Worth Reading: The forecast is still cloudy

The technical content of this year’s BCE was, as usual, presented by some of the best and brightest minds in telecom. Unfortunately, most of those minds were in agreement that the landscape for SDN and NFV, in particular, has not gotten any clearer in the last year. In fact, in many ways the clouds have gotten denser. —ECI blog

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iSPF verse PRC

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Worth Reading: Good Samaritans with network visibility

In a big open office 30 feet from me, a team of US Veterans speak intently on the phone to businesses large and small, issuing urgent warnings of specific cyber security threats. They call to get stubborn, confused people to take down hidden ransomware distribution sites. They call with bad news that a specific computer at the business has malware that steals login credentials. They call with good news — you can beat the bad guys this time by not sending the money — minutes before an email arrives to the business with fraudulent wire transfer instructions. —CircleID

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OneLogin and Password Managers

An interesting incident this last week brings password managers back to the front of the pile—

OneLogin, an online service that lets users manage logins to sites and apps from a single platform, says it has suffered a security breach in which customer data was compromised, including the ability to decrypt encrypted data. —Krebs on Security

I used to use LastPass, but moved off of their product/service when LogMeIn bought them—my previous encounters with LogMeIn have all been negative, and I have no intention of using their service again in any form. During that move, I decided it was important to make another decision about the tradeoff between an online (cloud based) password manager, or one that keeps information in a local file. The key problem with cloud based services of this kind are they paint a huge target onto your passwords. The counter argument is that such cloud based services are more likely to protect your passwords than you are, because they focus their time and energy on doing so.

First lesson: moving to a cloud based application does not mean moving to a situation where the cloud provider actually knows what you are storing, nor how to access Continue reading

Open Networking for Large-Scale Networks

Shawn Zandi and I recently recorded a new webinar for Ivan over at ipspace.net around open source and disaggregated networking. If you have ever wanted to find out about these topics, this webinar is a great place to start in understanding what options are available, and how easy/hard it is to get this kind of thing running.

The webinar is available here.

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Worth Reading: WannaCry and Vulnerabilities

All software contains bugs or errors in the code. Some of these bugs have security implications, granting an attacker unauthorized access to or control of a computer. These vulnerabilities are rampant in the software we all use. A piece of software as large and complex as Microsoft Windows will contain hundreds of them, maybe more. These vulnerabilities have obvious criminal uses that can be neutralized if patched. Modern software is patched all the time — either on a fixed schedule, such as once a month with Microsoft, or whenever required, as with the Chrome browser. —Schneier on Security

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Worth Reading: Tolerance

The idea of tolerance is that reasonable people can disagree. You still believe you are right, and the other person is wrong, but you accept that they are nonetheless a reasonable person with good intentions, and that they don’t need to be punished for holding the wrong opinion. —Errata Security

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Ethereum: The “Next New Internet?”

According to this article, we now have a new Internet being developed: Ethereum (thanks to Chase Mitchell, one of my regular readers, for pointing this new development out). In fact, it’s called “web 3.0,” in a bid to become “The Next New Internet.” Given I tend to be a little concerned about the future of the Internet, I thought I’d look into this new one a bit to discover what it’s all about… Pardon the length of the ensuing investigation.

To begin to understand Ethereum, you have to understand block chainsbecause Ethereum is a type of block chain. To understand block chains, you must begin with the hash. A has is a simple concept that is actually quite difficult to implement in a useful way: a hash takes any a string of numbers of any size and returns a fixed length number, or hash, that (more or less) uniquely represents the original string. The simple to implement part is this—one rather naive hash is it simply add the numbers in a set of numbers until you reach a single digit, calling the result the hash. For instance…

23523
2 + 3 + 5 + 2 + 3 ==  Continue reading

Worth Reading: Tainted Leaks

This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign. It provides evidence of how documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of Russia was tampered with and then “leaked” to achieve specific propaganda aims. We name this technique “tainted leaks.” The report illustrates how the twin strategies of phishing and tainted leaks are sometimes used in combination to infiltrate civil society targets, and to seed mistrust and disinformation. It also illustrates how domestic considerations, specifically concerns about regime security, can motivate espionage operations, particularly those targeting civil society. —Citizen Lab

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Open Networking for Large Scale Networks

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Worth Reading: Bill would surveil Americans for life

The bill requires sharing of private student data among various federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, and the Bureau of the Census (this is a non-exclusive list). So an individual’s personally identifiable student-loan data can be linked to his tax information and his military information and his Social Security records and everything the census knows about him, which if he filled out the long form is pretty much everything about his life. There are no limits on the purposes for which this data-matching can take place. The only limits will exist in bureaucrats’ imagination. —The Federalist

