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COVID-19 Profiteers?

Numerous online companies are using the COVID-19 crisis to make their products better known (PacketPushers collected some of them). Nothing wrong with that - they’re investing into providing free- or at-cost resources, and hope to get increased traction in the market. Pretty fair and useful.

Then there are others… Here’s a recent email I got:

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Money Moves: March 2020

Palo Alto paid $420M for CloudGenix; Microsoft acquired Affirmed; AWS pledged $20 million to...

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Altiostar CEO: Open RAN Will Dominate in 3 Years

“In the next three years economic forces will drive operators to go to open RAN," said Altiostar...

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Remote work, regional lockdowns and migration of Internet usage

The recommendation for social distancing to slow down the spread of COVID-19 has led many companies to adopt a work-from-home policy for their employees in offices around the world, and Cloudflare is no exception.

As a result, a large portion of Internet access shifted from office-focused areas, like city centers and business parks, towards more residential areas like suburbs and outlying towns. We wanted to find out just precisely how broad this geographical traffic migration was, and how different locations were affected by it.

It turns out it is substantial, and the results are quite stunning:

Gathering the Data

So how can we determine if Internet usage patterns have changed from a geographical perspective?

In each Cloudflare Point of Presence (in more than 200 cities worldwide) there's an edge router whose responsibility it is to switch Internet traffic to serve the requests of end users in the region.

These edge routers are the network's entry point and for monitoring and debugging purposes each router samples IP packet information regarding the traffic that traverses them. This data is collected as flow records and contains layer-3 related information, such as the source and destination IP address, port, packet size etc.

These statistical Continue reading

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UPDATE 4-10: How enterprise networking is changing with a work-at-home workforce

As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!UPDATE 4.17AT&T reported that Email traffic is down 25% as more people opt for phone and video calls.  Video conferencing is on the rise with more than 470k Webex Meeting Calls on April 9, the highest during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It also stated instant messaging, including text traffic from messaging apps and platforms, has slightly declined since the week prior, but overall is up nearly 60%.To read this article in full, please click here

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APRS

Another post in my burst of amateur radio blog posts.

To say that the documentation for APRS is not great is an understatement. What should be the best source of information, aprs.org, is just a collection of angry rants by the inventor of APRS, angrily accusing implementations and operators of using his invention the wrong way. There’s no documentation about what the right way is, just that everyone is wrong.

So here I’ll attempt to write down what it is, in one place, in an effort to both teach others, and for people who know more than me to correct me.

The best source of APRS information for me has actually been Kenwood radio manuals. See resources at the bottom.

APRS in short

APRS is a way to send short pieces of digital information as packets of data. The messages are:

• Status about you
  • Your position (optionally not exact)
  • Your heading
  • Your QSY (frequency you’re tuned to if someone wants to call)
• Weather reports
• Status about “items” and “objects”. This is objects that are not you, and aren’t a radio. For example where the meeting point is, or a hurricane.
• Short messages

The protocol

As an operator you Continue reading

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Daily Roundup: Cisco Vows No Job Cuts

Cisco pledged to preserve jobs; AWS added direct storage to ECS, Fargate; and SAP prepped for...

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Zscaler Buys Cloud Security Startup Cloudneeti

Gartner recommends all security vendors invest in cloud security posture management and forecasts...

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Scientists Create a Long-Distance Cryogenic Microwave Quantum Network

There’s been quite a bit of fanfare around quantum computing during the last few years, with experts predicting that quantum computers will help fuel the growing computational demands of artificial intelligence, as well as forming the backbone of an unhackable internet. But beyond the hype is the reality that quantum computers are still some ways from being commercially viable, as researchers continue to resolve issues like accuracy, size and how to build a superconducting electrical oscillators that are used in some quantum chips need to be cooled down to near-absolute zero temperatures, otherwise the problem of Quantum Device Lab at study co-author quantum entanglement, two particles become linked in a way so that whatever happens to one particle, it also immediately occurs to the other, no matter the distance. Having proven that a cryogenically based, long-distance quantum network is indeed possible, the team is now working to construct a 30-meter (98.4-foot) quantum link. See more over at ETH Zurich’s

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AI Surges In Response to Pandemic

Spending on AI is poised to jump, particularly among enterprises that are deploying the technology...

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Cisco, Other Tech Firms Vow No Job Cuts

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said his company has the wherewithal to survive the pandemic without laying...

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Heavy Networking 511: A Wireless Upgrade Case Study

Today's Heavy Networking is all about wireless. Guest Bryan Ward, Lead Network Engineer at Dartmouth College, takes us through a campus-wide wireless upgrade that the institution is currently undertaking. We get nerdy about planning, infrastructure, cabling, and more, and dive into why the college is switching vendors.

