Time Synchronization, Security, and Trust

Time is something that is often overlooked or taken for granted, but the accuracy and reliability of time is critical to our lives and must be protected. Time is a core concept underlying nearly all physical and virtual systems. Distributed computer systems, key to many functions inherent in our daily lives, rely on accurate and reliable time, yet we rarely stop and think about how that time is constructed and represented. Accurate and reliable time is needed to determine when an event occurs, in what order a particular sequence of events occurs, or when to schedule an event that is to occur at a particular time in the future. Finally, and of particular interest to our trust agenda here at the Internet Society, quality reliable time is required for many of the security technologies that help provide trust for the Internet. It is a vital and often overlooked part of the Internet infrastructure.

Some specific examples where accurate reliable secure time information is vital include:

  • The finance sector where there are high demands on the time synchronization of business clocks in trading systems. This is especially true in the high frequency trading where a new EU legislation called Markets Continue reading

Worth Reading: Wave System’s DPU architecture

Their view is that dataflow architectures are the only way to efficiently train networks with high performance. The CPU is carved out of their systems entirely and as we explained when first details were clear about what they were working on in depth last year, the Hybrid Memory Cube does a great deal of the heavy lifting in terms of both compute and data flow. We now have far more detail than we’ve seen to date about how it works—and where it might carve out market share in the future. —Nicole Hemsoth @The Next Platform

The post Worth Reading: Wave System’s DPU architecture appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Portland (Oregon): Cloudflare’s 117th Data Center!

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Even as the luckiest amongst us across the US West Coast dashed off to Oregon to be closer to the solar eclipse path of totality, Cloudflare engineers were busy turning up our newest data center in Portland.

This deployment serves as our 27th data center in North America alone, and our 117th globally. It also provides additional redundancy to our Seattle and San Jose data centers, while increasing our capacity to run services and fight growing attacks.

Special History

The Silicon Forest corridor around Portland holds a special place in the hearts of the Cloudflare team. It is both new (by way of our latest edge deployment bringing us closer to millions of Oregon Internet users), and familiar (since we have had an internal data center in this region for many years, enabling services such as analytics and enterprise logs).

The greater Portland area has played a pivotal area in building high-technology products from companies such as Tektronix (test and measurement equipment), Mentor Graphics (electronic design automation) and Intel (with nearly 20,000 employees across Oregon).

Expanding the edge

At our Portland data center, we locally interconnect with ISPs such as Comcast (into their regional area networks such as Beaverton and Continue reading

Five Steps You Can Take Right Now to Increase Your Privacy

You should care about your privacy online even if you think you have nothing to hide. A key aspect of privacy is being able to choose what information you share publicly and what is private. Would you want your bank account balance displayed for anyone to see? What about your medical history?

Encryption is a vital tool for protecting private communications online from unwanted eyes. We use it every day, often without even realizing it. But, encryption is not magic. If you want to better protect your privacy online, here are five steps you can take right now:

  1. Use End to End Encryption for all Messages: End to End (E2E) encryption is a way to secure the messages you send via email or a messaging app so that they can only by read by those you intended to read it including your friends, bank, doctor, etc. Read the fine print – not all encrypted services are E2E. Use messaging apps that have E2E encryption (e.g. Signal, Wire). Encourage your friends and family to switch to an app that has E2E.  Remember that sending an unencrypted message is like sending a postcard. Anyone can read it and you Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 1st, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

Obviously, cloud native is simplicity itself. (Cloud Native Landscape Project)

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

 

  • $10: price for IPv4 address (and falling); 10-15%: better IPv6 network performance; 711M: Record Onliner Spambot Dump; 41.4-tesla: strongest resistive magnet; 85%: cell towers offline due to Hurricane Harvey; 1M: Facebook accounts turned off every single day; 700K: Lyft drivers; $160B: Crypto Market Cap; $1.5M: bounty for iPhone jail break; 2.93M: pirated views of Mayweather-McGregor fight; 465k: people need to update pacemaker firmware; 70,065,920: views of Taylor Swift in 2 days; 2 trillion: kafka messages per day at LinkedIn; $35 billion: saved when planes fly themselves; 990: bird species in North America; 108B: number of people who have ever lived; 500M: DuckDuckGo anonymous searches in one month; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @asymco: The iPhone is not only the best selling product of all time but it may be the most used. 60 trillion minutes a year.
    • @Nick_Craver: Stack Overflow Questions (last 30 days): 1,280,911,699 Hits 26.92 ms Avg Render Time 11,040,996,940 SQL Queries Continue reading

New Study: Understanding MANRS’ Potential for Enterprises and Service Providers

[Note: This post was originally published on the MANRS Blog at https://www.routingmanifesto.org/2017/09/new-study-understanding-manrs-potential-for-enterprises-and-service-providers/.]

Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security, or MANRS, was founded with the ambitious goal of improving the security and reliability of the global Internet routing system, based on collaboration among participants and shared responsibility for Internet infrastructure. These are undoubtedly essential pillars supporting the Internet’s tremendous growth and success, but we must better articulate the incentives of contributing to global security and resilience to grow MANRS participation and reach our goals.

To do so, we engaged 451 Research to understand the attitudes and perceptions of Internet service providers and the broader enterprise community around MANRS and how it relates to their organizations. The results of the study are documented in the report: https://www.routingmanifesto.org/resources/research/.

The study results demonstrate considerable unrealized potential for MANRS, showing that enterprises are interested in security and their interest should be a strong incentive for more service providers to participate. Market education could be particularly effective in overcoming the operational inertia that many providers face.

The key points from the study are:

  • While MANRS itself is not well known by enterprises, its attributes are highly valued.
  • Enterprises have high Continue reading

Time Synchronization, Security, and Trust

Time is something that is often overlooked or taken for granted, but the accuracy and reliability of time is critical to our lives and must be protected. Time is a core concept underlying nearly all physical and virtual systems. Distributed computer systems, key to many functions inherent in our daily lives, rely on accurate and reliable time, yet we rarely stop and think about how that time is constructed and represented. Accurate and reliable time is needed to determine when an event occurs, in what order a particular sequence of events occurs, or when to schedule an event that is to occur at a particular time in the future.

Karen O'Donoghue

Worth Reading: Updating Surveillance Laws

For decades, Americans have forfeited their privacy rights for a false sense of safety. Broad, sweeping surveillance laws––such as, but certainly not limited to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act––have given the federal government carte blanche in the realm of surveillance. Thankfully, a recently introduced bipartisan Senate bill would restore some vital protections to Americans’ privacy. —Dan King @The Federalist

The post Worth Reading: Updating Surveillance Laws appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Docker in Higher Education: Announcing Tools & Resources for Teachers

Docker in Higher Education.png

At the beginning of the summer we published a blog post announcing the Docker Student Developer Kit and Campus Ambassador program. The positive reception from students has been overwhelming and we were so excited to see hundreds of applications flood in!

Many teachers took notice of the enthusiasm of their students and began to reach out, asking us for tools, resources and support in using Docker in the classroom and adding Docker to their curriculum. To this end we have put together a free package for teachers!

Making use of this offer will enable teachers to effectively use and teach Docker in the classroom as we will be able to provide:

  1. Free Tools: eliminating the need for students to install anything locally, thus saving you valuable class time
  2. Resources: the most up to date presentations, hands-on labs, workshops etc. on every topic for every skill level
  3. Support and recognition: you will have a dedicated contact at Docker to help you through the process and also be welcomed into the online Docker Teachers community where you can collaborate and learn from other educators

If you are a teacher at a higher-education institution who would like to unlock the benefits outlined Continue reading

Juniper to buy advanced threat protection security startup Cyphort

Juniper today announced intentions to acquire Cyphort, a Santa Clara-based startup that offers an advanced threat detection, analytics and mitigation platform. Juniper says it will integrate Cyphort’s technology with its Sky Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) product line.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: DEEP-DIVE REVIEW: How Cyphort makes advanced threat protection easier than ever +Cyphort’s software platform detects advanced threats, evasion techniques and zero-day vulnerabilities using a combination of behavioral analytics, machine-learning and long-data security analysis, the company says. The platform can work across virtual infrastructure, cloud environments and edge devices. In addition to identifying threats, Cyphort creates real-time timelines of incidents and can integrate with network tools to update security postures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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