Worth Reading: Doing nothing on EMP

Imagine you’re driving down the interstate, and suddenly, your car comes to a halt. You pick up your cell phone to call a family member for help, but you don’t have service. Then, when you look up, you see that all vehicles are also stopped. It’s 96 degrees out so you decide to walk to the nearest gas station to grab a bottled water only to find that your debit card has been rendered useless. -Townhall

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BGP Code Dive (1)

I often tell network engineers they need to learn to code—and they sometimes take my advice and run off to buy a book, or start an online program (which reminds me, I’m way, way behind in my own studies about right now). But learning to code, and being able to use that skill for anything are actually two different things. In fact, my major problem with my coding skills is finding projects I can undertake where I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time. Anyone want to write the world’s 25 millionth implementation of inserting the date and time into a document? No, I didn’t really think so.

So what can you do with coding skills? One thing you can do is <em?read the source. Thus, I’m starting an entirely new feature here at ‘net Work. Every now and again (which means I don’t know how often), I’m going to poke at some routing or control plane code or another, and try to figure out what it actually does. Why not just go through a single protocol line by line? Because—honestly—it’s not a useful way to approach a protocol in code. Rather—here is my first bit of advice—you want Continue reading

Worth Reading: Net Neutrality as a good start

Within the net neutrality arrangements, the incumbent operators will now have to treat their broadband businesses in exactly the same way as, in the past, they had to provide other telecoms services such as telephony. In other words, they can’t discriminate by giving preference to their own content service, or on the basis of others paying them premium prices for premium services aimed at favouring certain services over others. -CircleID

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Worth Reading: Net Neutrality set in stone

Nothing is forever and beyond change. That said, it is beginning look as if net neutrality will be with us for a while. Certainly, it is embedded in our laws more firmly than it ever has been. In a 2-to-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that the rules promulgated early last year by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are legal. The challenge had been brought by a group of telecommunications companies and associations. The Washington Post reports that the ruling has the narrow impact of prohibiting unequal treatment of content providers. That, however, is just one example of the impact of a regulatory structure that enables telecommunications to be managed as a utility… -IT Business Edge

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Worth Reading: D.C. Circuit decision in ‘net neutrality case

In a resounding victory for net neutrality advocates and consumers alike, the D.C. Circuit issued its decision in US Telecom v. FCC, a landmark ruling ensuring that government regulators maintain the authority necessary for preserving an open internet. -Center for Democracy and Technology

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Worth Reading: The last bastion of proprietary software

Open source software has done a lot to transform the IT industry, but perhaps more than anything else it has reminded those who architect complex systems that all elements of a datacenter have to be equally open and programmable for them to make the customizations that are necessary to run specific workloads efficiently and therefore cost effectively. -The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Life on a satellite link

When I give presentations on the topic, I often ask my audience what comes first to their mind when I mention the term “packet loss”. Audiences that have gone through engineering school often come back with “noise”, “bit/symbol error”, “checksum” or the like – all things that cause packets to be lost at the receiver. They see packet loss as a physical / link layer issue. -APNIC

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Detail of a Tapestry

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Worth Reading: Does more data really lead to better decision?

There is a popular adage within many quarters of the “big data” world that the more data you have, the more accurate your decision making will be. Is this really true? Or, as I’ve pointed out in the past, are our analyses less representative than ever before? -Forbes

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Worth Reading: The Great Firewall of China gets stronger

The Chinese government is tightening its control over free speech in China. Once sheepish in the face of censorship accusations, China is now touting its “internet sovereignty” as something to be admired and adopted. -The Stream

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On differential privacy

Over the past several weeks, there’s been a lot of talk about something called “differential privacy.” What does this mean, how does it work, and… Is it really going to be effective? The basic concept is this: the reason people can identify you, personally, from data collected off your phone, searches, web browser configuration, computer configuration, etc., is you do things just different enough from other people to create a pattern through cyber space (or rather data exhaust). Someone looking hard enough can figure out who “you” are by figuring out patterns you don’t even think about—you always install the same sorts of software/plugins, you always take the same path to work, you always make the same typing mistake, etc.

The idea behind differential security, considered here by Bruce Schneier, here, and here, is that you can inject noise into the data collection process that doesn’t impact the quality of the data for the intended use, while it does prevent any particular individual from being identified. If this nut can be cracked, it would be a major boon for online privacy—and this is a nut that deserves some serious cracking.

