Industrial IoT faces big challenges

Future cellular Internet of Things (IoT) networks are going to be expected to deliver much lower latency and significantly higher reliability. Getting to that point, however, must be a step-by-step approach, said a telco equipment executive at Mobile World Congress Americas earlier this month.“Doing one at a time is not so difficult, but doing both at the same time is a challenge,” said Jawad Manssour, head of Networks Portfolio Management at Product Area Networks with equipment maker Ericsson, during a presentation at the conference.Ericsson is one of the world’s big three principal base station and cellular equipment vendors, along with Huawei and Nokia. Mobile network providers Sprint and Ericsson recently announced that they are building a distributed virtualized core IoT network and an IoT operating system.To read this article in full, please click here

Industrial IoT faces big challenges

Future cellular Internet of Things (IoT) networks are going to be expected to deliver much lower latency and significantly higher reliability. Getting to that point, however, must be a step-by-step approach, said a telco equipment executive at Mobile World Congress Americas earlier this month.“Doing one at a time is not so difficult, but doing both at the same time is a challenge,” said Jawad Manssour, head of Networks Portfolio Management at Product Area Networks with equipment maker Ericsson, during a presentation at the conference.Ericsson is one of the world’s big three principal base station and cellular equipment vendors, along with Huawei and Nokia. Mobile network providers Sprint and Ericsson recently announced that they are building a distributed virtualized core IoT network and an IoT operating system.To read this article in full, please click here

Don’t Miss The Latest Module In Our Certified Ethical Hacking v10 Technology Course!

Module 9 is here! Tune into Josue Vargas’s newest video – Certified Ethical Hacking: Denial of Service to learn about DoS and DDoS attacks and how to prevent them.

About the Course

DoS and DDoS are disruptive attacks meant to bring a server or network out of operation. You might have seen some of this in the news, especially as related to hacktivism (people who hack for a cause). A DDoS attack can be a big financial hit on an organization. In this module you will learn how this type of attack is accomplished and even how it can be done stealthily. As an ethical hacker you will get the point of view of the attacker, as usual, but you will also learn how to protect your organization from this type of event using the right tools and strategies.

Cisco unearths 13 ‘High Impact’ IOS vulnerabilities you need to patch now

Cisco today exposed 13 vulnerabilities in its IOS and IOS XE switch and router operating software that the company said should be patched as soon as possible.The vulnerabilities were detailed in Cisco’s twice-yearly dump of IOS exposures. All have a High Impact security rating, and fixes should be evaluated by users quickly.[ Also see Invaluable tips and tricks for troubleshooting Linux. ] The company said this particular batch of issues could let an attacker gain elevated privileges for an affected device or cause a denial of service (DoS) on an affected device.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco unearths 13 ‘High Impact’ IOS vulnerabilities you need to patch now

Cisco today exposed 13 vulnerabilities in its IOS and IOS XE switch and router operating software that the company said should be patched as soon as possible.The vulnerabilities were detailed in Cisco’s twice-yearly dump of IOS exposures. All have a High Impact security rating, and fixes should be evaluated by users quickly.[ Also see Invaluable tips and tricks for troubleshooting Linux. ] The company said this particular batch of issues could let an attacker gain elevated privileges for an affected device or cause a denial of service (DoS) on an affected device.To read this article in full, please click here

Building a Community LTE Network in Bokondini, Indonesia

As part of our work in the University of Washington’s Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab, we recently spent four weeks in Bokondini, a village in the Papuan Highlands. During our time in Bokondini, we helped some community members extend Internet access throughout the village via a community LTE network, using a technology stack that we call CoLTE (for Community LTE).

The Area and Background

Bokondini is a small village (population ~1,500) in the Baliem Valley, a mountainous region located in the highlands of Indonesian Papua. The Papuan Highlands are a famously rugged, remote, and hard-to-cover area, and many inhabitants of the region live without any form of telecommunications whatsoever. Infrastructure in Bokondini is a remarkably ad-hoc process; for example, electricity comes from a small set of solar panels and a micro hydro generator, and tends to shut off between the hours of 9pm and 6am.

