In this Network Collective Short Take, Russ shares his thoughts on the practical and economical motivators for open source software and how reality is likely somewhat different from perception.
A separate
Internet: The MIT
Technology Review looks at the implications of Russia’s test to
cut itself off from the rest of the Internet, scheduled for early April. The
shutdown is a test of an Internet sovereignty law being considered in Russia,
but it’s unclear how the country will actually accomplish the disconnect.
Clamping
down: Egypt is cracking down on fake news with new rules that critics
say are meant to curb dissent and restrict information the government believe
is a threat to national security, The Hill
reports. The country’s Supreme Media Regulatory Council can now
block websites and some social media accounts with more than 5,000 followers
for what it believes is “fake news” and can fine operators up to US$14,400
without getting a court order. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir
Putin has signed two bills that critics say amount to censorship, Ars
Technica says. One bill allows stiff fines for disseminating what the
government determines is fake news, and the second allows fines and jail time
for insulting government officials, including Putin.
Encrypting the IoT: The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking at encryption methods to protect the Internet of Things and other computing devices against future encryption-cracking technologies, Continue reading
The need for safe, reliable, and easy-to-use communications tools has given rise to unified communications (UC), a strategy that integrates multiple communications modalities under a single management and security umbrella. The result is more effective communication, improved collaboration, and a boost to security and regulatory policies. Now that mobility is the primary networking vehicle for end users, it’s time for IT departments to make mobile unified communications (MUC) a priority.The most important benefit of MUC is the ability of organizations to finally leave behind the uncontrolled, untracked mish-mash of consumer-centric, carrier, and third-party communications tools traditionally applied over the years. Communications are a critical organizational resource; MUC is a much easier vehicle to manage and scale, and MUC offers the visibility and control that’s essential to enterprise IT deployments. These advantages will enable MUC to become the dominant provisioning strategy and mechanism for organizational communications over the next five to 10 years.To read this article in full, please click here
Werner Vogels recently published a blog post describing Amazon Aurora as their fastest growing service ever. That post provides a high level overview of Aurora and then links to two SIGMOD papers for further details. Also of note is the recent announcement of Aurora serverless. So the plan for this week on The Morning Paper is to cover both of these Aurora papers and then look at Calvin, which underpins FaunaDB.
Say you’re AWS, and the task in hand is to take an existing relational database (MySQL) and retrofit it to work well in a cloud-native environment. Where do you start? What are the key design considerations and how can you accommodate them? These are the questions our first paper digs into. (Note that Aurora supports PostgreSQL as well these days).
Here’s the starting point:
In modern distributed cloud services, resilience and scalability are increasingly achieved by decoupling compute from storage and by replicating storage across multiple nodes. Doing so lets us handle operations such as replacing misbehaving or unreachable hosts, adding replicas, failing over from a writer to a replica, scaling the size Continue reading
If you want to see what real competition might look like at some point in the future of the server racket, look no further than the Ethernet switch market, where switch ASICs and the companies that build switches alike have to fight for every dollar and make it up in volume every year without pause. … “Relentless Competition Drives Down Ethernet Switch Costs”
On today's Heavy Networking we explore the intersection of policy, politics, and technology with the Internet Governance Project (IGP), which connects tech and policy experts to help bridge gaps in understanding between these two communities, with the goal of influencing outcomes on issues such as free expression, privacy, and security.
In today’s post we’re going to talk about building a CI/CD pipeline for Cloudflare Worker’s using Travis CI. If you aren’t yet aware, Cloudflare Workers allow you to run Javascript in all 165 of our data centers, and they deploy globally in about 30 seconds. Learn more here.
There are a few steps before we get started. We need to have a Worker script we want to deploy, some optional unit tests for the script, a serverless.yml file to deploy via the Serverless Framework, a .gitignore file to ignore the node_modules folder, and finally, a .travis.yml configuration file. All of these files will live in the same GitHub repository, which should have a final layout like:
In a recent post we discussed a method for testing Workers. We’ll reuse this method here to test a really simple Worker script below which simply returns Hello World! in the body of the response. We will name our Worker worker.js.
addEventListener('fetch', event => {
event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
})
async function handleRequest(request) {
return new Continue reading
Van Gogh? Nope. A satellite image of phytoplankton populations or algae blooms in the Baltic Sea. (NASA)
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.5 billion: weekly visits to Apple App store; $500m: new US exascale computer; $1.7 billion: EU's newest fine on Google; flat: 2018 global box office; up: digital rentals, sales, and subscriptions to streaming services; 43%: Dutch say let AI run the country; 2 min: time from committing an AWS key to Github to first attack; 40: bugs in blockchain platforms found in 30 days; 100%: Norwegian government 2025 EV target;
Quotable Quotes:
@raganwald: You know what would really help restore confidence? Have members of the executive leadership team, and Boeing’s board of directors, fly on 737 Max’s, every day, for a month. Let them dogfood the software patch. I am ? serious.