The Black Elephant in the Room

The Black Elephant in the Room

When I come to work at Cloudflare, I understand and believe in this main purpose of why we exist: Helping to Build a Better Internet.

The reason why we feel like we can help build a better internet is simply because we believe in values that instill a nature of freedom, privacy, and empowerment in the tool that helps individuals broaden their intellectual and cultural perspective on the daily.

Knowing all of this, our own great company needs to be able to build itself daily into a better company. And that starts with having those conversations which are always uncomfortable. And let me be clear in saying this, being uncomfortable is a good thing because that makes one grow and not be stagnant. Saying all that, here we go...

The Afrocultural community at Cloudflare should take pride in being diverse and inclusive for all just as we all work together to help build a better internet for all.

And one of the many ways we can build upon this effort is to do more than just belong in a work place and eventually build off of that, feeling normal over time. When I mean belong, it’s more than the "Impostor Continue reading

Coppell ISD Integrates Security into Infrastructure via VMware AppDefense

What do you get when you provide 12,800 kids with technology and programming classes? You get 12,800 people who are getting ready for the modern workforce of today and tomorrow. You also get 12,800 potential vulnerabilities. With the growing quantity of phishing emails, ransomware and malware that Coppell Independent School District (CISD) already had to combat with a small staff, this Texas school system was looking for smarter solutions.

“All these students who have taken programming classes, they’re often looking to bypass administrative privileges, looking for ways around the internet filters, or looking for ways to play games on the school computers,” said Stephen McGilvray, CISD Executive Director of Technology. “So, in addition to all these external threats we have to worry about, we also have a bunch of homegrown, internal threats.”

The school district recently underwent a data center refresh, which included updates for VMware vSphere, VMware App Volumes and VMware Horizon, and launched the implementation of VMware NSX Data Center. During the refresh, their VMware sales rep told them about a relatively new security product called VMware AppDefense.

At its core, AppDefense shifts the advantage from attackers to defenders by determining and ensuring good application Continue reading

BrandPost: Top 2019 SD-WAN Predictions

For the past three years, SD-WAN has been one of the most talked about technology trends. All the discussion around SD-WAN has helped shine the spotlight on the business value enterprises can realize by changing the way they build their wide area networks.As the market continues to gain momentum coming into the new year, here are my annual predictions for SD-WAN and the future of the WAN edge infrastructure market. You can also view Silver Peak’s webinar to prepare for SD-WAN in 2019.SD-WAN Market ConsolidationTo read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 220: Cisco Announces ACI Anywhere; U.S. Prosecutors Target Huawei

Today's Network Break analyzes a slew of Cisco Live announcements including ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex for edge deployments, Huawei's run-ins with U.S. prosecutors, financial results from Juniper Networks and Mellanox, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 220: Cisco Announces ACI Anywhere; U.S. Prosecutors Target Huawei appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Japan to Probe Residents’ IoT Devices

Government hacking: Japanese government workers will be able to hack into residents’ Internet of Things devices in an attempted survey of IoT insecurity, ZDNet reports. The Japanese government recently approved an amendment that allows the survey by employees of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. The government hacking effort is part of Japan’s preparation for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. Government officials are worried that other hackers might use compromised IoT devices to launch attacks against the games.

Evolving encryption: A story at TechTarget looks at the evolution of the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, established in 2016. The free and automated certificate authority is “changing the industry in interesting ways” by making the certificate process less cumbersome, the story says. Meanwhile, a story at CSO Online looks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s efforts to encrypt the entire Internet and says that Let’s Encrypt is an important piece of that campaign.

