AT&T trials open switches for better future services

A coast-to-coast network trial by AT&T last month, using open-source "white box" switches, pointed toward an imagined future of more reliable services that may come quicker than some people think.The carrier ran a trial on its core network earlier this year using switches based on chips from Intel, Broadcom and startup Barefoot Networks. The latter only started shipping in sample quantities in December, making the trial deployment a remarkably quick turnaround.Like other carriers and cloud providers, AT&T is aggressively shifting its network toward SDN (software-defined networking). As these changes are carried out across more infrastructure, they should give both service providers and subscribers more flexibility and higher performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T trials open switches for better future services

A coast-to-coast network trial by AT&T last month, using open-source "white box" switches, pointed toward an imagined future of more reliable services that may come quicker than some people think.The carrier ran a trial on its core network earlier this year using switches based on chips from Intel, Broadcom and startup Barefoot Networks. The latter only started shipping in sample quantities in December, making the trial deployment a remarkably quick turnaround.Like other carriers and cloud providers, AT&T is aggressively shifting its network toward SDN (software-defined networking). As these changes are carried out across more infrastructure, they should give both service providers and subscribers more flexibility and higher performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Which Mac should you buy?

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re thinking about buying a new Mac and may be in need of a little guidance. Fortunately, we’re quite familiar with Apple’s Macs, and we’re happy to help you choose the right Mac for you.Mac miniTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Review: Amazon QuickSight covers the BI basics

When I reviewed self-service exploratory business intelligence (BI) products in 2015, I covered the strengths and weaknesses of Tableau 9.0, Qlik Sense 2.0, and Microsoft Power BI. As I pointed out at the time, these three products offer a range of data access, discovery, and visualization capabilities at a range of prices, with Tableau the most capable and expensive, Qlik Sense in the middle, and Power BI the least capable but a very good value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

IBM: Tax-related spam up 6,000% since Dec.; Darkweb tactics net billions

Tis’ the season for tax villains. The notion that spam has been increasing lately has been obvious recently and for more evidence of that nasty trends you need look no further than this fact: From Dec 2016 to Feb 2017, IBM X-Force researchers saw a 6,000% increase in tax-related spam emails.And that’s just one of a number of tax season scams and frauds IBM X-Force security researchers have been tracking in a report “Cybercrime Riding Tax Season Tides: Trending Spam and Dark Web Findings” issued today.+More on Network World: IRS Dirty Dozen: Phishing, phone cons and identity theft lead scam list for 2017+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM: Tax-related spam up 6,000% since Dec.; Darkweb tactics net billions

Tis’ the season for tax villains. The notion that spam has been increasing lately has been obvious recently and for more evidence of that nasty trends you need look no further than this fact: From Dec 2016 to Feb 2017, IBM X-Force researchers saw a 6,000% increase in tax-related spam emails.And that’s just one of a number of tax season scams and frauds IBM X-Force security researchers have been tracking in a report “Cybercrime Riding Tax Season Tides: Trending Spam and Dark Web Findings” issued today.+More on Network World: IRS Dirty Dozen: Phishing, phone cons and identity theft lead scam list for 2017+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What home products are most susceptible to cyber burglars?

No matter how intelligent they claim to be, many smart home gadgets are vulnerable to hackers. Nowadays even the lock on your front door is susceptible to a cyberattack. No longer do you only have to worry about someone simply picking the lock, now a burglar could go through cyberspace to unlatch the door.Just like the lock on your front door to keep out burglars, you should protect your high-tech devices from cyber threats. Start by choosing different passwords for your internet router and each of your smart devices. It is also important to use multi-factor authentication as an added protection to prevent a hacker who guesses your password from breaking into your home. You should regularly install manufacturer updates to make sure you are running the most current security system in your home.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What home products are most susceptible to cyber burglars?

No matter how intelligent they claim to be, many smart home gadgets are vulnerable to hackers. Nowadays even the lock on your front door is susceptible to a cyberattack. No longer do you only have to worry about someone simply picking the lock, now a burglar could go through cyberspace to unlatch the door.Just like the lock on your front door to keep out burglars, you should protect your high-tech devices from cyber threats. Start by choosing different passwords for your internet router and each of your smart devices. It is also important to use multi-factor authentication as an added protection to prevent a hacker who guesses your password from breaking into your home. You should regularly install manufacturer updates to make sure you are running the most current security system in your home.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FAQ: What just happened to online privacy?

