Future Thinking: Chris Yiu

In 2017, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. While preparing to launch the 2019 Global Internet Report, we interviewed Chris Yiu to hear his perspective on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.

Chris is a senior policy fellow for technology in the Renewing the Centre team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. His work focuses on how new technologies can be used to enhance the functioning of liberal democracy, and on policy solutions to the new economic challenges of automation and the digital economy. Chris was previously a general manager at Uber and has held senior roles in a number of public, private, and third-sector organizations. He recently authored the report, “A New Deal for Big Tech: Next-Generation Regulation Fit for the Internet Age” (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 2018).

The Internet Society: In your report you write that this “new deal for big tech” is urgent for protecting democratic values globally. Why?

Chris Yiu: Political leaders face an external environment characterised by disruption Continue reading

Research: Legal Barriers to RPKI Deployment

Much like most other problems in technology, securing the reachability (routing) information in the internet core as much or more of a people problem than it is a technology problem. While BGP security can never be perfect (in an imperfect world, the quest for perfection is often the cause of a good solution’s failure), there are several solutions which could be used to provide the information network operators need to determine if they can trust a particular piece of routing information or not. For instance, graph overlays for path validation, or the RPKI system for origin validation. Solving the technical problem, however, only carries us a small way towards “solving the problem.”

One of the many ramifications of deploying a new system—one we do not often think about from a purely technology perspective—is the legal ramifications. Assume, for a moment, that some authority were to publicly validate that some address, such as 2001:db8:3e8:1210::/64, belongs to a particular entity, say bigbank, and that the AS number of this same entity is 65000. On receiving an update from a BGP peer, if you note the route to x:1210::/64 ends in AS 65000, you might think you are safe in using this Continue reading

Episode 42 – SD-WAN Beyond The Hype

There’s no doubt that Software-Defined Wide Area Networking is one of the most hyped technologies we’ve seen recent history. From cost savings to unprecedented simplicity, no claim seemed to be off limits when it came to controller driven networks. Now that’s it’s 2019 and some of the dust is settling we wanted to have a chat with a couple of engineers who have been in the thick of it and know what it’s really like to design, implement, and operate Software-Defined WANs.

 

We would like to thank VIAVI Solutions for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. VIAVI Solutions is an application and network management industry leader focusing on end-user experience by providing products that optimize performance and speed problem resolution. Helping to ensure delivery of critical applications for businesses worldwide, Viavi offers an integrated line of precision-engineered software and hardware systems for effective network monitoring and analysis. Learn more at www.viavisolutions.com/networkcollective.

We would also like to think PathSolutions for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. PathSolutions TotalView is designed to automatically dig deep into network devices to learn what they know about your network’s performance. This means your network is no longer full of mysteries because you know everything your network knows. Try TotalView on your Continue reading

Orange Matter: Where is Your Configuration Source of Truth?

Orange Matter Logo

I’ve been blogging for Solarwinds recently, posting on Orange Matter, with a cross-post to the Thwack Geek Speak forum. The post linked here looks at where we define our source of truth for device configurations; is it the device itself? Should it be? This is a key question when looking at automation, and one we should all be asking ourselves.

This post appeared on Orange Matter as “Where Is Your Config Source of Truth?“, but I’m also linking to the version posted on Thwack, mainly because that format allowed me to use more images and be slightly more irreverent, which is perhaps a bit more in character.

Where Is Your Config Source of Truth?

I’d love it if you were to take a moment to visit and read, and maybe even comment!

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Orange Matter: Where is Your Configuration Source of Truth? and give me a share/like. Thank you!

What Makes IoT A Security Risk?

IoT security is a pretty hot topic in today’s world. That’s because the increasing number of smart devices is causing issues with security professionals everywhere. Consumer IoT devices are expected to top 20 billion by 2020. And each of these smart devices represents an attack surface. Or does it?

