There’s a Techlash. The G20 Should Listen.

The Internet is at risk. Once thought of as the global equalizer, opening doors for communication, work opportunities, commerce and more – the Internet is now increasingly viewed with skepticism and wariness. We are witnessing a trend where people fare feeling let down by the technology they use. Fueled by unease and uncertainty about the growing scope of threats to security and privacy that come with an always-on, tech-driven world, people are now looking for ways to disconnect and are placing greater emphasis on values and human interaction.

The way we live our lives is now inextricably linked to the Internet – which is estimated to contribute US$6.6 trillion a year, or 7.1 percent of total GDP in the G20 countries by 2020. In developing nations, that digital economy is growing steadily by 15 to 25 percent a year. Yet the Internet essentially is under attack. Large scale data breaches, uncertainties about how our data is being used and monetized, cybercrime, surveillance and other online threats are impacting Internet users’ trust. We are at an important crossroads for the Internet and its healthy development is at stake.

It is our collective duty to find a response to the Continue reading

Security Aspects of SD-WAN Solutions

Christoph Jaggi, the author of Transport and Network Security Primer and Ethernet Encryption webinars published a high-level introductory article in Inside-IT online magazine describing security deficiencies of SD-WAN solutions based on the work he did analyzing them for a large multinational corporation.

As the topic might be interesting to a wider audience, I asked him to translate the article into English. Here it is…

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Python: the seven simple things network engineers need to know

Are you like me? Are you a network engineer, or other professional, transitioning their skill set to include programming and automation? Does your programming experience experience come from a few programming courses you attended in college a long time ago? Then please read on because I created this Python guide for people like you and me.

In this guide, I explain the absolute minimum amount you need to learn about Python required to create useful programs. Follow this guide to get a very short, but functional, overview of Python programming in less than one hour.

When you begin using Python, there are a lot of topics you do not need to know so I omit them from this guide. However, I don’t want you to have to unlearn misconceptions later, when you become more experienced, so I include some Python concepts that other beginner guides might skip, such as the Python object model. This guide is “simple” but it is also “correct”.

Getting Started

In this guide, I will explore the seven fundamental topics you need to know to create useful programs almost immediately. These topics are:

  1. The Python object model simplified
  2. Defining objects
  3. Core types
  4. Statements
  5. Simple programs
  6. Modules
  7. Continue reading

IoT vendors talk open buildings, black hats and a jam conspiracy

Welcome to what we’re hoping is the first in a long string of regular updates from the world of IoT; everything from security to platform news will be fair game, and the aim is to help you be better grounded in the rapidly expanding Internet of Things space.Schneider’s building open thingsSchneider Electric, the Andover, Mass.,-based building-infrastructure manufacturer, recently rolled out a new open framework for IoT implementations, dubbing the product EcoStruxure Building.[ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ] It’s a software platform that makes it easy for sensors and controllers to talk to each other, even in complicated, large-scale building projects where there could be a lot of both types of devices.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: How IoT is Impacting DNS, and Why It’s Scaring Both CISOs and Networking Pros

What impact is the internet of things having on enterprise networks and the way we use DNS? For many network and security pros today, the answer is “no clue,” due to the lack of source address validation combined with the explosive growth of IoT, expected to hit more than 75 billion connected devices by 2025[2].From embedded sensors laced with unknown code to devices that can exfiltrate data from otherwise secure networks, IoT devices are already leading a new wave of cyberthreats, from sensors designed with little or no thought towards security to network connectivity relying on default passwords, that can lead to cameras that query SQL databases. This blog post looks at some of the dangers with a view to how DNS can help stop them before they do harm.To read this article in full, please click here

Until we meet again…

As I wrap up my tenure at the the helm of the Internet Society on September 1,  I want to thank each and all of you for your engagement, support and friendship.  The last five years have been exhilarating—getting to know you, learning so much from you and acting together — to make the Internet better.

You have made a critical difference in strengthening and growing the Internet Society. The organization is now over 100 staff strong, serving on every continent but Antarctica.  We have grown to 126 Chapters in 108 countries, with 8 global Special Interest Groups (SIGs). The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) has joined our organizational membership and we have new and vibrant partnerships with civil society and human rights organizations. The IETF has adopted a new structure to better serve its administration. Our
youth outreach and our engagement with the Internet Hall of Fame honorees and ISOC alumni have allowed us to look to the future as we gain wisdom from those who shaped the Internet and the Internet Society. More policy makers and governmental organizations look to us for our reports, research and expertise allowing for increased dialogue and collaboration at a time when it is Continue reading

Populating New Namespaces Using Heptio Ark

Heptio Ark is a tool designed to backup and restore Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. As such, it enables users to do a bunch of very useful things like copy cluster resources across cloud providers or replicate environments for development, staging, testing, QA, etc. In this post, I’ll share a slightly different use case for Ark: populating resources into new Kubernetes namespaces.

Kubernetes namespaces, if you’re not familiar, are a way to scope resource names and provide a way to divide cluster resources between multiple resources via resource quotas (see the Kubernetes documentation on namespaces for more details). As such, when you create a new Kubernetes namespace, it’s empty. However, you may have a need or desire to have certain things present in every namespace within a cluster—for example, perhaps you have a set of ExternalName Services that point to resources outside the cluster to make it easier for applications and developers to integrate with external resources. Maybe you have a ConfigMap that developers can use to configure their applications. It could be that you want a particular secret to be present in all new namespaces so that developers don’t need to worry about managing certain credentials. In such Continue reading

What do you believe now that you didn’t five years ago? Centralized wins. Decentralized loses.

 

 

Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there's a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time.

I say unfortunately because ten years ago, even five years ago, I still believed decentralization would win. Why? For all the idealistic technical reasons I laid out long ago in Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing In The Ambient Cloud.

While the internet and the web are inherently decentralized, mainstream applications built on top do not have to be. Typically, applications today—Facebook, Salesforce, Google, Spotify, etc.—are all centralized.

That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977),  TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999).

We do have new decentalized services: Bitcoin(2009), Minecraft(2009), Ethereum(2104), IPFS(2015), Mastadon(2016), and PeerTube(2018). We're still waiting on Pied Piper to deliver the decentralized internet. 

On an evolutionary timeline decentralized systems are neanderthals; centralized systems are the humans. Neanderthals came first. Humans may have interbred with neanderthals, humans may have even killed off the neanderthals, but Continue reading

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