How to protect your data when using public Wi-Fi

Many people are not aware of this, but Wi-Fi hotspots at Starbucks, Barnes & Noble or your local hotel that offers it as a complimentary service are not safe for confidential browsing, performing financial transactions or for viewing your emails.Public Wi-Fi does not offer encryption for individuals using the same password and hotspot. Also, your signals are broadcast across the immediate area. It is easy for someone else within your vicinity to eavesdrop on your communication. An unskilled hacker can intercept your signal using a phony hotspot or a tampering software that can be found on a search engine.+ Also on Network World: 4 lesser-known Wi-Fi security threats and how to defend against them + The first task of a hacker is to get on the same network as the potential victim, then they can carry out that task with a public Wi-Fi network because they have the password. It does not matter if a network password is given out by the cashier or printed in your hotel room's welcome packet, once public, your security is compromised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How eero mesh WiFi routers connect to the cloud

This is a guest post by Gabe Kassel, Product Manager for Embedded Software at eero.

Relying on a single wireless router to provide internet in every room of the home is like expecting a single light bulb to illuminate the entire house. It’s physics - WiFi radio waves don’t travel through walls or objects easily. The eero Home WiFi System is a new take on home connectivity, bucking the trend of one high-powered device in the center of the home. Instead, eero uses multiple access points that talk to each other via our proprietary mesh technology -- TrueMesh -- to spread coverage and a high throughput connection throughout a home.

eero’s hardware - its distributed access point system - solves the problem of spreading a consistent, stable WiFi signal in a home. But hardware is only part of the puzzle. On the backend of eero’s technology, we face different challenges: how do we build a highly available, high performance infrastructure that’s able to communicate with each eero device? We’ve discussed parts of our architecture previously, but we haven’t yet explored into how we use Cloudflare to eliminate one “single-point-of-failure” in our architecture.

How eeros interact with the cloud

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Xen hypervisor faces third highly critical VM escape bug in 10 months

The Xen Project has fixed three vulnerabilities in its widely used hypervisor that could allow operating systems running inside virtual machines to access the memory of the host systems, breaking the critical security layer among them.Two of the patched vulnerabilities can only be exploited under certain conditions, which limits their use in potential attacks, but one is a highly reliable flaw that poses a serious threat to multitenant data centers where the customers' virtualized servers share the same underlying hardware.The flaws don't yet have CVE tracking numbers, but are covered in three Xen security advisories called XSA-213, XSA-214 and XSA-215.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Xen hypervisor faces third highly critical VM escape bug in 10 months

The Xen Project has fixed three vulnerabilities in its widely used hypervisor that could allow operating systems running inside virtual machines to access the memory of the host systems, breaking the critical security layer among them.Two of the patched vulnerabilities can only be exploited under certain conditions, which limits their use in potential attacks, but one is a highly reliable flaw that poses a serious threat to multitenant data centers where the customers' virtualized servers share the same underlying hardware.The flaws don't yet have CVE tracking numbers, but are covered in three Xen security advisories called XSA-213, XSA-214 and XSA-215.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Xen hypervisor faces third highly critical VM escape bug in 10 months

The Xen Project has fixed three vulnerabilities in its widely used hypervisor that could allow operating systems running inside virtual machines to access the memory of the host systems, breaking the critical security layer among them.Two of the patched vulnerabilities can only be exploited under certain conditions, which limits their use in potential attacks, but one is a highly reliable flaw that poses a serious threat to multitenant data centers where the customers' virtualized servers share the same underlying hardware.The flaws don't yet have CVE tracking numbers, but are covered in three Xen security advisories called XSA-213, XSA-214 and XSA-215.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Books that I like

How Does Internet Work - We know what is networking

I was planning for some time now to make a list of books I read recently, here’s the list It should be something like a book reading suggestion list in order to maybe help you pick the right materials in your networking technology learning journey. On the top are the books I used most while studying for my certs but also some of them are the books that I usually carry with me on my Kindle or PDF wherever I go. It is always a good idea to have those books on you so you can have a look at

Books that I like

Join Us at World Press Freedom Day This Week!

A free and independent press, including online, is a pillar of vibrant societies. Yet, its future is in jeopardy. 
 
Press freedom is declining across the world, as surveillance of journalists and violations of the confidentiality of sources become more common. Reporters are often victims of government orders to shut down media websites or blogs in the name of national security or public order.

