Weekend Reads ‭188A6‬

The security skills gap is real, and it is a problem. But what if you could replace the most basic security jobs with an AI? According to Gunter Ollmann @CircleID, this is possible today. The next question you might want to ask is this: if AI’s replace all the entry level positions, then how are we going to train up senior level engineers? Remember that every hiring manager wants someone with ten years of experience on a product that has only been out for two years…

US customers pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world, and broadband availability is sketchy at best for millions of Americans. But instead of tackling that problem head on, the FCC is increasingly looking the other way, relying on ISP data that paints an inaccurately rosy picture of Americans’ internet access. And as long as regulators are relying on a false picture of US broadband access, actually solving the problem may be impossible. —Karl Bode @The Verge

American businesses are in for a rude awakening. Sweeping new privacy regulations, such as the EU’s landmark GDPR law and California’s Consumer Privacy Act, along with the ongoing SEC probe of Facebook’s data Continue reading

The Presence of Community Networks in Latin America and the Caribbean

The community of Latin America and the Caribbean has maintained an incessant activity in community networks topics, particularly during September. This work has been reflected in various spaces, highlighting the Latin American Summit of Community Networks that took place in Argentina.

A Work with History

Interest in community networks in the Latin American and Caribbean region is not recent. At least since 2015, the operators of these networks have worked together, exchanging experiences and best practices. Part of the result of this collaboration is found in the documents of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity (DC3). It is worth mentioning that the creation of the Internet Society’s Special Interest Group on Community Networks (SIG CN) was announced during the closing ceremony of the IGF 2017 meeting.

The effort has been reflected in various spaces. This year, several operators of these networks were invited to participate in the Fifth Annual Latin America Spectrum Management Conference, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from September 5 to 7. On the last day of the Conference, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conducted a capacity building workshop on spectrum and community networks.

The Latin American Summit

In addition to their participation in Continue reading

Technology Short Take 105

Welcome to Technology Short Take #105! Here’s another collection of articles and blog posts about some of the common technologies that modern IT professionals will typically encounter. I hope that something I’ve included here proves to be useful for you.

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Security

The future of networking: Open source networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open source networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. Dan Kohn who leads the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation cites cost savings, improved resilience and higher development velocity for both bug fixes and the rolling out of new features for this change. Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking at The Linux Foundation used the term "open-sourcification" in his keynote.To read this article in full, please click here

The future of networking: Open source networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open source networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. Dan Kohn who leads the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation cites cost savings, improved resilience and higher development velocity for both bug fixes and the rolling out of new features for this change. Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking at The Linux Foundation used the term "open-sourcification" in his keynote.To read this article in full, please click here

The future of networking: Open networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. The conference drew both business and technical leaders focused on networking beyond software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) with deep technical tracks and opportunities for attendees to learn from peers across the industry.To read this article in full, please click here

The future of networking: Open networking is the ‘new norm’

If you weren’t in Amsterdam last week, you missed an extremely exciting conference – the Open Networking Summit Europe 2018. This Linux Foundation event drew more than 700 networking, development and operations leaders and enterprise users from open source service providers, cloud companies, and more.Chief among the conference themes was the idea that open networking is the "new norm," with lots of vendors attesting to how this theme is playing out in the IT industry. The conference drew both business and technical leaders focused on networking beyond software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) with deep technical tracks and opportunities for attendees to learn from peers across the industry.To read this article in full, please click here

I know you’ll be back: interpretable new user clustering and churn prediction on a mobile social application

I know you’ll be back: interpretable new user clustering and churn prediction on a mobile social application Yang et al., KDD’18

Churn rates (how fast users abandon your app / service) are really important in modelling a business. If the churn rate is too high, it’s hard to maintain growth. Since acquiring new customers is also typically much more expensive than expanding in existing accounts, churn hits you twice over. So it’s really important to understand what causes users to churn in your business, and ideally to be able to predict users likely to churn so that you can intervene. This paper describes ClusChurn, the churn prediction system deployed at Snapchat.

It has been argued for decades that acquiring new users is often more expensive than keeping old ones. Surprisingly, however, user retention and its core component, churn prediction, have received much less attention from the research community… While this paper focuses on the Snapchat data as a comprehensive example, the techniques developed here can be readily leveraged for other online platforms, where users interact with the platform functions as well as other users.

The central idea in ClusChurn is to cluster users into clusters that are meaningful Continue reading

NSX Cloud 2.3 – Support for AWS, Free Visibility into Public Cloud Workloads & more!

