Worth Reading: Digital Content and the Fate of Businesses

There are two key differences between buying media in a physical format versus a digital one. First, there’s the technical aspect: Maintaining long-term access to a file requires a hard copy of it—that means, for example, downloading a film, not just streaming from a third party’s server. The second distinction is a bit more complicated, and it has to do with how the law has shaped digital rights in the past 15 years. It helps to think about the experience of a person giving up CDs and using iTunes for music purchases instead. —via the atlantic

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Worth Reading: The Future of Network Management

Is good performance and stress reporting something you look for before purchase? I sure don’t think they’re part of the vendor marketing! Until they are, good luck getting good reporting! —via netcraftsmen

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HL: Cisco Express Forwarding

…this book will provide the insight required to understand how CEF truly works inside Cisco’s routers and switches. This book can promote you to the elite; it is the last piece of the puzzle that will tell exactly how packets are moved inside a router.

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Bouy

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Worth Reading: Hybrid Infrastructure

Although industry experts anticipate a 44 percent annual growth in cloud-based workloads over the next several years, the reality is that despite rapid cloud adoption, many businesses will continue to have a significant part of their daily operations tied to physical infrastructure and its processes for many years to come. The Cloud is for everyone, but not for everything. — via the data center journal

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Rule 11 is your friend

It’s common enough in the networking industry — particularly right now — to bemoan the rate of change. In fact, when I worked in the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC), we had a phrase that described how we felt about the amount of information and the rate of change: sipping through the firehose. This phrase has become ubiquitous in the networking world to describe the feeling we all feel of being left out, left behind, and just plain not able to keep up.

It’s not much better today, either. SDNs threaten to overturn the way we build control planes, white boxes threaten to upend the way we view vendor relationships, virtualization threatens to radically alter the way we think about the relationship between services and the network, and cloud computing promises just to make the entire swatch of network engineers redundant. It’s enough to make a reasonable engineer ask some rather hard questions, like whether it’s better to flip burgers or move into management (because the world always needs more managers). Some of this is healthy change, of course — we need to spend more time thinking about why we’re doing what we’re doing, and the competition of the cloud Continue reading

Worth Reading: Eggs and Baskets

In another time, people would have cautioned strongly against relying on a single supplier for your critical IT needs. On the web, that’s thrown out the window. —via the register

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Worth Reading: Outsourcing Security

That is not to say, however, that outsourcing has no downsides. In the area of IT security, in particular, the potential threat of data mishandling and breaches have tempered many companies’ willingness to invest all-out in outsourcing IT security. That fear is legitimate, but it’s not something that can’t be dealt with. -via infosec buddy

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Greenland

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Worth Reading: Revisiting Internet Governance

The realpoltik is that in addition to all of its other aspects — such as its social and economic elements — the internet has become a weapon in the arsenal of the military and security forces. Of course, we all knew that this was the case but the abovementioned affairs brought this out into the open, and I think even the most militant opponents of internet governance were shocked by the extent to which these agencies were already using the internet and the other technologies it facilitates, such as data-gathering and data analytics. -via circleid

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Worth Reading: Fake Reviews

More than half of the adults in Britain, around 25 million people, use online review websites such as Amazon, Tripadvisor, Expedia and Checkatrade to find the best deals. But their impressions are “distorted” by the growth of a “clandestine” market for fake reviews… via connecting

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Worth Reading: DPRIVE

DNS privacy will be getting more attention over the coming years, as attacks as well as defenses move from the application to the network layer. It’s good to see efforts like DPRIVE looking ahead… via circleid

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Memorize — or Think?

I have several friends with either photographic, or near photographic, memories. For instance, I work with someone (on the philosophical side of my life) who is just astounding in this respect. If you walk into his office and ask about some concept you’ve just run across, no matter how esoteric, he can give you a rundown of every major book in the field covering the topic, important articles from several journals, and even book chapters that are germane and important. I’ve actually had him point me to the text of a footnote when I asked about a specific concept.

It seems, to me, that the networking industry often focuses on this sort of thing. Quick, can you name the types of line cards available for the Plutobarb CNX1000, how many of each you can put in the chassis, what the backplane speed is, and what the command is to configure OSPF type 3 filters on Tuesdays between three and four o’clock? When we hit this sort of question, and can’t answer it, people look at us like we’re silly or something.

Right?

I know, because I’ve been there. I’ve had people ask me the strangest questions in interviews, such as Continue reading

QOTW: Playing with the animal withing

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal [or] play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth.
Dag Hammarskjöld

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Worth Reading: You can’t replace biometrics

Some security researchers refer to authentication systems based on fingerprints – such as unlocking an iPhone by using the home button’s fingerprint reader – as a type of active biometrics, as opposed to passive biometrics, which might look at the location or MAC address of a PC that is attempting to log into a banking application. And when active-biometrics data gets stolen, there’s little that victims can do to prevent the data from being abused. via bankinfo security

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Worth Reading: Skynet Barbie

Essentially, we’re conducting live experiments on our kids in regards to language development, their ability to self-regulate, interpersonal relations, and more. Unfortunately, there’s little good research to measure these impacts. via packetpushers

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Imprisoned and censored voices around the world

The number of individuals in prison around the world for raising their voices online is on the rise. In 2014, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that over half of imprisoned journalists were arrested for activities conducted on the Internet. In a 2015 report, Reporters Without Borders cited 178 incidents of imprisoned “netizens” in just a selection of twelve countries. Now that individuals can speak up without the need for institutions or gatekeepers, states choose the most direct way to take away their power: incarcerating them, and taking them offline. via the offline project

This is something every engineer, every blogger, and everyone who has a passion for free speech can help with. We live in a world that increasingly sees free speech as some sort of monstrously abnormal concept (even in the US); this is a fight we need to take up if any of us expect to be able to have a conversation about anything other than whether you should use EIGRP or IS-IS on a particular network.

We need to stand up for everyone who speaks, even if we don’t agree with them.

This is important.

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Worth Reading: Antivirus and Zero Day

Deploying multiple AV products might expand the total number of known malware signatures in your AV armor, but this approach doesn’t combat the biggest flaw: new, zero-day malware that no AV product has ever encountered (and therefore can’t possibly recognize). Even with frequent updates to the signature database, AV software just can’t keep up. via the cloud security alliance

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Beunos Aires

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Reaction: Openstack, snowflakes, and complexity

More recently, OpenStack luminary Randy Bias has candidly derided the silos that different vendors impose on OpenStack, containing “special features that only you have.” The result? “Every OpenStack deployment is its own unique snowflake,” Bias notes, due to the “hundreds upon hundreds of configuration options.” via infoworld

For all those who think opensource is going to take over the world, cleaning up (and destroying) the mess open standards have made, there is a lesson in here.

It won’t.

The problem isn’t open standards. The problem isn’t open source. We have met the problem, and it is… us. We are the problem here. What we keep thinking is that we can “solve” complexity in some way. Each time a new unicorn comes on the scene, we think, “here, at least, is the magical unicorn that will make the physical world work the way I always wanted it to.” But like real life unicorns, you won’t find one in your rose garden. Or any other garden, for that matter. Unicorns don’t exist. Get over it.

Instead of looking for the next magical unicorn, we need to get to work figuring out which problems need to be solved, which ones Continue reading