The Week in Internet News: Germany Considers Banning Encryption on Chat Apps

Transparent chatting: The German Ministry of the Interior is considering new regulations that would ban end-to-end encryption on chat apps, The Register reports. The proposed rules would require operators of chat services to provide plain-text records of users’ chats under court order. Meanwhile, by saying it sometimes needs access to user communications, Facebook is creating a blueprint for German officials, Forbes says.

No, thanks: In other anti-encryption news, the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, has issued its own proposal to allow spy agencies to listen into chat and other encrypted communications. But U.S. tech companies, cryptography experts, and human rights groups, lined up in opposition to the proposal, notes Fortune. The Internet Society has also added its name to the letter.

Attacking encryption another way: Meanwhile, a new study suggests a quantum computer could break 2048-bit RSA encryption in about eight hours, reports the MIT Technology Review. The researchers “have found a more efficient way for quantum computers to perform the code-breaking calculations, reducing the resources they require by orders of magnitude.”

No need to ban encryption on the IoT: At the risk of this being too encryption-focused this week, we look at one more related story: Continue reading

Network Break 237: Standards Bodies About-Face On Huawei; Will China’s Military Dump Windows?

Today's Network Break podcast examines the latest twists in the Huawei vs. USA battle, speculates on China's threat to ban Windows from military computers, explores a new telemetry feature from Mellanox, discusses Google's moves to deprecate ad-blocking features in Chrome, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 237: Standards Bodies About-Face On Huawei; Will China’s Military Dump Windows? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Grafana and Influx – Infrastructure Engineers Language

If you want to understand what Infra engineer speaks and use a tool provided by them you need to have some exposure to the tool itself, you don’t have to be an expert.

 

Monitoring systems that I see nowadays are mostly centric around Prometheus while the Database used for storing any time-series events is InfluxDB. How do you actually map beautifully, its via Grafana

Grafana – https://grafana.com/

Influxdb – https://www.influxdata.com/

Prometheus – https://prometheus.io/

Now the problem here is that many tools are programmed on a daily basis, from a Network Engineer point of view I understood a few things. 

Not everything you need to know the end to end like an Expert for that tool and some choices is purely based on Cost than anything else. 

How would you really understand this? I set up a BME680 sensor in my home and will precisely use Grafana and Influx to map the recordings

Tools Used 

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-bme680-humidity-temperature-barometic-pressure-voc-gas

Raspberry Pi 3

Docker Images – Grafana and Influx

Sample Influx Script – https://github.com/yukthr/auts/blob/master/random_programs/influx-test.py

And finally Beautiful Grafana

All of this is open source and are not hard after the invent of Docker. Give Continue reading

Know Thy Environment Before Redesigning It

A while ago I had an interesting consulting engagement: a multinational organization wanted to migrate off global Carrier Ethernet VPN (with routers at the edges) to MPLS/VPN.

While that sounds like the right thing to do (after all, L3 must be better than L2, right?) in that particular case they wanted to combine the provider VPN with Internet-based IPsec VPN… and doing that in parallel with MPLS/VPN tends to become an interesting exercise in “how convoluted can I make my design before I give up and migrate to BGP”.

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Continuous integration of machine learning models with ease.ml/ci

Continuous integration of machine learning models with ease.ml/ci: towards a rigorous yet practical treatment Renggli et al., SysML’19

Developing machine learning models is no different from developing traditional software, in the sense that it is also a full life cycle involving design, implementation, tuning, testing, and deployment. As machine learning models are used in more task-critical applications and are more tightly integrated with traditional software stacks, it becomes increasingly important for the ML development life cycle also to be managed following systematic, rigit engineering discipline.

I didn’t find this an easy paper to follow at all points, but the question it addresses is certainly interesting: what does a continuous integration testing environment look like for a machine learning model? ease.ml/ci is a CI system for machine learning, and it has to take into account two main differences from a regular CI test suite:

  1. Machine learning is inherently probabilistic , so test conditions are evaluated with respect to an (\epsilon, \delta) -reliability requirement, where (1-\delta) is the probability of a valid test, and \epsilon is the error tolerance.
  2. By getting pass/fail feedback from the CI server, the model can adapt to the test set used in the CI environment, leading to it Continue reading

MultiCloud… flare

If you want to start an intense conversation in the halls of Cloudflare, try describing us as a "CDN". CDNs don't generally provide you with Load Balancing, they don't allow you to deploy Serverless Applications, and they certainly don't get installed onto your phone. One of the costs of that confusion is many people don't realize everything Cloudflare can do for people who want to operate in multiple public clouds, or want to operate in both the cloud and on their own hardware.

Load Balancing

Cloudflare has countless servers located in 180 data centers around the world. Each one is capable of acting as a Layer 7 load balancer, directing incoming traffic between origins wherever they may be. You could, for example, add load balancing between a set of machines you have in AWS' EC2, and another set you keep in Google Cloud.

