Will Data Destroy Democracy?

Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School and Darren Bolding, CTO, Cambridge Analytica

Moderator: Matthew Prince, Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

MP: If there’s one person responsible for the Trump presidency, it seems there is a compelling argument that that might be you.

DB: I very much disagree with that.

MP: How does Cambridge Analytica work, and how did the Trump campaign use it to win the presidency?

DB: we take that data and match it up with lists of voters, and combine that data science to come up with ideas about you who might want to sell a product to, or in teh case of politics, this is this person's’ propensity to vote, this is the candidate they are likely most interested in. WE also do all the digital advertising. By combining data with digital advertising, we have lots of power.

MP: so you don’t want to take credit for having won the election; but the campaign's use of data and targeting was an important factor in the election.

DB: Yes, and what Cambridge did was basically a great turnaround story.

MP: larry you ran a presidential Continue reading

Napalm Getting Started

Napalm is a network automation library written in python that abstracts the differences between libraries such as Juniper's pyez and Arista's pyeapi bringing a common interface across many API's. Napalm is well supported in the network community, originally started by David Barroso and Elisa...

OpenStack SDN – Skydiving Into Service Function Chaining

SFC is another SDN feature that for a long time only used to be available in proprietary SDN solutions and that has recently become available in vanilla OpenStack. It serves as another proof that proprietary SDN solutions are losing the competitive edge, especially for Telco SDN/NFV use cases. Hopefully, by the end of this series of posts I’ll manage do demonstrate how to build a complete open-source solution that has feature parity (in terms of major networking features) with all the major proprietary data centre SDN platforms. But for now, let’s just focus on SFC.

SFC High-level overview

In most general terms, SFC refers to packet forwarding technique that uses more than just destination IP address to decide how to forward packets. In more specific terms, SFC refers to “steering” of traffic through a specific set of endpoints (a.k.a Service Functions), overriding the default destination-based forwarding. For those coming from a traditional networking background, think of SFC as a set of policy-based routing instances orchestrated from a central element (SDN controller). Typical use cases for SFC would be things like firewalling, IDS/IPS, proxying, NAT’ing, monitoring.

SFC is usually modelled as a directed (acyclic) graph, where the first and Continue reading

As Seen on TV

Chris Cantwell, Co-Creator and Show Runner, Halt & Catch Fire

Moderator: John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

CC: first off, we have very low ratings! The story came from my father who worked in computers in the early 80s in dallas; later in california. The dynamic between those characters was influenced by my dad.

This was largely a story about reverse engineering. The underdog story was interesting: not Bill Gates, not Silicon Valley, but a different story about the computer world.

JGC: and you managed to do 4 seasons

CC: In four seasons we go from ‘83 to ‘94; we cover everything from small networks to building of internet backbone, rise in search and www

JGC: I watched it before I came; it gave me some bad memories because there were AOL disks

CC: We have an incredible prop team. Some comes from RI computer museum; i have to ask our prop master, he might have manufactured them from images online.

JGC: This is a show about tech but also about money; these people are trying to build companies. The same people trying again and again. Is that a metaphor for recycling something?

CC: Yes, i Continue reading

Private Companies, Public Squares

Daphne Keller, Director, Stanford Center for Internet & Society, and Lee Rowland, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project

Moderator: Matthew Prince, Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

MP: Technology and law seem like they are colliding more and more. Tech companies are being asked to regulate content. For a largely non-lawyer audience, give us some foundations about basic rules when you have content on your network?

LR: Communications 2.0 makes the 1st amendment almost quaint. The vast majority of speech that we exchange happens online. When it is hosted by private companies, the 1st amendment doesn’t constrain it. So this is a space governed by norms and individual choices of people like Matthew. In the wake of Cloudflare's decision to take down the Daily Stormer, Matthew penned a piece saying it’s scary that we have this power, and I exercised it. We have a completely unaccountable private medium of communication.

MP: There are shields for companies for this; What is intermediary liability and why is this a position at Google/Stanford?

DK: No one knows what it means; it’s a set of laws that tell platforms when they have to take down Continue reading

Betting on Blockchain

Juan Benet, Founder, Protocol Labs, and Jill Carlson, GM, Tezos Foundation

Moderator: Jen Taylor, Head of Product, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

JT: Tell us about what BlockChain is

JC: Going back to 2008, advent of blockchain came with bitcoin white paper.

The word Blockchain wasn’t mentioned at that point, but that was the advent of this tech.

What it solved was niche problem called double spend problem. Creation of digital cash.

What you see in a bank account isn’t digital cash. The problem in cryptography was how to create digital cash that doesn't rely on 3rd party intermediary. This is what Bitcoin created.

JB: Blockchain packs in lots of stuff: useful as brand. Like internet/web in early 90s, the meaning is fuzzy.

