Internet Shutdowns cannot be a solution to political challenges in Chad

The Internet Society is concerned with the continuous disruptions of Internet and social media services in Chad in the month of April, 2018.

Internet shutdowns are not a solution to political and economic challenges.

Government ordered disruptions have been reported from 2nd of April 2018, in the context of political protests and unrest across the country.  This is not the first time Internet access has been suspended in Chad. In January 2018, the Internet was disrupted following demonstrations organized by civil society organizations. Again in 2016, Chad experienced an eight-month social media cutoff following controversial elections in 2016.

While we recognize that the Chadian government has a duty to maintain public order, there is little evidence on the benefits of shutdowns in preventing any sort of violent protests. On the other hand, there is growing evidence on the collateral damages resulting from taking people off the network.

One of these damages is economic. These disruptions have been estimated to have costed the country €18 million (approximately 13 billion CFA francs), according to Internet Without Borders. These are extremely conservative numbers that do not even take into account a set of cumulative economic factors.

Shutdowns also affect thousands of local entrepreneurs Continue reading

On the ‘web: How to Bridge the Network Skills Gap

The landscape is littered with training for all these new skills, but there is little time, or guidance, through the process of retraining into these new skills. The process of retraining, far too often, feels like leaving all your old skills behind and learning completely new ones. The seeming wide array of paths the average engineer faces, combined with the uncertainty of which of these paths forward represent the real future, can seem overwhelming. @TechTarget

NSX-T Automation with Terraform

NSX-T Automation with Terraform Do you want to maintain your network and security infrastructure as a code? Do you want to automate NSX-T? One more option has been just added for you! Following my previous post about NSX-T: OpenAPI and SDKs you might have figured out how easy it is to generate different language bindings for NSX-T. Thankfully to this, we... Read more →

NSX-T Automation with Terraform

Do you want to maintain your network and security infrastructure as a code? Do you want to automate NSX-T? One more option has been just added for you!

Following my previous post about NSX-T: OpenAPI and SDKs you might have figured out how easy it is to generate different language bindings for NSX-T. Thankfully to this, we have generated Go Lang NSX-T SDK that we use as a foundation of the new NSX-T Terraform provider.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software by HashiCorp. It allows creation, modification, and deletion of an infrastructure using a high-level configuration files that can be shared between team members, treated as a code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. These configuration files are written in HCL(HashiCorp Configuration Language) which is actually JSON with some fine-tuning. Plain JSON can be also used.

There are several important components in Terraform:

1. Providers are responsible for managing the lifecycle of the resources: create, read, update, delete. The Providers usually require some sort of configuration to provide authentication, endpoint URLs, etc. By default, resources are matched with the provider with the start of the name. For example, a resource nsxt_logical_switch is associated with provider called nsxt.

Example of Continue reading

Will Chapel Mark Next Great Awakening for Parallel Programmers?

Just because supercomputers are engineered to be far more powerful over time does not necessarily mean programmer productivity will follow the same curve. Added performance means more complexity, which for parallel programmers means working harder, especially when accelerators are thrown into the mix.

It was with all of this in mind that DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project rolled out in 2009 to support higher performance but more usable HPC systems. This is the era that spawned systems like Blue Waters, for instance, and various co-design efforts from IBM and Intel to make parallelism within broader reach to the …

Will Chapel Mark Next Great Awakening for Parallel Programmers? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Fixing reachability to 1.1.1.1, GLOBALLY!

Fixing reachability to 1.1.1.1, GLOBALLY!

Recently we announced our fast, privacy-centric DNS resolver 1.1.1.1, supported by our global network. As you can see 1.1.1.1 is very easy to remember, which is both a blessing and a curse. In the time leading up to the announcement of the resolver service we began testing reachability to 1.1.1.1, primarily using the RIPE Atlas probes. The RIPE Atlas project is an extensive collection of small monitoring devices hosted by the public around the world. Currently there are over 10,000 active probes hosted in over 3,000 networks, giving great vantage points for testing. We found large numbers of probes unable to query 1.1.1.1, but successfully able to query 1.0.0.1 in almost all cases. 1.0.0.1 is the secondary address we have assigned for the resolver, to allow clients who are unable to reach 1.1.1.1 to be able to make DNS queries.

This blog focuses on IPv4. We provide four IPs (two for each IP address family) in order to provide a path toward the DNS resolver independent of IPv4 or IPv6 reachability.

1.0.0.0/8 was assigned in Continue reading

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BrandPost: Can Your IT Infrastructure Withstand Extreme Weather?

It seems that every three to five years, the impact of inclement weather, storms, and floods appears to peak. And the periods in between weather events seem to be getting shorter. As the number and severity of storms continues to increase far beyond what we have typically experienced, many small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) are now forced to re-evaluate how well their IT infrastructure can continue to support the organization when there is a weather event. This is becoming a critical issue, as many SMBs may find themselves without power for multiple days, which has been the case with the recent nor-easters plaguing the East Coast.Too many SMBs have not assessed the ability of their power and cooling infrastructure to support critical IT equipment in the event of a short- or long-term power outage. Despite frequent and substantial changes at the hardware and application levels, power management and UPS solutions may be decades old. The impact of today’s digital business could not even be conceived of, let alone considered, in the design of these older, legacy backup systems. Further, many of the batteries that provide emergency power haven’t been changed or maintained in years. And many older UPS products Continue reading

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