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Election interference from Uber and Lyft

Almost nothing can escape the taint of election interference. A good example is the announcements by Uber and Lyft that they'll provide free rides to the polls on election day. This well-meaning gesture nonetheless calls into question how this might influence the election.

"Free rides" to the polls is a common thing. Taxi companies have long offered such services for people in general. Political groups have long offered such services for their constituencies in particular. Political groups target retirement communities to get them to the polls, black churches have long had their "Souls to the Polls" program across the 37 states that allow early voting on Sundays.

But with Uber and Lyft getting into this we now have concerns about "big data", "algorithms", and "hacking".

As the various Facebook controversies have taught us, these companies have a lot of data on us that can reliably predict how we are going to vote. If their leaders wanted to, these companies could use this information in order to get those on one side of an issue to the polls. On hotly contested elections, it wouldn't take much to swing the result to one side.

Even if they don't do this consciously, their Continue reading

Tech calendar 2018-19: Upcoming events of interest to IT pros

Tech Events Event Description Starts Ends Location AWS re:Invent AWS Re:invent is Amazon's opportunity to update IT and business leaders on the latest features of its cloud service.The event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to more than 2,000 technical sessions, a partner expo, and more. 2018-11-26 2018-11-30 Las Vegas, NV IT Roadmap This one-day event focused on powering the agile enterprise looks at the latest approaches to make IT more responsive, nimble, and robust. 2018-12-06 2018-12-06 Washington, D.C. SXSW Covering everything from entertainment to entrepreneurship, this sprawling conference has tracks dedicated to Tech Industry & Enterprise, Coding & Development, Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, Health & Medtech, and VR/AR/MR. 2019-03-08 2019-03-17 Austin, TX Enterprise Connect Aimed at companies looking to upgrade or replace legacy systems or deploy and integrate next-gen communications and collaboration systems, services, apps and networks. 2019-03-18 2019-03-21 Orlando, FL Google Cloud Next Google Cloud Next is where the company announces all the latest updates to the Google Cloud Platform. The conference also offers educational, networking and hands-on opportunities for its more than 10,000 attendees. 2019-04-09 2019-04-11 San Francisco, CA Computex Taipei Based in Asia, this massive technology trade show and expo focuses on information Continue reading

Tech calendar 2018-19: Upcoming events of interest to IT pros

App Micro-segmentation How To’s: Informatica, Oracle and SAP

consolidated posts from the VMware on VMware blog

Are you someone that prefers a blank sheet of paper or an empty text pad screen? Do you get the time to have that thought process to create the words, images or code to fill that empty space? Yes to both — I’m impressed! Creating something from scratch is an absolutely magical feeling especially once it gets to a point of sharing or usefulness. However, many of us spend a bit more of our time editing, building upon or debugging. Fortunately, that can be pretty interesting as well.

In the case of setting up mico-segmentation with VMware NSX Data Center, you have a couple options on quickly getting started:

Those resources and more are great jumping off points especially since you likely have more than just Informatica, Oracle and SAP apps in your environments.

Now, should you have those Informatica, Oracle and SAP apps, then here’s the next level of details. I’m Continue reading

Weekly Wrap Podcast: WikiLeaks Unmasks Amazon Data Center Locations

SDxCentral Weekly Wrap for October 19, 2018. Ericsson's third quarter results get overshadowed by an ongoing corruption scandal.

Cisco’s Viptela SD-WAN Is the First VNF on Bell Canada’s VNS

The platform allows enterprise customers to deploy and manage applications and services that reside in the carrier’s private cloud. It comes with a 99.9 percent SLA for uptime.

SolarWinds Goes Public (Again)

The company opened on the NYSE at $15.30 per share and offered 25 million shares.

Automation: Flow Control & Dimensionality

Human beings as we are, struggle sometimes to think multi-dimensionally about tasks. Our brains seem to have a conscious layer and a sub-conscious layer. Whether you think in words, noise or images, your brain is a single threaded engine with a silent co-processor that can either assist or annoy. Experience has shown that we look at network automation challenges through this shaped lens and try and solve things that makes sense to humans, but not necessarily for mechanized processes.

In an attempt not to lose my own thread, I’ll try and explain some different view points through examples.

Example One: I’m English, Make me some Tea!

Making a a cup of tea is a very English thing to do and the process of making one will suffice for this example.

Let’s look at the process involved:

// { type: activity}
(Start)-><a>[kettle empty]->(Fill Kettle)->|b|
<a>-(note: Kettle activities)
<a>[kettle full]->|b|->(Boil Kettle)->|c|
|b|->(Add Tea Bag)-><d>[Sugar: yes]->(Add Sugar)->(Add Milk)
<d>[Sugar: no]->(Add Milk)
<d>-(note: Sweet tooth?)
(Add Milk)->|c|->(Pour Boiled Water)
(Pour Boiled Water)->(Enjoy)->(Stop)

Fig.1

This makes us a relative standard cup of English breakfast tea.

Let’s assume macros exist for milk and sugar quantity and the dealing of a mug or best china Continue reading

Street Curve

Curved street in Oxford England

When It Comes to IoT, We Must Work Together to #SecureIt

My first ever rendezvous with the word “IoT” was during my final year at a college conference, when a prominent regional start-up figure dispensed an oblique reference to it. I learned that IoT was the next big thing veering towards the mass market, which would eventually change the course of everyday human existence by making our way of life more convenient. What caught my attention was the term “things” in IoT – an unbounded category which could be anything from the the bed you sleep on, the clothes you drape, or even the personal toiletries you use.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a class of devices that “can monitor their environment, report their status, receive instructions, and even take action based on the information they receive.” IoT connotes not just the device but also the complex network connected to the device. Multiple studies have revealed that there are more connected devices than people on the planet. Although, combining computers and networks to devices has existed for long, they were previously not integrated to consumer devices and durable goods, used in ordinary day to day life. Furthermore, IoT being an evolving concept, exhibiting a range of ever-changing features, Continue reading

Weekly Show 412: What Managers Want From Their Teams

What does your manager want? On today's Weekly Show we talk to two managers to find out how they work with their teams, what they see as their roles, how they hire, and much more. Our guests are Michael Bushong and Omar Sultan.

The post Weekly Show 412: What Managers Want From Their Teams appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cumulus, Facebook Push Open Data Center Interconnect

Cumulus Networks launched a transponder abstraction interface, which is a vendor-agnostic way to manage transponders. This makes data center interconnect technology more open.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 19th, 2018

Hey, wake up! It's HighScalability time:

Now that's a cloud! The largest structure ever found in the early universe. The proto-supercluster Hyperion may contain thousands of galaxies or more. (Science)

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please support me on Patreon. I'd really appreciate it. Know anyone looking for a simple book explaining the cloud? Then please recommend my well reviewed book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love it and you'll be their hero forever.

four petabytes: added to Internet Archive per year; 60,000: patents donated by Microsoft to the Open Invention Network; 30 million: DuckDuckGo daily searches; 5 seconds: Google+ session length; 1 trillion: ARM device goal; $40B: Softbank investment in 5G; 30: Happy Birthday IRC!; 97,600: Backblaze hard drives; 15: new Lambda function minute limit; $120 Billion: Uber IPO; 12%: slowdown in global growth of internet access; 25%: video ad spending in US; 1 billion: metrics per minute processed at Netflix; 900%: inflated Facebook ad-watch times; 31 million: GitHub users; 19: new AWS Public datasets; 25%: IPv6 adoption; 300: requests for Nest data; 913: security Continue reading