Americans Deserve Better User Privacy

On May 15th, the White House tweeted it had created a new online surveying tool for Americans to report instances of social media censorship due to political bias. Setting aside the politics of this move, there are serious privacy and security concerns that come with hosting such a survey on its website.

When users visit the reporting site, they’re required to give personal information including their name, citizenship status, zip code, phone number, and email address, all before any questions are actually asked about the alleged social media bias. They are then prompted to include links to their social media platforms, usernames, and other digitally-intrusive information.

Sound fishy? It should.

That is a significant amount of personal, highly-identifiable information to give up as a part of a selective survey. The irrelevance of most of this information to the survey’s purpose begs the question: why does the government need it and what will they use it for?

Neither question is answered anywhere in the survey or its related materials. That alone poses a serious privacy concern. If users don’t know how their data will be used, how can they trust that their information is secure and being used only for the Continue reading

Future Kubernetes Will Mimic What Facebook Already Does

If you want to see what the future of the Kubernetes container management system will look like, then the closed source, homegrown Tupperware container control system that Facebook has been using and evolving since 2011 – before Docker containers and Kubernetes were around – might be a good place to find inspiration. …

Future Kubernetes Will Mimic What Facebook Already Does was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Viavi Enterprise Provides Unexpected Network Insights

Many of us will have experienced the challenges of taking a performance alert (or user complaint) and drilling down to root cause. Performance issues can be intermittent, and it can be difficult to get visibility of what caused a problem at a particular time. Viavi Enterprise thinks it has the answer, combining analysis of packet feeds (e.g. from taps and mirror ports) and IPFix, xFlow and cloud service flow logs to monitor application performance as it would be experienced by a user. Sounds good? It looked pretty good, too.

Johnny Five Need Input!

Nothing can happen without data, and that comes from a number of potential sources.

Observer Gigastor

The Observer Gigastor product is available as a virtualized solution (to capture east-west traffic in virtualized environments), a portable appliance for tactical deployment, and two hardware appliance models (in a charming shade of purple) which can provide from 96TB to 1.2PB of storage. The idea of Gigastor is to capture packets at line rate and retain the raw packet data in case it’s needed later. The packets are analyzed, and that metadata is fed to the reporting and visualization system, Observer Apex.

Observer GigaFlow

It’s not always possible Continue reading

The CCIE Times Are A Changing

Today is the day that the CCIE changes. A little, at least. The news hit just a little while ago that there are some changes to the way the CCIE certification and recertification process happens. Some of these are positive. Some of these are going to cause some insightful discussion. Let’s take a quick look at what’s changing and how it affects you. Note that these changes are not taking effect until February 24, 2020, which is in about 8 months.

Starting Your Engines

The first big change comes from the test that you take to get yourself ready for the lab. Historically, this has been a CCIE written exam. It’s a test of knowledge designed to make sure you’re ready to take the big lab. It’s also the test that has been used to recertify your CCIE status.

With the new change on Feb. 24th, the old CCIE written will go away. The test that is going to be used to qualify candidates to take the CCIE lab exam is the Core Technology exam from the CCNP track. The Core Technology exam in each CCNP track serves a dual purpose in the new Cisco certification program. If you’re Continue reading

BrandPost: Empowering Charitable Work with Scalable Cloud Networking Technology

Like most charitable organizations, The Salvation Army relies on volunteer help. Volunteers around the world serve people in need at service centers, retail stores, and satellite offices in metropolitan cities, rural communities, and at the scene of disaster areas. All of these locations have to stay online, connected, and sharing data, but with such a wide range of sites, networking is a challenge. Add in staff with varying levels of expertise and locations ranging in size from with one person at a small satellite office to hundreds at international headquarters, and you quickly have a very complicated situation on your hands.The wide variety of spaces and available talent to manage IT infrastructure has created a nightmare for network administrators trying to keep data flowing where it needs to go. That is, until the organization began upgrading to next-level networking, making configuration, setup, and maintenance of networks at each location far easier, and freeing up personnel—volunteer and otherwise—for more productive work.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Building the Network to Grow a Global Virtual Reality Company

This decade saw the spectacular rise of mobile devices as the platform of choice for everything from social media and gaming to customer service and online payments. Now it’s time for a new platform to revolutionize the way consumers and businesses engage with digital content. It’s time for the world to be introduced to the next generation of entertainment, shopping, healthcare, and more: augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).According to research firm McKinsey, immersive computing could actually replace mobile devices. While it’s difficult to imagine anything approaching today’s ubiquity of smartphones, Goldman Sachs estimates that the emerging AR and VR industry could see up to $182 billion in annual revenue by 2025 –  a figure that far surpasses the current $88 billion in combined in-home entertainment and movie box office revenues.To read this article in full, please click here

Reaction: Overly Attached

In a recent edition of ACM Queue, Kate Matsudaira has an article discussing the problem of being overly attached to a project or solution.