We are very excited about the following key NSX Cloud features which are shipping as part of the latest NSX release – NSX 2.3

 

Support for AWS:

NSX 2.3 now extends support for native AWS workloads. This is a big step towards VMware’s pursuit for a truly Hybrid Cloud NSX Solution. NSX customers can now simplify and scale operations across a growing number of accounts, subscriptions, virtual networks, availability zones and regions in AWS, Azure and private cloud. Furthermore, this opens the doors for adding more networking platform capabilities such as service insertion, etc.  Look out for more information on this in our future blogs.

 

Free Visibility into Public Cloud Workloads:

If you have an NSX-T based Datacenter deployed within your on-premise environment, it only takes one additional VM to extend your visibility to include all your Public Cloud workloads. Here is how you go about it: In the NSX-T download page, under the Product Downloads section, you will see the link to download “NSX Manager / NSX Cloud Service Manager / NSX Policy Manager”. This is the NSX Unified Appliance which can be configured as an NSX Manager, or NSX Cloud Service Continue reading

Are you ready? How to prepare for the DNSSEC Root KSK Rollover on October 11, 2018

skeleton key

Are you ready? Are your systems prepared so that DNS will keep functioning for your networks?  One week from today, on Thursday, October 11, 2018, at 16:00 UTC ICANN will change the cryptographic key that is at the center of the DNS security system – what we call DNSSEC. The current key has been in place since July 15, 2010. This is a long-planned replacement.

If everything goes fine, you should not notice and your systems will all work as normal. However, if your DNS resolvers are not ready to use the new key, your users may not be able to reach many websites, send email, use social media or engage in other Internet activities!

This change of this central security key for DNS is known as the “Root Key Signing Key (KSK) Rollover”. It has been in discussion and planning since 2013. We’ve written many articles about it and spoken about it at many conferences, as have many others in the industry. ICANN has a page with many links and articles at:

But here we are, with only a few days left and you may be wondering – how can I know if my systems Continue reading

Notes on the Bloomberg Supermicro supply chain hack story

Bloomberg has a story how Chinese intelligence inserted secret chips into servers bound for America. There are a couple issues with the story I wanted to address.


The story is based on anonymous sources, and not even good anonymous sources. An example is this attribution:
a person briefed on evidence gathered during the probe says
That means somebody not even involved, but somebody who heard a rumor. It also doesn't the person even had sufficient expertise to understand what they were being briefed about.

The technical detail that's missing from the story is that the supply chain is already messed up with fake chips rather than malicious chips. Reputable vendors spend a lot of time ensuring quality, reliability, tolerances, ability to withstand harsh environments, and so on. Even the simplest of chips can command a price premium when they are well made.

What happens is that other companies make clones that are cheaper and lower quality. They are just good enough to pass testing, but fail in the real world. They may not even be completely fake chips. They may be bad chips the original manufacturer discarded, or chips the night shift at the factory secretly ran through on the Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Identity awareness: it’s more than just a packet

It was about 20 years ago when I plugged my first Ethernet cable into a switch. It was for our new chief executive officer. Little did she know that she was about to share her traffic with most others on the first floor. At that time being a network engineer, I had five floors to be looked after.Having a few virtual LANs (VLANs) per floor was a common design practice in those traditional days. Essentially, a couple of broadcast domains per floor were deemed OK. With the VLAN-based approach, we used to give access to different people on the same subnet. Even though people worked at different levels but if in the same subnet, they were all treated the same.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Identity awareness: it’s more than just a packet

It was about 20 years ago when I plugged my first Ethernet cable into a switch. It was for our new chief executive officer. Little did she know that she was about to share her traffic with most others on the first floor. At that time being a network engineer, I had five floors to be looked after.Having a few virtual LANs (VLANs) per floor was a common design practice in those traditional days. Essentially, a couple of broadcast domains per floor were deemed OK. With the VLAN-based approach, we used to give access to different people on the same subnet. Even though people worked at different levels but if in the same subnet, they were all treated the same.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Identity awareness: it’s more than just a packet

It was about 20 years ago when I plugged my first Ethernet cable into a switch. It was for our new chief executive officer. Little did she know that she was about to share her traffic with most others on the first floor. At that time being a network engineer, I had five floors to be looked after.Having a few virtual LANs (VLANs) per floor was a common design practice in those traditional days. Essentially, a couple of broadcast domains per floor were deemed OK. With the VLAN-based approach, we used to give access to different people on the same subnet. Even though people worked at different levels but if in the same subnet, they were all treated the same.To read this article in full, please click here

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