IDG Contributor Network: The evolution of storage from on-premises to cloud

Anyone that has kept up with this column knows I tend to focus on one storage architecture more than any other – the hybrid-cloud storage architecture. That’s because I truly believe in its ability to meet the challenges of today’s IT storage – ever-expanding data, multiple sites, a need for flexibility and scale, while simultaneously meeting specific performance demands. For this month’s column, I thought we would take a look at how we got to this point and see if this evolution informs where we might go in the near future.Early days – pre-NAS The very earliest business storage systems were designed for a world long-gone. One in which a business would be expected to manage maybe thousands of files. Even the largest enterprise would have a storage system to support hundreds of concurrent users, no more. These legacy systems had regularly scheduled down time for maintenance, but it was not unusual to not have access for unscheduled reasons.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The evolution of storage from on-premise to cloud

Anyone that has kept up with this column knows I tend to focus on one storage architecture more than any other – the hybrid-cloud storage architecture. That’s because I truly believe in its ability to meet the challenges of today’s IT storage – ever-expanding data, multiple sites, a need for flexibility and scale, while simultaneously meeting specific performance demands. For this month’s column, I thought we would take a look at how we got to this point and see if this evolution informs where we might go in the near future.Early days – pre-NAS The very earliest business storage systems were designed for a world long-gone. One in which a business would be expected to manage maybe thousands of files. Even the largest enterprise would have a storage system to support hundreds of concurrent users, no more. These legacy systems had regularly scheduled down time for maintenance, but it was not unusual to not have access for unscheduled reasons.To read this article in full, please click here

Microservices Management: Securing Endpoints

Building IoT-ready networks must become a priority

The Internet of Things (IoT) era has arrived, and over the next few years, billions of devices will be connected to company networks. How many? ZK Research has forecast that by 2022, there will be 80 billion connected devices. (Note: I am an employee of ZK Research.) ZK Research Given many network managers struggle running today's networks, adding orders of magnitude more devices certainly won’t make life better. Even if it seems IoT may be a few years off, it’s critical that network professionals start prepping their network now.To read this article in full, please click here

Building IoT-ready networks must become a priority

The Internet of Things (IoT) era has arrived, and over the next few years, billions of devices will be connected to company networks. How many? ZK Research has forecast that by 2022, there will be 80 billion connected devices. (Note: I am an employee of ZK Research.) ZK Research Given many network managers struggle running today's networks, adding orders of magnitude more devices certainly won’t make life better. Even if it seems IoT may be a few years off, it’s critical that network professionals start prepping their network now.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing DockerCon 2018 Session: Cool Hacks

One of the most anticipated sessions at DockerCon is Cool Hacks, where we showcase a few members of the Docker community pushing the envelope on what you can achieve with Docker, in a demo heavy session, showing trends of what innovators are building on top of the Docker platform. This year, we’ll talk about Space, AI and Serverless!

Past Cool Hacks have gone to be widely used: last year Marcos Nils and Jonathan Leibiusky showed Play with Docker, a Docker playground that you can run in your browser that is now used by tens of thousands of developers and system administrators monthly to learn the basics on Docker and was applied to learning Kubernetes with Play with Kubernetes; And Alex Ellis demoed a FaaS, a portable serverless platform running on top of Swarm, that grew into the OpenFaaS project, one of the 12 installable serverless platforms mentioned in the Cloud Native Foundation Serverless Working Group serverless landscape.

This post should whet your appetite for what to expect in Dockercon 2018 Cool Hacks session.

Docker for Space, software devops in a hardware world, and how we build software to hit an asteroid

Christopher Heistand, Flight Software Lead at Johns Hopkins University Continue reading

Upcoming Webinars: June 2018 and Beyond

Wow. Where did the spring 2018 go? It’s almost June… and time for a refreshed list of upcoming webinars:

• Christoph Jaggi will run do another free webinar – this time on Ethernet Encryptors– on June 5^th;
• I’ll run an Amazon Web Services Networking workshop in Zurich on June 13^th;
• We had to change the schedule a little bit: the last webinar before the summer break will be an overview of real-life automation wins on June 19^th.

Measuring the tendency of CNNs to learn surface statistical regularities

Measuring the tendency of CNNs to learn surface statistical regularities Jo et al., arXiv’17

With thanks to Cris Conde for bringing this paper to my attention.

We’ve looked at quite a few adversarial attacks on deep learning systems in previous editions of The Morning Paper. I find them fascinating for what they reveal about the current limits of our understanding.

…humans are able to correctly classify the adversarial image with relative ease, whereas the CNNs predict the wrong label, usually with very high confidence. The sensitivity of high performance CNNs to adversarial examples casts serious doubt that these networks are actually learning high level abstract concepts. This begs the following question: How can a network that is not learning high level abstract concepts manage to generalize so well?

In this paper, Jo and Bengio conduct a series of careful experiments to try and discover what’s going on. The initial hypothesis runs like this:

• There are really only two ways we could be seeing the strong generalisation performance that we do. Either (a) the networks are learning high level concepts, or (b) there may be a number of superficial cues in images that are shared across training and test datasets, Continue reading

Worth Reading: The value of edge computing

IoT and the much anticipated 5G takeover, as well as several other data-related advances, hinge on greater network efficiencies—that is, speed. Real-time processing and streamlined data pathways are vital to seeing these next-generation technologies take hold. —Bob DeSantis @Data Center Journal

Network Break 186: VPNFilter Malware Spreading; Happy GDPR Day!

