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

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

AWS Cloud Services Overview: What’s New in 2018

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:

First Subsea Cable Across South Atlantic Activated

Qualcomm Sets Its Sights on Edge Computing, IoT and 5G

The chip maker is retooling its server business to focus on edge computing and is pushing hard on new growth areas like IoT and 5G.

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

The Graph Database Poised To Pounce On The Mainstream

Perhaps the most important decision that any company will ever make is how they intend to structure and store the information they will preserve to encapsulate the goods and services they provide to their customers. …

The Graph Database Poised To Pounce On The Mainstream was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

HPC And AI Can’t Compute Without Fast, Scalable Storage

By definition, HPC is always at the cutting edge of computing, driving innovations in processor, system, and software design that eventually find their way into more mainstream computing systems. …

HPC And AI Can’t Compute Without Fast, Scalable Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Worth Reading: For Whom the Dell Tolls

We are going to look at Dell from just before the deal went down and up until its second quarter of fiscal 2019, which ended in early August, and using the characterizations it currently has when it talks to Wall Street. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @The Next Platform

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

Kong Crushes API Orchestration Challenges

Kong CEO and co-founder Augusto Marietti has touted the company’s platform as an “air traffic control to manage, broker, and hold APIs.”

Scality Rolls Out Multi-Cloud Management Tool Zenko in Open Source and Enterprise Editions

The product uses a Kubernetes orchestration framework. It supports on-premises storage devices and cloud storage from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Digital Ocean, Wasabi, and Scality’s software-defined storage platform Ring.

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

On the ‘net: FDDI

Token Ring, in its original form, was clearly a superior technology. For instance, because of the token passing capabilities, it could make use of more than 90% of the available bandwidth. In contrast, Ethernet systems, particularly early Ethernet systems used a true “single wire” broadcast domain. The Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), is like Token Ring in many ways.

NFV Equipment and Software to Top $48B by 2023, Ovum Says

Although Tier 1 operators are leading the way with NFV, the research firm says that it believes smaller operators will begin to see the benefits as well.  

Nuage Networks SD-WAN 2.0 Brings Connectivity Beyond Branches

SD-WAN 2.0 takes into account the new requirements of IT and new enterprise communication patterns to spread SD-WAN across multiple locations and clouds, says Nuage CEO Sunil Khandekar.

Google Rounds Out Insight into TPU Architecture and Inference

This week we have heard much about the inference side of the deep learning workload, with a range of startups emerging at the AI Hardware Summit. …

Google Rounds Out Insight into TPU Architecture and Inference was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

Announcing general availability of VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.3.0

With this release, NSX-T 2.3 continues to enable VMware’s vision of delivering consistent, pervasive connectivity and intrinsic security for applications and data across any environment. These new advancements help customers implement a more secure, end-to-end software-based network architecture – a Virtual Cloud Network – that supports their multi-cloud enterprises and advanced security in new and compelling ways.

NSX-T Data Center 2.3 extends advanced multi-cloud networking and security capabilities to AWS, in addition to Microsoft Azure and on-premises environments, and adds support for bare metal hosts as well.

Here are a few highlighted features among what’s new in this release.

Extending NSX-T Data Center support for Bare-Metal

NSX-T Data Center 2.3 introduces support for bare metal hosts, in addition to hypervisor and container environments. This includes Linux-based workloads running on bare-metal servers, as well as containers running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor. To support this new capability, NSX-T leverages the Open vSwitch, allowing any Linux host to be an NSX-T transport node.

Bare-Metal Server Support

This release introduces support for Bare-Metal native compute workloads running RHEL 7.4, 7.5, CentOS 7.4, and Ubuntu 16.0.4 operating systems that allows users to network Bare-Metal compute Continue reading

Hybrid IoT communications could be the best option

Using a sole communications technology doesn’t make sense in many Internet of Things (IoT) implementations, says connectivity vendor Sigfox.In fact, the company, which provides Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks, says one could use a hybrid that includes an unlicensed LPWA network along with a licensed, cellular LTE narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or LTE Cat M1 network solution instead. That way you can support cheap, unlicensed IoT short messaging close up, as is offered by Sigfox and others, and then offload the sensor traffic to more expensive, licensed LTE cellular mobile networks as the devices move off home base, such as what happens in asset tracking, Sigfox says.To read this article in full, please click here

Hybrid IoT communications could be the best option

Using a sole communications technology doesn’t make sense in many Internet of Things (IoT) implementations, says connectivity vendor Sigfox.In fact, the company, which provides Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks, says one could use a hybrid that includes an unlicensed LPWA network along with a licensed, cellular LTE narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or LTE Cat M1 network solution instead. That way you can support cheap, unlicensed IoT short messaging close up, as is offered by Sigfox and others, and then offload the sensor traffic to more expensive, licensed LTE cellular mobile networks as the devices move off home base, such as what happens in asset tracking, Sigfox says.To read this article in full, please click here