Applied machine learning at Facebook: a datacenter infrastructure perspective

Applied machine learning at Facebook: a datacenter infrastructure perspective Hazelwood et al., _HPCA’18 _

This is a wonderful glimpse into what it’s like when machine learning comes to pervade nearly every part of a business, with implications top-to-bottom through the whole stack. It’s amazing to step back and think just how fundamentally software systems have changed over the last decade in this regard.

Just how pervasive is machine learning at Facebook?

  • “At Facebook, machine learning provides key capabilities in driving nearly all aspects of user experience… Machine learning is applied pervasively across nearly all services.”
  • “Facebook funnels a large fraction of all stored data through machine learning pipelines, and this fraction is increasing over time to improve model quality.”
  • “Looking forward, Facebook expects rapid growth in machine learning across existing and new services…. Over time, most services indicate a trend toward leveraging increased amounts of user data.. the training data sets are trending towards continued and sometimes dramatic growth.”

The modern user-experience is increasingly powered by machine learning models, and the quality of those models depends directly on the volume and quality of the data powering them: “For many machine learning models Continue reading

Internet Economics

The way in which we communicate, and the manner, richness and reach of our communications has a profound impact on the shape and function of our economy and our society, so its perhaps entirely proper that considerations of the manner in which we develop and tune public policies in this industry take place in open forums. One way is to bring together the various facets of how we build, operate and use the Internet and look at these activities from a perspective of economics and public policy.

GE rolls out its industrial IoT platform Predix out into separate company

GE has spun off its industrial internet of things platform into a separate company while making other changes including selling off its interest in field-service software  ServiceMax.These moves shake up of the company’s GE Digital division and also include parting ways with the group’s CEO, Bill Ruh.Predix is GE's ingestion and processing platform for industrial operations data, developed with the idea of providing a standardized way for companies to utilize the information coming from their sensor-equipped industrial gear. One business might use the software, which is delivered in a PaaS format, as a way to automate reliability and maintenance for production line equipment, another might use it to track whether a generator is in danger of breaking down.To read this article in full, please click here

Tools: Dark Mode Chrome Extension

“Eye Care” Add dark mode to Chrome via extension. Source seems to check out.  Source Web Site:  Dark Reader – https://darkreader.org/ Also has extension for Firefox and Safari.  Link: Dark Reader – Chrome Web Store – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh/related Side Note: All those years of brightest possible monitors declaiming about number of NITS a screen and now […]

The post Tools: Dark Mode Chrome Extension appeared first on EtherealMind.

Notes on Build Hardening

I thought I'd comment on a paper about "build safety" in consumer products, describing how software is built to harden it against hackers trying to exploit bugs.

What is build safety?

Modern languages (Java, C#, Go, Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc.) are inherently "safe", meaning they don't have "buffer-overflows" or related problems.

However, C/C++ is "unsafe", and is the most popular language for building stuff that interacts with the network. In other cases, while the language itself may be safe, it'll use underlying infrastructure ("libraries") written in C/C++. When we are talking about hardening builds, making them safe or security, we are talking about C/C++.

In the last two decades, we've improved both hardware and operating-systems around C/C++ in order to impose safety on it from the outside. We do this with  options when the software is built (compiled and linked), and then when the software is run.

That's what the paper above looks at: how consumer devices are built using these options, and thereby, measuring the security of these devices.

In particular, we are talking about the Linux operating system here and the GNU compiler gcc. Consumer products almost always use Linux these Continue reading

Enhance Security with NSX Cloud and Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure

While virtual desktops have successfully helped address security and operational challenges, IT organizations still have concerns about a growing threat landscape and an expanded security perimeter that they need to protect, especially in public cloud environments. Malware, phishing, and other emerging advanced threats can be used to compromise a virtual desktop to serve as jumping off point for an attacker to move laterally into the rest of the network.  Until now, customers could secure their VMware Horizon deployments in on-premises data centers with VMware NSX. We are happy to announce that NSX can now also secure virtual workloads deployed by VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, providing a more robust security posture in cloud-hosted virtual desktop environments in Microsoft Azure.

It’s been a great year for Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure. This service offering allows customers to easily pair their own Microsoft Azure capacity with the intuitive Horizon Cloud control to quickly deliver virtual desktops and apps to end-users in a matter of hours. There is a lot of momentum from customers as they adopt Horizon Cloud to deliver virtual desktops and application from their own Microsoft Azure infrastructure to any device, anywhere.

One of the key features of the Continue reading

Some Random Thoughts From Security Field Day

I’m spending the week in some great company at Security Field Day with awesome people. They’re really making me think about security in some different ways. Between our conversations going to the presentations and the discussions we’re having after hours, I’m starting to see some things that I didn’t notice before.

  • Security is a hard thing to get into because it’s so different everywhere. Where everyone just sees one big security community, it is in fact a large collection of small communities. Thinking that there is just one security community would be much more like thinking enterprise networking, wireless networking, and service provider networking are the same space. They may all deal with packets flying across the wires but they are very different under the hood. Security is a lot of various communities with the name in common.
  • Security isn’t about tools. It’s not about software or hardware or a product you can buy. It’s about thinking differently. It’s about looking at the world through a different lens. How to protect something. How to attack something. How to figure all of that out. That’s not something you learn from a book or a course. It’s a way of adjusting your Continue reading

Reading Between the MLPerf Lines

Every important benchmark needs to start somewhere.

The first round of MLperf results are in and while they might not deliver on what we would have expected in terms of processor diversity and a complete view into scalability and performance, they do shed light on some developments that go beyond sheer hardware when it comes to deep learning training. …

Reading Between the MLPerf Lines was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

VMware Cloud on AWS with NSX-T SDDC – Connectivity, Security, and Port Mirroring Demo

AWS with NSX-T

VMware Cloud on AWS with NSX-T SDDC – Connectivity, Security, and Port Mirroring Demo

 

VMware Cloud on AWS with NSX-T SDDC – Networking and Security

Watch the embedded demo below or view on the NSX YouTube channel here to see several cool NSX-T networking and security capabilities within VMware Cloud on AWS. The demo shows connectivity from VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC to on-prem via AWS Direct Connect Private VIF. Access to native AWS services from VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC is also shown. Additionally, Edge security policies, distributed firewall/micro-segmentation, and port mirroring are demonstrated. Continue reading

Weekend Reads 121418

Australia’s House of Representatives has finally passed the “Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill 2018,” also known as the Anti-Encryption Bill, on Thursday that would now allow law enforcement to force Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Signal, and other tech giants to help them access encrypted communications. —Swati Khandelwal @thehackernews.com

Equifax could have prevented a breach of its systems and the resulting leak of sensitive information on nearly 148 million people by focusing more heavily on security, creating a clear hierarchy of responsibilities, and reducing complexity in its infrastructure, a congressional committee concluded in a report released on Dec. 10. —Robert Lemos @darkreading.com

Small and home office routers are becoming major targets for criminals seeking to steal banking and other online account credentials belonging to Internet users. The latest indication of the trend is “Novidade,” a dangerous new exploit kit that multiple attack groups appear to be using to target routers belonging to millions of users in Brazil and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the world. —Jai Vijayan @darkreading.com

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) originally aimed to keep local traffic local and reduce dependence on third parties. However, ever-increasing traffic volumes create pressure for more dense and diverse peering, Continue reading

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