Research: BBR Congestion-Based Congestion Control

Congestion control has proven to be one of the hardest problems to solve in packet based networks. The “easy” way to solve this problem is with admission control, but this “easy” solution is actually quit deceptive; creating the algrorithms and centralized control to manage admission control is much more difficult than it seems. This is why many circuit switched networks just use some form of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), giving each device connected to the network a single “slot,” and filling empty slots with idle frames, ultimately throwing bandwidth away in the name of simpler computation of fairness.

The problem space has, however, attracted a lot of research. In this post, I’ll be looking at one such effort, a research paper published in the October 2016 edition of ACM Queue describing a system called BBR, a congestion-based congestion control system. At the heart of this system is the concept of the bottleneck link, or bottleneck in the path, which is the lowest bandwidth, highest delay, or perhaps the most congested link in the path between two hosts. The authors use the following figure to describe the current operational point of most congestion control systems, and then the optimal point of Continue reading

Worth Reading: What drives IPv6 deployment

It’s been six years since World IPv6 Launch day on the 6th June 2012. In those six years we’ve managed to place ever increasing pressure on the dwindling pools of available IPv4 addresses, but we have still been unable to complete the transition to an all-IPv6 Internet. —Geoff Huston @Potaroo

Advertising Multiple Paths in BGP (BGP-Addpath)

The post Advertising Multiple Paths in BGP (BGP-Addpath) appeared first on Noction.

High School in China Installs Facial Recognition Cameras to Monitor Students’ Attentiveness | The Epoch Times

Software Defined Teaching

On Why I’m Shifting my Career Focus to Software

For the past few months I’ve been involved in a case study project with some colleagues at Cisco where we’ve been researching what the most relevant software skills are that Cisco’s pre-sales engineers could benefit from. We’re all freaking experts at Outlook of course (that’s a joke ) but we were interested in the areas of programming, automation, orchestration, databases, analytics, and so on. The end goal of the project was to identify what those relevant skills are, have a plan to identify the current skillset in the field, do that gap analysis and then put forward recommendations on how to close the gap.

This probably sounds really boring and dry, and I don’t blame you for thinking that, but I actually chose this case study topic from a list of 8 or so. My motivation was largely selfish: I wanted to see first-hand the outcome of this project because I wanted to know how best to align my own training, study, and career in the software arena. I already believed that to stay relevant as my career moves along that software skills would be essential. It was just a question of what type of skills and in which specific areas.

Continue reading

EIGRP: A Multi-Vendor Demo

TSB phishing attacks | Salted Hash Ep 33

TSB customers in the U.K. were already frustrated by the bank's technical problems, but now the situation has gotten worse as criminals take advantage of the chaos. Host Steve Ragan looks at recent TSB phishing attacks and the kit that powers them.

Happy Eyeballs v2 (and how I Was Wrong Again)

In Moving Complexity to Application Layer I discussed the idea of trying to use all addresses returned in a DNS response when trying to establish a connection with a server, concluding with “I don’t think anyone big enough to influence browser vendors is interested in reinventing this particular wheel.”

I’m really glad to report I was wrong ;) This is what RFC 8305 (Happy Eyeballs v2) says:

Large-scale analysis of style injection by relative path overwrite

Large-scale analysis of style injection by relative path overwrite Arshad et al., WWW’18

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site, or from the WWW 2018 proceedings page).

We’ve all been fairly well trained to have good awareness of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Less obvious, and also less well known, is that a similar attack is possible using style sheet injection. A good name for these attacks might be SSS: same-site style attacks.

Even though style injection may appear less serious a threat than script injection, it has been shown that it enables a range of attacks, including secret exfiltration… Our work shows that around 9% of the sites in the Alexa top 10,000 contain at least one vulnerable page, out of which more than one third can be exploited.

I’m going to break today’s write-up down into four parts:

1. How on earth do you do secret exfiltration with a stylesheet?
2. Injecting stylesheet content using Relative Path Overwite (RPO)
3. Finding RPO vulnerabilities in the wild
4. How can you defend against RPO attacks?

Secret exfiltration via stylesheets

Style sheet injection Continue reading

On Why I’m Shifting my Career Focus to Software

For the past few months I've been involved in a case study project with some colleagues at Cisco where we've been researching what the most relevant software skills are that Cisco's pre-sales engineers could benefit from. We're all freaking experts at Outlook of course (that's a joke ?) but we were interested in the areas of programming, automation, orchestration, databases, analytics, and so on. The end goal of the project was to identify what those relevant skills are, have a plan to identify the current skillset in the field, do that gap analysis and then put forward recommendations on how to close the gap.

This probably sounds really boring and dry, and I don't blame you for thinking that, but I actually chose this case study topic from a list of 8 or so. My motivation was largely selfish: I wanted to see first-hand the outcome of this project because I wanted to know how best to align my own training, study, and career in the software arena. I already believed that to stay relevant as my career moves along that software skills would be essential. It was just a question of what type of skills and in which specific Continue reading