Unpacking the Stack and Addressing Complaints about Content

Unpacking the Stack and Addressing Complaints about Content
Unpacking the Stack and Addressing Complaints about Content

Although we are focused on protecting and optimizing the operation of the Internet, Cloudflare is sometimes the target of complaints or criticism about the content of a very small percentage of the more than thirteen million websites that use our service. Our termination of services to the Daily Stormer website a year and a half ago drew significant attention to our approach to these issues and prompted a lot of thinking on our part.  

At the time, Matthew wrote that calls for service providers to reject some online content should start with a consideration of how the Internet works and how the services at issue up and down the stack interact with that content. He tasked Cloudflare’s policy team with engaging broadly to try and find an answer. With some time having passed, we want to take stock of what we’ve learned and where we stand in addressing problematic content online.  

The aftermath of the Daily Stormer decision

The weeks immediately following the decision in August 2017 were filled with conversations. Matthew made sure the Cloudflare team accepted every single invitation to talk about these issues; we didn’t simply put out a press release or “no comment” anyone. Continue reading

Dynamic Network Diagrams, This is what we need!

We all create network diagrams. Network Engineers create network diagrams.  But for who ? When ? How they are accurate ? Do we really need network diagrams ? Let me share my thoughts with you.    Network engineers have been creating network diagrams, physical diagrams, logical diagrams, showing Vlans , IP addresses , so many …

The post Dynamic Network Diagrams, This is what we need! appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Cloudflare Signs European Commission Declaration on Gender Balanced Company Culture

Cloudflare Signs European Commission Declaration on Gender Balanced Company Culture

Last week Cloudflare attended a roundtable meeting in Brussels convened by the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Mariya Gabriel, with all signatories of the Tech Leaders’ Declaration on Gender Balanced Company Culture. Cloudflare joined this European Commission initiative late last year and, along with other companies, we are committed to taking a hands-on approach to close the digital gender divide in skills, inception of technologies, access and career opportunities.

In particular, we have all committed to implementing, promoting and spreading five specific actions to achieve equality of opportunities for women in our companies and in the digital sector at large:

  1. Instil an inclusive, open, female-friendly company culture
  2. Recruit and invest in diversity
  3. Give women in tech their voice and visibility
  4. Create the leaders of the future
  5. Become an advocate for change

The project, spearheaded by the Digital Commissioner as part of a range of actions to promote gender balance in the digital industry, allows for the exchange of ideas and best practices among companies, with opportunities to chart progress and also to discuss the challenges we face. Many companies around the table shared their inspiring stories of steps taken at company level to encourage diversity, push back against Continue reading

Building the Network Automation Source of Truth

This is one of the “thinking out loud” blog posts as I’m preparing my presentation for the Building Network Automation Solutions online course. I’m probably missing a gazillion details - your feedback would be highly appreciated

One of the toughest challenges you’ll face when building a network automation solution is “where is my source of truth” (or: what data should I trust). As someone way smarter than me said once: “You could either have a single source of truth of many sources of lies”, and knowing how your devices should be configured and what mistakes have to be fixed becomes crucial as soon as you move from gathering data and creating reports to provisioning new devices or services.

Read more ...

The Global Internet Report: Consolidation in the Internet Economy

The 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future focused attention on the significant potential of the Internet for innovation and sustainable development, but without denying or shirking the challenges it also introduces. This forward-looking analysis is a powerful advocacy tool for anyone who wants to protect and build the open Internet.

Over the past year, we spent time working with our community on a new report. It takes a closer look at one of those forces and how it may impact the future: Consolidation in the Internet Economy. Understood as growing forces of concentration, vertical and horizontal integration, and fewer opportunities for market entry and competition, this topic includes the impact of consolidating forces on all stakeholders as well as on the Internet’s underlying and evolving technology.

We chose this theme because findings from the 2017 report, and what’s happened since, are showing increasing concerns about a growing concentration of power in the Internet economy. They point to market and technical forces that may be driving consolidation at different “layers” of the Internet, from network developments and hosting services to applications. Among these trends are processes that enable some companies to own our experience at almost every stage.

Continue reading

JNCIA Junos

One of my goals for 2019 is the brush back up on networking theory/operation after the last couple of years focused on network automation. This is a bit of a brain dump about my adventure in pursuit of the JNCIA-Junos certification and the study materials I used. Preface I have worked as...

A basic question about TCP

So on Twitter, somebody asked this question:
I have a very basic computer networking question: when sending a TCP packet, is the packet ACK'ed at every node in the route between the sender and the recipient, or just by the final recipient?
This isn't just a basic question, it is the basic question, the defining aspect of TCP/IP that makes the Internet different from the telephone network that predated it.


Remember that the telephone network was already a cyberspace before the Internet came around. It allowed anybody to create a connection to anybody else. Most circuits/connections were 56-kilobits-per-secondl using the "T" system, these could be aggregated into faster circuits/connections. The "T1" line consisting of 1.544-mbps was an important standard back in the day.