Nicolas Seidler

Review: Two higher-end peripherals for your notebook lifestyle

The world of smartphones and tablets hasn’t yet completely taken over the world just yet – there are lots of people who still use an old-fashioned notebook (gosh, can’t believe I’m using the term ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘notebook’ in the same sentence) for their work, whether at home, in the office or traveling.But there are still limitations to these devices when it comes to audio and video – especially if you’re looking for some higher-end quality, as well as some portability. I recently tested two such devices – the new Logitech BRIO 4K webcam and the Jabra Speak 710 Bluetooth speaker. Don’t be scared by the higher price tags compared with other webcams and speaker systems – the higher-end quality and style make up for the extra price tag.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenMP: From Parallel Loops To Exaflops

This fall will mark twenty years since the publication of the v1.0 specification of OpenMP Fortran. From early loop parallelism to a heterogeneous, exascale future, OpenMP has apparently weathered well the vicissitudes and tumultuous changes of the computer industry over that past two decades and appears to be positioned to address the needs of our exascale future.

In the 1990s when the OpenMP specification was first created, memory was faster than the processors that performed the computation. This is the exact opposite of today’s systems where memory is the key bottleneck and the HPC community is rapidly adopting faster memory

OpenMP: From Parallel Loops To Exaflops was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Healthcare data breaches skyrocket, but is there good news coming?

In 2016, 328 individual healthcare breaches occurred, surpassing the previous record of 268 in 2015, according to Bitglass’ recent Healthcare Breach Report. As a direct result of the breaches, records of approximately 16.6 million Americans were exposed due to hacks, lost or stolen devices, unauthorized disclosure and more.The good news, however, is that the overall number of compromised records has declined for the second year in a row, and early indications suggest that those numbers will continue to decline in 2017.+ Also on Network World: Healthcare records for sale on Dark Web + The report aggregates data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Wall of Shame—a database of breach disclosures required as part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)—to identify the most common causes of data leakage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Healthcare data breaches skyrocket, but is there good news coming?

In 2016, 328 individual healthcare breaches occurred, surpassing the previous record of 268 in 2015, according to Bitglass’ recent Healthcare Breach Report. As a direct result of the breaches, records of approximately 16.6 million Americans were exposed due to hacks, lost or stolen devices, unauthorized disclosure and more.The good news, however, is that the overall number of compromised records has declined for the second year in a row, and early indications suggest that those numbers will continue to decline in 2017.+ Also on Network World: Healthcare records for sale on Dark Web + The report aggregates data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Wall of Shame—a database of breach disclosures required as part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)—to identify the most common causes of data leakage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

April 2017: The month in hacks and breaches

April may not have been the busiest month for security breaches, but what it lacks in volume it made up for in variety. The month began loudly when a hacker set off all of Dallas’s 156 emergency tornado alarms for 90 minutes in the wee hours of the morning on the seventh.Then on April 10, London-based Wonga Group revealed that as many as a quarter-million bank accounts may have been compromised. They weren’t alone. On the seventeenth, InterContinental reported that customer data may have been taken at more than 1,000 of its hotels.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

April 2017: The month in hacks and breaches

April may not have been the busiest month for security breaches, but what it lacks in volume it made up for in variety. The month began loudly when a hacker set off all of Dallas’s 156 emergency tornado alarms for 90 minutes in the wee hours of the morning on the seventh.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Why online etiquette matters — and why IT leaders should care

It seems that not a week goes by without social media hitting a new high — or, as United Airlines might attest, a new low. Whatever your perspective, there’s no denying that social networks and online connections can shape how we work, think and interact to a dramatic degree.High-tech analyst and consultant Scott Steinberg offers guidance on how to get along in this digital world with his new book, Netiquette Essentials: New Rules for Minding Your Manners in a Digital World, which was released in February. This is Steinberg’s seventh book about business or technology. Here he discusses why manners matter on social media, and why CIOs should care.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: The 6 best JavaScript IDEs

JavaScript is used for many different kinds of applications today. Most often, JavaScript works with HTML5 and CSS to build web front ends. But JavaScript also helps build mobile applications, and it’s finding an important place on the back end in the form of Node.js servers. Fortunately, JavaScript development tools—both editors and IDEs—are rising to meet the new challenges.Application lifecycle management (ALM) integration in Visual Studio 2017 is very good. I would happily use Visual Studio 2017 as my IDE for JavaScript if I were working primarily on Windows-based computers on projects using Microsoft technologies, especially ones that included Azure deployments and those of enterprise scale.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Making sense of cybersecurity qualifications

IBM’s cybersecurity division has hired nearly 2,000 professionals to its security team since 2015. Leaders recognize that the skills needed to succeed don't always come in the form of a traditional degree, but “the sheer volume of new certifications being created does pose challenges,” says Diana Kelley, global executive security adviser.It’s a growing problem for many employers. Increasingly, hiring companies must sift through resumes that tout cybersecurity-related degrees, certificates, industry certifications, apprenticeship credentials, digital badges, micro master’s degrees, nanodegrees and other credentials – trying to determine what a candidate really knows and how those credentials fit together.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here