CyberTech conference showcases cybersecurity solutions originating in Israel  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Mention “cybersecurity conference” and most people think of the annual RSA Conference, which was held last week. But halfway around the world, the annual CyberTech Tel Aviv event is building momentum as one of the largest gatherings of cybersecurity professionals in the world. This year, more than 10,000 people representing 67 countries amassed in Tel Aviv, and I had the privilege of being one of them.Israel is making a name for itself, and that name is Cyber Nation. A 2011 government resolution created the National Cyber Bureau as an advising body for the Prime Minister. The bureau’s main mission is to bolster Israel’s national cybersecurity defenses, but a secondary mission is to promote research and development in the cyber field and encourage the commercial cyber industry in Israel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CyberTech conference showcases cybersecurity solutions originating in Israel  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Mention “cybersecurity conference” and most people think of the annual RSA Conference, which was held last week. But halfway around the world, the annual CyberTech Tel Aviv event is building momentum as one of the largest gatherings of cybersecurity professionals in the world. This year, more than 10,000 people representing 67 countries amassed in Tel Aviv, and I had the privilege of being one of them.Israel is making a name for itself, and that name is Cyber Nation. A 2011 government resolution created the National Cyber Bureau as an advising body for the Prime Minister. The bureau’s main mission is to bolster Israel’s national cybersecurity defenses, but a secondary mission is to promote research and development in the cyber field and encourage the commercial cyber industry in Israel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM and Visa plot to monetize IoT with sensor-driven invisible transactions

In a matter of years there will be about 20 billion connected devices on the planet. This is the internet of things (IoT), and financial services institution Visa today announced its intention to turn many of these into a way for you to pay.Speaking at today's opening of IBM's Watson IoT Centre in Munich, Germany - an enormous skyscraper with labs inside that will invite the company's many partners in IoT to take up residence - Visa's Jim McCarthy and IBM's Bret Greenstein laid out their vision.Think of what the plastic card in your wallet represents: it is a simple form factor that securely communicates a payment between the consumer and the retailer. But Greenstein suggested that its time may be up, as every object around us begins to have intelligence embedded within them, these could also be payment signifiers in some way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM delivers machine learning on the private cloud

IBM is making machine learning technology available in the place where much of the world's enterprise data resides: the z System mainframe. Today Big Blue announced IBM Machine Learning, a cognitive platform for creating, training and deploying a high volume of analytic models in the private cloud. The platform draws on the core machine learning technology from its Watson Machine Learning service on its Bluemix public cloud offering. "Our mission is making data simple and accessible to clients," says Rob Thomas, general manager, IBM Analytics. "If you look at the data landscape today, over 90 percent of the data in the world today cannot be Googled. It's neither simple, nor accessible. Most of that data resides behind corporate firewalls in private clouds."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Usable Security Highlighted at NDSS 2017

43% off TP-Link Smart LED Wi-Fi Light Bulb, 50W Dimmable and Alexa Compatible – Deal Alert

TP-Link has discounted its 50W smart bulb 43% to just $19.99. Use the Kasa app to turn on/off or dim from anywhere in the world. Set up a schedule, set the mood, and even control with your voice via an Alexa-enabled device such as Echo or Dot. Reviewers rate 4 out of 5 stars (see reviews) on Amazon, where you can get yourself one (or more) for just $20, a good deal considering it typically lists north of $20 and sometimes $30 with various online retailers. See the discounted TP-Link smart LED bulb on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Rising Tide of CCIE Written Costs

In CCIE news this week, Cisco has raised the price of their exams across the board. The CCNA has moved up to $325, and the CCIE Written moves from $400 to $450. It goes without saying that there is quite a bit of outcry in the community. Why is the price of the CCIE Written exam surging so high?

No Such Thing As A Free Test

The most obvious answer is that the amount of work going in to development of the exam has increased. The number of people working behind the scenes to create a better exam has caused the amount of outlay to go up, hence the need to recover those costs. This is the simplest explanation of all the cost increases.

