Acer’s Windows VR headset shows promise, needs polish

Microsoft unveiled the first Windows Mixed Reality headset Wednesday, and an early look at a prototype version of the hardware shows promise, along with room for improvement.The Acer Mixed Reality Development Edition headset will start rolling out to developers later this month, but Microsoft offered a demo of a pre-release prototype during the Game Developers Conference this week.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows VR headset shows promise, needs polish

The first Windows Mixed Reality headsets will start shipping to developers later this month, as Microsoft works to distribute the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset to a handpicked group of software makers.Microsoft offered me an early look at one of its internal prototypes, which shared a number of similarities with Acer’s hardware in terms of design and overall feature set. It wasn’t identical to the final hardware, but was built to roughly illustrate some of the capabilities users should expect. Here are my first impressions.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Response: IETF RFC 8033 Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE)

Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE) is another active queue management algorithm for dropping packets.

Similar to RED, PIE randomly drops an
incoming packet at the onset of congestion. Congestion detection,
however, is based on the queuing latency instead of the queue length
(as with RED). Furthermore, PIE also uses the derivative (rate of
change) of the queuing latency to help determine congestion levels
and an appropriate response. The design parameters of PIE are chosen
via control theory stability analysis. While these parameters can be
fixed to work in various traffic conditions, they could be made
self-tuning to optimize system performance.

We know that Bufferbloat is problem, and there are many algorithms proposed. PIE might be suitable for existing network hardware since its approximates Random Early Discard. BBR Congestion Control has been suggested and implemented by Google (related to QUIC/HTTP2) and possibly has the momentum, so I’m not sure if PIE

Link:https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8033.txt

Link: BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control – ACM Queue – http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184

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5 lessons from Amazon’s S3 cloud blunder – and how to prepare for the next one

According to internet monitoring platform Catchpoint, Amazon Web Service’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced a three hour and 39 minute disruption on Tuesday that had cascading effects across other Amazon cloud services and many internet sites that rely on the popular cloud platform.“S3 is like air in the cloud,” says Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti; when it goes down many websites can’t breathe. But disruptions, errors and outages are a fact of life in the cloud. Bartoletti says there’s no reason to panic: “This is not a trend,” he notes. “S3 has been so reliable, so secure, it’s been the sort of crown jewel of Amazon’s cloud.“To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meet the newest member of the RPi family: The Raspberry Pi Zero W

The Raspberry Pi Zero, priced at $5, has been, to say the least, a hit. Launched in November 2015, the Zero is a tiny (65mm by 30mm by 5mm) stripped-down but well-featured single board computer with a 1GHz ARM11 core, 512MB of RAM, mini-HDMI with 1080p60 output, and a 40-pin GPIO header that's pin compatible with the A+, B+, and 2B models. The problem with the Zero was connectivity; with only a single micro USB port you had to add a USB hub to connect keyboad, mouse, Wi-Fi dongle, and so on making the total cost far less attractive.To answer this issue, the Raspberry Pi Foundation just released the latest member of the RPi family: The Raspberry Pi Zero W which adds 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support. It also includes the CSI camera connector that was added to the revised Raspberry Pi Zero board. All this for just $10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon’s AWS S3 outage impacted Apple’s services

Yesterday afternoon, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant and prolonged outage that brought a number of popular websites and services down. While Amazon is more readily known for its online retail business, the company's cloud services division has quickly become a huge money maker for the Jeff Bezos-led company. What's more, AWS provides the backbone for many well-known sites, including Netflix and Quora."We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said yesterday amidst a flurry of confusion and frustration.The problem was eventually resolved, but not before a number of services from Apple were affected. For a brief while yesterday, iOS users experienced difficulties accessing the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud backups, iWork and other cloud-based services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon’s AWS S3 outage yesterday impacted Apple’s services

