The Week in Internet News: New Bill May Weaken Encryption

Unintended consequences: New legislation in the U.S. Senate to crack down on child exploitation online may lead to limits on encryption, many critics say. The EARN IT Act would give Attorney General William Barr the authority to create new rules to protect children, potentially including encryption backdoors, as Barr as called for, Wired.com reports. The bill put new conditions on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has for years protected websites from lawsuits targeting user-generated content and comments.

Voluntary steps: Meanwhile, Google, Facebook Microsoft, Twitter, Snap, and Roblox have agreed to adopt 11 voluntary principles to prevent online child sexual exploitation, CNet notes, although some critics have also suggested these rules are the first step toward weakening encryption.

Not so fast: In other encryption news, security certificate issuer Let’s Encrypt has delayed a plan to revoke more than 1 million certificates because of a recently discovered bug in its CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) code, Ars Technica reports. But because of confusion over a very short window for websites to renew their certificates, Let’s Encrypt gave them more time.

Bad certificates: Meanwhile, hackers have come up with a way to disguise malware as security certificate updates, Continue reading

Automation Analytics – UX Enhancements

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform now includes hosted service offerings, one of which is Automation Analytics.  This application provides a visual dashboard, health notifications and organization statistics for your Ansible Automation.  If you are new to Automation Analytics and want more background information please refer to my previous blog Getting Started with Automation Analytics.

Enhanced Filtering 

On the Automation Analytics dashboard there is the ability to filter by Red Hat Ansible Tower cluster and by date.  Red Hat recommends having a cluster local to where the automation is happening, for example if you had a data center in Japan, Germany and the United States you would most likely have an Ansible Tower Cluster in each geographic region.  This allows users to perform drill down filtering to individual clusters to get data relevant for a specific physical site or group. This is helpful if, for example, a company's team in Japan only cared about data relevant to them in the drop down menu.

Previously, this only affected the top graph, but not sub cards such as Top Templates or Top Modules.  In the following video you can now see that all cards are updated simultaneously.

Continue reading

Cisco Deploys SDN, Optical Transport for 5G in Asia

Cloudflare for Teams Free for Small Businesses During Coronavirus Emergency

There are a lot of people and businesses worldwide that are currently suffering, so I don't want to waste any time in getting to the point.

Beginning today, we are making our Cloudflare for Teams products free to small businesses around the world. Teams enables remote workers to operate securely and easily. We will continue this policy for at least the next 6 months. We're doing this to help ensure that small businesses that implement work from home policies in order to combat the spread of the virus can ensure business continuity. You can learn more and apply at: https://www.cloudflare.com/smallbusiness

We've also helped launch an online hub where small businesses can see technology services available to them for free or a substantial discount from multiple companies, during the Coronavirus Emergency: https://openforbusiness.org

To understand more about why we're doing this, read on.

The IT Strain of WFH

We have a team at Cloudflare carefully monitoring the spread of the SARS-Coronavirus-2, which is responsible for the COVID-19 respiratory disease. Like at many other companies, we have heeded the advice of medical professionals and government agencies and are increasingly allowing employees to work from home in impacted regions in order Continue reading

Automation Story: Zero-Touch Provisioning

Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) is a solved problem if you believe the networking vendors… and yet numerous network automation projects involve at least some ZTP functionality. It seems that smart organizations investing in premium people (instead of premium vendors) prefer the Unix way of solving problems: take a number of small versatile tools, and put them together to build a solution that fits your requirements.

Anne Baretta did exactly that and combined Oxidized, FreeZTP, Ansible and custom web UI to build a ZTP solution that addresses the needs of his organization.

Notes

• Patrick Ogenstad covered numerous ZTP details in our network automation course.

Automation Story: Zero-Touch Provisioning

Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) is a solved problem if you believe the networking vendors… and yet numerous network automation projects involve at least some ZTP functionality. It seems that smart organizations investing in premium people (instead of premium vendors) prefer the Unix way of solving problems: take a number of small versatile tools, and put them together to build a solution that fits your requirements.

