Weekend Reads 121523

NTT Data has opened a hotel at which it plans to watch people sleep, as part of a plan to gather – and of course sell – data about the snoozing habits of ten million people.

Business and technical leaders should prepare to focus on memory safety in software development, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) urged on Wednesday.

A proposed fork of the OpenPGP standard, called “LibrePGP” and initiated by GnuPG’s maintainer Werner Koch, has made a series of statements on its own website1 in order to justify its existence.

Cisco has quietly introduced changes to the licensing model for its Catalyst range, and will bring it to more products over time.

ICANN’s response to the European Union’s Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) is a litmus test on whether its policy processes can address the needs of all stakeholders, instead of only satisfying the needs of the domain industry.

One of the joys of operational privacy professionals is getting that random, Friday afternoon Slack from someone on the product team asking, “Can we [insert questionable action] with our customer data?”

Lackluster security controls in one of Google’s cloud services for data scientists could allow hackers to Continue reading

HN714: Building The Branch Of The Future With SASE Powered By AI (Sponsored)

HN714: Building The Branch Of The Future With SASE Powered By AI (Sponsored)

SD-WAN and SASE are evolving to encompass more features and capabilities around security, application performance, network visibility, and more. On today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we look at how AI is transforming SD-WAN and SASE to help build the branch of the future.

The post HN714: Building The Branch Of The Future With SASE Powered By AI (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

D2C225: Security KubeConversations Part 2 – Cloud-Native Security Challenges

D2C225: Security KubeConversations Part 2 – Cloud-Native Security Challenges

This is part two of a special edition of Day Two Cloud with conversations recorded at KubeCon 2023 in Chicago. These conversations cover the state of cloud-native security, getting a holistic view of your cloud-native environment, security challenges for Kubernetes, and the state of the software supply chain.

The post D2C225: Security KubeConversations Part 2 – Cloud-Native Security Challenges appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Conditional Git Configuration

Building on the earlier article on automatically transforming Git URLs, I’m back with another article on a (potentially powerful) feature of Git—the ability to conditionally include Git configuration files. This means you can configure Git to be configured (and behave) differently based on certain conditions, simply by including or not including Git configuration files. Let’s look at a pretty straightforward example taken from my own workflow.

Here’s a configuration stanza from my own system-wide Git configuration:

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Work/Code/Repos/"]
    path = ~/Work/Code/Repos/.gitconfig

The key here is the includeIf keyword. In this case, Git will include the referenced configuration file specified by path, if the location of the Git repository matches the path specification after gitdir. Basically, what this means is that all repositories under ~/Work/Code/Repos will trigger the inclusion of the additional configuration file.

Here’s the additional configuration file:

[user]
    email = name@work-domain.com
    name = Scott Lowe
[commit]
    gpgsign = false

As long as I group all work-relatd repositories in the specified directory path, these values override the system-wide values. This means I can specify my work e-mail address as the e-mail Continue reading

Video: Language Model Basics

After a brief introduction of how the language models fit into the AI/ML landscape, Javier Antich explained the language model basics, including auto-regression, types of language models, the specifics of large language models, and potential use cases,

Video: Language Model Basics

After a brief introduction of how the language models fit into the AI/ML landscape, Javier Antich explained the language model basics, including auto-regression, types of language models, the specifics of large language models, and potential use cases,

Fortinet Releases Advisor, Its GenAI Assistant Focused on Threat Investigation and Remediation

Optimizing NSX Performance Based on Workload and ROI

Optimizing NSX Performance Based on Workload

Overview

Performance tuning, in general, requires a holistic view of the application traffic profiles, features leveraged and the criteria for performance from the application perspective. In this blog, we will take a look at some of the factors to consider when optimizing NSX for performance.

Applications

In a typical data center, applications may have different requirements based on their traffic profile. Some applications such as backup services, log files and certain types of web traffic etc., may be able to leverage all the available bandwidth. These long traffic flows with large packets are called elephant flows. These applications with elephant flows, in general, are not sensitive to latency. 

In contrast, in-memory databases, message queuing services such as Kafka, and certain Telco applications may be sensitive to latency. These traffic flows, which are short lived and use smaller packets are generally called mice flows. Applications with mice flows are not generally bandwidth hungry.

While in general, virtual datacenters may be running a mixed set of workloads which should run as is without much tuning, there may be instances where one may have to tune to optimize performance for specific applications. For example, applications Continue reading

KU043: How (& Why) To Contribute To The Kubernetes Release Team

KU043: How (& Why) To Contribute To The Kubernetes Release Team

Cloud engineer Leonard Pahlke talks about his experience over six terms on the Kubernetes release team, from joining to moving through various roles. He emphasizes the importance of community involvement, the welcoming nature of open source and cloud native fields, and the diverse opportunities for contribution.

The post KU043: How (& Why) To Contribute To The Kubernetes Release Team appeared first on Packet Pushers.

IPB141: IPv6 End Of Year Wrap-Up 

IPB141: IPv6 End Of Year Wrap-Up 

This episode looks at 2023 milestones for IPv6, including overall adoption levels, security advancements, and the state of IPv6-only in the enterprise.

The post IPB141: IPv6 End Of Year Wrap-Up  appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Intel “Emerald Rapids” Xeon SPs: A Little More Bang, A Little Less Bucks

With each successive Intel Xeon SP server processor launch, we can’t help but think the same thing: it would have been better for Intel and customers alike if this chip was out the door a year ago, or two years ago, as must have been planned. …

The post Intel “Emerald Rapids” Xeon SPs: A Little More Bang, A Little Less Bucks first appeared on The Next Platform.

Intel “Emerald Rapids” Xeon SPs: A Little More Bang, A Little Less Bucks was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Using DNS to estimate the worldwide state of IPv6 adoption

In order for one device to talk to other devices on the Internet using the aptly named Internet Protocol (IP), it must first be assigned a unique numerical address. What this address looks like depends on the version of IP being used: IPv4 or IPv6.

IPv4 was first deployed in 1983. It’s the IP version that gave birth to the modern Internet and still remains dominant today. IPv6 can be traced back to as early as 1998, but only in the last decade did it start to gain significant traction — rising from less than 1% to somewhere between 30 and 40%, depending on who’s reporting and what and how they’re measuring.

With the growth in connected devices far exceeding the number of IPv4 addresses available, and its costs rising, the much larger address space provided by IPv6 should have made it the dominant protocol by now. However, as we’ll see, this is not the case.

Cloudflare has been a strong advocate of IPv6 for many years and, through Cloudflare Radar, we’ve been closely following IPv6 adoption across the Internet. At three years old, Radar is still a relatively recent platform. To go further back in time, we Continue reading

netlab: Version-Specific Topology Files

TL&DR: If you’re using netlab to build labs for your personal use, you can skip this one, but if you plan to use it to create training labs (like my BGP labs project), you might want to keep reading.

Like any complex enough tool, netlab eventually had to deal with inconsistent version-specific functionality and configuration syntax (OK, topology attributes). I stumbled upon this challenge when I wanted to make labs that use two types of configurable devices.

netlab: Version-Specific Topology Files

TL&DR: If you’re using netlab to build labs for your personal use, you can skip this one, but if you plan to use it to create training labs (like my BGP labs project), you might want to keep reading.

Like any complex enough tool, netlab eventually had to deal with inconsistent version-specific functionality and configuration syntax (OK, topology attributes). I stumbled upon this challenge when I wanted to make labs that use two types of configurable devices.

Why Secure SD-WAN is a Pillar of Enterprise Cybersecurity

Fighting Back Against Fileless Malware