Specs of Microsoft’s purported CloudBook leaked

Over the past few weeks there have been rumors of a new version of Windows 10, called Windows 10 Cloud, that sounded like a reimagined Windows RT and would only load apps from the Windows Store and do everything online. Along with the new OS have been rumors of a new piece of hardware, dubbed the CloudBook, which would be targeted at the popular Chromebooks created by Google and its OEM partners. Chromebooks are basically modern-day netbooks, in that they are aimed at internet use, have very long battery life and are below cost. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This is the closest thing Intel has built to a discrete GPU

Intel doesn't make its own discrete GPU but has built something that specializes in processing 4K graphics. But that product isn't powerful enough to run Crysis, if you were wondering.The chipmaker showed off its Intel Visual Compute Accelerator 2 at the NAB show in Las Vegas this week. It has the build of a GPU but is designed for server applications and not for PCs.The VCA 2 is aimed at cloud streaming 4K video, graphics, and virtual reality content. Servers with the graphics accelerator installed could be used to stream video or broadcast content.The VCA 2 uses the 4K-capable Iris Pro Graphics P580 graphics chip and three Intel Xeon E3-1500 v5 processors. The P580 is also used in Intel's mini-PC called Skull Canyon, which is designed for gaming.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This is the closest thing Intel has built to a discrete GPU

Intel doesn't make its own discrete GPU but has built something that specializes in processing 4K graphics. But that product isn't powerful enough to run Crysis, if you were wondering.The chipmaker showed off its Intel Visual Compute Accelerator 2 at the NAB show in Las Vegas this week. It has the build of a GPU but is designed for server applications and not for PCs.The VCA 2 is aimed at cloud streaming 4K video, graphics, and virtual reality content. Servers with the graphics accelerator installed could be used to stream video or broadcast content.The VCA 2 uses the 4K-capable Iris Pro Graphics P580 graphics chip and three Intel Xeon E3-1500 v5 processors. The P580 is also used in Intel's mini-PC called Skull Canyon, which is designed for gaming.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Password and security recommendations

Rather than just regurgitate the usual unworkable advice (make each password 14 different random characters, change them every week, and never write them down) we tried to look at the real threats on the current Internet and offer advice that makes sense today. The password advice does recommend strong passwords or pass phrases, but then mostly talks about operational issues: do encrypt channels where passwords are sent via HTTPS or the like, do use multiple factors where possible, do use federated authentication to minimize the number of passwords people have to use, do make users change default passwords before using a new account, and don’t do hard account lockouts after password failures (an easy way to harass your enemies.) While it does say to make it easy for users to change passwords when they want, it doesn’t recommend required password changes, since that is counterproductive–people use a pattern like password1, password2, password3, write them down, or most likely both. —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Password and security recommendations appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Ixia goes native to build its cloud visibility solution

Earlier this month Ixia announced an update to its CloudLens product where it could now provide visibility into public clouds. Ixia wasn’t the first packet broker vendors to roll out a solution that extends the visibility infrastructure to the cloud. That honor goes to Gigamon, which announced the general availability of its visibility platform for Amazon Web Services.Over the past few years, the packet broker space has heated up, as customers are feeling the pain of running distributed environments and have brought in more network management and security tools. Packet brokers effectively create a middleware layer that sits between the network and tools and makes it significantly easier to deploy best-of-breed tools. Now that IT departments are aggressively expanding to the cloud, it makes sense that the visibility tier would need to as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security certificates gone wrong

Security certificates are designed to authenticate hosts. Browsers have become pretty good about understanding chains of authorities, and making users accept the risk when websites can’t prove the chain of authorities needed to verify they are who they say they are.Sites masquerading as legitimate sites, however, employ sad little tricks, such as “punycode”—URL links embedded in otherwise official-looking phishing emails. These tricks are malicious. There are also sites that should be well-administrated but are not.Then there are sites, important sites, that botch their own security with certificates ostensibly granted by places such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security certificates gone wrong

Security certificates are designed to authenticate hosts. Browsers have become pretty good about understanding chains of authorities, and making users accept the risk when websites can’t prove the chain of authorities needed to verify they are who they say they are.Sites masquerading as legitimate sites, however, employ sad little tricks, such as “punycode”—URL links embedded in otherwise official-looking phishing emails. These tricks are malicious. There are also sites that should be well-administrated but are not.Then there are sites, important sites, that botch their own security with certificates ostensibly granted by places such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Escher Erases Batching Lines for Efficient FPGA Deep Learning

Aside from the massive parallelism available in modern FPGAs, there are other two other key reasons why reconfigurable hardware is finding a fit in neural network processing in both training and inference.

First is the energy efficiency of these devices relative to performance, and second is the flexibility of an architecture that can be recast to the framework at hand. In the past we’ve described how FPGAs can fit over GPUs as well as custom ASICs in some cases, and what the future might hold for novel architectures based on reconfigurable hardware for these workloads. But there is still …

Escher Erases Batching Lines for Efficient FPGA Deep Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Box revises platform pricing to ease developer adoption

Box is trying to give developers who want to use its platform more pricing consistency with a new  announced Tuesday.Customers will now pay on the basis of how much active use they're getting out of the Box Platform, which offers cloud storage and content management capabilities for third-party applications. Companies can purchase packages from Box that include a set number of active users, API calls, bandwidth, and storage use.The first package costs US$500 per month and includes 100 monthly active users, 175,000 Box API calls, 125GB of bandwidth, and 125GB of storage in Box's cloud. The more packages companies purchase, the less they have to pay per package. For developers just getting started with the platform, there's a free tier that allows 10 monthly active users, 15,000 API calls, 10GB of bandwidth, and 10GB of storage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

9 Easy Ways to Break a Cisco Network

Every day operation of a Cisco router is likely to cause failure.