Anne Baretta did exactly that and combined Oxidized, FreeZTP, Ansible and custom web UI to build a ZTP solution that addresses the needs of his organization.

Notes

• Patrick Ogenstad covered numerous ZTP details in our network automation course.

Postcard From San Francisco (RSAC 2020)

There was plenty to see and hear at this years RSA conference, not the least of which was the VMware announcement of a modern data center security solution for today’s private and public clouds

I can report there was brisk business at the the booth with plenty of questions on our solution. Booth duty is not everyone’s favorite but I always look forward to the opportunity to hear directly from customers. There are often questions we don’t have the answers to, but it helps us keep our focus in the areas that matter the most.

My colleague Vivek  has already done a fantastic job blogging on our intrinsic security story and our announcements at this year’s event. I wanted to share some great explainer videos from our executive team.

Unshackle Legacy Security Restrictions for 2020 and Beyond

In this 20 minute video, Part#1, Tom Gillis, VMware SVP/GM of Networking and Security, covers how new data center and branch security approaches can prevent attacks in the enterprise.

Part#2 is a live demonstration of how to protect lateral traffic in the DC

In this second of two 20 minute videos, Tom is joined onstage by Continue reading

Building an elastic query engine on disaggregated storage

Essential things to know about container networking

Containers have emerged over the past several years to provide an efficient method of storing and delivering applications reliably across different computing environments. By containerizing an application platform and its dependencies, differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructures are abstracted away. Networking has emerged as a critical element within the container ecosystem, providing connectivity between containers running on the same host as well as on different hosts, says Michael Letourneau, an IT architect at Liberty Mutual Insurance. "Putting an application into a container automatically drives the need for network connectivity for that container," says Letourneau, whose primary focus is on building and operating Liberty Mutual's container platform. To read this article in full, please click here

Isambard 2 Is About Driving Technology Diversity

It’s been just more than a decade since Arm executives began to talk about bringing the company’s system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture, which has long been the dominant design for processors found in billions of smartphones and other mobile device, into the datacenter. …

Isambard 2 Is About Driving Technology Diversity was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Modifying Visual Studio Code’s Bracketing Behavior

There are two things I’ve missed since I switched from Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code (I switched in 2018). First, the speed. Sublime Text is so much faster than Visual Studio Code; it’s insane. But, the team behind Visual Studio Code is working hard to improve performance, so I’ve mostly resigned myself to it. The second thing, though, was the behavior of wrapping selected text in brackets (or parentheses, curly braces, quotes, etc.). That part has annoyed me for two years, until this past weekend I’d finally had enough. Here’s how I modified Visual Studio Code’s bracketing behaviors.

Before I get into the changes, allow me to explain what I mean here. With Sublime Text, I used a package (similar to an extension in the VS Code world) called Bracketeer, and one of the things it allowed me to do was highlight a section of text, wrap it in brackets/braces/parentheses, and then—this part is the missing bit—it would deselect the selected text and place my insertion point outside the closing character. Now, this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but let me assure you that it is. I didn’t have to use any extra keystrokes to keep Continue reading

Fixing a Thinkpad T420 battery problem on Linux

I upgraded my T420 because Ubuntu Mate 19.10 now supports the Nvidia Optimus drivers and includes a utility that lets me switch between Intel and Nvidia graphics cards. However, the upgrade seemed to break the power management on my laptop. When running on the battery, the laptop would suddenly lose power after only 10 minutes, even when the battery still shows ninety percent charge.

I installed Linux Advanced Power Management, TLP. TLP solved my problem. Also, for good measure, I upgraded the BIOS because, while troubleshooting this issue, I discovered is was very out of date.

In his post, I describe how to install and configure TLP and how to upgrade the BIOS on a Lenovo Thinkpad T420.

