How Social Networking Has Changed in the Past Year Due to COVID-19
From the beginning of this year, people started working from home to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The routines of practically everyone changed one afternoon. More and more people’s work and daily lives have changed to working online and working from home.
How Social Networking Changed Since COVID-19 Began
In the beginning, resources helped social managers and teams navigate their responses to handle COVID-19. After posts were uploaded at the beginning of the year, using different social media platforms, we were able to get more information about the spread of the virus. For people and users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, optimal send times were used.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn had a lot more users because of the pandemic. Lots of them made use of these platforms to handle their jobs and to send them to appropriate individuals all around the world.
COVID-19 Changed the Prime Posting Times for Social Media Sites
The data that got pulled for the yearly review showed the best times to upload necessary data. From the middle of April 2020, the most important times to upload different things on social media and to go online first changed. In different Continue reading
Why We’re Helping to Measure the Internet
Here at the Internet Society, we’ve always known that the Internet can be an integral part of our existence. 2020 has shown us that we need stable, reliable, and available Internet for everyone, everywhere.
Much of our work – and the work of the organizations that facilitate the smooth functioning of the Internet – is focused on helping to increase the Internet’s reach, reliability, resilience, availability and security. One of the ways we can track whether these efforts are working is to collect and measure data on various facets of the Internet. This helps to build up a bigger picture of the Internet’s development over time and the resulting data can be used to inform and support policy, investment, and education.
Internet Insights
The Internet Society Insights platform was launched in December 2020 to provide a curated set of insights to help everyone gain deeper, data-driven insight into the Internet. We’re collating data from several trusted organizations – data partners – and will examine Internet trends, generate reports, and tell data-driven stories on how the Internet is evolving.
In this blog, we catch up with some of our data partners and prominent members of the Internet measurement community to find out more about why Continue reading
Freeze Your Credit Reports Before Identity Thieves Open Credit In Your Name
I found out today that I’m a victim of identify theft. Specifically, the bad guys have gotten a hold of my name, SSN, and probably other fun tidbits of my personal information. My best guess is that this is a result of the Equifax breach, not that it matters.
How Did I Notice The Identity Theft?
I am enrolled in a free credit monitoring service that notifies me when things happen on my credit report. (I’m not recommending a particular monitoring service. The one I’m using is tied to a bank where I’m a customer, and it’s good enough.) There were two “hard inquiries” listed within a few days of each other.
There are hard and soft inquiries. As I understand it, a hard inquiry means you’ve applied for credit, and the lending institution is trying to figure out whether or not they’ll extend you the money. If you see a hard inquiry and you’re not applying for credit, that’s a red flag. Soft inquiries are for things like pre-approved credit card offers that you didn’t ask for but receive in the mail anyway.
One of the hard inquiries was from the Small Business Association government agency. The thief Continue reading
New Report Explores COVID-19’s Impact on the Internet in Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many have shifted their day-to-day activities to online. To sustain the spike in Internet traffic, fast and affordable Internet service are now more critical than ever.
Yet, Ookla Insights shows that Internet speed in Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka has declined since the pandemic. A new Internet Society report, The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Performance in Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, examines the impact of this fall in the performance and quality of Internet services in these countries on online users.
Informed by an online survey, taken by two hundred Internet users – predominantly tech-savvy city dwellers with access to the Internet – the report reveals there is a decline in Internet performance in the three countries. It shows that though the performance decline frustrated online users, more are increasingly spending on high-speed Internet.
The research advocates for governments and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to take advantage of the situation and accelerate efforts to increase network capacity and reliability to address the performance gaps.
Here are some highlights from The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Performance in Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Fall in Internet Performance
Around 50-80% of Continue reading
Day Two Cloud 078: Cloud Economics Are Ridiculous
Corey Quinn stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to explore the complicated world of understanding and managing cloud costs, CapEx vs OpEx, cloud lock-in, and other tricky issues. Corey is Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill Group. He also publishes the Last Week In AWS newsletter.
The post Day Two Cloud 078: Cloud Economics Are Ridiculous appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Day Two Cloud 078: Cloud Economics Are Ridiculous
Corey Quinn stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to explore the complicated world of understanding and managing cloud costs, CapEx vs OpEx, cloud lock-in, and other tricky issues. Corey is Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill Group. He also publishes the Last Week In AWS newsletter.CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream – Blog.CentOS.org
Becomes beta test for RHEL.
Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone
In September, we announced that we’re building a new, free Web Analytics product for the whole web. Today, I’m excited to announce that anyone can now sign up to use our new Web Analytics — even without changing your DNS settings. In other words, Cloudflare Web Analytics can now be deployed by adding an HTML snippet (in the same way many other popular web analytics tools are) making it easier than ever to use privacy-first tools to understand visitor behavior.
Why does the web need another analytics service?
Popular analytics vendors have business models driven by ad revenue. Using them implies a bargain: they track visitor behavior and create buyer profiles to retarget your visitors with ads; in exchange, you get free analytics.
At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet, and part of that is to deliver essential web analytics to everyone with a website, without compromising user privacy. For free. We’ve never been interested in tracking users or selling advertising. We don’t want to know what you do on the Internet — it’s not our business.
