When It Comes to Smart Toys, It Pays to Shop Smart

When your in-laws give your child a loud toy for the holidays, you know you are going to have to hear it for the next few months. But when that toy connects to the Internet, how can you be sure that you’re the only ones listening?

This holiday season, “smart toys” (Internet or Bluetooth-enabled toys) are some of the most popular toys on the market. A lot of these toys look awesome, including:

  • remote control cars that connect with an app and allow you to race against AI controlled cars;
  • stuffed animals that play back messages sent from loved one’s smartphones; and
  • soccer balls that track your form when you kick them.

Smart toys come with fantastic features, but if left unsecured, smart toys can present a serious privacy risk to those who use them. For instance:

Unsecured smart toys present Continue reading

The Symmetry Of Putting Fluid Dynamics In The Cloud

There has been a lot of talk about taking HPC technologies mainstream, taking them out of realm of research, education and government institutions and making them available to enterprises that are being challenged by the need to manage and process the huge amounts of data being generated through the use of such compute- and storage-intensive workloads such as analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

At The Next Platform, we have written about the efforts by systems OEMs likes IBM, Dell EMC, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and software makers like Microsoft and SAP to develop offerings that are cost-efficient and …

The Symmetry Of Putting Fluid Dynamics In The Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A Thanksgiving Carol: How Those Smart Engineers at Twitter Screwed Me

Thanksgiving Holiday is a time for family and cheer. Well, a time for family. It's the holiday where we ask our doctor relatives to look at that weird skin growth, and for our geek relatives to fix our computers. This tale is of such computer support, and how the "smart" engineers at Twitter have ruined this for life.

My mom is smart, but not a good computer user. I get my enthusiasm for science and math from my mother, and she has no problem understanding the science of computers. She keeps up when I explain Bitcoin. But she has difficulty using computers. She has this emotional, irrational belief that computers are out to get her.

This makes helping her difficult. Every problem is described in terms of what the computer did to her, not what she did to her computer. It's the computer that needs to be fixed, instead of the user. When I showed her the "haveibeenpwned.com" website (part of my tips for securing computers), it showed her Tumblr password had been hacked. She swore she never created a Tumblr account -- that somebody or something must have done it for her. Except, I was Continue reading

Introduction to OSPF NSSA Area

Today I am going to talk about the OSPF NSSA area as this is one of the most important topic and always been asked by the interviewers. I knew many of you are already aware if the OSPF NSSA area but it is important for the network engineers who started studying OSPF in details specially area types. OSPF is one of the widely used protocol in the enterprise network and there are so many enhancements done like to integrate with the IPv6 and OSPFv3.

Before we talk about OSPF NSSA area,  I would like to tell you guys that we have our own youtube channel for various network videos that can further help you guys to study further. I will going to add many more videos soon on the channel, Please subscribe to the channel for the study network related videos


Subscribe us on Youtube: http://y2u.be/0c4lMYVp9go

OSPF NSSA Area
NSSA stands for not-so-stubby area and is used in OSPF protocol. NSSA is to allow OSPF Stub areas to carry External routes which is the routes learned from other protocols like RIP, EIGRP or BGP and then redistribution into an NSSA area creates a special type of link-state advertisement (LSA) Continue reading

5 Reasons Why We’re Thankful for the Docker Community

As the weather gets colder and the days get shorter, we wanted to take some time to give a warm “thank you” to the Docker Community. With an ever-growing community and active community leaders, there’s a lot that Docker has to be thankful for this year! Here’s our top five:

Moby Docker ThanksgivingDocker Community Gives Back

1. Docker Community Gives Back

Members of  the Docker and Moby  Community work with unbelievable amounts of dedication and passion on some of the best open source projects around. Their hardwork never goes unnoticed, and the Moby Project is better because of it’s community of awesome contributors.  

Interested in getting started on the Moby Project? Get more info on how you can get involved here.

 

2. Our Community Knows how to Take Action

With over 500 Community Leaders and locations in 81 countries, we’re continually impressed by the initiative our community takes in mentoring and teaching one another – even when you’re on different parts of the globe. We’ve seen you collaborate and create, and we couldn’t be more thankful for all of the impressive tips, tricks and knowledge that you share with us and the community.

