Connecting 500K Bolivians to a National Research and Education Network

As players in the development of the Internet in the world, the academic and scientific communities of the five continents have made important efforts to establish National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) to interconnect universities and research centers to exchange information at a regional level. Examples of these networks are GÉANT in Europe, Internet 2 in the United States, and RedCLARA (Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks) in the Latin American region.

The Bolivian academic sector is made up of more than 60 universities with half a million students and 20,000 teachers. Unfortunately Bolivia is the only country that is not connected to RedCLARA. Bolivia not only lacks connection with any NREN, but also has not managed to constitute its own National Academic Scientific Network. Since 2002, several attempts have been made, involving more than 30 universities in the country. As a result, the statutes and regulations of the Bolivian Integration Academic Network (RIAB) have been drafted.

The project Red Academica Boliviana, led by the Internet Society Bolivia Chapter and supported by Beyond the Net Funding Programme, has a long-term goal: to lay the foundations that will strengthen the development of research and education in Bolivia through the Continue reading

2,600 meters closer to the stars: Cloudflare Data Center #149 in Bogotá, Colombia

2,600 meters closer to the stars: Cloudflare Data Center #149 in Bogotá, Colombia

2,600 meters closer to the stars: Cloudflare Data Center #149 in Bogotá, Colombia
At 2625 meters (8612 feet) above sea level, Bogotá (Colombia) is one of the four highest capital cities in the world. Now, it is also home to Cloudflare's 149th data center.

This is the 29th city to be added just in March, and joins our existing Colombia datacenter in Medellín, launched four years ago.

2,600 meters closer to the stars: Cloudflare Data Center #149 in Bogotá, ColombiaCC BY-SA 2.0 image by nigel_sb

Bogotá is the third largest city in South America after São Paulo (Brazil) and Lima (Peru). Bogotanos affectionately known as Rolos are proud of their city with its rich cultural heritage, and its modern transportation systems (Ciclovias, Transmilenio) despite the heavy traffic. Whether you are visiting the world famous gold museum or savoring the mouthwatering Ajiaco soup, Bogotá has something for everyone, and visitors are always warmly received by the locals.

2,600 meters closer to the stars: Cloudflare Data Center #149 in Bogotá, ColombiaCC BY-SA 2.0 image by krossbow

Bogotá is our 11th deployment in the Latin America and Caribbean Region, and is located at a Tier III facility in the Bogota Free Trade Zone specially developed to attract ICT Investments. We'll continue our expansions in the Latin America and Caribbean region (and around the world!).

Come meet the Cloudflare team at the LACNIC29 Meeting in end April Continue reading

SpaceX Gets US Approval to Launch Space-Based Broadband Service

If all goes as planned, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will eventually launch 4,425 satellites into orbit with the goal of delivering broadband service to all corners of the Earth.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission, on Wednesday, approved SpaceX’s request to move forward with its space-based broadband proposal, on the condition that the aerospace company launch half of the satellites within six years.

Once deployed, the low-Earth orbit satellites will cover the entire United States, including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and eventually, provide “full-time coverage to virtually the entire planet,” the FCC said in its approval order.

SpaceX plans to begin launching the satellites in 2019. About 800 satellites will need to be deployed for the broadband service to be operational. The company, in the midst of launching 10 satellites on Friday, didn’t have an immediate comment on the FCC approval.

The company calls the proposed service “Starlink” and plans to offer wireless broadband speeds comparable to fiber-optic service.

The FCC imposed a number of conditions on SpaceX’s application. Several other satellite operators raised concerns about spectral interference from the SpaceX satellites, and others suggested the large number of satellites would eventually lead to orbital debris, or Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 30th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics.

 

  • 6,000: new viri spotted by AI; 300,000: Uber requests per second; 10TB & 600 years: new next-gen optical disk; 32,000: sites running Coinhive’s JavaScript miner code; $1 billion: Uber loss per quarter; 3.5%: global NAND flash output lost to power outage; 100TB: new SSD; 48TB: RAM on one server; 200 million: Telegram monthly active users; 2,000: days Curiosity Rover on Mars; 225: emerging trends; 4,425: SpaceX satellites approved; 

  • Quotable Quotes:

Show 383: Optimizing Internet Traffic With Expereo (Sponsored)

BGP is good for keeping the Internet connected. And that s about it. BGP isn t good at optimizing the path between two endpoints, as it s more about optimizing service provider costs than traffic performance.

Therefore, there are products on the market that optimize your traffic flows across the Internet despite default BGP behavior. Some of these products actually manipulate BGP, which will be the focus of our sponsored show today. Our sponsor Expereo is here to discuss their XCA and XCA Edge products with us.

Joining us from Expereo are Francois Devienne, VP of Networks; and Sander Barens, VP of Commercial Development.

Expereo is a managed service provider. We discuss how the company optimizes BGP to get the best out of the Internet, and explore Expereo’s XCA and XCA Edge products.

