Online Trust Audit for 2020 Presidential Campaigns Update

On 7 October 2019, the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance (OTA) released the Online Trust Audit for 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaigns. Overall, 30% of the campaigns made the Honor Roll, and 70% had a failure, mainly related to scores for their privacy statements. As part of this process, OTA reached out to the campaigns, offering to explain their specific Audit scores and ways to improve them. The campaigns were also told that they would be rescored in mid-November and the updated results would be published in early December. As a result, several campaigns contacted us to understand the methodology and scoring, and several of them made improvements.

Rescoring of all elements of the Audit was completed on 25 November, and the table below shows the updated results since release of the original Audit. Several campaigns have been suspended since early October (Messam, O’Rourke, Ryan, and Sanford, as well as Bullock and Sestak in early December). Campaigns shown in bold in the Honor Roll column made enough improvements to earn passing scores for their privacy statements and thereby achieve Honor Roll status. Campaigns shown in italics at the bottom of the table are new entrants since the Audit was released. Continue reading

Self-hosted videos with HLS: subtitles

In a previous article, I have described a solution to self-host videos while offering a delivery adapted to each user’s bandwith, thanks to HLS and hls.js. Subtitles¹ were not part of the game. While they can be declared inside the HLS manifest or embedded into the video, it is easier to include them directly in the <video> element, using the WebVTT format:

<video poster="poster.jpg"
       controls preload="none">
  <source src="index.m3u8"
          type="application/vnd.apple.mpegurl">
  <source src="progressive.mp4"
          type='video/mp4; codecs="avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2"'>
  <track src="de.vtt"
         kind="subtitles" srclang="de" label="Deutsch">
  <track src="en.vtt"
         kind="subtitles" srclang="en" label="English">
</video>

Watch the following demonstration, featuring Agent 327: Operation Barbershop, a video created by Blender Animation Studio and currently released under the Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives 2.0 license:

You may want to jump to 0:12 for the first subtitle. Most browsers should display a widget to toggle subtitles. This works just fine with Chromium but Firefox will not show the menu Continue reading

Tuning BGP Convergence in High-Availability Firewall Cluster Design

Two weeks ago Nicola Modena explained how to design BGP routing to implement resilient high-availability network services architecture. The next step to tackle was obvious: how do you fine-tune convergence times, and how does BGP convergence compare to the more traditional FHRP-based design.

Declarative assembly of web applications from pre-defined concepts

Declarative assembly of web applications from predefined concepts De Rosso et al., Onward! 2019

I chose this paper to challenge my own thinking. I’m not really a fan of low-code / no-code / just drag-and-drop-from-our-catalogue forms of application development. My fear is that all too often it’s like jumping on a motorbike and tearing off at great speed (rapid initial progress), only to ride around a bend and find a brick wall across the road in front of you. That doesn’t normally end well. I’ve seen enough generations of CASE (remember that acronym?), component-based software development, reusable software catalogues etc. to develop a healthy scepticism: lowest-common denominators, awkward or missing round-tripping behaviour, terrible debugging experiences, catalogues full of junk components, inability to accommodate custom behaviours not foreseen by the framework/component developers, limited reuse opportunities in practice compared to theory, and so on.

The thing is, on one level I know that I’m wrong. To start with, there’s Grady Booch’s observation that “the whole history of computer science is one of ever rising levels of abstraction” ¹. Then there’s the changing demographic of software building. Heather Miller recently gave a great presentation on this topic, ‘The Continue reading

Fortinet Extends Cloud Security Into AWS CloudFormation

Cisco goes deep into AWS hybrid cloud with SD-WAN, security, Outposts data center support

Cisco is taking its integration with Amazon Web Services to a new level, announcing plans to integrate its SD-WAN, network services and security wares with the cloud giant's hybrid cloud environment, including its new Outposts offering. Outposts offers AWS-designed hardware that lets customers run compute and storage on premises, while connecting to AWS’s cloud services. Each Outpost has a pair of networking devices, each with 400 Gbps of connectivity and support for 1 GigE, 10 GigE, 40 GigE, and 100 Gigabit fiber connections. AWS announced the general availability of Outposts at its annual AWS re:Invent symposium, held this week in Las Vegas. To read this article in full, please click here

AWS Outposts Lands, Pushes to the Edge

How IBM plans to compete in the cloud

IBM hopes to reduce the complexity of moving workloads to the cloud through Cloud Paks,’ its series of specialized packaged offerings that enterprise can implement relatively quickly. But is it enough?

How IBM plans to compete in the cloud

IBM hopes to reduce the complexity of moving workloads to the cloud through Cloud Paks,’ its series of specialized packaged offerings that enterprise can implement relatively quickly. But is it enough?

