DC CyberWeek Is Here!

DC CyberWeek Is Here!
DC CyberWeek Is Here!

Photo by Sarah Ferrante Goodrich / Unsplash

This October is the 15th annual National Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the United States, a collaboration between the US government and industry to raise awareness about the part we can all play in staying more secure online. Here at Cloudflare, where our mission is to help build a better internet, we look forward to this month all year.

As part of this month-long education campaign, Cloudflare is participating in D.C CyberWeek this week, the largest cybersecurity festival in the U.S, taking place in Washington, DC. This year’s event is expected to have over 10,000 attendees, more than 100 events, and feature representatives from over 180 agencies, private companies, and service providers. We will join with other leaders in cybersecurity, to share best practices, find ways to collaborate, and work to achieve common goals.

Along with the United States, the European Union also runs a month-long cyber awareness campaign in October, with the initiative having started back in 2012. The aim of this advocacy campaign is similar: promoting cybersecurity among citizens and organizations, and providing information on available tools and resources. Watch our CTO speak to some of the main considerations around Continue reading

Website update: Experiencing problems with translations into French and Spanish

I must apologize to readers of our French and Spanish versions of our website. We are currently experiencing a problem with our usage of the WordPress Multilingual (WPML) plugin that is preventing us from sending our new content out for translation.  It is proving to be quite difficult to identify and fix the issue. We are working with our development team, our hosting provider, and the WPML support team to find the solution. I hope that in the next couple of days we can solve this and return to our regular publishing in three languages.

Thank you for your patience.

P.S. Those who want more of the technical details can see the open WPML support ticket. You are also welcome to contact me directly at [email protected].

The post Website update: Experiencing problems with translations into French and Spanish appeared first on Internet Society.

Where The FPGA Hits The Server Road For Inference Acceleration

There are an increasing number of ways to do machine learning inference in the datacenter, but one of the increasingly popular means of running inference workloads is the combination of traditional CPUs acting as a host for FPGAs that run the bulk of the inferring. …

Where The FPGA Hits The Server Road For Inference Acceleration was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

How industrial predictive maintenance can prevent equipment failure

Entropy sucks. But industrial predictive maintenance can help it suck a little less for factories, oil rigs, aircraft engines, and even data centers. The key is to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning to help companies “accurately determine when a manufacturing plant, machine, component, or part is likely to fail, and thus needs to be replaced.”That, in a nutshell, is the point behind a fascinating new Google Cloud blog post by Prashant Dhingra, Machine Learning Lead, Advanced Solutions Lab, laying out “A strategy for implementing industrial predictive maintenance.”To read this article in full, please click here

Huawei targets Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm with new AI chips

Chinese smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co. announced at its Huawei Connect 2018 show in Shanghai an update to its Ascend artificial intelligence (AI) chips with a new set of cloud services, software, tools, training, and framework.The company is putting itself in direct competition with the main AI chip developers in the U.S., namely Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm, but also ARM, IBM, to some degree Google, and even fellow Chinese tech giant Alibaba.Chairman Eric Xu introduced the Ascend 910 and Ascend 310 chips along with the Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN), a chip operators library and automated operators development toolkit, and MindSpore, an inference framework for devices, edge networks, and cloud training.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: Facebook Bans ‘Clickbait’ Political Accounts

Good-bye clickbait? Facebook has tossed out more than 800 publishers and accounts it accused of trafficking in clickbait and political spam, the Washington Post reports. Facebook also accused some of the accounts of “inauthentic behavior,” otherwise known as fake news. The bans met with some resistance, with some critics saying Facebook’s terms of service represent a moving target.

Let’s Encrypt rising: Let’s Encrypt, a service that provides websites free SSL certificates, is helping the Internet move toward better encryption, Forbes says. Let’s Encrypt “may finally fix the broken world of HTTPS hosting and usher in an online future in which creating an HTTPS site becomes as transparent as visiting one,” the author writes.

Government’s role in IoT security: The U.S. government could drive more security into the Internet of Things industry by changing its tech acquisition standards, says Nextgov. Federal agencies could use the Federal Acquisition Regulation to enforce minimum security standards, the author suggests.

RIP Google+: Google is planning to shut down the consumer version of its Google+ social media site after the company disclosed a massive data breach there, The Verge reports. Google+ also has “low usage and engagement,” according to Google.

Insecure security cameras: Millions of Continue reading

Why Is Network Automation such a Hot Topic?

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

One of my readers asked a very valid question when reading the Why Is Network Automation So Hard blog post:

Why was network automation 'invented' now? I have been working in the system development engineering for 13+ years and we have always used automation because we wanted to save time & effort for repeatable tasks.

He’s absolutely right. We had fully-automated ISP service in early 1990’s, and numerous service providers used network automation for decades.

Read more ...

Capturing and enhancing in situ system observability for failure detection

Capturing and enhancing in situ system observability for failure detection Huang et al., OSDI’18

The central idea in this paper is simple and brilliant. The place where we have the most relevant information about the health of a process or thread is in the clients that call it. Today the state of the practice is to log and try to recover from a failed call at the client, while a totally separate failure detection infrastructure is responsible for figuring out whether or not things are working as desired. What Panorama does is turn clients into observers and reporters of the components they call, using these observations to determine component health. It works really well!

Panorama can easily integrate with popular distributed systems and detect all 15 real-world gray failures that we reproduced in less than 7s, whereas existing approaches detect only one of them in under 300s.

Panaroma is open source and available at https://github.com/ryanphuang/panorama.

Combating gray failures with multiple observers

Panaroma is primarily design to catch gray failures, in which components and systems offer degraded performance but typically don’t crash-stop. One example of such a failure is a ZooKeeper cluster that could no longer service write Continue reading

How to irregular cyber warfare

Somebody (@thegrugq) pointed me to this article on "Lessons on Irregular Cyber Warfare", citing the masters like Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, Mao, Che, and the usual characters. It tries to answer:
...as an insurgent, which is in a weaker power position vis-a-vis a stronger nation state; how does cyber warfare plays an integral part in the irregular cyber conflicts in the twenty-first century between nation-states and violent non-state actors or insurgencies
I thought I'd write a rebuttal.

None of these people provide any value. If you want to figure out cyber insurgency, then you want to focus on the technical "cyber" aspects, not "insurgency". I regularly read military articles about cyber written by those, like in the above article, which demonstrate little experience in cyber.

The chief technical lesson for the cyber insurgent is the Birthday Paradox. Let's say, hypothetically, you go to a party with 23 people total. What's the chance that any two people at the party have the same birthday? The answer is 50.7%. With a party of 75 people, the chance rises to 99.9% that two will have the same birthday.

The paradox is that your intuitive way of calculating Continue reading
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