BGP and Traffic Engineering Mechanisms for WISPs
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Nest Alert: Protection From Pwned* Passwords
A colleague just received an “Urgent Security Alert – Action Requested” email from Nest. At first glance it looked like either a phishing attempt or one of the way-too-often breach notifications we all receive these days. Instead, it was a real alert notifying him that the password he uses for his Nest account had been compromised in a data breach – not at Nest but somewhere else. Nest encouraged him to update to a unique password and enable two-step verification (additional authentication beyond a password, usually referred to as multi-factor authentication).
While it’s not clear exactly how Nest determined that the password was compromised, it could have come from security researcher Troy Hunt’s recently updated Pwned Passwords service (part of his “have i been pwned?” site). Via this service, you can enter a password to see if it matches more than half a billion passwords that have been compromised in data breaches. A hashed version of the full list of passwords can also be downloaded to do local or batch processing. (“Pwned” is video gamer talk for “utterly defeated,” as in “Last time we played, I pwned him.”)
Hunt created this service in response to the National Continue reading
Hitachi Pulls Itself Together In The Datacenter
Hitachi is a massive multi-national conglomerate that has more than 300,000 employees and 950 subsidiaries and a reach that extends into a wide array of industries, from aircraft and automotive systems to telecommunications, construction, defense and financial services. It also is among the world’s largest IT companies, nestled in there among the likes of Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Samsung. Hitachi’s sprawling technology capabilities ranges from compute and storage appliances in its well-known Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) unit to datacenter management software, data management and business intelligence, and the Internet of Things.
For the past several years, the company …
Hitachi Pulls Itself Together In The Datacenter was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Tracking Enterprise Infrastructure Evolution
Experts at Interop ITX discussed how cloud, containers, open source, and other trends are transforming IT infrastructure.
Layers of Single-Pane-of-Glass Abstractions Won’t Solve Your Problems
This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.
We’ve been told for years how we’re over-complicating networking, and how the software-defined or intent-based whatever will remove all that complexity and remove the need for networking engineers.
What never ceases to amaze me is how all these software-defined systems are demonstrated: each one has a fancy GUI that looks great in PowerPoint and might even work in practice assuming you’re doing exactly what they demonstrated… trying to be creative could result in interesting disasters.
Read more ...Progressive growing of GANs for improved quality, stability, and variation
Progressive growing of GANs for improved quality, stability, and variation Karras et al., ICLR’18
Let’s play “spot the celebrity”! (Not your usual #themorningpaper fodder I know, but bear with me…)
In each row, one of these is a photo of a real person, the other image is entirely created by a GAN. But which is which?
The man on the left, and the woman on the right, are both figments of a computer’s imagination.
In today’s paper, Karras et al. demonstrate a technique for producing high-resolution (e.g. 1024×1024) realistic looking images using GANs:
The key idea is to grow both the generator and discriminator progressively: starting from a low resolution, we add new layers that model increasingly fine details as training progresses. This both speeds the training up and greatly stabilizes it, allowing us to produce images of unprecedented quality.
You can find all of the code, links to plenty of generated images, and videos of image interpolation here: https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans. This six-minute results video really showcases the work in a way that it’s hard to describe without seeing. Well worth the time if this topic interests you.
Progression
Recall that in a GAN setup we pitch a Continue reading