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Flight

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Worth Reading: We are all groot

If you venture forth on becoming a programmer after reaching any kind of reasonable adulthood — i.e., gotten through college, survived the military, worked a “real” job or two — you’re used to feeling reasonably successful. Which is one of the perks of being a so-called grownup. Starting new at the very bottom of a new major life area with zero knowledge or experience is something we all did at some point — when you think about it, that is pretty much what childhood is all about. But your typical kid has lots of energy, no mortgage/rent or car payments to worry about, and — most importantly — is developmentally wired to learn a whole bunch of stuff all at once with their nice fresh, flexible brain. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Nosy neighbors and cloud privacy

You get your run-of-the-mill noisy neighbours – the ones who occasionally have friends round and play music a little too loud until a little too late. And then in the UK at least you get what we used to call “Asbos,” named after the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders that were introduced to try and curb deliberate disturbances of the peace. The same thing happens on the public cloud. You have accidental interference from neighbouring processes, and then you have your cloud ASBOs – which make deliberate attacks on neighbouring processes. —the morning paper

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Open19: A New Step for Data Centers

While most network engineers do not spend a lot of time thinking about environmentals, like power and cooling, physical space problems are actually one of the major hurdles to building truly large scale data centers. Consider this: a typical 1ru rack mount router weighs in at around 30 pounds, including the power supplies. Centralizing rack power, and removing the sheet metal, can probably reduce this by about 25% (if not more). By extension, centralizing power and removing the sheet metal from an entire data center’s worth of equipment could reduce the weight on the floor by about 10-15%—or rather, allow about 10-15% more equipment to be stacked into the same physical space. Cooling, cabling, and other considerations are similar—even paying for the sheet metal around each box to be formed and shipped adds costs.

What about blade mount systems? Most of these are designed for rather specialized environments, or they are designed for a single vendor’s blades. In the routing space, most of these solutions are actually chassis based systems, which are fraught with problems in large scale data center buildouts. The solution? Some form of open, foundation based standard that can be used by all vendors to build equipment Continue reading

Worth Reading: Transform your career with public speaking

Don’t sit around waiting to be picked. Pick yourself. That simple, low risk step, started a journey. That little step toward fear is how I ended up here, writing this post at a bar on an international flight. Who saw that coming?! Of course, I’m glossing over a many steps in between. After speaking at my job, I worked my way up to speaking at local user groups, then regional conferences. I presented sessions at over a dozen conferences across the US before I worked up the courage to speak overseas. But that first lunch & learn made all the difference. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: These words should be banned

Client: “Our Big Data Rock Star ideated a cloud-based, scalable, native programmatic tool set that produced excellent learnings.” [Consultant]: “Well, it sounds like he took it to the next level … efforting 110% to craft a best practices, robust solution you can leverage, and it’s clearly out of the box thinking … but maybe you shouldn’t try to boil the ocean … it’s got a lot of moving parts and I’m not sure it’s something you want to take ownership of. … You might be accused of punching the puppy, so the optics are all wrong. We should probably put this in the parking lot.” —Shelly Palmer

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Worth Reading: Ten habits you should never take to real life

Too many adults have taken a Facebook page from a preteen. The problem is not that young people will never leave their metaphoric snowflake bank or literalist university campus, it is that people never quite leave the virtual world of their social networks. So here’s a list to help keep these tendencies out of our un-virtual lives. —The Federalist

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Worth Reading: The future of ransomware

Ransomware isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular and profitable. The concept is simple: Your computer gets infected with a virus that encrypts your files until you pay a ransom. It’s extortion taken to its networked extreme. The criminals provide step-by-step instructions on how to pay, sometimes even offering a help line for victims unsure how to buy bitcoin. The price is designed to be cheap enough for people to pay instead of giving up: a few hundred dollars in many cases. Those who design these systems know their market, and it’s a profitable one. —Schneier on Security

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Anycast and Latency

One of the things I hear from time to time is how smaller Internet facing service deployments, with just a few instances, cannot really benefit from anycast. Particularly in the active-active data center use case, where customers can connect to one data center or another, the cost of advertising the service as an anycast, and the resulting requirement to keep the backend databases tightly synchronized, is often played as a eating a lot of complexity for the simplicity of having a single address in the DNS system, and hence not losing customer interaction time while the DNS records are timing out so the customer can reconnect to the service.

There is, in fact, some interesting recent research in this area. The research is directed at the DNS root servers themselves, probably because they are publicly accessible, and a well known system that has relied on anycast for many years (so the operators of the root DNS servers are probably well versed in the ways of anycast). One interesting chart from the post over at APNIC’s blog is—

The C root has 8 servers, while the L root has around 144 (according to the article pointed to above). Why is it Continue reading