Worth Reading: Time is not on your side

Many of the presenters, like Truman Boyes of Bloomberg and Peyton Maynard-Koran of EA, discussed the idea of building boxes from existing components instead of buying them from established networking vendors like Cisco and Arista. The argument does hold some valid ideas. If you can get your hardware from someone like EdgeCore or Accton and get your software from someone else like Pluribus Networks or Pica8 it looks like a slam dunk. You get 90% to 95% of a solution that you could get from Cisco with much less cost to you overall. —Networking Nerd

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Black Bird

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Worth Reading: Improving metrics in cyber resiliency

With the growth in cloud computing, businesses rely on the network to access information about operational assets being stored away from the local server. Decoupling information assets from other operational assets could result in poor operational resiliency if the cloud is compromised. Therefore, to keep the operational resiliency unaffected, it is essential to bolster information asset resiliency in the cloud. To study the resiliency of cloud computing, the CSA formed a research team consisting of members from both private and public sectors within the Incident Management and Forensics Working Group and the Cloud Cyber Incident Sharing Center. —The Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Cloud data storage data planes

And while such backup solutions solved the traditional data center backup to tape, and eventually disk, really well, the solution does not readily translate into a distributed multicloud solution. That’s where a data protection solution requires cloud-scale, multiprovider integration with clear separation of control, data movement and multitier data storage. The separation not only provides independent scaling at the control and data level, but also creates the opportunity for vendor or cloud provider independence. Additionally, the separation of data plane services allows the solution to leverage all current and future innovations around data movement, data copy and storage optimizations that the cloud storage provides natively. —Prasenjit Sarkar @ The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Why culture company matters

The impact of a company’s culture is reflected in a company’s ability to achieve their goals and productivity levels, and in their employees’ satisfaction. The company culture can make or break a business. Yet, company culture is the one thing that many aspiring programmers overlook in their job search. Unfortunately, they usually find out after accepting a job offer that they are working for a company with a very poor culture. That oversight can have a negative impact on their career. To better explain the impact of company culture, I am going to use experiences from my career to illustrate. —Jennifer Bland @ freecodecamp

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Worth Reading: Everything you need to know about Linux containers

If you look at the dictionary’s definition of containers, it would be ‘an object for holding and transporting something’. In the same way, Linux containers (mostly abbreviated as LXC in technical language) help in providing virtualisation to the Linux operating system. Tough to comprehend? Wait! Let’s suppose that your enterprise requires to move your code from one environment to another, or that you want to keep your machines and servers tidy and clean. Whether these systems are for development or production purposes, or if you want to try out some different application or development stack on your regular machine without contaminating it, the solution is containers. Linux containers empower enterprises and companies in wrapping and isolating their products with all the necessary files used for running them. —Vinayak Vaid @ opensource.org

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On the ‘web: What’s Wrong with BGP

Our guests are Russ White, a network architect at LinkedIn; and Sue Hares, a consultant and chair of the Inter-Domain Routing Working Group at the IETF. They discuss the history of BGP, the original problems it was intended to solve, and what might change. This is an informed and wide-ranging conversation that also covers whitebox, software quality, and more. Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

You can jump to the original post on Packet Pushers here.

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Worth Reading: When the cloud deletes our data

When we talk about people losing their data in the cloud, the conversation typically revolves around hackers, violating terms of service or sites going out of business. However, it is important to remember that in a cloud world we rarely have many rights when it comes to the data we upload or create in the cloud environments provided by many consumer companies and that data can be deleted without us even knowing until after it is far too late. Making matters more complicated, even the biggest brand names don’t necessarily operate their own cloud environments or own the underlying data that makes their services run, meaning that a change anywhere in this pipeline can result in irreplaceable data being lost. —Kalev Leetaru @ Forbes

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Worth Reading: The rise of fourth wave computing

According to a recent Jefferies report, the fourth wave of computing has started and it is being driven by the adoption of IoT with parallel processing as the solution. Tectonic shifts in computing have been caused by major forces dating back to the 1960s. —Nick Tausanovitch @ The Next Platform

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The History of Networking: BABEL

On this edition of the Network Collective’s History of Networking, Juliusz Chroboczek sits down to discuss the origins of the BABEL routing protocol. You can see the original post over on the Network Collective here.