Yesterday afternoon, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant and prolonged outage that brought a number of popular websites and services down. While Amazon is more readily known for its online retail business, the company's cloud services division has quickly become a huge money maker for the Jeff Bezos led company. What's more, AWS provides the backbone for many well known sites, including Netflix and Quora."We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said yesterday amidst a flurry of confusion and frustration.The problem was eventually resolved, but not before a number of services from Apple were affected. For a brief while yesterday, iOS users experienced difficulties accessing the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud backups, iWork and other cloud-based services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition For Xbox One – Deal Alert

The Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition has everything fans need to live out their Star Wars battle fantasies, including Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Battlefront Season Pass. Rebels and Imperials alike will be able to expand their galaxy, with 4 epic expansion packs, including Star Wars Rogue One: Scarif. In addition, players can enjoy 30+ maps, 14 heroes and 14 game modes. The list price on the game has just dropped sharply down to just $19.99 on Amazon.  See the discounted Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition for Xbox One now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google slams the brakes on Pixel Chromebooks

Google is pressing pause on its efforts to build Pixel laptops, leaving the in-house premium brand to tablets and phones.The company’s hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, recently told reporters during Mobile World Congress in Spain that Google had “no plans” to create a new Chromebook Pixel, according to TechCrunch. For now, Google is leaving it up to third-party Chromebook makers like Asus, Acer, HP, and Samsung to fill in the gaps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

February 2017: The month in hacks and breaches

On February 5, an anonymous hacker kicked off February’s breaches, taking down a dark web hosting service that the hacker claimed was hosting child pornography sites. In the process, the hacker showed just how easily the dark web can be compromised.Then, on February 10, as many as 20 hackers (or groups of hackers) exploited a recently patched REST API vulnerability to deface over 1.5 million web pages across about 40,000 WordPress websites. “The flaw was fixed in WordPress 4.7.2, released on Jan. 26, but the WordPress team did not publicly disclose the vulnerability's existence until a week later,” Lucian Constantin reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

February 2017: The month in hacks and breaches

On February 5, an anonymous hacker kicked off February’s breaches, taking down a dark web hosting service that the hacker claimed was hosting child pornography sites. In the process, the hacker showed just how easily the dark web can be compromised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Palo Alto Stock Down 22% After Earnings

Competition from the likes of Cisco and Check Point is rising.

Azure Stack’s third technical preview arrives

Azure Stack, Microsoft’s hybrid cloud system, is getting close to release. On Wednesday, the tech giant unveiled the third major public beta for customers that want to test it out.The new release brings a handful of additional capabilities for users to test, like support for Azure D-Series virtual machine sizes and deployment with ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) to support systems that don’t have constant connections to Azure. Technical Preview 3, as this release is known in Microsoft parlance, will get a handful of other features over the coming months, including support for Azure Functions and Active Directory multi-tenancy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Getting Started with Lyft Envoy for Microservices Resilience

This is a guest repost by Flynn at datawireio on Envoy, a Layer 7 communications bus, used throughout Lyft's service-oriented architecture.

Using microservices to solve real-world problems always involves more than simply writing the code. You need to test your services. You need to figure out how to do continuous deployment. You need to work out clean, elegant, resilient ways for them to talk to each other.

A really interesting tool that can help with the “talk to each other” bit is Lyft’s Envoy: “an open source edge and service proxy, from the developers at Lyft.” (If you’re interested in more details about Envoy, Matt Klein gave a great talk at the 2017 Microservices Practitioner Summit.)

Envoy Overview

It might feel odd to see us call out something that identifies itself as a proxy – after all, there are a ton of proxies out there, and the 800-pound gorillas are NGINX and HAProxy, right? Here’s some of what’s interesting about Envoy:

• It can proxy any TCP protocol.
• It can do SSL. Either direction.
• It makes HTTP/2 a first class citizen, and can translate between HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 (either direction).
• It has good flexibility around discovery and Continue reading

