Hottest Black Friday 2016 Windows PC, tablet and game deals

Big dealsWhile Windows phone deals are non-surprisingly almost non-existent for Black Friday 2016, there are plenty of Microsoft Windows desktops and laptops, Surface tablets and Xbox gaming deals being touted this holiday shopping season. Come Nov. 25, and even earlier for many retailers, here are some of the best deals around.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP’s power-packed Z2 Mini desktop takes on Apple’s aging Mac Mini

HP has been hoping that sleek, powerful hardware will lure Apple Mac aficionados to switch to its PCs, and now is aiming the new Z2 Mini mini-desktop at Mac Mini users.The Z2 Mini packs the computing power of a full-size desktop into a box that can be held in one hand. Starting at $699, it will be available worldwide starting in December.HP has been excelling in PC design, with innovative desktops like Pavilion Wave, a cylindrical desktop, and Elite Slice, a modular mini-desktop onto which components can be snapped.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Comments for my biracial niece

I spent the night after Trump’s victory consoling my biracial niece worried about the election. Here are my comments. You won’t like them, expecting the opposite given the title. But it’s what I said.

I preferred Hillary, but that doesn’t mean Trump is an evil choice.

Don’t give into the hate. You get most of your news via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are at best one-sided and unfair. At worst, they are completely inaccurate. Social media posts are driven by emotion, not logic. Sometimes that emotion is love of cute puppies. Mostly it’s anger, fear, and hate. Instead of blindly accepting what you read, challenge it. Find the original source. Find a better explanation. Search for context.

Don’t give into the hate. The political issues that you are most concerned about are not simple and one-sided with obvious answers. They are complex and nuanced. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they are unreasonable or evil. In today’s politics, it has become the norm that we can’t simply disagree with somebody, but must also vilify and hate them. We’ve redefined politics to be the fight between the virtuous (whatever side we are on) and the Continue reading

How to teach endian

On /r/programming is this post about byte-order/endianness. It gives the same information as most documents on the topic. It is wrong. It's been wrong for over 30 years. Here's how it should be taught.

One of the major disciplines in computer science is parsing/formatting. This is the process of converting the external format of data (file formats, network protocols, hardware registers) into the internal format (the data structures that software operates on).

It should be a formal computer-science discipline, because it's actually a lot more difficult than you'd expect. That's because the majority of vulnerabilities in software that hackers exploit are due to parsing bugs. Since programmers don't learn about parsing formally, they figure it out for themselves, creating ad hoc solutions that are prone to bugs. For example, programmers assume external buffers cannot be larger than internal ones, leading to buffer overflows.

An external format must be well-defined. What the first byte means must be written down somewhere, then what the second byte means, and so on. For Internet protocols, these formats are written in RFCs, such as RFC 791 for the "Internet Protocol". For file formats, these are written in documents, such as those describing GIF files, JPEG Continue reading

This malware attack starts with a fake customer-service call

Hotel and restaurant chains, beware. A notorious cybercriminal gang is tricking businesses into installing malware by calling their customer services representatives and convincing them to open malicious email attachments. The culprits in these hacks, which are designed to steal customers’ credit card numbers, appear to be the Carbanak gang, a group that was blamed last year for stealing as much as $1 billion from various banks. On Monday, security firm Trustwave said that three of its clients in the past month had encountered malware built with coding found in previous Carbanak attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This malware attack starts with a fake customer-service call

Hotel and restaurant chains, beware. A notorious cybercriminal gang is tricking businesses into installing malware by calling their customer services representatives and convincing them to open malicious email attachments. The culprits in these hacks, which are designed to steal customers’ credit card numbers, appear to be the Carbanak gang, a group that was blamed last year for stealing as much as $1 billion from various banks. On Monday, security firm Trustwave said that three of its clients in the past month had encountered malware built with coding found in previous Carbanak attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network Automation Survey

Network Automation is just getting started and it’s odd to say that as IT professionals from other technology disciplines are always surprised to see how much manual interaction there still is between the networking engineering/operations teams and the actual devices they manage.

I’ll never forget the days in 2012-2013 performing my best Google searches to find ways to program or to automate network routers and switches. I didn’t care what programming language was being used or even what tool, but I found nothing. Every time I heard someone say they were using a network script, I’d say “email it to me, that sounds interesting.” Unfortunately, 100% of the time, it ended up being a notepad or a Word file, not a script. What a bummer.