Show Links:

Expereo

Expereo XCA Edge

The post Show 383: Optimizing Internet Traffic With Expereo (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Weekend Reads 033018: Olympic Destroyer, SONiC, and all the rest

The crippling Olympic Destroyer attack that hit several systems supporting the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics last month may have forever changed the game of attack attribution: the sophisticated attackers created a convincing forgery of malware associated with the North Korean nation-state Lazarus Group, fooling several experts who initially pinned the blame for the attacks on the DPRK. —Kelly Jackson Higgins @Dark Reading

SONiC is the default switch OS powering Azure and many other parts of the Microsoft Cloud. Since last year’s Summit, we have grown its footprint substantially and are now also powering services such as our AI platform, making sure researches have the very best experience when working on solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. —Yousef Khalidi @Azure

For decades, academics and technologists have sparred with the government over access to crypographic technology. In the 1970s, when crypto started to become an academic discipline, the NSA was worried, fearing that they’d lose the ability to read other countries’ traffic. And they acted. For example, they exerted pressure to weaken DES. —Steve Bellovin @CircleID

Cybersecurity attacks have become a weekly occurrence in many news columns. One recent example was that of one of our customers, QIWI payment system, successfully Continue reading

Juma Baldeh: Breaking Barriers to Access in Gambia

How do you shift the cultural stigma around technology and gender? As Juma Baldeh has proven in Gambia, you do it one girl at a time. Baldeh founded Hackathon Girls Banjul for girls ages 8 to 18 in her home country, in coordination with the Mozilla Foundation. As the first technology club of its kind there, members receive six months of free weekly classes on web literacy and basic computing skills. More importantly, the club gives more than 40 girls a safe space to collaborate and share experiences as they work together on projects for a tech-savvy Gambia.

“Too often I witness young girls, who are skilled in math and science, lose hope as they prepare for interviews and professional positions,” Baldeh said. “Right now, many girls in this field leave it because they think computer jobs are too difficult and they lose confidence at some point.”

The club started with a small space and just five girls, training to be proficient in basic computing skills, computer programing, online security and privacy, and research and networking. Through these skills the girls can then go on to civic participation, economic empowerment, and leadership roles. One of the many problems with Continue reading

Short Take – Cisco Disaggregation Announcement

In this Network Collective short take, Jordan Martin shares his thoughts on the recent announcement from Cisco that they will be offering disaggregated solutions. Has Cisco seen the light? Will Cisco abandon hardware completely? Or are the doing all of this for other reasons?

Related Episodes:

Jordan Martin
Host

The post Short Take – Cisco Disaggregation Announcement appeared first on Network Collective.

The cloud continues to drive network evolution

It’s fair to say that there has never been a bigger driver of network evolution than the cloud. The reason for this is the cloud is a fundamentally different kind of compute paradigm, as it enables applications, data, and architecture changes to be done seemingly instantly. Cloud-native infrastructure is what enables mobile app developers to roll out new versions daily if they so choose.The cloud is network-centric Another fact about the cloud is that it is a network-centric compute model, so a poorly performing network leads to equally poorly performing applications. A lack of network agility means DevOps teams need to sit around twiddling their thumbs while network operations make changes to the network. To read this article in full, please click here

The cloud continues to drive network evolution

It’s fair to say that there has never been a bigger driver of network evolution than the cloud. The reason for this is the cloud is a fundamentally different kind of compute paradigm, as it enables applications, data, and architecture changes to be done seemingly instantly. Cloud-native infrastructure is what enables mobile app developers to roll out new versions daily if they so choose.The cloud is network-centric Another fact about the cloud is that it is a network-centric compute model, so a poorly performing network leads to equally poorly performing applications. A lack of network agility means DevOps teams need to sit around twiddling their thumbs while network operations make changes to the network. To read this article in full, please click here

The cloud continues to drive network evolution

It’s fair to say that there has never been a bigger driver of network evolution than the cloud. The reason for this is the cloud is a fundamentally different kind of compute paradigm, as it enables applications, data, and architecture changes to be done seemingly instantly. Cloud-native infrastructure is what enables mobile app developers to roll out new versions daily if they so choose.The cloud is network-centric Another fact about the cloud is that it is a network-centric compute model, so a poorly performing network leads to equally poorly performing applications. A lack of network agility means DevOps teams need to sit around twiddling their thumbs while network operations make changes to the network. To read this article in full, please click here

Power Failure Leaves Brazilian Internet In The Dark

On Wednesday, March 21, a massive power failure impacted large parts of northern Brazil, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity. Beginning at about 3:40pm local time (18:40 UTC), the outage was reportedly due to the failure of a transmission line near the Belo Monte hydroelectric station.

As occurred in a major power outage in Brazil in 2009, this power failure had a measureable impact on the country’s Internet. This is illustrated below through graphs from Oracle Dyn’s Internet Intelligence team based on BGP and traceroute data, as well as graphs from Akamai’s mPulse service, based on end user Web traffic.

The graphic below depicts the counts of available networks (lower graph) and unstable networks (upper graph) for Brazil in the latter half of March 21. The number of unstable networks spikes around 18:40 UTC as routers of ISPs in Brazil began re-routing traffic away from disabled connections, while the lower graph shows that the corresponding drop in available networks (i.e. routed prefixes) was minor when compared to the total number routes that define the Internet of Brazil.

In addition to aggregating BGP routing information from around the globe, the Internet Intelligence team also performs millions of Continue reading

Technology Short Take 97

Welcome to Technology Short Take 97! This Tech Short Take marks the end of an era (sort of); it’s the last Tech Short Take published while I’m a VMware employee (today is my last day; see here for more details). But enough about me—let’s talk some tech! This Short Take may be a bit longer than some, so buckle up.

Networking

1 … 1,664 1,665 1,666 1,667 1,668 … 3,840