Bokondini’s current relationship to the Internet revolves primarily around the local school. The community pays for a small (1Mbps) satellite Internet connection that terminates at the local elementary school, where it’s used to provide WiFi coverage to teachers on the school campus. Coverage is extended to a few other houses in Continue reading

Forget ‘smart homes,’ the new goal is ‘autonomous buildings’

In 2018, the concept of a smart building is no longer surprising. With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), so-called smart buildings and homes are everywhere, providing various degrees of intelligent management and control of various building systems, including lighting, HVAC, communications, and security. In most cases, however, those “smart” capabilities are still relatively limited, don’t always work together, and require a significant amount of human attention to function.Dwight Stewart, founder and CTO of 5-year-old Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) vendor Igor, dreams of something much bigger and better. He sees the firm’s new Nexos smart building platform as the first step toward his vision of truly autonomous buildings.To read this article in full, please click here

Introducing Cloudflare Registrar: Domain Registration You Can Love

Introducing Cloudflare Registrar: Domain Registration You Can Love
Introducing Cloudflare Registrar: Domain Registration You Can Love

“I love my domain registrar.” Has anyone ever said this? From before Cloudflare even launched in September 2010, our early beta customers were literally begging us: "Will you please launch a registrar too?!" Today we're doing just that, launching the first registrar we hope you’ll be able to say you love. It's built around three principles: trust, security, and always-fair pricing. And it’s available to all Cloudflare customers.

Needing Secure Domain Registration Ourselves

Cloudflare has actually run a registrar for some time. Like many of our best products, it started by solving an internal issue we had. Cloudflare has several mission-critical domains. If the registration of these domains were ever compromised, it would be, in a word, bad.

For years, we worked with our original domain registrar to ensure these domains were as locked down as possible. Unfortunately, in 2013, a hacker was able to compromise several of the systems of the registrar we used and come perilously close to taking over some of our domains.

That began a process of us looking for a better registrar. Unfortunately, even the registrars that charge hefty premiums and promise to be very secure turn out to have pretty lousy security. Continue reading

Cloudflare Registrar: what happens when you register a domain?

Cloudflare Registrar: what happens when you register a domain?
Cloudflare Registrar: what happens when you register a domain?

Every website, large or small, started with an idea, rapidly followed by registering a domain. Most registrars offer promotions for your initial domain registration and then quietly hike the price with each renewal. What they don’t tell customers is that the price they pay to a registry, for your registration, is set by the registry. In some cases, we’ve found registrars charging eight times the wholesale price for a domain renewal.

Today, we’re launching Cloudflare Registrar, the first domain registrar you can love. Cloudflare Registrar will never charge you more than what we pay to the registry for your domain. No markup and no surprise fees. For eight years Cloudflare has built products that make the internet faster and safer. It's time for us to start where your internet journey starts, your domain.

A quick introduction to domain registration

When you register a domain, you become the owner, or registrant, for that domain for a set period of time. Now that you are the registrant, you can create an authoritative record that tells the world the nameservers for your domain. The domain name system, or DNS, uses those nameservers to direct traffic to the IP address of your server.

Continue reading

A Markdown-to-PDF Workflow on Linux

In May of last year I wrote about using a Makefile with Markdown documents, in which I described how I use make and a Makefile along with CLI tools like multimarkdown (the binary, not the format) and Pandoc. At that time, I’d figured out how to use combinations of the various CLI tools to create various formats from the source Markdown document. The one format I hadn’t gotten right at that time was PDF. Pandoc can create PDFs, but only if LaTeX is installed. This article describes a method I found that allows me to create PDFs from my Markdown documents without using LaTeX.

Two tools are involved in this new conversion process: Pandoc, which I’ve discussed on this site before; and wkhtmltopdf, a new tool I just recently discovered. Basically, I use Pandoc to go from Markdown (MultiMarkdown, specifically) to HTML, and then use wkhtmltopdf to generate a PDF file from the HTML.

The first step in the process is to use Pandoc to convert from Markdown to HTML, including the use of CSS to include custom formatting. The command looks something like this:

pandoc --from=markdown_mmd+yaml_metadata_block+smart --standalone \
--to=html -V css=/home/slowe/Documents/std-styles.css \
--output=<destination-html-filename> <source-md-filename>

This generates Continue reading

Guide to Cloud Computing Architectures

Choosing the right cloud computing architecture depends on your business and technology service requirements. This excerpt from Architecting Cloud Computing Solutions explains the different cloud models including baseline cloud architectures, complex architectures, and hybrid clouds.