The Project Jengo Saga: How Cloudflare Stood up to a Patent Troll – and Won!

The Project Jengo Saga: How Cloudflare Stood up to a Patent Troll – and Won!
The Project Jengo Saga: How Cloudflare Stood up to a Patent Troll – and Won!

Remember 2016? Pokemon Go was all the rage, we lost Prince, and there were surprising election results in both the UK and US. Back in 2016, Blackbird Technologies was notorious in the world of patent litigation. It was a boutique law firm that was one of the top ten most active patent trolls, filing lawsuits against more than 50 different defendants in a single year.

In October 2016, Blackbird was looking to acquire additional patents for their portfolio when they found an incredibly broad software patent with the ambiguous title, “PROVIDING AN INTERNET THIRD PARTY DATA CHANNEL.” They acquired this patent from its owner for $1 plus “other good and valuable consideration.” A little later, in March 2017, Blackbird decided to assert that patent against Cloudflare.

As we have explained previously, patent trolls benefit from a problematic incentive structure that allows them to take vague or abstract patents that they have no intention of developing and assert them as broadly as possible. Instead, these trolls collect licensing fees or settlements from companies who are otherwise trying to start a business, produce useful products, and create good jobs. Companies facing such claims usually convince themselves that settlements Continue reading

SDxCentral’s Top 10 Articles — October 2019

AT&T Offloads $1.95B; Cisco Warns IBN Is Coming; AWS Makes It Rain; HPE Takes On VMware;...

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An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations

An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations Ren et al., SOSP’19

I was drawn in by the headline results here:

This paper presents an analysis of how Linux’s performance has evolved over the past seven years… To our surprise, the study shows that the performance of many core operations has worsened or fluctuated significantly over the years.

When you get into the details I found it hard to come away with any strongly actionable takeaways though. Perhaps the most interesting lesson/reminder is this: it takes a lot of effort to tune a Linux kernel. For example:

  • “Red Hat and Suse normally required 6-18 months to optimise the performance an an upstream Linux kernel before it can be released as an enterprise distribution”, and
  • “Google’s data center kernel is carefully performance tuned for their workloads. This task is carried out by a team of over 100 engineers, and for each new kernel, the effort can also take 6-18 months.”

Meanwhile, Linux releases a new kernel every 2-3 months, with between 13,000 and 18,000 commits per release.

Clearly, performance comes at a high cost, and unfortunately, this cost is difficult to get around. Most Linux users cannot afford Continue reading

An SD-WAN service that gets around the Great Firewall of China legally

The saying goes that China is the world’s factory. For many companies around the world, their products or components of their products are produced in mainland China. At the same time, China’s population of more than a billion people makes it one of the world’s largest consumer markets. Thus, for either production or sales, many companies want to do business in China and have established facilities there.On the networking front, this means that multinational companies need to extend their wide area network into China to support their large or rapidly growing operations—and that’s easier said than done.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Many organizations had done this using VPNs, but in early 2018, the Chinese government placed restrictions on IPsec traffic to basically block it from going in and out of the country. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said these restrictions are in accordance with the China Cross-border Data Telecommunications Industry Alliance (CDTIA), which was created to regulate cross-border data communication.To read this article in full, please click here

An SD-WAN service that gets around the Great Firewall of China legally

The saying goes that China is the world’s factory. For many companies around the world, their products or components of their products are produced in mainland China. At the same time, China’s population of more than a billion people makes it one of the world’s largest consumer markets. Thus, for either production or sales, many companies want to do business in China and have established facilities there.On the networking front, this means that multinational companies need to extend their wide area network into China to support their large or rapidly growing operations—and that’s easier said than done.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Many organizations had done this using VPNs, but in early 2018, the Chinese government placed restrictions on IPsec traffic to basically block it from going in and out of the country. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said these restrictions are in accordance with the China Cross-border Data Telecommunications Industry Alliance (CDTIA), which was created to regulate cross-border data communication.To read this article in full, please click here

DNS Wars

The 77th NANOG meeting was held in Austin, Texas at the end of October and they invited Farsight’s Paul Vixie to deliver a keynote presentation. These are my thoughts in response to his presentation, and they are my interpretation of Paul’s talk and more than a few of my opinions thrown in for good measure!