This load balancing isn't just round-robining traffic. It supports weighting to allow you to control how much traffic goes to each cluster. It supports latency-based routing to automatically route traffic to the cluster which is closer (so adding geographic distribution can be as simple as spinning up machines). It even supports health checks, allowing it Continue reading

IoT Roundup: New research on IoT security, Microsoft leans into IoT

As with any technology whose use is expanding at such speed, it can be tough to track exactly what’s going on in the IoT world – everything from basic usage numbers to customer attitudes to more in-depth slices of the market is constantly changing. Fortunately, the month of May brought several new pieces of research to light, which should help provide at least a partial outline of what’s really happening in IoT.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Just Write Code: Improving Developer Experience for Cloudflare Workers

Just Write Code: Improving Developer Experience for Cloudflare Workers
Just Write Code: Improving Developer Experience for Cloudflare Workers

We’re excited to announce that starting today, Cloudflare Workers® gets a CLI, new and improved docs, multiple scripts for everyone, the ability to run applications on workers.dev without bringing your own domain, and a free tier to make experimentation easier than ever. We are building the serverless platform of the future, and want you to build your application on it, today. In this post, we’ll elaborate on what a serverless platform of the future looks like, how it changes today’s paradigms, and our commitment to making building on it a great experience.

Three years ago, I was interviewing with Cloudflare for a Solutions Engineering role. As a part of an interview assignment, I had to set up an origin behind Cloudflare on my own  domain. I spent my weekend, frustrated and lost in configurations, trying to figure out how to set up an EC2 instance, connect to it over IPv6, and install NGINX on Ubuntu 16.4 just so I could end up with a static site with a picture of my cat on it. I have a computer science degree, and spent my career up until that point as a software engineer — building this simple app was Continue reading

Cisco SDWAN Self Hosted Lab Part 1

One of the posts I get contacted about the most is this one on how the setup a self hosted Viptela control plane. Since Cisco acquired Viptela the process has changed and is now (IMO) a bit simpler. With the release of SDWAN software version 19.1.0 it is now possible to use virtual...

CCIE Renewed Once More – Exam 400-101 v5.1

I’ve given in to the Sunk Cost Fallacy once more: I’ve renewed my CCIE. There was a lot of foot dragging this time around, and I only had four months to spare. But it’s done, for another year. Here’s some quick notes on my prep, and thoughts on the exam.

Preparation

I decided to sit the CCIE R&S Written Exam to renew. This was the easiest route for me. I don’t use Cisco products on a day to day basis, so certifying with a different track would be very hard for me.

The version hasn’t changed since the last time I sat it. It’s still 400-100, v5.1. The only difference is that the “Evolving Technologies” section has been tweaked a little. Think Automation toolsets, Cloud concepts, etc.

I used the study guide I purchased last time from “CCIE in 8 Weeks”. I also re-subscribed to their online practice exams. I meant to only subscribe for 3 months, but…I couldn’t get motivated to do this exam. I ended up paying for another 3 months access, before I finally knuckled down and did the study while I was on vacation. I flicked through my old CCIE flashcards a few times too.

Continue reading

CCIE Renewed Once More – Exam 400-101 v5.1

I’ve given in to the Sunk Cost Fallacy once more: I’ve renewed my CCIE. There was a lot of foot dragging this time around, and I only had four months to spare. But it’s done, for another year. Here’s some quick notes on my prep, and thoughts on the exam.

Preparation

I decided to sit the CCIE R&S Written Exam to renew. This was the easiest route for me. I don’t use Cisco products on a day to day basis, so certifying with a different track would be very hard for me.

The version hasn’t changed since the last time I sat it. It’s still 400-100, v5.1. The only difference is that the “Evolving Technologies” section has been tweaked a little. Think Automation toolsets, Cloud concepts, etc.

I used the study guide I purchased last time from “CCIE in 8 Weeks”. I also re-subscribed to their online practice exams. I meant to only subscribe for 3 months, but…I couldn’t get motivated to do this exam. I ended up paying for another 3 months access, before I finally knuckled down and did the study while I was on vacation. I flicked through my old CCIE flashcards a few times too.

Continue reading

CCIE Renewed Once More – Exam 400-101 v5.1

I’ve given in to the Sunk Cost Fallacy once more: I’ve renewed my CCIE. There was a lot of foot dragging this time around, and I only had four months to spare. But it’s done, for another year. Here’s some quick notes on my prep, and thoughts on the exam.

Preparation

I decided to sit the CCIE R&S Written Exam to renew. This was the easiest route for me. I don’t use Cisco products on a day to day basis, so certifying with a different track would be very hard for me.

The version hasn’t changed since the last time I sat it. It’s still 400-100, v5.1. The only difference is that the “Evolving Technologies” section has been tweaked a little. Think Automation toolsets, Cloud concepts, etc.

I used the study guide I purchased last time from “CCIE in 8 Weeks”. I also re-subscribed to their online practice exams. I meant to only subscribe for 3 months, but…I couldn’t get motivated to do this exam. I ended up paying for another 3 months access, before I finally knuckled down and did the study while I was on vacation. I flicked through my old CCIE flashcards a few times too.

Continue reading

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