I like to think I’m a solid Googler too. It was amazing though - there was near nothing. Do a search today on network automation or network programming and you’d be amazed on what you’ll find - we’ve come a long way in the past 36 months with respect to network automation, but I truly believe we’re still in the 2nd or 3rd inning (if we were playing a game of baseball, of course).

Continue reading

Network Automation Survey

Network Automation is just getting started and it’s odd to say that as IT professionals from other technology disciplines are always surprised to see how much manual interaction there still is between the networking engineering/operations teams and the actual devices they manage.

I’ll never forget the days in 2012-2013 performing my best Google searches to find ways to program or to automate network routers and switches. I didn’t care what programming language was being used or even what tool, but I found nothing. Every time I heard someone say they were using a network script, I’d say “email it to me, that sounds interesting.” Unfortunately, 100% of the time, it ended up being a notepad or a Word file, not a script. What a bummer.

I like to think I’m a solid Googler too. It was amazing though - there was near nothing. Do a search today on network automation or network programming and you’d be amazed on what you’ll find - we’ve come a long way in the past 36 months with respect to network automation, but I truly believe we’re still in the 2nd or 3rd inning (if we were playing a game of baseball, of course).

Continue reading

GE buys ServiceMax for $915M to boost its IoT power

General Electric’s US$915 million acquisition of field service management company ServiceMax on Monday should help enterprises combine what GE does for industrial products and assets with more tools for those who work on them.GE Digital, the division that’s buying ServiceMax, sells software and services for connecting industrial assets and products in the field, then collecting and analyzing data about them. ServiceMax has a cloud-based platform for tasks like scheduling maintenance calls and making sure the right technician is on each job with the right part.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Networking Field Day 13 – Sneak Preview

This is going to be a busy week for the Tech Field Day family. They have delegates en-route to Tech Field Day 12 this morning, and Wednesday the crew for Network Field day 13 arrive. I can’t express how excited I am about going to Networking Field Day 13 this week. I haven’t been to an actual NFD event since NFD2, although I did get to go to the TFD9 event in Austin a couple years ago. I can’t wait to land in San Jose. For those new to this concept, Networking Field day is an event that is focused on bringing together IT product vendors and thought leaders in the industry to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. Please be sure to read my disclaimer page on this topic. These events are streamed live, so if you want to listen in while we talk about the latest and greatest technologies from the vendors we’re meeting with, or if you just want to listen to us moan and groan at the occasional Gartner or NASCAR slides… you should tune in. On the menu for this week we have a number of exciting companies that I’d Continue reading

12 steps to lower your espionage risk

"What company would not like to know exactly what its competitor is doing?"When we talk about corporate espionage, we're talking about companies stealing information that gives them a competitive or economic advantage, writes Chuck Easttom in the new 3rd edition of his book Computer Security Fundamentals. It's not showy, often low-tech and sometimes downright dirty, as exemplified by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's admission that he "hire[d] private investigators to sift through Microsoft garbage in an attempt to garner information."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Worth Reading: IoT Goes Nuclear

Within the next few years, billions of IoT devices will densely populate our cities. In this paper we describe a new type of threat in which adjacent IoT devices will infect each other with a worm that will spread explosively over large areas in a kind of nuclear chain reaction, provided that the density of compatible IoT devices exceeds a certain critical mass. In particular, we developed and verified such an infection using the popular Philips Hue smart lamps as a platform. —Eyal Ronen

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Your security mirages

Yes, I was hit last week. Forensics are in progress. I got doxxed, too.It has made me realize that most of systems security is an illusion. Here are my favorite alternate realities:1. Everything is safe behind the firewall.Ever heard of UBFWI—as in User’s Been Fooling With It? While IPD/IPS and firewall networked-technology has improved so vastly, there’s nothing like a user with an infected laptop to bring in a lulu.2. Obscure operating systems never get hit. Hackers only go for the gold with Windows.Here, let me laugh out loud and roll on the floor. Mine was an obscure server version on an obscure branch of an obscure BSD limb. Listen to the sound of lunch getting eaten: mine. Chomp, chomp, burp.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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