Weekend Reads 091820
In Europe and beyond we struggle with effective policing of online communications. As generations before, we want to be both: free and safe when we interact with others, go shopping or get our news. While this balance is difficult, it is possible to achieve: the rapid development of online communications, often proclaimed the wild west of modern society, Continue reading
MUST Read: Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing
One of the weekend reads collected by Russ White contained a pointer to a hilarious description of blockchain - a solution in search of a problem. Here are a few quotes to get you started (and I had a really hard time selecting just a few):
I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection.
At its core, blockchain is a glorified spreadsheet.
The only thing is that there’s a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide.
Someone should use that article as a framework and replace blockchain with OpenFlow or SDN ;)
Heavy Networking 540: Sinefa Blends Network Data, Synthetics To Measure End User Experience (Sponsored)
In today's sponsored show, we talk with Sinefa about its Digital Experience Monitoring capabilities. Sinefa assembles network traffic, DPI, end point monitoring, and synthetic transactions to get clear, actionable information on network performance to measure end user experience and improve troubleshooting. Our guests are Chris Siakos, CTO; and Alex Henthorn-Iwane, VP of Product Marketing.
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Heavy Networking 540: Sinefa Blends Network Data, Synthetics To Measure End User Experience (Sponsored)
In today's sponsored show, we talk with Sinefa about its Digital Experience Monitoring capabilities. Sinefa assembles network traffic, DPI, end point monitoring, and synthetic transactions to get clear, actionable information on network performance to measure end user experience and improve troubleshooting. Our guests are Chris Siakos, CTO; and Alex Henthorn-Iwane, VP of Product Marketing.The Digital Services Act and Why the Architecture of the Internet Must Be Preserved
Earlier this year, as part of the European Digital Strategy, the European Commission announced a Digital Services Act package to develop new and revised rules to harmonize and deepen the Single Market for digital services. As a part of that initiative, it also initiated a public consultation to scope the specific issues that may require regulatory intervention.
The Internet Society submitted recommendations in response to the critical issues raised in this consultation. One of the key considerations that we hope comes across in this submission is that in order “to design better regulation for the Internet, it is important to understand two things: the first one is that today’s Internet, despite how much it has evolved, still continues to depend on its original architecture; and, the second relates to how preserving this design is important for drafting regulation that is fit for purpose.”
As noted by the Commission, the scale of digital services is substantially different from 20 years ago, when the E-Commerce Directive was introduced. New actors and new services have emerged, creating a much more complex ecosystem. This new ecosystem presents new challenges, particularly with regard to illegal and harmful activities and content online. Current discussions and regulatory initiatives Continue reading
Making Connections to Make a Difference at the 2020 Chapter Workshops
Each year during Chapter Workshops, representatives from across the Internet Society come together to advance their shared vision of an open and trusted Internet for everyone. They gather elbow-to-elbow on five different continents, sharing experiences and exchanging local, regional, and global perspectives. These annual workshops are a meeting ground for Internet Society Chapters, project leads, global colleagues, and our partners at the Internet Society Foundation – a chance to collaborate, define strategies, and develop plans.
Key to the Chapter Workshops is working closely to foster synergies, exchange lessons learned, spark engagement, and strengthen relationships across the global Internet Society community.
This year is a little different.
The 2020 Chapter Workshops come at a time when the world is grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and relying on the Internet to enable continuity. We now understand too well the importance of having a better, reliable, and affordable Internet for everyone.
With this in mind, the Chapter Workshops have been tailored to this context and will take place virtually – where human connection will still be on the agenda. Each region has identified priority topics and developed their sessions accordingly.
Africa (22-25 September)
Europe (5-7 October)
Asia-Pacific (15-16 October)
North America & The Caribbean (19-23 October)
Middle East Continue reading
Raking the floods: my intern project using eBPF
Cloudflare’s globally distributed network is not just designed to protect HTTP services but any kind of TCP or UDP traffic that passes through our edge. To this end, we’ve built a number of sophisticated DDoS mitigation systems, such as Gatebot, which analyze world-wide traffic patterns. However, we’ve always employed defense-in-depth: in addition to global protection systems we also use off-the shelf mechanisms such as TCP SYN-cookies, which protect individual servers locally from the very common SYN-flood. But there’s a catch: such a mechanism does not exist for UDP. UDP is a connectionless protocol and does not have similar context around packets, especially considering that Cloudflare powers services such as Spectrum which are agnostic to the upper layer protocol (DNS, NTP, …), so my 2020 intern class project was to come up with a different approach.
Protecting UDP services
First of all, let's discuss what it actually means to provide protection to UDP services. We want to ensure that an attacker cannot drown out legitimate traffic. To achieve this we want to identify floods and limit them while leaving legitimate traffic untouched.
The idea to mitigate such attacks is straight forward: first identify a group of packets that is Continue reading
Video: Cisco SD-WAN Routing Goodness
After covering the Cisco SD-WAN components and its architecture in the Cisco SD-WAN Foundations and Design Aspects webinar, David Penaloza focused on the routing capabilities it offers and its control plane characteristics, including types of routes and some scalability recommendations.