Properties that all of these apps have in common:

Academic definition: A blockchain is an indelible chain of blocks; once you insert information into one of them it remains.

Marketing definition: many applications have been developed over last few years, all have to do with public verifiability. Reliance on cryptographic methods to achieve goals on clearing payments and the ability to check and verify.

Across the board, removing 3rd parties from equation. Establishing publicly verifiable Continue reading

The New Breed of Patent Trolls

Lee Cheng, President & Co-CLO, Symmetry IP LLC, and Vera Ranieri, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Moderator: Doug Kramer, General Counsel, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

DK: Patent--IP issues and challenges are accelerating important supreme court cases. there’s also a flurry of legislative activity about patents. Good idea to talk about this topic: where is this going? How to push world in virtuous direction?

DK: current state of affairs. Vera: at the core is the patent itself, which is issued by and often adjudged by the patent office… is this where the problem lies?

VR: I like to blame everyone. How does someone get a patent in the first place? Someone comes up with an invention, patent attorney, documents it with opaque language, and files. The examiner then interprets the patent and searches for prior art, and says “I think this is what the patent owner is trying to claim.”

In the software space, it’s especially difficult. A lot of where inventing happens in software is right here, in businesses. People have a problem and find a solution by developing software. They don’t patent and publish.

Patent office tends to focus on patents.

DK: Talk about the Continue reading

If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Tales from the Early Internet

Paul Mockapetris, Inventor, DNS, and David Conrad, CTO, ICANN

Moderator: Matthew Prince, Co-Founder & CEO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

MP: You guys wrote all this stuff; why is the internet so broken?

PM: People complain about security flaws, but there is no security in original design of dns. I think of it that we haven’t had the right investment in rebuilding the infrastructure.

Original stuff was only good for 10 years, but we’ve been using it for 30.

DC: The fact that we were able to get Packard from one machine to another in the early days was astonishing in itself.

MP: So what are you worried about in terms of Internet infrastructure that we aren’t even thinking about?

PM: i’m worried about the fact that a lot of places like the ITF are very incremental in their thinking, and that people aren’t willing to take the next big jump. E.g. hesitancy to adopt blockchain

Being able to experiment and try new stuff is important.

The idea that you can't change anything because it will affect the security and stability of the internet. we need to weigh benefits and risks or we will eventually die of Continue reading

Making the World Better by Breaking Things

Ben Sadeghipour, Technical Account Manager, HackerOne, and Katie Moussouris, Founder & CEO, Luta Security

Moderator: John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

JGC: We’re going to talk about hacking

Katie Moussouris helps people how to work around security vulnerabilities.

Ben Sadeghipour is a technical account manager at HackerOne, and a hacker at night

JGC: Ben, you say you’re a hacker by night. Tell us about this.

BS: It depends who you ask: if they encourage it; or, we do it for a good reason. “Ethical hacker” - we do it for a good reason. Hacking can be illegal if you’re hacking without permission; but that’s not what we do.

JGC: You stay up all night

BS: I lock myself in the basement

JGC: Tell us about your company.

KM: I was invited to brief Pentagon when I worked at Microsoft; The pentagon was interested in the implementation of this idea in a large corporation like Microsoft.
“Hacking the pentagon” The adoption of Bug Bounty has been slow. We were interested in working with a very large company like Microsoft. There was interest in implementing ideas from private sector at Pentagon. I helped the internal team at Continue reading

A Cloud Without Handcuffs

Brandon Philips, Co-Founder & CTO, CoreOS, and Joe Beda, CTO, Heptio, & Co-Founder, Kubernetes

Moderator: Alex Dyner, Co-Founder & COO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

We’re exploring increasing risk of few companies locking in customers gaining more power over time.

AD: I want to hear your stories about how you got into what you do.

JB: Kubernetes faced problem of either having googlers use rbs or bring X to rest of world. We wanted to have Googlers and outside people using something similar. We chose to do it as open source because you play a different game when you’re the underdog. Through open source we could garner interest. We wanted to provide applicational mobility.

AD: Brandon, talk about your mission and why you started company.

BP: We started CoreOS four years ago; We spent a lot of time thinking about this problem and containers were natural choice. They are necessary for achieving our mission. We wanted to allow people to have mobility around their applications. We wanted to enable new security model through containers. So we started building a product portfolio

AD: There are tradeoffs between using a container or an open source tech; how do you think Continue reading

Smartphone users on Wi-Fi drive most website traffic

Web visits from desktops and tablets have declined dramatically, says Adobe Digital Insights in Adobe Mobile Trends Refresh — Q2 2017.The device people are using: their smartphone. And the majority of that device’s traffic is arriving via Wi-Fi connections, not mobile networks, the analytics-oriented research firm says. Adobe has been tracking over 150 billion visits to 400 websites and apps since 2015.The sites these mobile users are visiting are large-organization national news, media and entertainment, and retail — with over 60 percent of those smartphone visits connecting through Wi-Fi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Making Mobile Faster than Fixed Line

Cole Crawford, Founder & CEO, Vapor IO, and Chaitali Sengupta, Consultant, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies

Moderator: Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder & COO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

CC: moved between private and public sector.