As Cisco pours more and more technology into the tests, the amount of hands and fingers touching them has gone down. At the same time, the quality of the eyeballs that do look at the exam has gone up. It’s a lot like going to a specialist doctor. The quality of the care you receive for your condition is high, but the costs associated with that doctor are higher than a regular general practice doctor. Cisco’s Continue reading

Python – Kirk Byers Course Week 2 Part 4

This post will describe the exercises and solutions for week two of Kirk Byers Python for Network Engineers.

The final assignment in week 2 is the following:

IV. You have the following string from "show version" on a Cisco router

cisco_ios = "Cisco IOS Software, C880 Software (C880DATA-UNIVERSALK9-M), Version 15.0(1)M4, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)"

Note, the string is a single line; there is no newline in the string.

How would you process this string to retrieve only the IOS version:

   ios_version = "15.0(1)M4"


Try to make it generic (i.e. assume that the IOS version can change). 

You can assume that the commas divide this string into four sections and that the string will always have 'Cisco IOS Software', 'Version', and 'RELEASE SOFTWARE' in it.

The first thing we want to do is to split the string into several parts and put them in a list. We were told that we could use the comma as a separator. We’ll print the list and show the type to show what is going on.

cisco_ios_list = cisco_ios.split(",")
print(cisco_ios_list)
print(type(cisco_ios_list))

This gives us the following output:

daniel@daniel-iperf3:~/python/Week2$ python3 ios_version.py 
['Cisco IOS Software', ' C880 Software (C880DATA-UNIVERSALK9-M)', '\n Version 15.0(1)M4',  Continue reading

Why is Apple hyping augmented reality?

Augmented reality has a powerful ally, and apparently ardent supporter, in Apple CEO Tim Cook. The leader of the most valuable publicly traded company in the world reiterated his optimistic outlook for the future of augmented reality (AR) and highlighted the technology’s capability to layer improvements in the physical world.“I’m excited about augmented reality because unlike virtual reality, which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but allows an improvement on what’s happening presently,” he told The Independent in a recent interview. “Most people don’t want to lock themselves out from the world for a long period of time and today you can’t do that because you get sick from it. With AR you can, not be engrossed in something, but have it be a part of your world, of your conversation. That has resonance.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A: Oracle’s future lies in cloud, APIs, and microservices

In addition to Java, Oracle has been focusing lately on cloud, chatbots, and APIs. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Oracle's Amit Zavery, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud, at this week's DeveloperWeek conference in San Francisco to talk about the company's technology directions.[ Docker, Amazon, TensorFlow, Windows 10, and more: See InfoWorld's 2017 Technology of the Year Award winners. | Cut to the key news in technology trends and IT breakthroughs with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter, our summary of the top tech happenings. ] InfoWorld: How are microservices and chatbots driving enterprises to an API-first strategy, the notion of which was posed in a description of your upcoming presentation?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RSA: Eric Schmidt shares deep learning on AI

SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt says artificial intelligence is key to advances in diverse areas such as healthcare and datacenter design and that security concerns related to it are somewhat misguided. (Alphabet is the parent company of Google).In a wide-ranging on-stage conversation here at the RSA Security conference with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of The Great A.I. Awakening, Schmidt shared his insights from decades of work related to AI (he studied AI as a PhD student 40 years ago) and why the technology seems to finally be hitting its stride.In fact, last year Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI is what helps the search giant build better products over time. "We will move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The high price of security shaming [Infographic]

Bad press following a security breach hits companies hard. In fact, it can be so damaging that “two-thirds of companies would pay an average of $124k to avoid public shaming scandals,” according to a recent Bitdefender survey of 250 IT security professionals. What’s more, “some 14 percent would pay more than $500k.” If you think that’s a high price to pay, consider this: 34 percent of companies were breached in the past 12 months, according to the report, and “74 percent of IT decision makers don’t know how the company was breached.” Among the survey’s other notable findings is that while 64 percent of respondents said they think their current security budget is sufficient, they also admitted that “only 64 percent of cyberattacks can be stopped, detected or prevented with the current resources.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The high price of security shaming [Infographic]

Bad press following a security breach hits companies hard. In fact, it can be so damaging that “two-thirds of companies would pay an average of $124k to avoid public shaming scandals,” according to a recent Bitdefender survey of 250 IT security professionals. What’s more, “some 14 percent would pay more than $500k.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