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.
IPv6 Buzz 060: Why the Internet Needs IPv6 – With Special Guest Vint Cerf
In this week's episode Ed, Scott, Tom, and guest host Greg Ferro talk to Vint Cerf about why the Internet needs IPv6, and whether the Internet is in danger of fragmenting along political lines and the impacts of that fragmentation. Vint is Google's chief Internet evangelist and the co-creator, with Bob Khan, of the Internet Protocol.
The post IPv6 Buzz 060: Why the Internet Needs IPv6 – With Special Guest Vint Cerf appeared first on Packet Pushers.
IPv6 Buzz 060: Why the Internet Needs IPv6 – With Special Guest Vint Cerf
In this week's episode Ed, Scott, Tom, and guest host Greg Ferro talk to Vint Cerf about why the Internet needs IPv6, and whether the Internet is in danger of fragmenting along political lines and the impacts of that fragmentation. Vint is Google's chief Internet evangelist and the co-creator, with Bob Khan, of the Internet Protocol.Architecting an Agile Approach to App Development
COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of digital transformation to warp speed. Never has the need to develop transformative technology been more urgent. Learn how you can accelerate and scale app development with a modern approach.CBRS Spectrum Auction Transforms Enterprise Cellular Landscape
Win, lose, or watch, IT managers gained as auction opens numerous opportunities for corporate wireless networks soon.About Your Remote Access Policy: It’s Time for an Update
Times have changed, with more employees working from home. Has your enterprise's remote access policy kept pace with the arrival of new users, tasks, access technologies, and threats?Can Video Game Systems Like PS5 Be Used for Workplace Team Collaboration?
Team collaboration has been an issue in the workplace for too long. Countless solutions have been proposed and tried. And here is a new idea. Can video game systems like PS5 be used for workplace team collaboration? The simple answer is yes. But how?
Video game systems have long had the option for multiplayer games. These also allow numerous people around the world to connect, create teams, and play against other teams. If you’re a true gamer, you would know how this works. However, what does this mean for offices? Video game systems like the PS5 have many features that can enable workplace team collaboration. Here are some of the ways this is encouraged.
3 Ways PS5 Will be Used for Workplace Team Collaboration
Delegation of Tasks
The option to play as teams helps develop skills in employees that contribute to the workplace. The more you work in a team, the better you adapt to it. In video game systems like PS5, you can choose your own game, which means having a story you like. This can engage the employees in multiple ways, but most importantly divide the tasks.
Playing as a team in a video game would not only Continue reading
Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin Errors
Every day, all across the Internet, something bad but entirely normal happens: thousands of origin servers go down, resulting in connection errors and frustrated users. Cloudflare’s users collectively spend over four and a half years each day waiting for unreachable origin servers to respond with error messages. But visitors don’t want to see error pages, they want to see content!
Today is exciting for all those who want the Internet to be stronger, more resilient, and have important redundancies: Cloudflare is pleased to announce a partnership with the Internet Archive to bring new functionality to our Always Online service.
Always Online serves as insurance for our customers’ websites. Should a customer’s origin go offline, timeout, or otherwise break, Always Online is there to step in and serve archived copies of webpages to visitors. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization that runs the Wayback Machine, a service which saves snapshots of billions of websites across the Internet. By partnering with the Internet Archive, Cloudflare is able to seamlessly deliver responses for unreachable websites from the Internet Archive, while the Internet Archive can continue their mission of archiving the web to provide access to all knowledge.
Enabling Always Online in the Continue reading
Are Business Needs Just Excuses for Vendor Shenanigans?
Every now and then I call someone’s baby ugly (or maybe it was their third cousin’s baby and they nonetheless feel offended). In such cases a common resort is to cite business or market needs to prove how ignorant and clueless I am. Here’s a sample LinkedIn comment talking about my ignorance about the need for smart NICs:
The rise of custom silicon by Presando [sic], Mellanox, Amazon, Intel and others confirms there is a real market need.
Now let’s get something straight: while there are good reasons to use tons of different things that might look inappropriate, irrelevant or plain stupid to an outsider, I don’t believe in real market need argument being used to justify anything without supporting technical facts (tell me why you need that stuff and prove to me that using it is the best way of solving a problem).
Use Python to translate TCP/UDP port numbers to names
This short post shows how you can use Python to convert TCP/UDP port number to port name and vice versa.
Most of us know names of common TCP and UDP ports like 22/ssh, 23/telnet, 80/http or 443/https. We learn these early in our networking careers and many of them are so common that even when woken up middle of the night you'd know 53 is domain aka dns!
But there are also many not-so commonly used ports that have been given names. These ones sometimes show up in firewall logs or are mentioned in literature. Some vendors also try to replace numeric value with a human readable name in the configs and outputs of different commands.
One way or the other, I'd be good to have an easy method of getting port number given its name, and on occasion we might want to get name of particular port number.
There are many ways one could achieve that. We might search web, drop into documentation, or even check /etc/services if we have access to Linux box.
I decided to check if we can do some programmatic translation with Python, seeing as sometimes we could have hundreds of entries to process and Continue reading