Install TLP

The Mate Power Management utility is part of the Mate desktop environment and provides basic configurations for power management. I don’t know why installing TLP solved my battery problem. I can only suggest that, if you are seeing a similar problem with your battery, try installing TLP before you spend money on a new battery.

TLP is in the Ubuntu repositories. Install TLP using the following command:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw
$ sudo  Continue reading

CEX (Code EXpress) 06. Look into your dictionary.

Hello my friend,

We have discussed so far ordinary variables in string, numeric and Boolean formats and list variables. Today we’ll close the review of the variables by covering the last, and definitely not least, type of variables called Python dictionary. In fact, this one of the most useful for us from the network automation perspective.

Network automation training – boost your career

Don’t wait to be kicked out of IT business. Join our network automation training to secure your job in future. Come to NetDevOps side.

How does the training differ from this blog post series? Here you get the basics and learn some programming concepts in general, whereas in the training you get comprehensive set of knowledge with the detailed examples how to use Python for the network and IT automation. You need both.

What are we going to do today?

The Python dictionary is a structured data. At a glance it might be similar to the list from the syntax prospective. However, it has a significant difference: in the list each element has an index (numerical value starting from 0), whereas in the dictionary each element has a key (string value you define based on your logic). Continue reading

Why the 100th Anniversary of Women’s Right to Vote in the U.S. is Important to Celebrate on International Women’s Day

Seven months ago, I joined Cloudflare to work on the Public Policy Team focusing on our democracy projects such as Project Galileo, Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns. Since I joined the team, I have learned a lot about how important cybersecurity protections are for organizations that are the target of sophisticated cyberattacks, while also learning about the complex election security environment in the United States and abroad.

It seems fitting that on International Women’s Day, a day people throughout the world are celebrating the achievements of women, we also celebrate the Centennial Anniversary of the Women’s Suffrage Movement which was the tipping point that gave many women voting rights in the United States.

Since I have been working on Cloudflare’s election security projects, this day means something extra special to me and many of my colleagues who believe that voting is the cornerstone of democracy and that having access to information regarding voting and elections is essential.

Here are five reflections that I want to share on International Women’s Day and the Centennial Anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment which granted women the right to vote in the United States:

1. The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States was Continue reading

Microsoft, Intel, Fortanix Execs Get Confidential at RSA

The Serious Business Of Being A Server OEM

Not everybody is a hyperscaler or large public cloud builder, and no two companies are happier about that than Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two largest original equipment manufacturers in the world for servers and storage and also the two companies that chased plenty of sales at these webscale datacenter operators in years gone by but which have learned, of necessity, to walk away from deals where they can’t make money or even lose money. …

The Serious Business Of Being A Server OEM was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Daily Roundup: OCP Blesses AT&T’s Disaggregated Security

OCP Blesses AT&T’s Disaggregated Security Architecture Push

Intel Vulnerability Serious But Unlikely, Experts Say

How Cloudflare keeps employees productive from any location

Cloudflare employs more than 1,200 people in 13 different offices and maintains a network that operates in 200 cities. To do that, we used to suffer through a traditional corporate VPN that backhauled traffic through a physical VPN appliance. It was, frankly, horrible to work with as a user or IT person.

With today’s mix of on-prem, public cloud and SaaS and a workforce that needs to work from anywhere, be it a coffee shop or home, that model is no longer sustainable. As we grew in headcount, we were spending too much time resolving VPN helpdesk tickets. As offices around the world opened, we could not ask our workforce to sit as every connection had to go back through a central location.

We also had to be ready to scale. Some organizations are currently scrambling to load test their own VPN in the event that their entire workforce needs to work remotely during the COVID-19 outbreak. We could not let a single physical appliance constrain our ability to deliver 26M Internet properties to audiences around the world.

To run a network like Cloudflare, we needed to use Cloudflare’s network to stay fast and secure.

We built Cloudflare Access, part Continue reading