History of computers, part 1 — The bulletin board system

One weird little quirk about being human is that we (as a group) tend to think things have been the way they currently are for a lot longer than they actually have been — and that they're not likely to change.Even the most hard and well-backed-up science tends to change with the proverbial wind. Example: Cholesterol ... good or bad? See? Things (and ideas) change. Fast. And often we don't think they've changed at all. Sometimes it's good to sit back and look at how things have already changed — to see how things might change in the future.Let's apply that to servers. Computers serving up bits of data to other computers. What did those look like 10 years ago? 20? 50? In this article series, let's look over each major era and type of servers, in no particular order — I'll be bouncing around a bit as I tell the story of "Computer Servers."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why microservices are the foundation to a digital future

There’s no doubt that digital transformation (DX) is revolutionizing the way we do business, and cloud computing serves as a key cog in the DX machine. Cloud’s elasticity can indeed help digital businesses communicate more rapidly and increase innovation. But to extract full value from the cloud, companies must make sure that they aren’t bringing the equivalent of a cutlass to a gun fight when it comes to migrating existing applications and accelerating software development.Here is what I mean: many businesses start their migration journeys by lifting and shifting existing on-premises applications into the cloud, making few to no changes to the application itself.  But running such the same old monolithic application architectures in the cloud means that your applications aren’t built to maximize cloud benefits. Just the opposite: They often present scalability issues, increase cost and require time-consuming application support. Ultimately, this will erode DX strategies, which depend on modernizing, rapidly iterating, and scaling applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMWare Networking to Openstack Networking to AWS Networking

Infrastructure and management of infrastructure has come a long way in the past few years. Buzzwords today (2016-17) are Private clouds, Public clouds and more recently Hybrid clouds and containers (docker, kubernetes, et.al.). Datacenter design is also changing rapidly with some companies expanding their server footprint building massive private clouds while others reduce them by adopting hybrid cloud strategies. Networking also has be re-thought and reworked by both the public cloud providers and their customers who move towards a hybrid cloud approach. One major area of investment by cloud adopters is to mimic and apply network policies and topologies present in a private data center onto one or more of public cloud providers.

Understanding the networking constructs in Openstack, VMware and AWS will help in making these networking design decisions. I will try to compare and equate network constructs in these three cloud technologies below:

Openstack

Amazon AWS

VMware (VSwitch / DVSwitch)
                                                             Virtual Network                             Continue reading

Heterogeneous Supercomputing on Japan’s Most Powerful System

We continue with our second part of the series on the Tsubame supercomputer (first section here) with the next segment of our interview with Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech).

Matsuoka researches and designs large scale supercomputers and similar infrastructures. More recently, he has worked on the convergence of Big Data, machine/deep learning, and AI with traditional HPC, as well as investigating the post-Moore technologies towards 2025. He has designed supercomputers for years and has collaborated on projects involving basic elements for the current and more importantly future exascale systems.

TNP: Will you be running …

Heterogeneous Supercomputing on Japan’s Most Powerful System was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: The rise of info-monopolies

Salil Mehta is a statistician and well-known public intellectual. See his impressive bio. He has been cited in major publications, such as the NYT. But Google closed his email and website (Statistical Ideas) down without notice or explanation. When he submitted an inquiry he got this. “After review, your account is not eligible to be reinstated due to a violation of our Google Terms of Service. We recommend viewing our Google Terms of Service …” —Fabius Maximus

The post Worth Reading: The rise of info-monopolies appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Video Series: Modernizing .NET Apps for IT Pros

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This is a new 5-part video series in Docker’s Modernize Traditional Apps (MTA) program, aimed at Microsoft IT Pros. The video series shows you how to move a .NET 3.5 app from Windows Server to a Windows Docker container and deploy it to a scalable, highly-available environment in the cloud – without any changes to the app.

Part 1 introduces the series, explaining what is meant by “traditional” apps and the problems they present. Traditional apps are built to run on a server, rather than on a modern application platform. They have common traits, like being complex to manage and difficult to deploy. A portfolio of traditional applications tends to under-utilize its infrastructure, and over-utilize the humans who manage it. Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) fixes that, giving you a consistent way to package, release and manage all your apps, without having to re-write them.

Part 2 shows how easy it is to move traditional apps to Docker EE. I start with an ASP.NET 3.5 WebForms application running on Windows Server 2003, and use Image2Docker to extract the app and package it as a Docker image. Then I run the application in a Docker Windows container on Continue reading

Large BGP Leak by Google Disrupts Internet in Japan

At 03:22 UTC on Friday, 25 August 2017, the internet experienced the effects of another massive BGP routing leak.  This time it was Google who leaked over 160,000 prefixes to Verizon, who in turn accepted these routes and passed them on.  Despite the fact that the leak took place in Chicago, Illinois, it had devastating consequences for the internet in Japan, half a world away. Two of Japan’s major telecoms (KDDI and NTT’s OCN) were severely affected, posting outage notices (KDDI / OCN pictured below).

Massive routing leaks continue

In recent years, large-scale (100K+ prefix) BGP routing leaks typically fall into one of two buckets:  the leaker either 1) announces the global routing table as if it is the origin (or source) of all the routes (see Indosat in 2014), or 2) takes the global routing table as learned from providers and/or peers and mistakenly announced it to another provider (see Telekom Malaysia in 2015).