CS: her company added 100 million customers in India.

MZ: Let’s start with where we are today: trends or things you’re seeing in the marketplace that weren’t there 5 years ago.

CC: What’s interesting is combination of data mass and data velocity, resulting in a more dynamic internet. E.g. Latency wasn’t mentioned by customers at first; AI is helping to create a new low-latency internet.

CS: One of the biggest things is applying lessons of cloud to telecom to see how we can make systems more centralized and virtualized. Network function virtualization; putting things on general service servers. Now dovetailing into 5G, where we see more bandwidth.

MZ: We’re currently in 4G world; when will 5G standard get finalized?

CS: Standards are getting finalized; trials are getting started. Many 5G systems are up and running NWC America ... is running trials already. I would say end of next year or 2019

MZ: So the future is here and it’s almost distributed? 4G took 2 years to Continue reading

Your guide to selecting pluggable transceiver modules

The high-cost of vendor-locked optics has spawned a lot of ingenuity over the years as other ‘non-approved’ manufacturers build the same optics to the same spec and try to get them to work as a low-cost alternative to preferred ODMs. But the whitebox revolution has now leveled the playing field. Lower cost whitebox hardware can work with low-cost or high-cost optics, without discrimination based on manufacturer brand. In the case of a data center deployment, the cost savings of using lower cost optics can translate to millions of dollars.

As long as the box manufacturer and the optics manufacturer both build to industry standards — both formal and informal ones — optics from any manufacturer should be able to work on any box. Most of the implementation details are specified by standards. However, that doesn’t guarantee that you can pick any module on the internet, order a thousand units and have a successful deployment.

At Cumulus Networks, we do everything we can to ensure a smooth, easy deployment. We believe that one of the critical benefits of disaggregation is that it provides you with the ability to choose whatever hardware and software best suit your business needs.

When it comes Continue reading

VMC Launches with Ansible Modules for Provisioning and Management

With the recent announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) availability and pricing, the first question the Ansible team received was, “Will the vmware_guest modules work with cloud?”

Before we answer that question, let’s take a step back and look at why teams use Ansible to provision and manage VMware environments. VMware offers several automation tools that work well within the VMware ecosystems - so why Ansible?

What if you want to share automation across VMware and non-VMware infrastructure?

Enter Ansible. Ansible allows organizations to standardize on a simple IT automation language, regardless of technology, vendor or functional area.

  • VMware - Pool-Check-Mark-01.svg
  • Cloud - Pool-Check-Mark-01.svg
  • Windows - Pool-Check-Mark-01.svg
  • Linux - Pool-Check-Mark-01.svg
  • Networking - Pool-Check-Mark-01.svg
  • Etc.

The Ansible VMware page does a good job of covering the key points if you want more detail.

VMC Launch

The good news is - yes - the Ansible VMware modules work with VMC out of the box.

VMC was announced as a hybrid cloud solution for VMware customers who want to leverage tools and skills that already exist in the organization. Using Ansible to provision VMs in on-premise (vSphere) and cloud (VMC) environments works in exactly the same manner.

This is the way you would expect the Ansible modules Continue reading

Disruptive Cryptography: Post-Quantum & Machine Learning With Encrypted Data

Shay Gueron, Associate Professor of Mathematics, University of Haifa, Israel, and Raluca Ada Popa, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Moderator: John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare

Photo by Cloudflare Staff

Raluca is also a Co-Director of the RISELab at UC Berkeley as well as Co-Founder and CTO of a cybersecurity startup called PreVeil. She developed practical systems that protect data confidentiality by computing over encrypted data as well as designed new encryption schemes that underlie these systems.

Shay was previously a Senior Principal Engineer, serving as Intel’s Senior Cryptographer and is now senior principal at AWS, and an expert in post-quantum, security, and algorithms.

JGC: Tell us about what you actually do.

RP: Computing on encrypted data is not just theoretical; it’s also exciting because you can keep data encrypted in the cloud. It covers hacking attacks while still enabling the functionality of the system. This is exciting because we can cover so many hacking attacks in one shot.

SG: I’m working on making new algorithms; also on making solutions for quantum computers that are increasingly strong.

SG: I’ve been working on cryptography: making it faster, recently I’ve been thinking about solutions for what will happen when we Continue reading

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