Cisco Live 2018 – Yes, I Went Too

It’s been a very busy month or so. June is always like that, it seems. There’s ARRL Field Day, which is always the last rainy weekend in June. This year, Cisco Live was in June, and that typically includes Tech Field Day activities. Right before that, we had the whole family in town for a family reunion. There was all sorts of stuff going on. Now that most of that has blown over, I’ve collected my thoughts and wanted to talk about Cisco Live this year.

Those who are of any importance in the networking world (LOL!) converged on Orlando this to attend the conference. Orlando brings back all sorts of memories — from Taverna Opa to Sizzler to LISP explained with plates — and we’re all familiar with the Orange County Convention Center. It’s a great facility with enough room to handle the largest of gatherings. I don’t think I saw the attendance numbers, but I would guess there were 30,000 attendees at Cisco Live this year. A typical crowd for the event, and the venue was more than adequate.

This year, I went on the Imagine Pass instead of the full conference pass. This pass included Continue reading

Too Old To Rocket Load, Too Young To Die

Too Old To Rocket Load, Too Young To Die

Rocket Loader is in the news again. One of Cloudflare's earliest web performance products has been re-engineered for contemporary browsers and Web standards.

No longer a beta product, Rocket Loader controls the load and execution of your page JavaScript, ensuring useful and meaningful page content is unblocked and displayed sooner.

For a high-level discussion of Rocket Loader aims, please refer to our sister post, We have lift off - Rocket Loader GA is mobile!

Below, we offer a lower-level outline of how Rocket Loader actually achieves its goals.

Prehistory

Early humans looked upon Netscape 2.0, with its new ability to script HTML using LiveScript, and <BLINK>ed to ensure themselves they weren’t dreaming. They decided to use this technology, soon to be re-christened JavaScript (a story told often and elsewhere), for everything they didn’t know they needed: form input validation, image substitution, frameset manipulation, popup windows, and more. The sole requirement was a few interpreted commands enclosed in a <script> tag. The possibilities were endless.

Too Old To Rocket Load, Too Young To Die

Soon, the introduction of the src attribute allowed them to import a file full of JS into their pages. Little need to fiddle with the markup, when all the requisite JS for the page Continue reading

History Of Networking – Christian O’Flaherty – The Latin American Internet

In this episode of the History of Networking, we are joined by Christian O’Flaherty of the Internet Society to discuss the growth of the Internet in Latin America, including the unique role internet exchanges have played in the region, and the resulting connectivity patterns.

 

Christian O'Flaherty
Guest
Donald Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Christian O’Flaherty – The Latin American Internet appeared first on Network Collective.

Montenegro: Learning Coding in Primary School

Although coding has yet to be upgraded from an extracurricular activity, a growing number of countries are introducing programming as part of the school syllabus. Coding is considered a new literacy that is becoming more-and-more important as technology innovation is impacting every field of human knowledge. Educators have a key role in teaching primary school children to be passionate about computer science and stimulating their imagination and spirit of competition to solve problems. Learning how to code starting in elementary school helps pupils acquire skills that will be relevant in tomorrow’s labour market and get the highest-paying entry level jobs as they become college graduates.

Motivated by a successful programming course held in 2017, the Internet Society Montenegro Chapter decided to organize a CodeWeek Java Programming and applied for the Beyond the Net Funding Programme Chapter Small Projects, an initiative intended to assist Internet Society Chapters with financial support to fund small projects such as events, learning opportunities, skill development, and networking with local entities.

“This was more than great. I had fun in every sense of that word. I would recommend this course to every friend. Can’t wait till next year!”

“I like this way of studying. Continue reading

Grand Pwning Unit: Accelerating microarchitectural attacks with the GPU

Grand Pwning Unit: Accelerating microarchitectural attacks with the GPU Frigo et al., IEEE Security & Privacy

The general awareness of microarchitectural attacks is greatly increased since meltdown and spectre earlier this year. A lot of time and energy has been spent in defending against such attacks, with a threat model that assumes attacks originate from the CPU. Frigo et al. open up an entirely new can of worms – modern SoCs contain a variety of special purpose accelerator units, chief among which is the GPU. GPUs are everywhere these days.

Unfortunately, the inclusion of these special-purpose units in the processor today appears to be guided by a basic security model that mainly governs access control, while entirely ignoring the threat of more advanced microarchitectural attacks.

I’m sure you know where this is heading…

It turns out the accelerators can also be used to “accelerate” microarchitectural attacks. Once more we find ourselves in a situation with widespread vulnerabilities. The demonstration target in the paper is a mobile phone running on the ARM platform, with all known defences, including any applicable advanced research defences, employed. Using WebGL from JavaScript, Frigo et al. show how to go from e.g. an advert Continue reading

How can web-scale networking improve your campus networks?

When you think of your ideal campus network, the term “web-scale” may not immediately come to mind. After all, the term web-scale is something you’re more likely to associate with the cloud than with your network. But you might be surprised to learn that your ideal campus network fits the definition of a web-scale network to a T.

Fundamentally, a web-scale network functions as a single unit that can grow and change on demand, without requiring hands-on reconfiguration of multiple switches or mass hardware replacement. And because it functions as a single unit, a web-scale network can also give you full visibility into the health of your network, end-to-end.

The primary way web-scale networks achieve this flexibility and visibility is by decoupling or disaggregating the hardware and the network operating system (NOS) that runs on the hardware. Since the advent of specialized hardware networking devices, the operating system and hardware have been tightly coupled together. Proprietary NOSes often have platform-independent code that runs only on specialized hardware. Because of that, upgrading to a new software version often means buying new hardware. In some cases, that may be as simple as buying additional RAM to support the new version. In more Continue reading

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