Worth Reading: Is cloud moving too fast for security?

That’s at least five-major cloud application and infrastructure data breach incidents for 2017, and we’re only in July. Add in the number of ransomeware and other attacks during the first half of this year and it’s clear the cloud has a real security problem. By now, most everyone recognizes the benefits of the cloud; bringing new applications and infrastructure online quickly and scaling it to meet ever changing business demands. —Doug Lane @ Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Do startup employees make more?

Since the average startup founder who makes it to Series A earns more than a large company employee, many believe that early-stage startup employees also earn more (albeit less than founders). Dustin Moskovitz has even claimed that startup early employees have better earnings prospects than founders. We’ve looked at the data, and this does not seem to be true on average. —Ben West @ 80000hours

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Bespoke Processors and the Future of Networks

As I spend a lot of time on Oak Island (not the one on television, the other one), I tend to notice some of those trivial things in life. For instance, when the tide is pretty close to all the way in, it probably is not going to come in much longer; rather, it is likely to start going back out soon. If you spend any time around clocks with pendulums, you might have noticed the same thing; the maximum point at which the pendulum swings is the point where it also begins swinging back. Of course my regular readers are going to recognize the point, because I have used it in many presentations about the centralization/decentralization craze the networking industry seems to go through every few years.

Right now, of course, we are in the craze of centralization. To hear a lot of folks tell it, in ten years there simply are not going to be routing protocols. Instead, we are going to all buy appliances, plug them in, and it is “just going to work.” And that is just for folks who insist on having their own network—for the part of the world that is not completely Continue reading

Worth Reading: Crafted DDoS

We’d like to introduce you to one of the most devastating ways to cause service instability in modern micro-service architectures: application DDoS. A specially crafted application DDoS attack can cause cascading system failures often for a fraction of the resources needed to conduct a more traditional DDoS attack. This is due to the complex, interconnected relationships between applications. —Scott Behrens and Bryan Payne @ Netflix

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Worth Reading: IPv4 route lookup on Linux

During the lifetime of an IPv4 datagram inside the Linux kernel, one important step is the route lookup for the destination address through the fib_lookup() function. From essential information about the datagram (source and destination IP addresses, interfaces, firewall mark, …), this function should quickly provide a decision. —Vincent Bernat @MTU Ninja

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Green Door

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Worth Reading: DNS Hijacking is Real

Over the years hackers have hijacked many domain names by manipulating their DNS records to redirect visitors to malicious servers. While there’s no perfect solution to prevent such security breaches, there are actions that domain owners can take to limit the impact of these attacks on their Web services and users. —Lucisn Constantin @ The New Stack

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Worth Reading: IPv6 flags and DNS configuration

One of the several capabilities provided by IPv6 is that hosts are provided two options to configure their IPv6 addressles) and other parameters like the Recursive DNS Server(RDNSS) information [2]; that is either by using the stateless address autoconfiguration [3] or by obtaining the information from aDHCPv6server(4]. IPv6 hosts are advised as for the environment options by some specific flags included in the Router Advertisement (RAI messages sent by the local router(s). —ENRW (PDF)

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On the ‘web: Openfabric and the trash can of the Internet

I sat with Greg Ferro over at Packet Pushers for a few minutes at the Prague IETF. We talked about Openfabric and how we are overusing BGP in many ways, as well as other odds and ends.

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Worth Reading: Cisco’s Viptella Challenge

When Cisco announced its intent to acquire leading SD-WAN vendor Viptela in May of 2017, the network industry buzzed with conversation. Now, we’re in the quiet purgatory while we wait for regulatory approval. Since the deal hasn’t been finalized yet, neither company can say much about their plans for integration. But it’s clear that a few challenges await Cisco as they consider how to integrate Viptela’s solution into their WAN portfolio. —Eyvonne Sharp @ Packet Pushers

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Worth Reading: Internet Resource Course

Following the success of the first course ‘Introduction to Cybersecurity’, the APNIC Academy has launched its second course: ‘Internet Resource Management’. The course is for anyone interested in managing their Internet number resources more effectively, familiarising themselves with the Internet ecosystem, and finding out new ways to engage with the Internet community. —APNIC

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Contrarian Reading on Net Neutrality

‘net neturality has been much in the news recently; a while back I did a piece for Tech Target on some of the complexities here, and I ran across three other articles that provide a contrarian view—not what you are likely to hear from the major edge providers. Since I am always trying to understand both sides of an issue, I am always looking for solid, well written views on both sides. It is hard to dig behind the hype in our 140 character world, but it is also important.

