The Week in Internet News: Community Broadband Offers Fastest Speeds in U.S.

Super fast: ISPs run by local communities or run through a partnership with a local community offer some of the fastest broadband in the U.S., a story at Vice.com says. Six of the 10 fastest ISPs in the country are either operated by local communities or are partnerships between the public and private sectors, according to a PCMag review.

Conflicting laws: Australia’s recently-passed encryption law, which mandates law enforcement access to encrypted communications, may conflict with the EU’s GDPR and the U.S. CLOUD Act, according to a story at ZDNet. Australian law enforcement agencies may have trouble requiring U.S. and EU companies to decrypt data, the Law Council of Australia has said.

Tweeting is back: The government of Chad has restored access to social media after a 16-month shutdown, QZ.com reports. That’s a lot of missed likes. The government had restricted access to electronic communications for “security reasons” and in “a context of terrorist threats.”

It steals your face: Mobile phone apps that allow you to edit pictures of your face may introduce security vulnerabilities, Forbes notes. One app may upload faces to a database without users’ permission, and another app Continue reading

Tech Bytes: AppNeta Blends Network Data, Synthetic Transactions For Performance Visibility (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Byte podcast, sponsored by AppNeta, delves into how AppNeta provides visibility and real-time insight into network performance by monitoring the end-to-end network path and capturing packets and flows, and performs synthetic testing for an accurate measure of user experience.

The post Tech Bytes: AppNeta Blends Network Data, Synthetic Transactions For Performance Visibility (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

AT&T partners with IBM and Microsoft, focuses on network capabilities

Earlier this year, AT&T finalized a deal to divest itself of its 31 data centers for $1.1 billion. Now that it has dumped its data center business, the company partnering with two of the largest providers of them: Microsoft and IBM.IBM and AT&T this week announced a multi-year strategic alliance where AT&T’s network and IBM Cloud will link up to provide software-defined network (SDN) services, including giving IBM Cloud access to AT&T’s 5G network. In return, IBM will make AT&T its primary provider of 5G, edge computing, and internet of things (IoT) services and help manage AT&T’s entire infrastructure footprint, including third-party cloud services, using Red Hat’s open-source tools to manage the network. This isn’t really new, as AT&T was using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for some time.To read this article in full, please click here

Sudden Explosion of Data Centers in India

 

Something very interesting is happening in the Indian telecom space these days.

The Indian government is considering a new data localisation law that would require all data around Indian citizens to be stored locally, i.e., within Indian borders. It starts with the fintech companies first, and would then bring in the social media and other IOT companies storing data in its ambit. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has cheerfully given a deadline to all fintech companies to ensure that the entire data operated by them, is stored in data centers only in India. Ouch.

RBI so far has refused to accept the representations made by the fintech companies to relax the norms. It’s ruled out the option of data mirroring while addressing the arguments of technological hurdles raised by the fintech companies. It’s instead suggested that companies opt for cloud services or private clouds in order to ensure data localization.

So, what’s data localisation? Data localisation is the process localising the citizen’s data to one’s home country for its processing, storage and collection before it goes through the process of being transferred to an international level. It’s done to ensure the country’s data protection and privacy Continue reading

Sudden Explosion of Data Centers in India

 

Something very interesting is happening in the Indian telecom space these days.

The Indian government is considering a new data localisation law that would require all data around Indian citizens to be stored locally, i.e., within Indian borders. It starts with the fintech companies first, and would then bring in the social media and other IOT companies storing data in its ambit. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has cheerfully given a deadline to all fintech companies to ensure that the entire data operated by them, is stored in data centers only in India. Ouch.

RBI so far has refused to accept the representations made by the fintech companies to relax the norms. It’s ruled out the option of data mirroring while addressing the arguments of technological hurdles raised by the fintech companies. It’s instead suggested that companies opt for cloud services or private clouds in order to ensure data localization.

So, what’s data localisation? Data localisation is the process localising the citizen’s data to one’s home country for its processing, storage and collection before it goes through the process of being transferred to an international level. It’s done to ensure the country’s data protection and privacy Continue reading

End of term

I can’t believe we’ve arrived at the end-of-term again already! I’ll be taking a four-week break from writing The Morning Paper, normal service resumes on Monday 19th August. A big milestone will slip quietly by during this recess – it was five years ago on the 30th July 2014 that I read and shared the very first paper in this current streak of paper reading. In case you’re wondering, that paper was "Why functional programming matters" (revisited again on the blog 2 years later). In terms of published posts, we’re also rapidly approaching the 1,000 posts/papers mark! I wonder what amazing research developments the next five years might bring us??!

