Increasing Entropy with Crypto4A

Have you ever thought about the increasing disorder in your life? Sure, it may seem like things are constantly getting crazier every time you turn around, but did you know that entropy is always increasing in the universe? It’s a Law of Thermodynamics!

The idea that organized systems want to fall into disorder isn’t too strange when you think about it. Maintaining order takes a lot of effort and disorder is pretty easy to accomplish by just giving up. Anyone with a teenager knows that the amount of disorder that can be accomplished in a bedroom is pretty impressive.

One place where we don’t actually see a lot of disorder is in the computing realm. Computers are based on the idea that there is order and rationality in everything that we do. This is so prevalent that finding a way to be random is actually pretty hard. Computer programmers have tried a number of ways to come up with random number generators that take a variety of inputs into the formula and come up with something that looks sufficiently random. For most people just wanting the system to guess a number between 1 and 100 it’s not too bad. But Continue reading

Consumers International Summit: Making IoT Privacy and Security a Priority

Each day, more and more of us buy products that connect to the Internet, such as personal assistants, fitness monitors, appliances, and home security systems. Odds are you have one, two, or even more. There are more than 23 billion of these Internet of Things (IoT) products installed around the globe – roughly triple the world’s population – and that number is growing.

The Internet of Things offers the promise of convenience, efficiency, and more personalized services. However, many of these products are designed with little consideration for basic security and privacy protections.

The Internet Society and Consumers International formed a working partnership last year to address these challenges and to make sure consumers have access to trusted Internet-connected devices. We are proud to be lead partner at the Consumers International Summit, 30 April – 1 May, focused on putting consumers at the heart of digital innovation.

Consumers care deeply about their privacy, security, and how their personal information is collected and handled. On May 1 at the Summit, our President and CEO Andrew Sullivan will unveil new research from Consumers International and the Internet Society exploring what matters most to consumers when buying connected devices. He will also Continue reading

Must Watch: History of Cisco IOS CLI

My first Cisco router was a blade for a Cabletron modular hub (anyone remembers what hubs were or a company named Cabletron?). We plugged it in, I read the documentation, figured out I had to type conf t and was faced with a blinking cursor staring back at me from an empty line.

A few years later I was invited to beta test Cisco software release 9.21 (it wasn’t called IOS yet). The best feature it had was the awesome configuration CLI with context-sensitive prompts and on-demand help.

Read more ...

The Wistar network emulator

Wistar is an open-source network emulator originally developed by Juniper Networks and released under the Apache license. It simplifies the presentation of Juniper products on its graphical user interface by making the multiple VMs that make up each JunOS virtual router appear as one node in the network topology.

Wistar also supports Linux virtual machines and, interestingly, uses cloud-init to configure Linux routers from the Wistar user interface. Wistar also supports generic virtual appliances, in a basic way. In this post, I will install Wistar and use it to work through two examples using open source routers.

Wistar Documentation

The Wistar installation procedure is documented in the Wistar GitHib page. The Wistar user guide is available at the Read the Docs website and some unpublished chapters are available on GitHub. Juniper published a presentation about using Wistar. In addition, there are a few other other blog posts available about using Wistar and comparing Wistar to other network emulators.

Wistar documentation is good enough to get started, but seems to be incomplete.

Install Wistar

I installed Wistar on my laptop computer running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I modified the Wistar Continue reading

Install Packer on Linux

Packer is another fantastic tool in the infrastructure as code tool belt from Hashicorp. Packer allows you to build base or golden images for Hypervisors such as KVM, Virtualbox and VMware based on configuration files. But that is not all, it can even build images for cloud providers such...

Can’t Attend DockerCon 2019? Here are your Top 5 “To Dos”

If you’re not one of the thousands of expected attendees at DockerCon 2019 in San Francisco, don’t worry! There are still many ways you can stay connected to the announcements, awesome demos and all of the amazing content coming out of this year’s event. Although we will miss you this year, we’ve put together a few suggestions to stay current on all things DockerCon.