 

Docker captain

 

3. All Roads Lead to Continue reading

Happy Thanksgiving 2017

In the US, today (Thursday, November 23) is Thanksgiving. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the meaning of Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving means different things to different people:

  • To folks outside the US, it often just a day with drastically reduced email volume and no interruptions from US-based coworkers. (Enjoy!)
  • To folks in the US, it’s a holiday filled with food (turkey, anyone?). There may also be family gatherings, football (American football, of course), and possibly some shopping. (There will most certainly be shopping tomorrow.)
  • To many people, it’s also a time to be thankful or grateful for the good things in their lives.
  • To Christians, like myself, it’s often a time to reflect on the blessings that God placed in your life. I know that I am quite blessed—blessed with a great family, an amazing wife, and the opportunity to work in a fast-paced industry (among many many other blessings).

Whatever Thanksgiving means to you, I hope that you enjoy the holiday. Happy Thanksgiving!

Promoting the African Internet Economy, an opportunity that cannot be missed

Some time ago, a European who visited my country and saw all the potential it possesses asked me “why is your country poor?”. It was a compelling question that made me think for years. It is true that there are external reasons such as the acts of colonial and other powers who have done everything to block economic progress. But, I have to admit, there is at least one major internal reason: we missed many opportunities for development.

We missed the industrial revolution of the 19th century that propelled Japan and many European countries to development. We missed the development opportunity that many South East Asian countries grabbed since the 1960s. We missed many other opportunities, simply because we didn’t realize they were there or we just could not agree on how to make the best out of them.

The African Union has a very clear vision to transform the socio-economic condition of the continent by 2063; by this year, the Union will be celebrating its hundredth anniversary (see Agenda 2063). This is a great vision. But, is Africa ready to use the opportunities that exist today and can enable it to arrive to its aspirations enshrined in Continue reading

Don Jr.: I’ll bite

So Don Jr. tweets the following, which is an excellent troll. So I thought I'd bite. The reason is I just got through debunk Democrat claims about NetNeutrality, so it seems like a good time to balance things out and debunk Trump nonsense.

The issue here is not which side is right. The issue here is whether you stand for truth, or whether you'll seize any factoid that appears to support your side, regardless of the truthfulness of it. The ACLU obviously chose falsehoods, as I documented. In the following tweet, Don Jr. does the same.

It's a preview of the hyperpartisan debates are you are likely to have across the dinner table tomorrow, which each side trying to outdo the other in the false-hoods they'll claim.

What we see in this number is a steady trend of these statistics since the Great Recession, with no evidence Continue reading

Basic Configuration for Cisco ASA 5505 Interfaces- Trunk Port

Today I am going to talk about the basic Cisco ASA configuration of trunk ports and also to make that Cisco asa with the failover link. We are putting two ASA where one is the primary one and another is the failover ASA in the DMZ zone. I already discuss on the Cisco ASA access port configurations. If you want to have a look on the configurations, please go through the below link as a reference
Basic Configuration for Cisco ASA 5505 Interfaces- Access Ports


Before we talk about these protocols,  I would like to tell you guys that we have our own youtube channel for various network videos that can further help you guys to study further. I will going to add many more videos soon on the channel, Please subscribe to the channel for the study network related videos

Subscribe us on Youtube: http://y2u.be/0c4lMYVp9go

Now let's talk about the basic Cisco ASA configuration for the trunk port. Below is the basic topology showing the Cisco ASA placed in the enterprise network. The configurations, IP addresses and topology shown here is only for the demo purposes and has no relevance with any of the enterprise networks.

Fig 1.1- Continue reading

Basic Configuration for Cisco ASA 5505 Interfaces- Access Ports

Today I am going to talk about the basic Cisco ASA configuration on the access ports and also to make that Cisco asa with the failover link. Later on i will come up with the configuration part of the Cisco asa with the trunk port configurations. We are putting two ASA where one is the primary one and another is the failover ASA in the DMZ zone.

Before we talk about these protocols,  I would like to tell you guys that we have our own youtube channel for various network videos that can further help you guys to study further. I will going to add many more videos soon on the channel, Please subscribe to the channel for the study network related videos

Subscribe us on Youtube: http://y2u.be/0c4lMYVp9go

Lets talk about the Cisco ASA configurations where we configures five VLAN interfaces, including the failover interface which is configured using the failover lan command. 
Fig 1.1- Cisco ASA 5505

Configuration Examples for ASA 5505 Interfaces
Here in the below example, we are taking VLAN 2, VLAN 3, VLAN 4 and VLAN 5 where VLAN 6 will be the failover link and after that all VLANs will be assigned to the Continue reading

The New DDoS Landscape

The New DDoS Landscape

News outlets and blogs will frequently compare DDoS attacks by the volume of traffic that a victim receives. Surely this makes some sense, right? The greater the volume of traffic a victim receives, the harder to mitigate an attack - right?