AWS, Verizon Launch 5G Partnership at re:Invent

Cisco SD-WAN, ACI Anywhere Gain AWS Links

Finally: AWS Gives Servers A Real Shot In The Arm

Finally, we get to test out how well or poorly a well-designed Arm server chip will do in the datacenter. …

Finally: AWS Gives Servers A Real Shot In The Arm was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Amazon joins the quantum computing crowd with Braket testbed

Amazon’s initial foray into the heavily hyped world of quantum computing is a virtual sandbox in which companies can test potential quantum-enabled applications and generally get to grips with the new technology, the company announced Monday.The product is named Braket, after a system of notation used in quantum physics. The idea, according to Amazon, is to democratize access to quantum computing in a small way. Most organizations aren’t going to own their own quantum computers for the foreseeable future; they’re impractically expensive and require a huge amount of infrastructure even for the limited proof-of-concept models at the current cutting-edge.To read this article in full, please click here

Amazon joins the quantum computing crowd with Braket testbed

Amazon’s initial foray into the heavily hyped world of quantum computing is a virtual sandbox in which companies can test potential quantum-enabled applications and generally get to grips with the new technology, the company announced Monday.The product is named Braket, after a system of notation used in quantum physics. The idea, according to Amazon, is to democratize access to quantum computing in a small way. Most organizations aren’t going to own their own quantum computers for the foreseeable future; they’re impractically expensive and require a huge amount of infrastructure even for the limited proof-of-concept models at the current cutting-edge.To read this article in full, please click here

The sale of PIR: The Internet Society Board Perspective

[Published on behalf of the Internet Society Board of Trustees.]

Last Friday we held a webinar with Internet Society members to answer questions about the sale of the Public Interest Registry (PIR). We were also able to unveil more details about the sale and its long-term contribution to the stability of the Internet Society (ISOC). On that call, we listened to our community members carefully. We heard the concerns regarding this decision from those who are worried about the future of the .ORG community, and who believe that we – as a non-profit and mission-driven organisation- are risking undermining our own legitimacy and responsibility to the public Internet.

First and foremost, we take the reaction from our community very seriously. Clearly, some members of the community believe that the decision to move forward with this transaction is harming our reputation. We fully understand the concerns expressed by our chapters and members, and we know that a lot of the criticism we have faced since announcing the transaction stems from the fact that we have not consulted openly, or been as clear as we should have been about what this sale would mean for both .ORG, and the Internet Society. It has always been the Board’s intention to be as open, transparent, and Continue reading

Juniper SD-WAN Now Handles SD-LAN

Heavy Networking 491: Real-Life Segment Routing & PCE

Heavy Networking revisits segment routing on today's episode. This time we look at segment routing as it's being use in an international science network. Our guest is Nick Buraglio. We discuss which flavor of segment routing in use, the problems the network was trying to solve and how segment routing addresses them, challenges of path computation, and more.

The post Heavy Networking 491: Real-Life Segment Routing & PCE appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Deutsche Telekom Embarks on Edge Computing for IoT

Best Practice for Creating Indexes on your MySQL Tables

By having appropriate indexes on your MySQL tables, you can greatly enhance the performance of SELECT queries. But, did you know that adding indexes to your tables in itself is an expensive operation, and may take a long time to complete depending on the size of your tables? During this time, you are also likely to experience a degraded performance of queries as your system resources are busy in index-creation work as well. In this blog post, we discuss an approach to optimize the MySQL index creation process in such a way that your regular workload is not impacted.

MySQL Rolling Index Creation

DPDK and Open vSwitch Installation on Debian 10

DPDK stands for Data Plane Development Kit. The DPDK project consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures. Open vSwitch can use the DPDK library to operate entirely in userspace. Thanks to it, performance of Open vSwitch increases. The tutorial help you to build and install Open vSwitch using DPDK datapah on Debian 10 Buster. The second part discuses DPDK and Open vSwitch configuration and compare performance of Open vSwitch applicance with enabled/disabled DPDK.

Note: You can download my Debian 10 Buster VMDK image with installed DPDK 18.11.2 and Open vSwitch 2.11.1 for quick testiing of Open vSwitch/DPDK functionality. If you do so, you can skip the tutorial and continue with Part 2 - DPDK/Open vSwitch Configuration.

Login/password: debian/debian

Host
Software:
- x86_64 GNU/Linux Debian 10 Buster, 4.19.0-5-amd64
- QEMU emulator version 3.1.0
Hardware:
- RAM Memory 2x Kingston 8192 MB DDRIII
- CPU - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 4 cores

Qemu Guest
Software:
- x86_64 GNU/Linux Debian 10 Buster, 4.19.0-6-amd64
- Open vSwitch - 2.11.1
- DPDK - 18.11.2
Hardware:
- 4 X Continue reading