The post 9 Easy Ways to Break a Cisco Network appeared first on EtherealMind.

Geeks In Vegas: 12 Things To Do

Response: Why a new routing stack? – Russ White

Some background on the Free Range Routing project.

The post Response: Why a new routing stack? – Russ White appeared first on EtherealMind.

Pluribus recharges, expands software-defined network platform

Looking to simplify what it calls the complexity associated with current Software Defined Networking controllers and proprietary protocols that require significant changes to customer network architecture and operations, Pluribus has refreshed and expanded its own SDN offering to address those challenges.+More on Network World: Cisco talks 2017 SD-WAN predictions+Customers looking to SDN to change and improve legacy network constraints have found many times that the SDN implementation has been nothing short of complex, and includes its own hardware-bound problems, said Steven Shalita, vice president of marketing and business development at Pluribus Networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pluribus recharges, expands software-defined network platform

Looking to simplify what it calls the complexity associated with current Software Defined Networking controllers and proprietary protocols that require significant changes to customer network architecture and operations, Pluribus has refreshed and expanded its own SDN offering to address those challenges.+More on Network World: Cisco talks 2017 SD-WAN predictions+Customers looking to SDN to change and improve legacy network constraints have found many times that the SDN implementation has been nothing short of complex, and includes its own hardware-bound problems, said Steven Shalita, vice president of marketing and business development at Pluribus Networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson’s 1Q Revenue Plummets 11%, Company Faces More Cuts

The company's cost reduction plan didn't go far enough.

MegaSwitch: an interesting new data center fabric

Data center fabrics are built today using spine and leaf fabrics, lots of fiber, and a lot of routers. There has been a lot of research in all-optical solutions to replace current designs with something different; MegaSwitch is a recent paper that illustrates the research, and potentially a future trend, in data center design. The basic idea is this: give every host its own fiber in a ring that reaches to every other host. Then use optical multiplexers to pull off the signal from each ring any particular host needs in order to provide a switchable set of connections in near real time. The figure below will be used to explain.

In the illustration, there are four hosts, each of which is connected to an electrical switch (EWS). The EWS, in turn, connects to an optical switch (OWS). The OWS channels the outbound (transmitted) traffic from each host onto a single ring, where it is carried to every other OWS in the network. The optical signal is terminated at the hop before the transmitter to prevent any loops from forming (so A’s optical signal is terminated at D, for instance, assuming the ring runs clockwise in the diagram).

The receive Continue reading

Would Verizon really publish my unlisted landline number?

The question occurs: What will happen if I cancel Verizon’s “Non-Published Service,” which for a ridiculously unjustifiable fee of $5.25 a month keeps my landline unlisted and my time at home almost entirely uninterrupted by scammers and robocalls.If I cancel this alleged “service,” will Verizon really punish me by publishing my number – unlisted now for 10 years – against my will and even if I first ask politely that they not do so?I know what you’re thinking: Of course, they will, they’re not only a cold-hearted corporation, they’re a carrier, for crying out loud. I, too, figure they will treat me like a shop owner who refuses to pay protection money: “Nice quiet dinnertimes you have going there; would be a shame if something happened to them.” But you never know for sure until you ask, right?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Would Verizon really publish my unlisted landline number?

The question occurs: What will happen if I cancel Verizon’s “Non-Published Service,” which for a ridiculously unjustifiable fee of $5.25 a month keeps my landline unlisted and my time at home almost entirely uninterrupted by scammers and robocalls.If I cancel this alleged “service,” will Verizon really punish me by publishing my number – unlisted now for 10 years – against my will and even if I first ask politely that they not do so?I know what you’re thinking: Of course, they will, they’re not only a cold-hearted corporation, they’re a carrier, for crying out loud. I, too, figure they will treat me like a shop owner who refuses to pay protection money: “Nice quiet dinnertimes you have going there; would be a shame if something happened to them.” But you never know for sure until you ask, right?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Getting Started: Tower Users and Credentials

In our previous Getting Started blog post, we discussed how to install Ansible Tower in your environment.

Now we’ll discuss how you can equip your Tower host with users and credentials.

To begin, let’s cover the essentials: setting up your user base and creating credentials for appropriate delegation of tasks.

How To Set Up A User Base

Building your user base will be the first thing you’ll need to do to get started with Tower. The user base can be broken into three easily-defined parts:

1. User: Someone who has access to Tower with associated permissions and credentials.

2. Organization: The top level of the user base - a logical collection of users, teams, projects and inventories.

3. Team: A subdivision of an organization - provides the means to set up and implement role-based access schemes as well as to delegate work across organizations.

Understanding User Types

There are three types of users that can be defined within Tower:

• Normal User: A user that is given no special permissions from the beginning - they must be granted to them by a system administrator.
  
  
• System Auditor: A user who will have view access only within Tower.
  
  
• System Administrator: A user who has the Continue reading

FCC chairman to announce plans to repeal net neutrality

The chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is expected to announce plans to repeal the agency's 2015 net neutrality rules on Wednesday.Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, will likely announce a plan to reverse course on the 2-year-old regulations and end the agency's classification of broadband as a regulated, common-carrier service. In a Wednesday speech, Pai will reportedly announce that he is scheduling a vote for the FCC's May 18 meeting to begin the process of repealing the rules.Pai has called the net neutrality rules a mistake that "injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market." President Donald Trump, who appointed Pai as the FCC's chairman, has also criticized the regulations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here