The internet sure seems mad about something.You’re not kidding.More than usual, that is.You’re right. President Trump just signed a bill into law that rolls back internet privacy protections enacted by the previous administration, and that has made things just a little angry around the ol’ internet.What kind of privacy rules are we talking about here?The previous iteration of the Federal Communications Commission created new rules last October for ISPs which stipulated that those ISPs would be required to seek customer permission before selling things like browser history data to advertisers for targeting purposes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FAQ: What just happened to online privacy?

The internet sure seems mad about something.You’re not kidding.More than usual, that is.You’re right. President Trump just signed a bill into law that rolls back internet privacy protections enacted by the previous administration, and that has made things just a little angry around the ol’ internet.What kind of privacy rules are we talking about here?The previous iteration of the Federal Communications Commission created new rules last October for ISPs which stipulated that those ISPs would be required to seek customer permission before selling things like browser history data to advertisers for targeting purposes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Developer-Ready Infrastructure: NSX and Pivotal

Organizations across industries are embarking on their journey of Digital Transformation. Time-to-market has become very crucial to the bottom-line and companies need to accelerate their application/services delivery and go from concept to production in record time.

Organizations are embracing containers, micro-service based architectures, Continuous Delivery and Integration tools as they are completely trying to change how they develop, deploy and deliver applications.

However, moving from monolith application architectures to microservices-based ones is no ordinary feat.

Many of these organizations leverage Pivotal’s expertise to deliver a modern application development environment. Pivotal’s flagship cloud-native platform Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides a modern app-centric environment that lets developers focus on delivering applications with speed and frequency of delivery. To find out more about Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and the now generally available Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.10.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry abstracts the underlying IaaS layer so that developers get a modern self-service application development environment, without worrying about the infrastructure. BOSH vSphere CPI plugin does a good job of consuming pre-created networks.

However, the truth is – “someone” always needs to do some provisioning – networks need to be carved out, load-balancers need to be configured, NAT rules need to be defined, reachability needs to Continue reading

Turn an old Wi-Fi network into a wireless mesh

I’ve tested a lot of Wi-Fi mesh (aka whole-home coverage systems) products lately, but what if you already have a good Wi-Fi router and don’t want to do a rip-and-replace job? There’s a new device available aimed just at this purpose.The AmpliFi HD Mesh Point, by Ubiquiti Labs, lets you create a mesh system with an existing Wi-Fi router. The device acts like one of the company’s satellite units on its existing AmpliFi HD Mesh System to expand Wi-Fi coverage within your home. If you happen to own the company’s mesh router and satellites, the Mesh Point can expand the existing network even more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flare Gives Spark SQL a Performance Boost

Spark has grown rapidly over the past several years to become a significant tool in the big data world. Since emerging from the AMPLab at the University of California at Berkeley, Spark adoption has increased quickly as the open-source in-memory processing platform has become a key framework for handling workloads for machine learning, graph processing and other emerging technologies.

Developers continue to add more capabilities to Spark, including a SQL front-end for SQL processing and APIs for relational query optimization to build upon the basic Spark RDD API. The addition of the Spark SQL module promises greater performance and opens

Flare Gives Spark SQL a Performance Boost was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Portworx shows how its done—raises an impressive B funding round

There is significant enterprise interest in moving away from a server-centric application approach and instead exploring containers. While Docker, the company possibly most synonymous with containers, has struggled to gain the sort of traction that justifies its stellar valuation, that doesn’t call into question containerization per se. There is clearly an opportunity here, and it is incumbent on vendors to find their market fit, develop realistic objectives, and execute, execute, execute.INSIDER Review: Container Wars: Rocket v. Odin v. Docker And so it is for the vendors filling in the whitespaces around the container ecosystem. Weaveworks is a good example of such a company. Weaveworks is helping to solve many of the networking issues around the production use of containers. Another area that is problematic is around data services—the move to containers makes life more complex from a data storage perspective. Two companies, ClusterHQ and Portworx, were involved in this space.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here