Strengthening Foundations for Creating Open Internet Standards

The Internet Engineering Task Force has reached a significant milestone in the process of evolving its own administrative structure to best suit the current requirements of its work. After nearly two years of discussion about various options, the IETF community has created the IETF Administrative LLC (IETF LLC), a new legal entity. Both the Internet Society’s CEO & President Kathy Brown and the Internet Society’s Board of Trustees Chair Gonzalo Camarillo have expressed strong support for the process that has led to this point, and for the direction the IETF has decided to take. Continuing its long-standing positions, the Internet Society also made financial commitments to support the process, and to the IETF going forward.

All of us at the Internet Society who work closely with the IETF believe this new administrative structure strengthens the the foundation for an Internet built on open standards. The new structure will not change any aspect of the IETF’s technical work or the Internet standards process, and clarifies the relationship between ISOC and the IETF. Importantly, the IETF and ISOC continue to be strongly aligned on key principles. ISOC initiatives related to the IETF, such as the Technical Fellows to the IETF and the Continue reading

The Datacenter Impact Of The GlobalFoundries 7 Nanometer Spike

Making money from sand is not as easy as making money from oil, and the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which has been assembling the GlobalFoundries chip making giant for the past decade is finding that out the hard way and as a consequence, the company is backing off on its development of 7 nanometer manufacturing techniques, which included a double whammy of traditional immersion lithography techniques as well as a move towards bleeding-edge extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology.

The Datacenter Impact Of The GlobalFoundries 7 Nanometer Spike was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

VMware sharpens security focus with vSphere Platinum, ‘adaptive micro-segmentation’

VMware is expanding its security range with a new version of its virtualization software that has security integrated into the hypervisor.“Our flagship VMware vSphere product now has AppDefense built right in,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told the audience at VMworld 2018, which kicked off this week in Las Vegas. “Platinum will enable virtualization teams – you – to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise.”[See our review of VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and check out IDC’s top 10 data center predictions. Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters] Announced one year ago, AppDefense is VMware’s data-center endpoint-security product, designed to protect applications running in virtualized environments. AppDefense uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to understand how an application is supposed to behave, and it detects threats by monitoring for changes to the application’s intended state.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware sharpens security focus with vSphere Platinum, ‘adaptive micro-segmentation’

VMware is expanding its security range with a new version of its virtualization software that has security integrated into the hypervisor.“Our flagship VMware vSphere product now has AppDefense built right in,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told the audience at VMworld 2018, which kicked off this week in Las Vegas. “Platinum will enable virtualization teams – you – to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise.”[See our review of VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and check out IDC’s top 10 data center predictions. Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters] Announced one year ago, AppDefense is VMware’s data-center endpoint-security product, designed to protect applications running in virtualized environments. AppDefense uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to understand how an application is supposed to behave, and it detects threats by monitoring for changes to the application’s intended state.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware sharpens security focus with vSphere Platinum, ‘adaptive micro-segmentation’

VMware is expanding its security range with a new version of its virtualization software that has security integrated into the hypervisor.“Our flagship VMware vSphere product now has AppDefense built right in,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told the audience at VMworld 2018, which kicked off this week in Las Vegas. “Platinum will enable virtualization teams – you – to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise.”[See our review of VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and check out IDC’s top 10 data center predictions. Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters] Announced one year ago, AppDefense is VMware’s data-center endpoint-security product, designed to protect applications running in virtualized environments. AppDefense uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to understand how an application is supposed to behave, and it detects threats by monitoring for changes to the application’s intended state.To read this article in full, please click here

Future Thinking: Mozilla Director of Public Policy Chris Riley on the Internet Economy

Last year, 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. We interviewed Chris Riley to hear his perspective on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.

Chris Riley is Director, Public Policy at Mozilla, working to advance the open Internet through public policy analysis and advocacy, strategic planning, coalition building, and community engagement. Chris manages the global Mozilla public policy team and works on all things Internet policy, motivated by the belief that an open, disruptive Internet delivers tremendous socioeconomic benefits, and that if we as a global society don’t work to protect and preserve the Internet’s core features, those benefits will go away. Prior to joining Mozilla, Chris worked as a program manager at the U.S. Department of State on Internet freedom, a policy counsel with the nonprofit public interest organization Free Press, and an attorney-advisor at the Federal Communications Commission.  

