Worth Reading: Take a pause on ransomware

As these devastating global ransomware attacks illustrate, cybersecurity is not an issue that can be ignored. Any time a device or system is connected to the Internet, it is a potential target. What was once just another lucrative means of extorting money from Internet users, ransomware is emerging as a preferred tool for causing widespread disruption of vital services such as hospitals, banks, shipping, or airports. Attacks are growing more sophisticated and more enduring, with longer term damaging effects and wider impact. Ransomware exploits the slow pace of security patching, systems that are dependent on old software, and poor backup practices. It also provides a smokescreen for other nefarious acts including stealing data and credentials, or even wiping data. So, the name “ransomware” becomes illusory: what we are really dealing with is “hydraware.” —The Internet Society

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Rough Guide to IETF 99: DNS Privacy and Security, including DNSSEC

There's a good bit of DNS secrurity and privacy activity happening at IETF 99 next week in Prague, although not all of that is in working groups. Here is a view of what is going on.

IETF 99 Hackathon

Once again there will be a good-sized "DNS team" at the IETF 99 Hackathon over the weekend (15-16 July). The IETF 99 Hackathon wiki outlines the work (scroll down to see it). From a security point of view, major projects include:

Dan York

Securing the AtSea App with Docker Secrets

Passing application configuration information as environmental variables was once considered best practice in 12 factor applications. However, this practice can expose information in logs, can be difficult to track how and when information is exposed, third party applications can access this information. Instead of environmental variables, Docker implements secrets to manage configuration and confidential information.

Secrets are a way to keep information such as passwords and credentials secure in a Docker CE or EE with swarm mode. Docker manages secrets and securely transmits it to only those nodes in the swarm that need access to it. Secrets are encrypted during transit and at rest in a Docker swarm. A secret is only accessible to those services which have been granted explicit access to it, and only while those service tasks are running.

The AtSea Shop is an example storefront application that can be deployed on different operating systems and can be customized to both your enterprise development and operational environments. The previous post showed how to use multi-stage builds to create small and efficient images. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how secrets are implemented in the application.

Creating Secrets

Secrets can be created using the command line or with a Compose file. The AtSea Continue reading

The X86 Battle Lines Drawn With Intel’s Skylake Launch

At long last, Intel’s “Skylake” converged Xeon server processors are entering the field, and the competition with AMD’s “Naples” Epyc X86 alternatives can begin and the ARM server chips from Applied Micro, Cavium, and Qualcomm and the Power9 chip from IBM know exactly what they are aiming at.

It is a good time to be negotiating with a chip maker for compute power.

The Skylake chips, which are formally known as the Xeon Scalable Processor family, are the result of the convergence of the workhorse Xeon E5 family of chips for two-socket and four-socket servers with the higher-end Xeon E7 …

The X86 Battle Lines Drawn With Intel’s Skylake Launch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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  • DBTA Roundtable OnDemand Webinar: Leveraging Big Data with Hadoop, NoSQL and RDBMS. Watch this recent roundtable discussion hosted by DBTA to learn about key differences between Hadoop, NoSQL and RDBMS. Topics include primary use cases, selection criteria, when a hybrid approach will best fit your needs and best practices for managing, securing and integrating data across platforms. Brian Bulkowski, CTO and Co-founder of Aerospike, presented along with speakers from Cask Data and Splice Machine. View now.

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Worth Reading: Internet of Terror

Before we get to the question of encryption and key length, I would like to point out two things. An IoT device is nothing more than an embedded system with a TCP/IP stack. It is not a magical object that is somehow protected from attackers because of how cool, interesting, or colorful it is. Second, and I can’t believe I have to point this out to people who would read or write to KV, but the Internet has a lot of stuff on it, and it’s getting bigger every day. Once upon a time, there were fewer than 100 nodes on the Internet, and that time is long past. KV has three Internet-enabled devices within arm’s reach, and, if you think a billion users of the Internet aren’t scary, try multiplying that by 10 once every fridge, microwave, and hotel alarm clock can spew packets into the ether(net). Let’s get this straight: if you attach something to a network—any network—it had better be secured as well as possible, because I am quite tired of being awakened by the sound of the gnashing of teeth caused by each and every new network security breach. The Internet reaches everywhere, and if even Continue reading

AI heading back to the trough

I like Gartner’s concept of the technology hype cycle. It assumes that expectations of new technologies quickly ramp to an inflated peak, drop into a trough of disillusionment, then gradually ascend a slope of enlightenment until they plateau. Of course, not all technologies complete the cycle or transition through the stages at the same pace.Artificial intelligence (AI) has arguably been in the trough for 60 years. I am thinking of Kubrick’s HAL and Roddenberry’s “computer” that naturally interact with humans. That’s a long trough, and despite popular opinion, the end is nowhere in sight.+ Also on Network World: Using artificial intelligence to teach computers to see + There’s so much excitement and specialized research taking place that AI has fragmented into several camps such as heuristic programming for game-playing AI, natural language processing for conversational AI, and machine learning for statistical problems. The hype is building again, and just about every major tech company and countless startups are racing toward another inflated peak and subsequent trough.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China Tunes Neural Networks for Custom Supercomputer Chip

Supercomputing centers around the world are preparing their next generation architectural approaches for the insertion of AI into scientific workflows. For some, this means retooling around an existing architecture to make capability of double-duty for both HPC and AI.

Teams in China working on the top performing supercomputer in the world, the Sunway TaihuLight machine with its custom processor, have shown that their optimizations for theSW26010 architecture on deep learning models have yielded a 1.91-9.75X speedup over a GPU accelerated model using the Nvidia Tesla K40m in a test convolutional neural network run with over 100 parameter configurations.

Efforts on …

China Tunes Neural Networks for Custom Supercomputer Chip was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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