Hence this post, with pointers to my older post and three other articles of interest. Warning: some of these are more trenchant and contrarian than others.

The primary foundation of net neutrality explained is this: Providers should not be able to give services they offer any advantage over a competing service running over their network. The perfect example might seem to be voice services. Suppose you purchase access to the internet from a company that not only sells internet access, but also voice services. Now, suppose the provider decides to sell its voice service as superior in quality to any other available voice service — and guarantee its service is Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Great Ethereum HAck

Around 12:00 PST, an unknown attacker exploited a critical flaw in the Parity multi-signature wallet on the Ethereum network, draining three massive wallets of over $31,000,000 worth of Ether in a matter of minutes. Given a couple more hours, the hacker could’ve made off with over $180,000,000 from vulnerable wallets. —Haseeb Qureshi @ Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Docker Part 0

Containers (and microservices) are the future of application delivery, at least until the next Great Tech Leap Forward comes along, and Docker is the category killer platform. Companies are adopting Docker at a remarkable rate these days. And, increasingly, all developers — and systems administrators, and cloud administrators — need to at least have a functional grounding in Docker technology. Or, even better, get busy adding it to their tool belts. —Michelle Gienow @ The New Stack

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You Can’t Balance

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Worth Reading: Pursue Meaning

A recent article in The Washington Post identified a rising “sea of despair” among the white working class and a surge in suicides from 1999 to 2015, when a record high of 600,000 Americans took their own lives. In a country as free and as prosperous as the United States of America, where the pursuit of happiness is enshrined as an unalienable right in the Declaration of Independence, why do so many of its citizens seem so increasingly, desperately unhappy? —Acculturated

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Worth Reading: The future is hardware

Since the advent of open source in telecoms, customers have increasingly fallen in love with the idea of getting all software for free. That keeps vendors scratching their heads when thinking about long term survival, let alone midterm profitability… and ways of differentiating. Hopefully the industry will find a way to keep on paying for software innovation rather than expecting it to happen ‘for free’, based on wishful thinking or long term relationships. It must be quite a shock for some vendors to realize that service providers are not buying from us for the fun of it. No they are buying solutions only because they a) need them and b) don’t get them for free. Our customers’ main business is serving their customers, not entertaining vendors. Rather, they would live without us and save a lot of money. Brutal, isn’t it? Well, why would they be different than us? —ECI

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IPv6 Standardization

The IETF published RFC8200 last week, which officially makes IPv6 an Internet Standard. While this move was a long time coming—IPv6 has now reached about 20% deployment—a more interesting question is: what has changed since RFC2460, which was a draft standard, was published in 2013? After all, the point of moving from the experimental to the draft standard to the internet standard states is to learn more about the protocol as it operates on the wire, and to make changes to improve deployability and performance.

Where would you look to determine what these changes might be? The IETF draft tracker tool, of course. If you look at the data tracker page for RFC8200, you will find a tab called history. From there, you have the option of looking at the revision differences, as shown below.

When you click on the wdiff button, you will see something like this—

In this case, I went back to the original version of the RFC2460bis draft (which just means the draft was designed to replace RFC2460). There are earlier versions of this draft from before it was accepted as a working group document, but even this comparison should give you some idea of the Continue reading

Worth Reading: BCP79bis and Patents in the IETF

Working on technical standards in the computing, communications and networking industries often involves dealing with patents. Like most standards-development organizations (SDOs), the IETF has policies that deal with patents covering IETF protocols, specifications and standards. The IETF’s first patent policy appeared in RFC 1310 (Mar, 1992), but the basis for today’s policy approach originated with RFC 2026 (October 1996), which still defines many aspects of the Internet Standards Process. The first major overhaul of this policy occurred a decade later in RFC 3979 (also designated as BCP 79). Though the IETF’s policies relating to copyrights, open source code and other forms of intellectual property (IPR) evolved, particularly after the formation of the IETF Trust in December 2005, the IETF’s patent policy remained relatively stable for more than 20 years. —IETF Blog

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Administravia 20170703

Just a short note: I’ve updated the sixty book section of the site with a new plugin designed to keep track of book libraries. Along the way, I’ve added an Amazon affiliate code, so maybe I can buy a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of banana nut bread at some point in the future. The look should really be a bit nicer, though, and it is easier to add books to this system than manually adding them as I was doing before.

Remember that the idea of sixty books is not that there are actually 60 books on the list, but rather this is what I read in an average year—and hence what I am challenging you to work up to.

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