The Internet Society: Why is there a need for promoting a better understanding of technology amongst policy wonks, and of policy among technologists?

Chris Riley: Continue reading

Microsoft lures Win Server 2008 users toward Azure

Microsoft is offering extended support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 to customers who shift these platforms from on-premises into Microsoft’s Azure cloud.The scheduled ends of extended support for the 2008 versions of Server and SQL Server are Jan. 14, 2020 and July 9, 2019, respectively. But if customers move these workloads into the Azure cloud, they get three extra years of support at no extra cost beyond the price of the Azure service.In the past, when the end-of-life clock started ticking, organizations made a mad dash to upgrade operating systems and SQL servers in order to keep their systems supported. Some organizations chose to continue running their applications completely unsupported, unpatched and un-updated – a very bad thing to do in this age of viruses, malware and cyberattacks.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft lures Win Server 2008 users toward Azure

Microsoft is offering extended support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 to customers who shift these platforms from on-premises into Microsoft’s Azure cloud.The scheduled ends of extended support for the 2008 versions of Server and SQL Server are Jan. 14, 2020 and July 9, 2019, respectively. But if customers move these workloads into the Azure cloud, they get three extra years of support at no extra cost beyond the price of the Azure service.In the past, when the end-of-life clock started ticking, organizations made a mad dash to upgrade operating systems and SQL servers in order to keep their systems supported. Some organizations chose to continue running their applications completely unsupported, unpatched and un-updated – a very bad thing to do in this age of viruses, malware and cyberattacks.To read this article in full, please click here

Interview: Benefits of Network Automation (Part 2)

As promised, here’s the second part of my Benefits of Network Automation interview with Christoph Jaggi published in German on Inside-IT last Friday (part 1 is here).

What are some of the challenges?

The biggest challenge everyone faces when starting the network automation is the snowflake nature of most enterprise networks and the million one-off exceptions we had to make in the past to cope with badly-designed applications or unrealistic user requirements. Remember: you cannot automate what you cannot describe in enough details.

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Learning the structure of generative models without labeled data

Learning the structure of generative models without labeled data Bach et al., ICML’17

For the last couple of posts we’ve been looking at Snorkel and BabbleLabble which both depend on data programming – the ability to intelligently combine the outputs of a set of labelling functions. The core of data programming is developed in two papers, ‘Data programming: creating large training sets, quickly’ (Ratner 2016) and today’s paper choice, ‘Learning the structure of generative models without labeled data’ (Bach 2017).

The original data programming paper works explicitly with input pairs (x,y) (e.g. the chemical and disease word pairs we saw from the disease task in Snorkel) which (for me at least) confuses the presentation a little compared to the latter ICML paper which just assumes inputs x (which could of course have pair structure, but we don’t care about that at this level of detail). Also in the original paper dependencies between labelling functions are explicitly specified by end users (as one of four types: similar, fixing, reinforcing, and exclusive) and built into a factor graph. In the ICML paper dependencies are learned. So I’m going to work mostly from ‘Learning the structure of generative Continue reading

Is the Linux 4.18 kernel heading your way?

How soon the 4.18 kernel lands on your system or network depends a lot on which Linux distributions you use. It may be heading your way or you may already be using it.If you have ever wondered whether the same kernel is used in all Linux distributions, the answer is that all Linux distributions use the same kernel more or less but there are several big considerations that make that "more or less" quite significant. Most distributions add or remove code to make the kernel work best for them. Some of these changes might eventually work their way back to the top of the code heap where they will be merged into the mainstream, but they'll make the distribution's kernel unique -- at least for a while. Some releases intentionally hold back and don't use the very latest version of the kernel in order to ensure a more predictable and stable environment. This is particularly true of versions that are targeted for commercial distribution. For example, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Edition) will not be nearly as aggressively updated as Fedora. Some distributions use a fork called Linux-libre, which is Linux without any proprietary drivers built in. It omits software Continue reading