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Heavy Networking 511: A Wireless Upgrade Case Study

Today's Heavy Networking is all about wireless. Guest Bryan Ward, Lead Network Engineer at Dartmouth College, takes us through a campus-wide wireless upgrade that the institution is currently undertaking. We get nerdy about planning, infrastructure, cabling, and more, and dive into why the college is switching vendors.

The post Heavy Networking 511: A Wireless Upgrade Case Study appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Weekly Wrap: Vodafone Cut Costs 50% With VMware Telco Cloud

SDxCentral Weekly Wrap for April 10, 2020: Vodafone cut costs by 50% with VMware's Telco Cloud;...

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AWS Adds Direct Storage to ECS, Fargate

The move extends persistent data storage to containers running in the AWS ecosystem and targets the...

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BGP Hell Is Other People

If you configure a newsreader to alert you every time someone hijacks a BGP autonomous system (AS), it will probably go off at least once a week. The most recent one was on the first of April courtesy of Rostelecom. But they’re not the only one. They’re just the latest. The incidences of people redirecting BGP, either by accident or be design, are becoming more and more frequent. And as we rely more and more on things like cloud computing and online applications to do our daily work and live our lives, the impact of these hijacks is becoming more and more critical.

Professional-Grade Protocol

BGP isn’t the oldest thing on the Internet. RFC 1105 is the initial draft of Border Gateway Protocol. The version that we use today, BGP4, is documented in RFC 4271. It’s a protocol that has enjoyed a long history of revisions and a reviled history of making networking engineers’ lives difficult. But why is that? How can a routing protocol be so critical and yet obtuse?

My friend Marko Milivojevic famously stated in his CCIE training career that, “BGP isn’t a routing protocol. It’s a policy engine.” When you look at the decisions of Continue reading

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How to Find a Networking Assistant

The networking assistant role is a major and important one in every business and organization. They are responsible for building, designing, implementing, and maintaining complex systems that keep employers in an organization productive. They work on computer networks that are the most critical part of every organization. They install, support, and maintain computer systems, including Intranet, Extranet, LAN (Local Area Networks), WAN (Wide Area Networks), phone system, network segments, and all other data communication systems.

Where to Find a Networking Assistant

When looking to hire a networking assistant for your business or organization, you need to spend time on some credible sites. Hiring a networking assistant shouldn’t stress you out, you only need to look in the right places to find the best for your business.

To connect with the right networking assistants, you need to check networking platforms where they spend time. Popular networking platforms or resources to find the best networking assistants include Cisco Support Community, Networking Forum, and AnandTech Forum. These are the top sites to find computer gurus for your business.

Start new forum threads to send recruitment messages and advertise your jobs to users on these platforms. Use the site as a resource to ask Continue reading

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Remote User Access in the Era of COVID-19

The worldwide lockdown due to COVID-19 has given me an opportunity to reflect on many aspects of life and work. Nowadays I’m helping enable companies and non-profits for secure remote access work (i.e. not site-to-site VPN). I was looking into enterprise-grade solutions for secure remote users access to VPNs when I came across the Smart … Continue reading Remote User Access in the Era of COVID-19 →

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Rolling With The Punches: Shifting Attack Tactics & Dropping Packets Faster & Cheaper At The Edge

On Cloudflare’s 8th birthday in 2017, we announced free unmetered DDoS Protection as part of all of our plans, regardless if you’re an independent blogger using WordPress on Cloudflare's Free plan or part of a large enterprise operating global network infrastructures. Our DDoS protection covers attack vectors on Layers 3-7; whether highly distributed and volumetric (rate-intensive) or small and sneaky. We protect over 26 million Internet properties, and at this scale, identifying small and sneaky DDoS attacks can be challenging, especially at L7. In this post, we discuss this challenge along with trends that we’ve seen, interesting DDoS attacks, and how we’ve responded to them so that you don’t have to worry.

Let’s Talk Trends

When analyzing attacks on the Cloudflare network, we’ve seen a steady decline in the proportion of L3/L4 DDoS attacks that exceed a rate of 30 Gbps in recent months. From September 2019 to March 2020, attacks peaking over 30 Gbps decreased by 82%, and in March 2020, more than 95% of all network-layer DDoS attacks peaked below 30 Gbps. Over the same time period, the average size of a DDoS attack has also steadily decreased by 53%, to just 11.88 Gbps. Yet, very large Continue reading

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Video: Networks Are (Not) Secure

It’s amazing how many people still believe in Security Fairy (the mythical entity that makes your application magically secure), fueling the whole industry of security researchers who happily create excruciatingly detailed talks of how you can use whatever security oversight to wreak havoc (even when the limitations of a technology are clearly spelled out in an RFC).

In the Networks Are Not Secure (part of How Networks Really Work webinar) I described why we should never rely on network infrastructure to provide security, but have to implement it higher up in the application stack.