Worth Reading: The Internet’s gilded age

The rise of the Internet has heralded rapid changes in our society. The opportunities presented by a capable and ubiquitous communications system and a global transportation network have taken some corporations from the multinational to the status of truly global mega-corporation. Good examples of these new corporations include Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. There are a handful of large scale winners in this space and many losers. But this is not the first time we’ve witnessed a period of rapid technological and social change. —Potaroo

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Worth Reading: Three attitudes that lead to maintainable code

When writing code, there are many specific principles that aim to make your code more maintainable: DRY, the single responsibility principle, the Law of Demeter, the open/closed principle, etc. These are great principles to follow, but it can be difficult to keep all of them in your head at once. I’ve found it’s often easier to keep a few broader ideas in mind. —Atomic Object

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Worth Reading: Web audio API

Web Audio API lets us make sound right in the browser. It makes your sites, apps, and games more fun and engaging. You can even build music-specific applications like drum machines and synthesizers. In this article, we’ll learn about working with the Web Audio API by building some fun and simple projects. —CSS Tricks

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Worth Reading: Digital security assessment quiz

As our reliance on digital devices increases, so does our digital vulnerability. Cyber attacks and hacks are growing both in number and sophistication, making it more important than ever that we take control of our own cybersecurity. But for those of us with limited technical knowledge, anything prefixed with “cyber” seems shrouded in a baffling binary fog. We at CDT wish to clear this intimidating haze by illuminating some effective security strategies. —Center for Democracy and Technology

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Worth Reading: Redundancy does not imply fault tolerance

It’s a tough life being the developer of a distributed datastore. Thanks to the wonderful work of Kyle Kingsbury (aka, @aphyr) and his efforts on Jepsen.io, awareness of data loss and related issues in the face of network delays and partitions is way higher than it used to be. Under the Jepsen tests, every single system tested other than ZooKeeper exhibited problems of some kind. But many teams are stepping up, commissioning tests, and generally working hard to fix the issues even if they’re not all there yet. —the morning paper

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Worth Reading: Fearing Facebook

I used to greatly admire Mark Zuckerberg. Now, I fear him. Here’s why. Facebook is now a supranational company. It spans the globe with about 2 billion subscribers, its 2016 revenue reached $27.6B—54% more than in 2015; it’s immensely profitable (37% of revenue) and cash-rich with $29.56 “in the bank”. Decades ago, European Communists complained about “multinationals”, companies whose spread over multiple countries allowed them to escape full accountability in any one location. —Monday Note

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On the ‘net: PCEP

The original Path Control Element Protocol (PCEP) work dates from the early 2000’s, with the first IETF RFC (4655) being made informational in 2006—which means PCEP predates the time when SDNs were “cool.” PCEP was originally, because of the increasingly complex nature of computing Traffic Engineering (TE) paths through (primarily), Service Provider (SP) networks. Three specific developments drove the design, standardization, and deployment of PCEP —ECI Blog

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Worth Reading: Fat Finger Folly

You see, many newly created production systems, when they first come online, focus more on functionality and less on supportability. They are built to provide a specific capability. Of course, the services must be maintained, but maintaining these services often involve manual tasks by operations individuals, tasks such as logging on to servers and rebooting them, or terminating processes, or updating a configuration file. For many production systems, this is how they are maintained. Individuals login to the production servers and high privileged or “superusers” and manually perform necessary actions. This is, unfortunately, a very common process in the industry. —The New Stack

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History!

The audio is a bit low on this video; it actually recorded a bit lower than this, and the process of amplifying made it poor quality. I’ve already separated the audio recorder from the camera; now I’m upgrading the mic, and playing with the settings on the recorder to make the audio better quality. I’m also playing with putting text and drawings on the side of the video, a concept I intend to use more often in the future.

So this is a bit of a play video, but with a somewhat serious topic: the importance of learning the history of network engineering. Some resources are included below.