But I doubt it can actually be cracked Continue reading

Worth Reading: Three reasons to put down your cell phone

The cell phone. We’ve gotten to a point where we can’t do anything without them, and to a point where they distract us from everything. Massive amounts of research has been, and is being, done about the impact this has on our minds and our relationships. But let me mention just a few quick reasons we should put our cell phones down as it relates to our kids. -Jamie Dew

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Worth Reading: 60 Limit and the CCDE

So how hard can it be to earn a CCDE? It’s just a rubber stamp to show that you have been working in design for a number of years, isn’t it? Well not quite. You have to really prove your experience and knowledge in a number of fields, encompassing a variety of roles that not every candidate would have been fortunate enough to have undertaken prior to gaining that prestigious CCDE number. -Cisco Learning

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Reaction: Complexity Sells

Over at IPSpace this last week, Ivan pointed to a paper by Dijkstra (and if you don’t know who that is, you need to learn a thing or two about the history of routing protocols—because history makes culture, and culture matters—or, as the tagline on this blog says, culture eats technology for breakfast). In this paper, Dijkstra points out some rather important things about computer science and programming that can be directly applied to the network engineering world. For instance, Ivan says—

People tend to forget that “doing away with the programmer” was COBOL’s major original objective. —Replace “programmer” with “networking engineer” and COBOL with SDN

I was fascinated with Ivan’s take on this paper—particularly in that complexity is an area I find interesting and very useful in my everyday life as a designer—that I went and read the original article. You should, too.

I think Ivan’s observations are spot on, but I think it’s worthwhile to actually broaden them. From where I sit, after 25 years building and breaking networks, I agree that complexity sells—but it sells for two particular reasons. The reason, as Dijkstra said all those years ago (in computer terms), is this:

Since the Continue reading

Worth Reading: One-fourth of malware comes from sharing

This report took up where we last off last quarter on our cloud malware research, in which we found that 4.1 percent of enterprises had at least one sanctioned cloud app laced with malware. This quarter that number has risen to 11.0 percent, or nearly triple since last quarter. This is before counting unsanctioned apps, which we are researching and will incorporate into future reports. -Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Software defined—you keep using those words…

Software Defined Networks (SDNs), are everywhere, and everyone is either building one, selling one, or using one. Everyone, that is, except—probably—you. Don’t feel too bad if you’re feeling left out, because it’s hard to know, precisely, what you’re actually being left out of. After all, can you actually define what an SDN is? -ECI

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Getting to the point of dual homing

I wonder how many times I’ve seen this sort of diagram across the many years I’ve been doing network design?

It’s usually held up as an example of how clever the engineer running the network is about resilience. “You see,” the diagram asserts, “I’m smart enough to purchase connectivity from two providers, rather than one.”

Can I point something out? Admittedly it might not be all that obvious from the diagram, but… Reality is just about as likely to squish your network connectivity like a bug no a windshield as it is any other network. Particularly if both of these connections are in the same regional area. The tricky part is knowing, of course, what a “regional area” might happen to mean for any particular provider.

The problem with this design is very basic, and tied to the concept of shared link risk groups. But let me start someplace a little simpler than that—with the basic, and important, point that putting fiber in the ground, and maintaining fiber that’s in the ground, is expensive. Unless you live in Greenland, fiber can be physically buried pretty easily (fiber in Greenland is generally buried with dynamite by a blasting crew, or Continue reading

Worth Reading: Who is responsible for your application security?

The dividing line between developers and IT operations used to be distinct. Developers were responsible for adding new features securely, but it was IT operations who had responsibility for infrastructure and network security. For the most part, developers didn’t have to think too much about the wider security context. With the advent of the cloud, and of devops, things changed radically. Now developers are quite capable of deploying cloud infrastructure at will, and the tools exist to make infrastructure deployment programmatic. These changes mean that developers do have to think about security, both within the scope of the code they are responsible for and within the wider organizational scope. – CircleID

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Worth Reading: Docker meets zombies

Last week a Dutch site reliability engineer at Wehkamp Labs shared a way to combine Docker container management with the video game Half-Life 2. The labs created an exotic hybrid where applications are represented in the game-world as virtual people who all need defending from an attack of zombies. -The New Stack

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Bird in flight

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