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Worth Reading: Is your mobile carrier your weakest link?

More online services than ever now offer two-step authentication — requiring customers to complete a login using their phone or other mobile device after supplying a username and password. But with so many services relying on your mobile for that second factor, there has never been more riding on the security of your mobile account. Below are some tips to ensure your mobile device (or, more specifically, your mobile carrier) isn’t the weakest link in your security chain. —Krebs on Security

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Worth Reading: Malware in your screen

Phone touchscreens, and other similar hardware components such as orientation sensors, wireless charging controllers, and NFC readers, are often produced by thirdparty manufacturers and not by the phone vendors themselves. Third-party driver source code to support these components is integrated into the vendor’s source code. In contrast to “pluggable” drivers, such as USB or network drivers, the component driver’s source code implicitly assumes that the component hardware is authentic and trustworthy. As a result of this trust, very few integrity checks are performed on the communications between the component and the device’s main processor. —Shattered Trust (PDF)

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Cross Links in a Spine and Leaf

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Worth Reading: It’s okay to forget what you read

Many of us feel this near-existential fear that we might “lose” what wisdom we extract from the books we read.Such fears are unfounded. First of all, if you love books, memory is never a problem. If I read for pure pleasure, what harm is there is forgetting? I get to enjoy the same wonderful book over and over again — for the book-lover, what better gift is there than forgetfulness? But many of us read books for reasons other than pleasure. We want to get something from the books we read. There is much written on retaining what you read (note it, connect it, summarize it, teach it, yawn…), but Paul Graham, I think, has something new and interesting to say. —Charles Chu on Medium

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Worth Reading: Wave System’s DPU architecture

Their view is that dataflow architectures are the only way to efficiently train networks with high performance. The CPU is carved out of their systems entirely and as we explained when first details were clear about what they were working on in depth last year, the Hybrid Memory Cube does a great deal of the heavy lifting in terms of both compute and data flow. We now have far more detail than we’ve seen to date about how it works—and where it might carve out market share in the future. —Nicole Hemsoth @The Next Platform

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Reflections

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Worth Reading: Updating Surveillance Laws

For decades, Americans have forfeited their privacy rights for a false sense of safety. Broad, sweeping surveillance laws––such as, but certainly not limited to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act––have given the federal government carte blanche in the realm of surveillance. Thankfully, a recently introduced bipartisan Senate bill would restore some vital protections to Americans’ privacy. —Dan King @The Federalist

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Worth Reading: Multiple perspectives on technical problems and solutions

So what was this architecture review meeting all about? It was pretty simple, really. It was just a presentation by the engineer(s) looking for feedback on a solution they came up with, and Kellan and I would ask questions. The meeting was open to anyone in the company who wanted to attend. The hope was that many engineers would attend, actually. The intent here was to help the engineers describe their problem as thoroughly as they can, and by asking questions, we could help draw out any tacit assumptions they made in thinking through the problem. In a nutshell: it was a critical-thinking exercise, and we wanted engineers to want to do this, because it was ideally about providing feedback. —John Allspaw @Kitchen Soap

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Worth Reading: Multitasking without Thrashing

Human context switching is more complicated than computer context switching. Whereas the computer context switch replaces a fixed number of bytes in a few CPU registers, the human has to recall what was “on the mind” at the time of the switch and, if the human was interrupted with no opportunity to choose a “clean break,” the human has to reconstruct lost short term memory. —Peter J. Denning @Communications of the ACM

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Worth Reading: The calculus of service availability

The vast majority of software services and systems should aim for almost-perfect reliability rather than perfect reliability—that is, 99.999% or 99.99% rather than 100%—because users cannot tell the difference between a service being 100% available and less than “perfectly” available. There are many other systems in the path between user and service (laptop, home WiFi, ISP, the power grid . . .), and those systems collectively are far less than 100% available. Thus, the marginal difference between 99.99% and 100% gets lost in the noise of other unavailability, and the user receives no benefit from the enormous effort required to add that last fractional percent of availability. Notable exceptions to this rule include antilock brake control systems and pacemakers! —Ben Treynor, Mike Dahlin, Vivek Rau, Betsy Beyer @The Communications of the ACM

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