A bit history of the Internet
Net Heads versus Bell Heads
On the History of the Shortest Path Problem
The Elements of Networking Style
Software Defined Networks has a great introductory section with a good bit of history

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Worth Reading: Comments on the Wikileaks CIA Vault #7

The CIA didn’t remotely hack a TV. The docs are clear that they can update the software running on the TV using a USB drive. There’s no evidence of them doing so remotely over the Internet. If you aren’t afraid of the CIA breaking in an installing a listening device, then you should’t be afraid of the CIA installing listening software. —Errata Security

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Worth Reading: Web Scale Networking

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we spoke to Josh Leslie, Chief Executive Officer, and JR Rivers, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Web-scale networking software provider Cumulus Networks. We discussed how to best define web-scale networking, and how Cumulus Linux is different from traditional networking solutions. They spoke to the need for inter-system communication for new workloads, and how that factors into building a software-defined data center. They told us about their company’s recent product release Cumulus Express, as well as its announcement around Facebook’s Backpack, an open network chassis. Our conversation included points about hyper-converged infrastructure, customer roadblocks, and the roadmap for Cumulus Networks. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: When your code has to work

Douglas Crockford famously declared browsers to be “the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable,” and that wasn’t hyperbole. Ensuring that our websites work across a myriad of different devices, screen sizes and browsers our users depend on to access the web is a tall order, but it’s necessary. If our websites don’t enable users to accomplish the key tasks they come to do, we’ve failed them. —Smashing Magazine

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Tan Gate

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Worth Reading: The nuanced future of 5G

5G sounds like the successor to 4G cellular telephony, and indeed that is the intent. While the progression from 2G to 3G, to 4G and now 5G seems simple, the story is more nuanced. At CES last month I had a chance to learn more about 5G (not to be confused with the 5Ghz WiFi) as well as another standard, ATSC 3.0 which is supposed to be the next standard for broadcast TV. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Keys to solving wicked problems

The incredible pace of change of the Internet — from research laboratory inception to global telecommunication necessity — is due to the continuing pursuit, development and deployment of technology and practices adopted to make the Internet better. This has required continuous attention to a wide variety of problems ranging from “simple” to so-called “wicked problems”. Problems in the latter category have been addressed through collaboration. This post outlines key characteristics of successful collaboration activities. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Bouncing back to private clouds

There is an adage, not quite yet old, suggesting that compute is free but storage is not. Perhaps a more accurate and, as far as public clouds are concerned, apt adaptation of this saying might be that computing and storage are free, and so are inbound networking within a region, but moving data across regions in a public cloud is brutally expensive, and it is even more costly spanning regions. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Creating an IXP in Denver

The word Internet is short for internetwork. It’s just a network of networks. So the more places you can connect those networks, the more robust the whole system is. That’s what Internet Exchange Points (“IXPs”) are. They’re the connection points where networks can connect to each other, and they’re a crucial part of the infrastructure of the Internet. In Europe, IXPs have traditionally been independent and are often run as nonprofits, whereas in North America, they’ve typically been owned and operated by commercial colocation facility operators or Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In the last several years, though, there’s been a movement in the US to build more independent, community-focused IXPs. IX-Denver is part of that movement. —The Internet Society

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Leaky Abstraction: An Example

The paper in question is from 2008, and the remedies have already been implemented in every BGP implementation I know of (in fact, getting rid of the scanner is something that just went into FR Routing). The paper can be found here, and a presentation based on the paper can be found here. They use a different example than mine in the paper—it’s a bit more subtle.

In this case, the abstraction is treating an AS as a single “thing” to provide stability in the larger routing system. But any time you have an abstraction, including summarization and aggregation, there is always some possibility the abstraction will leak. Here the leak is an internal route metric change “leaking” into an actual change in the path through the network, although both paths still exist. There are more subtle changes, such as a route metric change causing an update to be sent even though the path itself hasn’t even changed, but I chose this example to make it easier to understand.

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Worth Reading: The rise of the conversational interface

Eight trillion. That’s the number of text messages sent every year. For the record, that’s 23 billion texts sent every day. Or almost 16 million per minute. On July 7, 2016, Facebook reported that over one billion people now use Messenger, up 200 million since January 2016. As of February 1, 2016, WhatsApp logged one billion users on its platform. In case you didn’t know, Facebook owns WhatsApp. —A Little More Human

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Worth Reading: Cisco’s identity crisis

Our Cisco team has been reaching out to get feedback on our relationship with Cisco and its products — a healthy practice for any vendor. I’ve tried to be open, honest, and consistent in all our talks. As I mentally review our conversations, I conclude I’ve been contradictory. On one hand, I’ve talked about how the industry is changing and Cisco’s products need to evolve in a software-defined marketplace. At the same time, I’ve decried their decision to move last-generation data center products to the campus portfolio to make way for newer technology. —Eyvonne Sharp

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