Lagging encryption: Less than 30 percent of enterprise businesses encrypt their data across their on-premises environments, within their cloud services or on their mobile devices, according to a survey from French aerospace and security vendor Thales Group. A Computer Business Review story notes that encryption still isn’t widespread, Continue reading

Intel promotes Swan to CEO, bumps off Itanium, and eyes Mellanox

It was a busy week for Intel as it announced the promotion of CFO Bob Swan to CEO, ending a seven-month search, set a deadline for the life of its ill-fated Itanium processor, and is now reportedly in the running to buy Mellanox.I don’t think for a second these are unrelated. Swan is a money guy. Ending the life of Itanium and making a strategic acquisition are right in his wheelhouse.Swan’s elevation is just what analyst Jim McGregor called for a few weeks ago when I asked what was taking so long in the CEO search. Swan, 58, who joined Intel as CFO in October 2016, becomes Intel’s seventh CEO and only its second non-engineer. The first was the late Paul Otellini, and he worked out very well.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel promotes Swan to CEO, bumps off Itanium, and eyes Mellanox

It was a busy week for Intel as it announced the promotion of CFO Bob Swan to CEO, ending a seven-month search, set a deadline for the life of its ill-fated Itanium processor, and is now reportedly in the running to buy Mellanox.I don’t think for a second these are unrelated. Swan is a money guy. Ending the life of Itanium and making a strategic acquisition are right in his wheelhouse.Swan’s elevation is just what analyst Jim McGregor called for a few weeks ago when I asked what was taking so long in the CEO search. Swan, 58, who joined Intel as CFO in October 2016, becomes Intel’s seventh CEO and only its second non-engineer. The first was the late Paul Otellini, and he worked out very well.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel promotes Swan to CEO, bumps off Itanium, and eyes Mellanox

It was a busy week for Intel as it announced the promotion of CFO Bob Swan to CEO, ending a seven-month search, set a deadline for the life of its ill-fated Itanium processor, and is now reportedly in the running to buy Mellanox.I don’t think for a second these are unrelated. Swan is a money guy. Ending the life of Itanium and making a strategic acquisition are right in his wheelhouse.Swan’s elevation is just what analyst Jim McGregor called for a few weeks ago when I asked what was taking so long in the CEO search. Swan, 58, who joined Intel as CFO in October 2016, becomes Intel’s seventh CEO and only its second non-engineer. The first was the late Paul Otellini, and he worked out very well.To read this article in full, please click here

Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 4: Public Engagement

This is part 4 of a six part series based on a talk I gave in Trento, Italy. To start from the beginning go here.

We don’t believe that any of our software, not a single line of code, provides us with a long-term advantage. We could, today, open source every single line of code at Cloudflare and we don’t believe we’d be hurt by it.

How we think about Open Source

Why don’t we? We actually do open source a lot of code, but we try to be thoughtful about it. Firstly, a lot of our code is so Cloudflare-specific, full of logic about how our service works, that it’s not generic enough for someone else to pick up and use for their service. So, for example, open sourcing the code that runs our web front end would be largely useless.‌‌

But other bits of software are generic. There’s currently a debate going on internally about a piece of software called Quicksilver. I mentioned before that Cloudflare used a distributed key-value store to send configuration to machines across the world. We used to use an open source project called Kyoto Tycoon. It was pretty cool.‌‌

But Continue reading

Tech Field Day Extra @ CLEUR19 Recap

I spent most of last week with a great team of fellow networking and security engineers in a windowless room listening to good, bad and plain boring presentations from (mostly) Cisco presenters describing new technologies and solutions – the yearly Tech Field Day Extra @ Cisco Live Europe event.

This year’s hit rate (the percentage of good presentations) was about 50% and these are the ones I found worth watching (in chronological order):

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TensorFlow.js: machine learning for the web and beyond

TensorFlow.js: machine learning for the web and beyond Smilkov et al., SysML’19

If machine learning and ML models are to pervade all of our applications and systems, then they’d better go to where the applications are rather than the other way round. Increasingly, that means JavaScript – both in the browser and on the server.

TensorFlow.js brings TensorFlow and Keras to the the JavaScript ecosystem, supporting both Node.js and browser-based applications. As well as programmer accessibility and ease of integration, running on-device means that in many cases user data never has to leave the device.

On-device computation has a number of benefits, including data privacy, accessibility, and low-latency interactive applications.

TensorFlow.js isn’t just for model serving, you can run training with it as well. Since it’s launch in March 2018, people have done lots of creative things with it. And since it runs in the browser, these are all accessible to you with just one click! Some examples: