How to use your smartphone to get politically active

A new presidential administration usually fires up political passions from those on the winning and losing sides of the recent election.Bitter and cynical partisanship is sadly the norm, but it isn’t very constructive. Genuine civic engagement, however, can both empower you and encourage others to lobby and engage with your government about issues that matter.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: How to use public Wi-Fi hotspots safely The big question for anyone considering doing something as simple as contacting an elected official or lobbying for or against a bill is knowing where to start. It’s another of those questions your Android smartphone can help you answer, although you don’t want to end up on 200 mailing lists that do nothing but ask for donations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tips for negotiating with cyber extortionists

Paying ransom to a cyber extortionist holding enterprise data hostage might seem like a poor idea in principle but sometimes it might the best, or even only, option for extricating your organization from a crisis.Seventy percent of businesses hit in ransomware attacks have paid to resolve the problem, half of them over $10,000 and 20 percent over $40,000, a recent IBM survey of 600 corporate executives showed. Nearly six in 10 indicated they would be willing to pay a ransom to recover data.If your organization happens to be among those willing to consider a ransom payment, it is a good idea to devise a strategy for negotiating with the attackers before the need for it actually arises.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Tips for negotiating with cyber extortionists

Paying ransom to a cyber extortionist holding enterprise data hostage might seem like a poor idea in principle but sometimes it might the best, or even only, option for extricating your organization from a crisis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

5G Is Promising, But Challenging

Cisco Shrinks in Switching, Routing and DC

Cisco shrinking overall ~2% per quarter (fifth straight down quarter). 10% down in routing, 5% down in switching, 4% down in DC. Increases dividend, investors happy.

Cisco reported $11.6 billion in revenue for Q2 2017 on February 15, 2017, a 2% YoY decrease, but in line with guidance of a 2-4% YoY decline.

Revenue breakout:

Product, $8.49B (down 5.5%); Service, $3.09B (up 4.9%).

By segment:

Switching, $3.31B (down 5%); NGN Routing, $1.82B (down 10%); Collaboration, $1.06B (up 4%); Data Center, $790M (down 4%); Wireless, $632M (up 3%); Security, $528M (up 14%); Service provider video, $241M (down 41%); other, $116M (up 53%

“Cash” of $71.8 billion at the end of Q2 2017, with only $9.6 billion in the US. The introduction of a Corporate Tax Holiday could have huge positive ramifications for Cisco.

The Q3 2017 outlook calls for revenue to decline by 2% or to remain flat YoY.

Data Center

Total product revenue was down 4% and let me walk through each of the product areas. Switching declined 5%, driven by weakness in Campus partially offset by strength in the ACI portfolio, which was up 28%

Cisco ACI is holding Continue reading

More Thoughts on OSPF Forwarding Address

Angelos Vassiliou sent me an interesting lengthy email after I published my OSPF Forwarding Address series (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). I asked him whether it’s OK to publish his email together with my responses as a blog post and he gracefully agreed, so here it is.

What is Cyber Deception?

Cymmetria founder and CEO Gadi Evron explains the complex world of cyber deception, and how the principles of information control are helping to secure our systems.

The Challenges of Identity in the Cloud

JD Sherry, VP of Cloud Security at Optiv talks to Infoworld's Fahmida Rashid about the challenges of identity in cloud environments.

US legislation revived to curb warrantless geolocation tracking

U.S. legislators have reintroduced bills that would place curbs on warrantless access by the government to electronically generated geolocation information of Americans, including on the use of cell-site simulators that can capture cellphone data.Bicameral legislation introduced Wednesday, called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act, aims to create clear rules for when law enforcement agencies can acquire an individual’s geolocation information, generated from electronic devices like smartphones, GPS units and Wi-Fi equipped laptops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US legislation revived to curb warrantless geolocation tracking

U.S. legislators have reintroduced bills that would place curbs on warrantless access by the government to electronically generated geolocation information of Americans, including on the use of cell-site simulators that can capture cellphone data.Bicameral legislation introduced Wednesday, called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act, aims to create clear rules for when law enforcement agencies can acquire an individual’s geolocation information, generated from electronic devices like smartphones, GPS units and Wi-Fi equipped laptops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Tech Should Get Involved in Regulating IoT Security

If the industry doesn't act, lawyers will.

AT&T ICEs Vendors of Virtual Network Functions

No snowflake VNFs — just Lego blocks, please.

BrandPost: Making the case for hybrid MPLS/IPSec VPNs

IDC recently made a strong case for enterprise adoption of hybrid network-based IP virtual private network (VPN) services that combine Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)-enabled VPNs for larger sites and IPSec network-based VPNs for smaller locations. Many enterprises rely on MPLS for high-performance, critical communications. With an ability to support multiple protocols and to direct traffic more speedily from point to point, such as between data centers and major office hubs, MPLS has been a preferred option for knitting together enterprise virtual private networks (VPNs) over wide area networks (WANs). But, as enterprises have decentralized their workforces, they have adopted IPSec VPNs to accommodate remote and mobile workers using a variety of devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Manufacturer tools up virtualized network functions

Moving fast is a fundamental requirement in today’s business environment; flexibility and responsiveness are essential. New Zealand manufacturer Fisher & Paykel is leveraging new networking technologies to help it keep up with market changes. “We have large manufacturing sites in five countries; we sell in over 50; and distribute around the world,” says Jon White, general manager of IT for Fisher & Paykel, which has been manufacturing high quality appliances since 1934. “Technology helps us where we have distributed design centers, so we can allow people to collaborate on designs, and also make sure we that we reduce costs,” says White.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s Switching and Routing Revenue Dragged in Q2

Routing was down 10% and switching 5%.

Fixing Double Sublime Text Icons on Fedora 25

In my previous post on how to install Sublime Text 3 (ST3) on Fedora 25, I mentioned that I have observed instances where launching ST3 via the subl command creates an additional icon in the Dash. While searching for a solution to an issue with LibreOffice icons, I found a fix for this problem.

The fix is to add this line to the sublime-text.desktop file (typically found in /usr/share/applications):

StartupWMClass=subl

This tells Fedora and GNOME that when a window with the WMClass of “subl” appears, it should be considered a Sublime Text window. Once you add this line to the sublime-text.desktop file, then launching ST3 either via the GUI or via the subl command should create only a single ST3 icon in the Dash.

Now, back to trying to figure out this LibreOffice icon issue…

Correlating OVS and Guest Domain Interfaces

I’ve written a fair amount about Open vSwitch (OVS), including some articles on using it with KVM and Libvirt. One thing I haven’t discussed in such environments, though, is the potential challenge of mapping network interfaces in a guest domain to the corresponding OVS interface (for the purposes of troubleshooting, for example). There is no single command that will provide a guest-to-OVS interface map (as far as I know), but this information is easily gathered using a couple commands.

Gathering Information About the Guest Interface

First, we’ll need to gather some information about the interface from the guest domain’s perspective. There are two ways we can do this: from within the guest OS itself, or by interrogating Libvirt.

Working from Within the Guest OS

Inside the guest domain (I’m assuming you’re using a relatively recent Linux distribution), you only need to use standard commands like ip link list or ip addr list. The goal is to obtain the MAC address assigned to the particular guest interface. So, for example, if you wanted to get the MAC address for the guest “eth0” interface, you’d run:

    ip link list eth0

To isolate only the MAC address from the output of that Continue reading

A.I. faces hype, skepticism at RSA cybersecurity show

Vendors at this week's RSA cybersecurity show in San Francisco are pushing artificial intelligence and machine learning as the new way to detect the latest threats, but RSA CTO Zulfikar Ramzan is giving visitors a reality check."I think it (the technology) moves the needle," he said on Wednesday. "The real open question to me is how much has that needle actually moved in practice?"It's not as much as vendors claim, Ramzan warned, but for customers it won't be easy cutting through the hype and marketing. The reality is that a lot of the technology now being pushed isn’t necessarily new.In particular, he was talking about machine learning, a subfield in A.I. that’s become a popular marketing term in cybersecurity. In practice, it essentially involves building algorithms to spot bad computer behavior from good.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A.I. faces hype, skepticism at RSA cybersecurity show

Vendors at this week's RSA cybersecurity show in San Francisco are pushing artificial intelligence and machine learning as the new way to detect the latest threats, but RSA CTO Zulfikar Ramzan is giving visitors a reality check."I think it (the technology) moves the needle," he said on Wednesday. "The real open question to me is how much has that needle actually moved in practice?"It's not as much as vendors claim, Ramzan warned, but for customers it won't be easy cutting through the hype and marketing. The reality is that a lot of the technology now being pushed isn’t necessarily new.In particular, he was talking about machine learning, a subfield in A.I. that’s become a popular marketing term in cybersecurity. In practice, it essentially involves building algorithms to spot bad computer behavior from good.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bruce Schneier: Public-service technologists are needed to tame the IoT

The internet of things needs to be regulated and soon before it becomes even more of a tool to facilitate cyberattacks, and that means coming up with civic-minded technologists to help formulate government policies, security expert Bruce Schneier told an RSA Conference 2017 audience.+More on Network World: RSA: Watch out for a new weapon - your own data | Hot products at RSA 2017 +The problem is governments lack the technological expertise to understand the mindset of the makers of IoT devices and the markets in which they are sold.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here