Our customers have long relied on Cloudflare’s Analytics because we’re accurate, fast, and privacy-first. In September we released a Continue reading
Deprecating the __cfduid cookie
Cloudflare is deprecating the __cfduid cookie. Starting on 10 May 2021, we will stop adding a “Set-Cookie” header on all HTTP responses. The last __cfduid cookies will expire 30 days after that.
We never used the __cfduid cookie for any purpose other than providing critical performance and security services on behalf of our customers. Although, we must admit, calling it something with “uid” in it really made it sound like it was some sort of user ID. It wasn't. Cloudflare never tracks end users across sites or sells their personal data. However, we didn't want there to be any questions about our cookie use, and we don’t want any customer to think they need a cookie banner because of what we do.
So why did we use the __cfduid cookie before, and why can we remove it now?
The primary use of the cookie is for detecting bots on the web. Malicious bots may disrupt a service that has been explicitly requested by an end user (through DDoS attacks) or compromise the security of a user's account (e.g. through brute force password cracking or credential stuffing, among others). We use many signals to build machine learning models that can Continue reading
Implement Private VLAN Functionality with Linux Bridge and Libvirt
I wanted to test routing protocol behavior (IS-IS in particular) on partially meshed multi-access layer-2 networks like private VLANs or Carrier Ethernet E-Tree service. I recently spent plenty of time creating a Vagrant/libvirt lab environment on my Intel NUC running Ubuntu 20.04, and I wanted to use that environment in my tests.
Challenge-of-the-day: How do you implement private VLAN functionality with Vagrant using libvirt plugin?
There might be interesting KVM/libvirt options I’ve missed, but so far I figured two ways of connecting Vagrant-controlled virtual machines in libvirt environment:
Implement Private VLAN Functionality with Linux Bridge and Libvirt
I wanted to test routing protocol behavior (IS-IS in particular) on partially meshed multi-access layer-2 networks like private VLANs or Carrier Ethernet E-Tree service. I recently spent plenty of time creating a Vagrant/libvirt lab environment on my Intel NUC running Ubuntu 20.04, and I wanted to use that environment in my tests.
Challenge-of-the-day: How do you implement private VLAN functionality with Vagrant using libvirt plugin?
There might be interesting KVM/libvirt options I’ve missed, but so far I figured two ways of connecting Vagrant-controlled virtual machines in libvirt environment:
Industry Collaboration Key to Scaling Global Communications Infrastructure Beyond Human Cognition
As "big-picture" global collaborations become more visible and more necessary, the combined effects of photonic technologies and a new computing-communications infrastructure will ensure their success.Adapt Business Agility with Modern Load Balancing
It’s no secret that enterprises are rapidly automating the modern network across compute, storage, and network environments. What you may not know is that load balancing is being left behind. Traditional legacy architectures were conceived decades ago and were not designed with the needs of the modern enterprise in mind. They are simply not scalable, agile, or flexible enough. As a result, enterprises have had to overprovision their load balancers — whether physical or virtual — resulting in complexity and waste.
We all know that waste and complexity are the enemy of the modern enterprise, and, thankfully, the cloud offers a solution. Cloud-native load balancers provide automation and elasticity, but they do not come with a rich feature set or provide consistency between on-premises and cloud environments. It’s a tricky trade off that prevents enterprises from truly achieving their digital transformation goals.
But don’t fret. There is a viable solution. VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) gives enterprises the best of both worlds — an adaptable, flexible, and scalable load balancer that combines the simplicity of the public cloud with the rich features inherent in an enterprise-grade solution. Check out Ashish Shah’s VMworld breakout session on the need for a Continue reading
Docker CLI Cheat Sheet
Docker is a fantastic tool. In this post I am documenting common/useful commands for working with the Docker CLI. Containers Show all local running containers. Show all local containers. Stop all local running containers. Stop all local stopped containers. Images Show all local...Bookmarked Articles
Interesting articles that I have read on random topics.Operationalizing Advanced East-West Security at Scale in the Datacenter
East-west security is the new battleground for keeping enterprises safe from malicious actors. As we all know, perimeters will be breached. That’s a given. The massive scale of data center infrastructure makes it too easy for bad actors to find a vulnerable, unpatched server, penetrate it, and hide out — often for months and years — stealing your information, monitoring your communications, and causing disruptions.
According to Ambika Kapur, vice president of product marketing for VMware’s networking and security business unit, it’s imperative that enterprises come to the realization that bad actors will get into the network — and focus more on blocking their lateral movement once they make that initial breach. She spent years in the firewalling space at Cisco and learned how vulnerable perimeter security can be. Now, at VMware, Kapur is helping to lead the effort to make east-west security a viable option through a software-based approach that is scalable and cost-efficient.
Check out Kapur’s VMworld breakout session on operationalizing east-west security at scale to learn exactly how we are able to stop the lateral spread of threats and ultimately harden enterprise security:
Rather than hairpinning traffic to a dedicated physical appliance, VMware breaks up the firewall Continue reading
Looking Glass of Cloud Networking
Since the 2000 era, the network has changed dramatically, becoming more and more mission-critical. There are so many drivers powering today’s digital network transformation. Think about the Internet of Things or the cloud native applications or OT, operational technology. All of these are connected via cognitive cloud networking with its agile software stack, programmability and a leaf-spine network for all traffic types. This cloud network, pioneered by Arista is hungry for more innovation when it comes to secure visibility. It is a hard problem after all—network data is orders of magnitude more voluminous then typical data sources of ingestion.