RSA: Eric Schmidt shares deep learning on AI

SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt says artificial intelligence is key to advances in diverse areas such as healthcare and datacenter design and that security concerns related to it are somewhat misguided. (Alphabet is the parent company of Google).In a wide-ranging on-stage conversation here at the RSA Security conference with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of The Great A.I. Awakening, Schmidt shared his insights from decades of work related to AI (he studied AI as a PhD student 40 years ago) and why the technology seems to finally be hitting its stride.In fact, last year Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI is what helps the search giant build better products over time. "We will move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle preps developers for Java 9 upgrade

In preparation for the planned July release of Java 9, Oracle has released guidance for moving applications over to the forthcoming upgrade, which features big changes through modularization.The newly released JDK (Java Development Kit) 9 Migration Guide notes that every update brings with it binary, source, and behavioral incompatibilities with previous versions. "The modularization of the Java SE Platform brings many benefits but also many changes," Oracle said. "Code that uses only official Java SE Platform APIs and supported JDK-specific APIs should continue to work without change." But code that uses certain features or JDK-internal APIs may not run or may give different results, the company cautioned.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

H-1B advocate Sen. Orrin Hatch sets stage for new visa battle

The U.S. Senate's leading proponent for increasing the H-1B visa cap is Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). His previous legislative efforts have infuriated critics of the visa program. Hatch's 2015 visa cap-increasing bill, I-Squared, was so awful, said the IEEE-USA, that it would "help destroy" the U.S. tech workforce.Hatch is updating his I-Squared bill with reforms he hopes buy leeway with his critics. That doesn't seem likely.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi roundup: Hi, my breath is fresh, remote access, and a darker shade of Pi

Sticking Raspberry Pis in cute little packages is, after all, part of the point of the Raspberry Pi. It’s a small computer, so let’s put it places you can’t fit laptops or desktops. We’ve seen them behind picture frames, inside Nintendo Game Boy-ish shells, and in so many other places.Step forward, PiMiniMint creator Matt Wagner, who has managed to stuff a Raspberry Pi Zero – along with a screen, a battery, an SD card reader and much more – into a tin of Altoids. Curious.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cisco reserves $125 million to pay for faulty clock component in switches, routers + Microsoft's monthlong delay of patches may pose risksTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Industrial IoT: Removing Roadblocks

Startup Nyansa helps companies quantify the impact of application performance

Understanding the impact of an IT outage is a fairly standardized process. Take how much revenue the company generates, break it down to an hourly amount and, as they say in the UK, “Bob’s your Uncle”. However, IT outages aren’t nearly as common as they used to be a decade or more ago. Businesses build their infrastructure with so much redundancy that the concept of an outage is rare. I believe most companies could go into their data center and flick any piece of equipment off and not one user would notice.The bigger problems today are related to “brown out” situations, where things are working but not quite right. A user tries to make a call from a VoIP phone and the call is choppy or attempts to input some information into a CRM system and the interface is slow. These are much more difficult problems to quantify the impact of. Last year I asked a number of IT leaders if they were aware of how much productivity was lost due to poor application performance and most either took a shot in the dark or admitted they had no idea. As best as I can tell, the number is Continue reading

Startup Nyansa helps companies quantify the impact of application performance

Understanding the impact of an IT outage is a fairly standardized process. Take how much revenue the company generates, break it down to an hourly amount and, as they say in the UK, “Bob’s your Uncle”. However, IT outages aren’t nearly as common as they used to be a decade or more ago. Businesses build their infrastructure with so much redundancy that the concept of an outage is rare. I believe most companies could go into their data center and flick any piece of equipment off and not one user would notice.The bigger problems today are related to “brown out” situations, where things are working but not quite right. A user tries to make a call from a VoIP phone and the call is choppy or attempts to input some information into a CRM system and the interface is slow. These are much more difficult problems to quantify the impact of. Last year I asked a number of IT leaders if they were aware of how much productivity was lost due to poor application performance and most either took a shot in the dark or admitted they had no idea. As best as I can tell, the number is Continue reading