A VPN service that gets around the Great Firewall of China legally

The saying goes that China is the world’s factory. For many companies around the world, their products or components of their products are produced in mainland China. At the same time, China’s population of more than a billion people makes it one of the world’s largest consumer markets. Thus, for either production or sales, many companies want to do business in China and have established facilities there.On the networking front, this means that multinational companies need to extend their wide area network into China to support their large or rapidly growing operations—and that’s easier said than done.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Many organizations had done this using VPNs, but in early 2018, the Chinese government placed restrictions on IPsec traffic to basically block it from going in and out of the country. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said these restrictions are in accordance with the China Cross-border Data Telecommunications Industry Alliance (CDTIA), which was created to regulate cross-border data communication.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel unveils new Xeon E-2200 line for entry level servers

Intel is relaunching the Xeon E-2200 line, which it first introduced in May for workstations, as a low-end server processor for simpler tasks. The new chips are socket-compatible with the older E-2100 line so existing servers can be upgraded.Intel makes no bones about it, the Xeon E-2200 processors are for entry-level servers, coming in 4-core and 6-core designs as well as a new 8-core product capable of hitting 5.0 GHz with Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology 2.0.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The Xeon E-2288G and E-2278G CPUs are the new high-end models with eight cores and 16 threads, a boost over the six-core count of the E-2100. The E-2200 is meant for single-socket systems with a maximum memory capacity of 128GB.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel unveils new Xeon E-2200 line for entry level servers

Intel is relaunching the Xeon E-2200 line, which it first introduced in May for workstations, as a low-end server processor for simpler tasks. The new chips are socket-compatible with the older E-2100 line so existing servers can be upgraded.Intel makes no bones about it, the Xeon E-2200 processors are for entry-level servers, coming in 4-core and 6-core designs as well as a new 8-core product capable of hitting 5.0 GHz with Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology 2.0.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The Xeon E-2288G and E-2278G CPUs are the new high-end models with eight cores and 16 threads, a boost over the six-core count of the E-2100. The E-2200 is meant for single-socket systems with a maximum memory capacity of 128GB.To read this article in full, please click here

A VPN service that gets around the Great Firewall of China legally

The saying goes that China is the world’s factory. For many companies around the world, their products or components of their products are produced in mainland China. At the same time, China’s population of more than a billion people makes it one of the world’s largest consumer markets. Thus, for either production or sales, many companies want to do business in China and have established facilities there.On the networking front, this means that multinational companies need to extend their wide area network into China to support their large or rapidly growing operations—and that’s easier said than done.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Many organizations had done this using VPNs, but in early 2018, the Chinese government placed restrictions on IPsec traffic to basically block it from going in and out of the country. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said these restrictions are in accordance with the China Cross-border Data Telecommunications Industry Alliance (CDTIA), which was created to regulate cross-border data communication.To read this article in full, please click here

Tigera Joins the Fortinet Fabric-Ready Program and Partners with Fortinet to Secure Kubernetes Environments

We are proud to partner with Fortinet and join their Fabric-Ready Technology Alliance Partner program. With this partnership, Fortinet customers will be able to extend their network security architecture to their Kubernetes environments.

Our partnership was driven from interest from Fortinet’s customers to protect their Kubernetes based infrastructure. Kubernetes adoption is growing like wildfire and nearly every enterprise on the planet is at some stage of their Kubernetes journey.

The Tigera and Fortinet joint solution will support all cloud-based and on-premises Kubernetes environments. With this architecture, Tigera Secure will map security policies from FortiManager into each Kubernetes cluster in the cloud or on-premises. The joint solution will enable Fortinet customers to enforce network security policies for traffic into and out of the Kubernetes cluster (North/South traffic) as well as traffic between pods within the cluster (East/West traffic).

Tigera Secure will also integrate with threat feeds from FortiGuard to detect and block any malicious activity inside the clusters. Tigera will monitor the cluster traffic and send these events to FortiSIEM, enabling the security operations team to quickly diagnose the situation.

If you are attending Microsoft Ignite join us at our respective booths to learn more about our solution (Fortinet Booth #519 Continue reading

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