Hello, Dave

Adding intelligence to a device increases the number of ways that it can compromised. Take a simple thermostat, for example. The most basic themostat is about as dumb as you can get. It uses the expansion properties of metal to trigger switches inside of the housing. You set a dial or a switch and it takes care of the rest. Once you start adding things like programmability or cloud connection, you increase the number of ways that you can access the device. Maybe it’s a webpage or an app. Maybe you can access it via wireless or Bluetooth. No matter how you do it, it’s more available than the simple version of the thermostat.

What about industrial IoT devices? The same rule applies. In this case, we’re often adding remote access to Supervisory Control And Data Acquistion (SCADA) systems. There’s a big market from enterprise IT providers to create Continue reading

What’s New in Ansible Tower 3.4

 

Red Hat Ansible Tower 3-4

We hope that 2019 will be a great year and the Ansible team is here to start it off right. We're happy to announce that Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.4 is now generally available. In this release, there are several enhancements that can help improve automation practices. Engineering has been working hard to enhance Red Hat Ansible Tower. We're most excited about workflows enhancements, job slices, and some other nifty features. Let’s dive a little deeper into what we’re excited about in this release.


Workflow Enhancements

The enhancements to workflows in Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.4 are a combination of internal and customer requested features. This is designed to bring needed hybrid cloud management capabilities to engineers and administrators around the globe.

Workflow Convergence

Workflow convergence enables a convergence step that tracks the completion of multiple workflow jobs before continuing. For example, when deploying application updates there might be a need to wait until a group of nodes drains from a load balancer pool before having a service stopped on any node in the group. This helps enable a more complete dependency chain for jobs inside workflows.

Ansiblt-Tower-Covergence-Workflows

Nested Workflows

Workflows have been able to have job templates Continue reading

Survey: Enterprises want end-to-end management of SD-WAN

(Editor’s note: Recent research by Enterprise Management Associates takes a look at how enterprises view currently available SD-WAN products. This article by Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA’s research director for network management, details highlights of  “Wide-Area Network Transformation: How Enterprises Succeed with Software-Defined WAN,” a report based on EMA’s survey of 305 WAN decision-makers at distributed enterprises. EMA has posted a free webinar  about the report.) To read this article in full, please click here

Survey: Enterprises want end-to-end management of SD-WAN

(Editor’s note: Recent research by Enterprise Management Associates takes a look at how enterprises view currently available SD-WAN products. This article by Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA’s research director for network management, details highlights of  “Wide-Area Network Transformation: How Enterprises Succeed with Software-Defined WAN,” a report based on EMA’s survey of 305 WAN decision-makers at distributed enterprises. EMA has posted a free webinar  about the report.) To read this article in full, please click here

SD-WAN Reality Gap

Here’s some feedback I got from a subscriber who got pulled into an SD-WAN project:

I realized (thanks to you) that it’s really important to understand the basics of how things work. It helped me for example at my work when my boss came with the idea “we’ll start selling SD-WAN and this is the customer wish list”. Looked like business-as-usual until I realized I’ve never seen so big a difference between reality, customer wishes and what was promised to customer by sales guys I never met. And the networking engineers are supposed to save the day afterwards…

How did your first SD-WAN deployment go? Please write a comment!

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Neural ordinary differential equations Chen et al., NeurIPS’18

‘Neural Ordinary Differential Equations’ won a best paper award at NeurIPS last month. It’s not an easy piece (at least not for me!), but in the spirit of ‘deliberate practice’ that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be gained from trying to understand as much as possible.

In addition to the paper itself, I found the following additional resources to be helpful:

Neural networks as differential equations

Consider a multi-layered neural network. We have an input layer and an output layer, and inbetween them, some number of hidden layers. As an input feeds forward through the network, it is progressively transformed, one layer at a time, from the input to the ultimate output. Each network layer is a step on that journey. If we take a small number of big steps, we end up with a rough approximation to the true transformation function we’d like to learn. If we take a much Continue reading

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