This case is different because the vast majority of the routes involved in this massive routing leak were not in the global routing table at the time but instead were more-specifics of routes that were.  This is an important Continue reading

Staples Easy Button gets IoT makeover

“That was easy” is the iconic tagline of Staples. The international retailer has used that line since 2003. In 2005, the slogan took a material shape and appeared in ads as a red “easy” button. Now, Staples is giving its next-generation of the Easy Button a serious IoT makeover.The button was meant as a metaphor to represent easy business transactions. But that didn’t stop people from wanting an actual button. Staples responded by producing Easy Buttons as a “stress relieving” novelty. Pushing the button causes it to say, “That was easy.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The WireX Botnet: How Industry Collaboration Disrupted a DDoS Attack

Introduction

On August 17th, 2017, multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and content providers were subject to significant attacks from a botnet dubbed WireX. The botnet is named for an anagram for one of the delimiter strings in its command and control protocol. The WireX botnet comprises primarily Android devices running malicious applications and is designed to create DDoS traffic. The botnet is sometimes associated with ransom notes to targets.

A few days ago, Google was alerted that this malware was available on its Play Store. Shortly following the notification, Google removed hundreds of affected applications and started the process to remove the applications from all devices.

Researchers from Akamai, Cloudflare, Flashpoint, Google, Oracle Dyn, RiskIQ, Team Cymru, and other organizations cooperated to combat this botnet. Evidence indicates that the botnet may have been active as early as August 2nd, but it was the attacks on August 17th that drew the attention of these organizations. This post represents the combined knowledge and efforts of the researchers working to share information about a botnet in the best interest of the internet community as a whole. This blog post was written together by researchers from numerous organizations and released Continue reading

40% off Lexar microSD To Lightning Reader – Deal Alert

Lexar's microSD-to-Lightning reader makes it easy to move all your favorite content to & from your iOS device on the go. So whether you’re offloading stunning action photos from that sporting event, or dramatic video from your drone, or if you just want a simple solution to back up or move around your files while mobile -- it’s got you covered. With its small footprint, you can put it in your pocket and go. And the Lightning connector fits with most iOS cases, providing simple plug-and-play functionality. An optional app from the app store allows you to back up files when connected to your device for greater peace of mind. Lexar's microSD to Lightning reader averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, where its typical list price of $24.99 has been reduced a generous 40%, for now, to just $14.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSX-T 2.0 is here!

VMware NSX-T 2.0  VMware NSX is a network virtualization and security platform for the enterprise that is helping our customers make the transition to the digital era.  As developers embrace new technologies like containers, and the percentage of workloads running in public clouds increases, network virtualization must expand to offer a full range of networking and security services,... Read more →

NSX-T 2.0 is here !

VMware NSX is a network virtualization and security platform for the enterprise that is helping our customers make the transition to the digital era.  As developers embrace new technologies like containers, and the percentage of workloads running in public clouds increases, network virtualization must expand to offer a full range of networking and security services, natively, in these environments.

Today, we are announcing the next version of NSX-T that can provide network virtualization for a multi-cloud and multi-hypervisor environment. The NSX technology that you are familiar with and use it for so many years is now be available for cloud and container environments. Circa VMworld 2016, we showed a prototype of NSX that can provide network virtualization and micro-segmentation for native AWS workloads. That journey is now complete and the initial availability of that service for some customers is already available for their AWS workloads.

NSX can now provide seamless network virtualization for workloads running on either VMs or Containers. VMs can be located either on-prem or on AWS. NSX will provide the entire feature set for either Vmware vSphere Hypervisors or KVM hypervisors. For native workloads on AWS, NSX will provide VMware NSX Secure Cloud to provide the Continue reading

Google leaked prefixes – and knocked Japan off the Internet

Last Friday, 25 August, a routing incident caused large-scale internet disruption. It hit Japanese users the hardest, slowing or blocking access to websites and online services for dozens of Japanese companies.

What happened is that Google accidentally leaked BGP prefixes it learned from peering relationships, essentially becoming a transit provider instead of simply exchanging traffic between two networks and their customers. This also exposed some internal traffic engineering that caused many of these prefixes to get de-aggregated and therefore raised their probability of getting accepted elsewhere.

The incident technically lasted less than ten minutes, but spread quickly around the Internet and caused some damage. Connectivity was restored, but persistently slow connection speeds affected industries like finance, transportation, and online gaming for several hours. Google apologized for the trouble, saying it was caused by an errant network setting that was corrected within eight minutes of its discovery.

This incident showed, again, how fragile the global routing system still is against configuration mistakes, to say nothing about malicious attacks.

What it also showed is a lack of defense – the incident propagated seemingly without any attempt from other networks to stop it.

The Internet Society works to address security in many ways, Continue reading

IGF-USA: Promoting a More Inclusive Internet

The IGF-USA took place in Washington D.C on July 24, 2017. During the event, the panel “Promoting a More Inclusive Internet” looked at current barriers to an inclusive Internet and explored how access could be expanded to underserved areas and to underrepresented communities. Moderated by Dr. Brandie Nonnecke, Research & Development Manager for CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at the University of California-Berkeley and Chair of the San Francisco-Bay Area Internet Society Chapter Working Group on Internet Governance, the panel brought together several experts on access provision, each with many years experience of connecting the unconnected in the USA and overseas.

Decentralized Approach

One of the main themes of the panel was that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to getting communities online. Rather than focus on technical deployment, the panelists argued that the focus needs to shift to what Internet access actually means to different communities and to solutions adapted to fit their specific needs. When proposing solutions, the first question that needs to be asked is, ‘What are the problems that Internet access will solve?’ Often, what works for one community won’t work for another. “No one should decide what other people’s Internet access Continue reading

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