Cisco warns of NetFlow appliance vulnerability

Cisco today issued a security warning about a potential vulnerability in its NetFlow traffic monitoring device that could cause the system to lock-up. +More on Network World: Cisco tries to squash Smart Install security abuse+ Specifically, Cisco wrote: “A vulnerability in the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) decoder of the Cisco NetFlow Generation Appliance (NGA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device to hang or unexpectedly reload, causing a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to incomplete validation of SCTP packets being monitored on the NGA data ports. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending malformed SCTP packets on a network that is monitored by an NGA data port. SCTP packets addressed to the IP address of the NGA itself will not trigger this vulnerability. An exploit could allow the attacker to cause the appliance to become unresponsive or reload, causing a DoS condition. User interaction could be needed to recover the device using the reboot command from the CLI.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco warns of NetFlow appliance vulnerability

Cisco today issued a security warning about a potential vulnerability in its NetFlow traffic monitoring device that could cause the system to lock-up. +More on Network World: Cisco tries to squash Smart Install security abuse+ Specifically, Cisco wrote: “A vulnerability in the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) decoder of the Cisco NetFlow Generation Appliance (NGA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device to hang or unexpectedly reload, causing a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to incomplete validation of SCTP packets being monitored on the NGA data ports. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending malformed SCTP packets on a network that is monitored by an NGA data port. SCTP packets addressed to the IP address of the NGA itself will not trigger this vulnerability. An exploit could allow the attacker to cause the appliance to become unresponsive or reload, causing a DoS condition. User interaction could be needed to recover the device using the reboot command from the CLI.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco warns of NetFlow appliance vulnerability

Cisco today issued a security warning about a potential vulnerability in its NetFlow traffic monitoring device that could cause the system to lock-up. +More on Network World: Cisco tries to squash Smart Install security abuse+ Specifically, Cisco wrote: “A vulnerability in the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) decoder of the Cisco NetFlow Generation Appliance (NGA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device to hang or unexpectedly reload, causing a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to incomplete validation of SCTP packets being monitored on the NGA data ports. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending malformed SCTP packets on a network that is monitored by an NGA data port. SCTP packets addressed to the IP address of the NGA itself will not trigger this vulnerability. An exploit could allow the attacker to cause the appliance to become unresponsive or reload, causing a DoS condition. User interaction could be needed to recover the device using the reboot command from the CLI.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SD-WAN facilitates security on the WAN

With RSA San Francisco—one of, if not the biggest security show of the year—behind us, it’s a good time to revisit security and SD-WANs. I know, we already lived through Yoda’s prognostications about the future of networking and security. In that blog post, we spoke about vendor approaches to securing the new Internet connections created by SD-WAN. There’s another dimension, though, to SD-WAN security that we didn’t discuss and that’s about the WAN.The WAN: Risk and reward for today’s attackers For a lot of SD-WAN vendors, security integration means inspecting incoming and outgoing Internet traffic. But while services, such as Zscaler, may inspect HTTP traffic bound for the internet, they do nothing for traffic bound to other locations. And that’s a problem because increasingly site-to-site traffic requires its own inspection and protection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SD-WAN facilitates security on the WAN

With RSA San Francisco—one of, if not the biggest security show of the year—behind us, it’s a good time to revisit security and SD-WANs. I know, we already lived through Yoda’s prognostications about the future of networking and security. In that blog post, we spoke about vendor approaches to securing the new Internet connections created by SD-WAN. There’s another dimension, though, to SD-WAN security that we didn’t discuss and that’s about the WAN.The WAN: Risk and reward for today’s attackers For a lot of SD-WAN vendors, security integration means inspecting incoming and outgoing Internet traffic. But while services, such as Zscaler, may inspect HTTP traffic bound for the internet, they do nothing for traffic bound to other locations. And that’s a problem because increasingly site-to-site traffic requires its own inspection and protection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: How to bury a breach notification

Amid the hustle and bustle of the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, researchers at RSA released a startling report that received very little press coverage relative to its overall importance. The report detailed a malware campaign that piggybacked on a popular piece of software used by system administrators at some of the nation’s largest companies. Incredibly, the report did not name the affected software, and the vendor in question has apparently chosen to bury its breach disclosure. This post is an attempt to remedy that. —Krebs on Security

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