At least, this is how things used to work. An attacker would gain capacity and then use that capacity to launch an attack. With enough capacity, an attack would overwhelm the victim's network hardware with junk traffic such that they can no longer serve legitimate requests. If your web traffic is served by a server with a 100 Gbps port and someone sends you 200 Gbps, your network will be saturated and the website will be unavailable.

Recently, this dynamic has shifted as attackers have gotten far more sophisticated. The practical realities of the modern Internet have increased the amount of effort required to clog up the network capacity of a DDoS victim - attackers have noticed this and are now choosing to perform attacks higher up the network stack.

In recent months, Cloudflare has seen a dramatic reduction in simple attempts to flood our network with junk traffic. Whilst we continue to see large network level attacks, in Continue reading

Want to try Warp? We just enabled the beta for you

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States. It’s a holiday for getting together with family characterized by turkey dinner and whatever it is that happens in American football. While celebrating with family is great, if you use a computer for your main line of work, sometimes the conversation turns to how to setup the home wifi or can Russia really use Facebook to hack the US election. Just in case you’re a geek who finds yourself in that position this week, we wanted to give you something to play with. To that end, we’re opening the Warp beta to all Cloudflare users. Feel free to tell your family there’s been an important technical development you need to attend to immediately and enjoy!

Hello Warp! Getting Started

Warp allows you to expose a locally running web server to the internet without having to open up ports in the firewall or even needing a public IP address. Warp connects a web server directly to the Cloudflare network where Cloudflare acts as your web server’s network gateway. Every request reaching your origin must travel to the Cloudflare network where you can apply rate limits, access policies and authentication before the request hits your Continue reading

Pseudo-wires With Vagrant and Libvirt

Libvirt has the ability to create a pseudo-wire between virtual guest interfaces using either TCP or UDP. The advantage of using pseud-wires is that you do not need to create virtual switches to attach your guest VM interfaces to. Virtualbox has an annoying trait of stripping vlan tags on...

OpenStack SDN – NFV Management and Orchestration

In the ongoing hysteria surrounding all things SDN, one important thing gets often overlooked. You don’t build SDN for its own sake. SDN is just a little cog in a big machine called “cloud”. To take it even further, I would argue that the best SDN solution is the one that you don’t know even exists. Despite what the big vendors tell you, operators are not supposed to interact with SDN interface, be it GUI or CLI. If you dig up some of the earliest presentation about Cisco ACI, when the people talking about it were the actual people who designed the product, you’ll notice one common motif being repeated over and over again. That is that ACI was never designed for direct human interaction, but rather was supposed to be configured by a higher level orchestrating system. In data center environments such orchestrating system may glue together services of virtualization layer and SDN layer to provide a seamless “cloud” experience to the end users. The focus of this post will be one incarnation of such orchestration system, specific to SP/Telco world, commonly known as NFV MANO.

NFV MANO for Telco SDN

At the early dawn of SDN/NFV era a Continue reading

NetNeutrality vs. limiting FaceTime

In response to my tweets/blogs against NetNeutrality, people have asked: what about these items? In this post, I debunk the fourth item.
The issue the fourth item addresses is how AT&T restrict the use of Apple's FaceTime on its network back in 2012. This seems a clear NetNeutrality issue.

But here's the thing: the FCC allowed these restrictions, despite the FCC's "Open Internet" order forbidding such things. In other words, despite the graphic's claims it "happened without net neutrality rules", the opposite is true, it happened with net neutrality rules.

The FCC explains why they allowed it in their own case study on the matter. The short version is this: AT&T's network couldn't handle the traffic, so it was appropriate to restrict it until some time in the future (the LTE rollout) until it could. The issue wasn't that AT&T was restricting FaceTime in favor of its own video-calling service (it didn't have one), but it was instead an issue of "bandwidth management".

When Apple released FaceTime, they Continue reading

NetNeutrality vs. Verizon censoring Naral

In response to my anti-NetNeutrality blogs/tweets, people ask what about this? In this post, I address the second question.
Firstly, it's not a NetNeutrality issue (which applies only to the Internet), but an issue with text-messages. In other words, it's something that will continue to happen even with NetNeutrality rules. People relate this to NetNeutrality as an analogy, not because it actually is such an issue.

Secondly, it's an edge/content issue, not a transit issue. The details in this case is that Verizon provides a program for sending bulk messages to its customers from the edge of the network. Verizon isn't censoring text messages in transit, but from the edge. You can send a text message to your friend on the Verizon network, and it won't be censored. Thus the analogy is incorrect -- the correct analogy would be with content providers like Twitter and Facebook, not ISPs like Comcast.

Like all cell phone vendors, Verizon polices this content, canceling accounts that abuse the system, like spammers. Continue reading
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