In the phone system, when a connection is established, resources must be allocated in every switch along the path between the source and destination. When the phone system is overloaded, such as when you call loved ones when there's been an earthquake/tornado in their area, you'll sometimes get a message "No circuits are available". Due to congestion, it can't reserve the necessary resources in one of the switches along the route, so the call can't be Continue reading

ICANN urges adopting DNSSEC now

Powerful malicious actors continue to be a substantial risk to key parts of the Internet and its Domain Name System security infrastructure, so much so that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is calling for an intensified community effort to install stronger DNS security technology. Specifically ICANN is calling for full deployment of the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across all unsecured domain names. DNS,often called the internet’s phonebook, is part of the global internet infrastructure that translates between common language domain names and IP addresses that computers need to access websites or send emails.  DNSSEC adds a layer of security on top of DNS.To read this article in full, please click here

ICANN urges adopting DNSSEC now

Powerful malicious actors continue to be a substantial risk to key parts of the Internet and its Domain Name System security infrastructure, so much so that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is calling for an intensified community effort to install stronger DNS security technology. Specifically ICANN is calling for full deployment of the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across all unsecured domain names. DNS,often called the internet’s phonebook, is part of the global internet infrastructure that translates between common language domain names and IP addresses that computers need to access websites or send emails.  DNSSEC adds a layer of security on top of DNS.To read this article in full, please click here

ICANN urges adopting DNSSEC now

Powerful malicious actors continue to be a substantial risk to key parts of the Internet and its Domain Name System security infrastructure, so much so that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is calling for an intensified community effort to install stronger DNS security technology. Specifically ICANN is calling for full deployment of the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across all unsecured domain names. DNS,often called the internet’s phonebook, is part of the global internet infrastructure that translates between common language domain names and IP addresses that computers need to access websites or send emails.  DNSSEC adds a layer of security on top of DNS.To read this article in full, please click here

ICANN urges adopting DNSSEC now

Powerful malicious actors continue to be a substantial risk to key parts of the Internet and its Domain Name System security infrastructure, so much so that The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is calling for an intensified community effort to install stronger DNS security technology. Specifically ICANN is calling for full deployment of the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across all unsecured domain names. DNS,often called the internet’s phonebook, is part of the global internet infrastructure that translates between common language domain names and IP addresses that computers need to access websites or send emails.  DNSSEC adds a layer of security on top of DNS.To read this article in full, please click here

IHS Markit Talks Pioneering Private Cloud, Containers, and VMware Cloud on AWS

Global information, analytics, and solutions company IHS Markit provides data-driven insight for its government and corporate customers. Using VMware vRealize Automation, the company has already rolled out a private cloud that helped developers cut a 6-month infrastructure provisioning process down to one week. They’ve also been using VMware NSX-T Data Center to secure their workloads at a granular level with micro-segmentation, and to fundamentally re-think network design.

At VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, Andrew Hrycaj, Principal Network Engineer for IHS Markit, spoke about the company’s plans for software-defined networking and hybrid cloud. IHS Markit has deployed VMware NSX Data Center, including NSX-T Data Center and VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere, into five data centers. “The NSX Data Center advantage for us is the fact that it can interact with so many different environments; from containers, to the public cloud environment with AWS and Azure, to on-prem,” said Hrycaj. “We’ll be able to utilize micro-segmentation across all of them with a common security footprint. If NSX-T goes to all those different environments, we can apply the same security policy across all those different platforms. It makes operations’ life easier because the transparency is there.”

 

Innovating with Continue reading

Docker’s 6th Birthday: How do you #Docker?

 

 

Docker is turning 6 years old! Over the years, Docker Community members have found some amazing and innovative ways of using Docker technology and we’ve been blown away by all the use-cases we’ve seen from the community at DockerCon. From Docker for Space where NASA used Docker technology to build software to deflect asteroids to using “gloo” to glue together traditional apps, microservices and serverless, you all continue to amaze us year over year.

So this year, we want to celebrate you! From March 18th to the 31st, Docker User Groups all over the world will be hosting local birthday show-and-tell celebrations. Participants will each have 10-15 minutes of stage time to present how they’ve been using Docker. Think of these as lightning talks – your show-and-tell doesn’t need to be polished and it can absolutely be a fun hack and/or personal project. Everyone who presents their work will get a Docker Birthday #6 t-shirt and have the opportunity to submit their Docker Birthday Show-and-tell to present at DockerCon.

Are you new to Docker? Not sure you’d like to present? No worries! Join in the fun and come along to listen, learn, add to your sticker collection and Continue reading

Troubleshooting Webinar at Safari Books Online

I’m doing a live webinar on troubleshooting on Safari Books on the 19th of April—

Troubleshooting is a fundamental skill for all network engineers, from the least to most experienced. However, there is little material on correct and efficient troubleshooting techniques in a network engineering context, and no (apparent) live training in this area. Some chapters in books exist (such as the Computer Networking Problems and Solutions, published in December 2017), and some presentations in Cisco Live, but the level of coverage for this critical skill is far below what engineers working in the field to develop solid troubleshooting skills.

This course is grounded in the formal half split method of troubleshooting I learned back in electronic engineering applied to networks. It’s probably the most efficient and effective method of troubleshooting available.

You can register here.