There are so many interesting papers published all the time, and I can only cover the tiniest fraction of them on The Morning Paper. If you still feel in need of your regular paper fix over the next few weeks, then a great exercise is to think back to a paper you particularly enjoyed, see where it was published, and then go look through the proceedings to discover what else is there you might like.

For example, let’s say you enjoyed ‘Designing far memory data structures: think Continue reading

A Makefile for your Go project (2019)

My most loathed feature of Go was the mandatory use of GOPATH: I do not want to put my own code next to its dependencies. I was not alone and people devised tools or crafted their own Makefile to avoid organizing their code around GOPATH.

Hopefully, since Go 1.11, it is possible to use Go’s modules to manage dependencies without relying on GOPATH. First, you need to convert your project to a module:1

$ go mod init hellogopher
go: creating new go.mod: module hellogopher
$ cat go.mod
module hellogopher

Then, you can invoke the usual commands, like go build or go test. The go command resolves imports by using versions listed in go.mod. When it runs into an import of a package not present in go.mod, it automatically looks up the module containing that package using the latest version and adds it.

$ go test ./...
go: finding github.com/spf13/cobra v0.0.5
go: downloading github.com/spf13/cobra v0.0.5
?       hellogopher     [no test files]
?       hellogopher/cmd [no test files]
ok      hellogopher/hello       0.001s
$ cat go.mod
module hellogopher

require github.com/spf13/cobra v0.0.5

If you want a specific version, you can Continue reading

Sustainable Python scripts

Python is a great language to write a standalone script. Getting to the result can be a matter of a dozen to a few hundred lines of code and, moments later, you can forget about it and focus on your next task.

Six months later, a co-worker asks you why the script fails and you don’t have a clue: no documentation, hard-coded parameters, nothing logged during the execution and no sensible tests to figure out what may go wrong.

Turning a “quick-and-dirty” Python script into a sustainable version, which will be easy to use, understand and support by your co-workers and your future self, only takes some moderate effort. As an illustration, let’s start from the following script solving the classic Fizz-Buzz test:

import sys
for n in range(int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[2])):
    if n % 3 == 0 and n % 5 == 0:
        print("fizzbuzz")
    elif n % 3 == 0:
        print("fizz")
    elif n % 5 == 0:
        print("buzz")
    else:
        print(n)

Documentation​

I find useful to write documentation before coding: Continue reading

Rant: Some Internet Service Providers Should Really Know Better…

I was listening to a nice podcast with Nick Buraglio discussing the recent BGP hijack SNAFU impacting Cloudflare (and their reaction) and while I usually totally agree with Nick, I think that he tried to be way too nice when saying (paraphrasing) “I think Cloudflare was a bit harsh - I would prefer a more community-oriented approach along the lines of how could we help you do your job better”

Read more ...

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Heavy Networking 460: Extending The Life Of Your Cabling Plant With InterOptic (Sponsored)

On today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by InterOptic, we explore how to extend the life of your cabling plant as you grow to 100G Ethernet. We get very nerdy on cabling, modules, lasers, and more with guests Robert Coenen, VP of Business Development at Interoptic; and Alex Latzko, lead network architect at Server Central Turing Group.

The post Heavy Networking 460: Extending The Life Of Your Cabling Plant With InterOptic (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

RightsCon 2019: Human Rights in the Digital Age

Since its creation in 2011, RightsCon has gathered people from different sectors to discuss human rights in the digital age. It started as an event with a few hundred experts, but has become a major conference, with nearly 3000 participants in 2019. The 2019 program consisted of 17 tracks focusing on major issues, which totalized more than 450 sessions held in a period of four days.

As the conference started to attract a wider group of people, it adopted a series of measures to increase its diversity. The recent host countries, including Tunisia and Costa Rica, reflect the worldwide nature of the event, which now gathers individuals from all over the globe.

RightsCon has also gathered a considerable number of young people. They’ve had the opportunity to connect not only through regular conference activities, but during a summit on Day Zero. The summit aimed to engage youth and also brief them on the discussions taking place during the  rest of RightsCon.

The sessions at RightsCon were designed with different formats, which was reflected in the physical structure of the meeting rooms. They were organized not just in an audience format, but also roundtables, allowing for people to feel equal footing Continue reading

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