experience. On November 10, Google announced that Google Search will directly take web performance and page experience data into account when ranking results on their search engine results pages (SERPs), beginning in May 2021.
Rustam Lalkaka and Rita Kozlov explain in this blog post how Google Search will prioritize results based on how pages score on Core Web Vitals, a measurement methodology Cloudflare has worked closely with Google to establish, and we have implemented support for in our analytics tools. Read the full blog post.
Getting Continue reading
Fun Times: Another Broken Linux ALG
Dealing with protocols that embed network-layer addresses into application-layer messages (like FTP or SIP) is great fun, more so if the said protocol traverses a NAT device that has to find the IP addresses embedded in application messages while translating the addresses in IP headers. For whatever reason, the content rewriting functionality is called application-level gateway (ALG).
Even when we’re faced with a monstrosity like FTP or SIP that should have been killed with napalm a microsecond after it was created, there’s a proper way of doing things and a fast way of doing things. You could implement a protocol-level proxy that would intercept control-plane sessions… or you could implement a hack that tries to snoop TCP payload without tracking TCP session state.
Not surprisingly, the fast way of doing things usually results in a wonderful attack surface, more so if the attacker is smart enough to construct HTTP requests that look like SIP messages. Enjoy ;)
What’s Your Work From Home DR Plan?
It’s almost December and the signs are pointing to a continuation of the current state of working from home for a lot of people out there. Whether it’s a surge in cases that is causing businesses to close again or a change in the way your company looks at offices and remote work, you’re likely going to ring in the new year at your home keyboard in your pajamas with a cup of something steaming next to your desk.
We have all spent a lot of time and money investing in better conditions for ourselves at home. Perhaps it was a fancy new mesh chair or a more ergonomic keyboard. It could have been a bigger monitor with a resolution increase or a better webcam for the dozen or so Zoom meetings that have replaced the water cooler. There may even be more equipment in store, such as a better home wireless setup or even a corporate SD-WAN solution to help with network latency. However, have you considered what might happen if it all goes wrong and you need to be online?
In and Outage
Outages happen more often than we realize. That’s never been more evident than the situation Continue reading
Networking and Infrastructure News Roundup: November 27 Edition
In the news this week: New managed services for improving workflows in multi-clouds and for administering storage in and across hybrid environments.Securing Modern Applications
Modern applications are changing enterprise security. Apps today are comprised of dozens, or even hundreds, of microservices. They can be spun up and down in real time and may span multiple clouds (on–premises, private cloud, and public cloud). Traditional security stacks just aren’t suited to protecting these applications consistently.
To effectively secure modern apps, we start by identifying unique application assets across clouds—such as users, services, and data. We then continuously evaluate their risk and automatically make authorization decisions to adjust our application security and compliance posture based on asset identity—regardless of where they are or where they have moved.
Security professionals can learn how to use VMware network and security solutions to secure modern applications in the following VMworld sessions:
Security Policies for Modern Applications: An Evolution from Micro-segmentation (ISCS2240)
Enterprises are embracing cloud native transformation and modernizing traditional applications, from monolithic to microservices architectures. As applications transform and span multiple clouds (on–premises, private cloud, and public cloud), it’s essential to Continue reading
Get Off Social Media! Things to Spend Your Time on Instead
Social media can be hard to navigate especially now that there are so many platforms available at the touch of a button. Humans haven’t had enough time to evolve to social media and the vast technological innovations we’ve made. Twenty years ago, humans spent an average of 2-4 hours on their phones and the internet and now that number has grown to 10-14 hours.
This is a massive change over a very short amount of time. This, in conjunction with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on society, has had a rather large impact on frequent users of the internet. Despite the surplus of internet websites and platforms, people are feeling more lonely and detached than ever.
If you’re struggling with these feelings and other negative feelings as a result of the echo that is social media, here are 5 things you can do instead:
Go Outside!
Depending on the lockdown rules in your state or country, you should consider going outside. It is important that you experience nature, see other human beings, and remind yourself that you are not alone in the world. You can take a walk, go on a run or just sit on your balcony and Continue reading