If you’re not one of the thousands of expected attendees at DockerCon 2019 in San Francisco, don’t worry! There are still many ways you can stay connected to the announcements, cool demos and all of the amazing content coming out of this year’s event. Although we will miss you this year, we’ve put together a few suggestions to stay current on all things DockerCon.

1.  Watch the Livestream of the DockerCon keynotes

Register now to see the DockerCon keynote sessions live – on Tuesday, April 30 at 9 AM PT and on Wednesday, May 1 at 9:30 AM PT. Hear the latest Docker announcements from Steve Singh (CEO), Kal De (CTO) and  Scott Johnston (GM, Enterprise Solutions), learn how a range of companies are using Docker to power their business and find out what Docker Continue reading

Dell EMC and Cisco renew converged infrastructure alliance

Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed a collaboration on converged infrastructure (CI) products that has run for more than a decade, even as the momentum shifts elsewhere. The news was announced via a blog post by Pete Manca, senior vice president for solutions engineering at Dell EMC.The deal is centered around Dell EMC’s VxBlock product line, which originally started out in 2009 as a joint venture between EMC and Cisco called VCE (Virtual Computing Environment). EMC bought out Cisco’s stake in the venture before Dell bought EMC.To read this article in full, please click here

Dell EMC and Cisco renew converged infrastructure alliance

Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed a collaboration on converged infrastructure (CI) products that has run for more than a decade, even as the momentum shifts elsewhere. The news was announced via a blog post by Pete Manca, senior vice president for solutions engineering at Dell EMC.The deal is centered around Dell EMC’s VxBlock product line, which originally started out in 2009 as a joint venture between EMC and Cisco called VCE (Virtual Computing Environment). EMC bought out Cisco’s stake in the venture before Dell bought EMC.To read this article in full, please click here

EQUALS in Tech Awards: Nominations Now Open

Are you working to building a better Internet for women? Do you know initiatives that are promoting the development of digital skills for girls? Is your organization contributing to defend the Internet by helping women get equal access to leadership opportunities?

If the answers are yes, we have something for you.

The EQUALS Global Partnership has announced that the nominations for the 2019 EQUALS in Tech Awards are now open.

The Awards recognize groundbreaking initiatives from around the world aimed at bridging the gender digital divide.

The nomination period will run until June 11, 2019. You can nominate your own initiatives or those of others for an award in one of the following categories:

  • Access: Initiatives related to improving women’s and girls’ digital technology access, connectivity, and security
  • Skills: Initiatives that support development of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills of women and girls
  • Leadership (two subcategories):
    • Initiatives focused on promoting women in decision-making roles within the ICT field
    • Initiatives promoted by tech sector companies to bridge the digital gender divide
  • Research: Initiatives prioritizing research on gender digital divides and producing reliable evidence to tackle diversity issues within STEM and computing fields

The annual EQUALS in Tech Awards are Continue reading

Rapid Development of Serverless Chatbots with Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

Rapid Development of Serverless Chatbots with Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

Rapid Development of Serverless Chatbots with Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

I'm the Product Manager for the Internal Tools team here at Cloudflare. We recently identified a need for a new tool around service ownership. As a fast growing engineering organization, ownership of services changes fairly frequently. Many cycles get burned in chat with questions like "Who owns service x now?

Whilst it's easy to see how a tool like this saves a few seconds per day for the asker and askee, and saves on some mental context switches, the time saved is unlikely to add up to the cost of development and maintenance.

= 5 minutes per day
x 260 work days 
= 1300 mins 
/ 60 mins 
= 20 person hours per year

So a 20 hour investment in that tool would pay itself back in a year valuing everyone's time the same. While we've made great strides in improving the efficiency of building tools at Cloudflare, 20 hours is a stretch for an end-to-end build, deploy and operation of a new tool.

Enter Cloudflare Workers + Workers KV

The more I use Serverless and Workers, the more I'm struck with the benefits of:

1. Reduced operational overhead

When I upload a Worker, it's automatically distributed to 175+ data Continue reading

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