The longer you work on one system or application, the deeper the attachment. For years you have been investing in it—adding new features, updating functionality, fixing bugs and corner cases, polishing, and refactoring. If the product serves a need, you likely reap satisfaction for a job well done (and maybe you even received some raises or promotions as a result of your great work).

Attachment is a two-edged sword—without some form of attachment, it seems there is no way to have pride in your work. On the other hand, attachment leads to poorly designed solutions. For instance, we all know the hyper-certified person who knows every in and out of a particular vendor’s solution, and hence solves every problem in terms of that vendor’s products. Or the person who knows a particular network automation system and, as a result, solves every problem through automation.

The most pernicious forms of attachment in the network engineering world are to a single technology or vendor. One of the cycles I have seen play out many times across the last Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Better Broadband Boosts Employment

High-speed jobs: A new study suggests that better broadband service lowers unemployment rates, Vice.com reports. Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Oklahoma State University tracked broadband availability and unemployment rates in Tennessee and found that counties with access to high-speed broadband had a slightly lower unemployment rate than those with slower service.

More moderation: YouTube plans to remove white supremacist, hate speech and hoax videos, the Washington Post reports. The new policy will go farther than YouTube’s former prohibition on videos that promote violence or hatred against people based on their age, religious beliefs, gender, religion, immigration status and sexual orientation.

Encryption fight: Yandex, a provider of Internet-related services in Russia and the former Soviet Union, has reached an agreement with the Russian FSB security service on handing over encryption keys, Reuters reports. Details of the agreement weren’t immediately available. Yandex had originally resisted the FSB’s demand for encryption keys, Reuters says.

Bigger than the weather: U.S. residents believe fake news is a bigger problem than climate change or racism, according to a new survey detailed at Business Insider. Half of those surveyed said made-up news is a major problem, while just 46 said the Continue reading

Repost: Automation Without Simplification

The No Scripting Required to Start Your Automation Journey blog post generated lively discussions (and a bit of trolling from the anonymous peanut gallery). One of the threads focused on “how does automation work in real life IT department where it might be challenging to simplify operations before automating them due to many exceptions, legacy support…”

Here’s a great answer provided by another reader:

Read more ...

PyTorch-BigGraph: a large-scale graph embedding system

PyTorch-BigGraph: a large-scale graph embedding system Lerer et al., SysML’19

We looked at graph neural networks earlier this year, which operate directly over a graph structure. Via graph autoencoders or other means, another approach is to learn embeddings for the nodes in the graph, and then use these embeddings as inputs into a (regular) neural network:

Working with graph data directly is difficult, so a common technique is to use graph embedding methods to create vector representations for each node so that distances between these vectors predict the occurrence of edges in the graph.

When you’re Facebook, the challenge in learning embeddings is that the graph is big: over two billion user nodes, and over a trillion edges. Alibaba’s graph has more than one billion users and two billion items; Pinterest’s graph has more than 2 billion entities and over 17 billion edges. At this scale we have to find a way to divide-and-conquer. We’ll need to find some parallelism to embed graphs with trillions of edges in reasonable time, and a way of partitioning the problem so that we don’t need all of the embeddings in memory at each node (‘many standard methods exceed the memory Continue reading

BrandPost: Digital Transformation: IT Leaders Discuss SD-WAN’s Emerging Role

The digital economy is here, and the ability to innovatively meet ever evolving customer expectations has become the new reality.  For most organizations accomplishing this goal starts with digital transformation.In order to realize digital transformation benefits, companies need to move beyond a legacy network and invest in next generation components, according to participants in a recent IDG TechTalk Twitter chat.Unfortunately, past investments in legacy technology are still serving as a significant road block. A1) Issues such as technical debt, legacy security problems, poor/inconsistent Ops & maintenance, and a long list of infrastructure/bandwidth inadequacies can hold back #DigitalTransformation. #IdgTechTalkTo read this article in full, please click here

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