Make It Equal: Celebrating Women Who Are Making a Difference

On 22nd September, 22 women will join a growing community of people who believe in a world of equal opportunity for women and girls.

The Equals in Tech Award is an annual event that gives awards to those who are helping girls and women get equal access, skills, and opportunities online and in the tech industry.

It’s our second year at the event and every year the finalists never fall short of inspiration.

This year, 22 finalists were chosen from among 357 nominations from 80 countries. They’re creating AI Accelerators, exploring new ways to train entrepreneurs, and empowering female healthcare professionals. Out of the 22 finalists, 5 winners will be chosen, each representing a specific category.

EQUALS is a global network delivered by a committed partnership of corporate leaders, governments, nonprofit organizations, communities, and individuals around the world working together to bridge the digital gender divide – by bringing women to tech, and tech to women – and in so doing, bettering the lives of millions worldwide.  To find out more, visit their website.

If you’re thinking about submitting an entry for next year’s Equals in Tech Award – here’s what you need to know.

Be a part of it! Continue reading

Introducing the Cloudflare Onion Service

Introducing the Cloudflare Onion Service
  • When: a cold San Francisco summer afternoon
  • Where: Room 305, Cloudflare
  • Who: 2 from Cloudflare + 9 from the Tor Project
Introducing the Cloudflare Onion Service

What could go wrong?

Bit of Background

Two years ago this week Cloudflare introduced Opportunistic Encryption, a feature that provided additional security and performance benefits to websites that had not yet moved to HTTPS. Indeed, back in the old days some websites only used HTTP --- weird, right? “Opportunistic” here meant that the server advertised support for HTTP/2 via an HTTP Alternative Service header in the hopes that any browser that recognized the protocol could take advantage of those benefits in subsequent requests to that domain.

Around the same time, CEO Matthew Prince wrote about the importance and challenges of privacy on the Internet and tasked us to find a solution that provides convenience, security, and anonymity.

From neutralizing fingerprinting vectors and everyday browser trackers that Privacy Badger feeds on, all the way to mitigating correlation attacks that only big actors are capable of, guaranteeing privacy is a complicated challenge. Fortunately, the Tor Project addresses this extensive adversary model in Tor Browser.

However, the Internet is full of bad actors, and distinguishing Continue reading

Using CSR1000V in AWS Instead of Automation or Orchestration System

As anyone starting their journey into AWS quickly discovers, cloud is different (or as I wrote in the description of my AWS workshop you feel like Alice in Wonderland). One of the gotchas: when you link multiple routing domains (Virtual Private Clouds – the other VPC) you have to create static routing table entries on both ends. Even worse, there’s no transit VPC – you have to build a full mesh of relationships.

The correct solution to this challenge is automation:

Read more ...

First Subsea Cable Across South Atlantic Activated

Yesterday marked the first time in recent Internet history that a new submarine cable carried live traffic across the South Atlantic, directly connecting South America to Sub-Saharan Africa.  The South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) built by Angola Cables achieved this feat around midday on 18 September 2018.

Our Internet monitoring tools noticed a change in latency between our measurement servers in various Brazilian cities and Luanda, Angola, decreasing from over 300ms to close to 100ms.  Below these are measurements to Angolan telecoms TVCABO (AS36907) and Movicel (AS37081) as the SACS cable came online yesterday.

A race to be first

In the past decade there have been multiple submarine cable proposals to full this gap in international connectivity, such as South Atlantic Express (SAEx) and South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) cables.

In recent weeks, the SAIL cable, financed and built by China, announced that they had completed construction of their cable and it was the first cable connecting Brazil to Africa (Cameroon). However, since we haven’t seen any changes in international connectivity for Cameroon, we don’t believe this cable is carrying any traffic yet.

What’s the significance?

In addition to directly connecting Brazil to Portuguese-speaking Angola, the cable offers Continue reading

ICANN sets plan to reinforce internet DNS security

In a few months, the internet will be a more secure place. That’s because the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to go ahead with the first-ever changing of the cryptographic key that helps protect the internet’s address book – the Domain Name System (DNS). [ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it. ] The ICANN Board at its meeting in Belgium this week, decided to proceed with its plans to change or "roll" the key for the DNS root on Oct. 11, 2018. It will mark the first time the key has been changed since it was first put in place in 2010.To read this article in full, please click here

ICANN sets plan to reinforce internet DNS security

In a few months, the internet will be a more secure place. That’s because the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to go ahead with the first-ever changing of the cryptographic key that helps protect the internet’s address book – the Domain Name System (DNS). [ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it. ] The ICANN Board at its meeting in Belgium this week, decided to proceed with its plans to change or "roll" the key for the DNS root on Oct. 11, 2018. It will mark the first time the key has been changed since it was first put in place in 2010.To read this article in full, please click here

Prep for Cisco, CompTIA, and More IT Certifications With This $39 Bundle

Large companies need to maintain a robust IT infrastructure if they want to thrive in the digital age, and they can’t accomplish this without certified IT professionals. Luckily, traditional schooling isn’t necessary to land an IT job; IT professionals simply need to pass their certification exams, and they can do so thanks to the wealth of training courses available. One such resource is this Ultimate IT Certification Training Bundle, which is currently on sale for $39.To read this article in full, please click here