Democratic senators push to save net neutrality rules under Trump

Democratic senators have promised to fight any move by President Donald Trump's administration to gut the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules.Any moves by Trump or the Republican-controlled FCC to roll back the 2015 regulations will meet stiff resistance from Democratic lawmakers and digital rights groups, the five senators said during a press conference Tuesday.Millions of U.S. residents called for the FCC to pass strong net neutrality rules that prohibit broadband providers from selectively slowing or blocking internet traffic, said Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat.ALSO: The end of net neutrality is nigh—here’s what’s likely to happen The senators were joined by seven digital rights groups, including Public Knowledge, Free Press, and Fight for the Future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Now you can try Microsoft’s supersized Surface Hub before buying

Microsoft's program allowing potential customers to try a Surface Hub for 30 days before buying it will start on Feb. 15.The try-and-buy program is available only through Surface Hub resellers in North America, Asia, and Europe. A list of resellers can be found on Microsoft's website.The Surface Hub is a gigantic Windows 10 computer available with a 55-inch or 84-inch screen. The 55-inch model is priced at US$8,999 and the 84-inch model is $21,999.The computer is designed for collaboration, videoconferencing, and whiteboarding.  It runs a custom version of Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Study: 1 in 3 website visitors is an attack bot

For the 5th straight year, impersonator bots were the most active bad bots, making up 24.3 percent of all bot activity. Both cheap and effective, impersonator bots are most commonly used to launch DDoS attacks, including October’s attack against DNS provider Dyn.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Irish court hears case challenging transatlantic data transfers

Max Schrems' 2013 complaint to the Irish data protection commissioner over Facebook's handling of his personal information put him in an unusual position on Tuesday: He's a co-defendant, alongside Facebook, in a case before the High Court of Ireland.The case concerns the standard contract clauses that Facebook and other companies relied on to legalize their export of European Union citizens' personal information to the U.S. for processing in the months after the Safe Harbor agreement was overturned.The three-week hearing began Tuesday with representations from the data protection commissioner, which brought the case; Schrems and Facebook will get their turn next week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Study: 1 in 3 website visitors is an attack bot

For the 5th straight year, impersonator bots were the most active bad bots, making up 24.3 percent of all bot activity. Both cheap and effective, impersonator bots are most commonly used to launch DDoS attacks, including October’s attack against DNS provider Dyn.That’s among the key findings of Imperva’s Bot Traffic Report 2016, which is based on analysis of over 16.7 billion visits to 100,000 randomly-selected domains on the Imperva content delivery network from August 9, 2016 to November 6, 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Cloudflare Crypto Meetup #5: February 28, 2017

Come join us on Cloudflare HQ in San Francisco on Tuesday, Febrary 28, 2017 for another cryptography meetup. We again had a great time at the last one, we decided to host another. It's becoming a pattern.

We’ll start the evening at 6:00p.m. with time for networking, followed up with short talks by leading experts starting at 6:30p.m. Pizza and beer are provided! RSVP here.

Here are the confirmed speakers:

Deirdre Connolly

Deirdre is a senior software engineer at Brightcove, where she is trying to secure old and new web applications. Her interests include applied cryptography, secure defaults, elliptic curves and their isogenies.

Post-quantum cryptography

Post-quantum cryptography is an active field of research in developing new cryptosystems that will be resistant to attack by future quantum computers. Recently a somewhat obscure area, isogeny-based cryptography, has been getting more attention, including impressive speed and compression optimizations and robust security analyses, bringing it into regular discussion alongside other post-quantum candidates. This talk will cover isogeny-based crypto, specifically these recents results regarding supersingular isogeny diffie-hellman, which is a possible replacement for the ephemeral key exchanges in use today.

Maya Kaczorowski

Maya Kaczorowski is a Product Manager at Google in Security Continue reading

Microsoft’s custom voice recognition service hits public beta

Companies building applications that leverage speech recognition have a new machine-learning based tool to improve their work. Microsoft is opening the public beta for its Custom Speech Service, the company said Tuesday.The service, formerly known as CRIS, allows customers to train a speech recognition system to work in a specific scenario, allowing it to produce more accurate results. For example, the Custom Speech Service can be trained to provide better results in a noisy airport or set up to work better with voices from a particular group, like kids or people with different accents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Upcoming Webinar: Open Networking for Large Scale Networks

Shawn Zandi and I are doing a two part webinar over at ipspace.net—

Most modern data centers are still using vendor-driven “future proof” routers and switches with offering lots of (often unnecessary) capabilities. To build large, however, it is often better to build simple—radically simple. This webinar will cover the design components involved in building a data center or cloud fabric using a single, disaggregated device—the way some hyperscale and web scale operators build their networks. The first live session of the webinar will consider the benefits of disaggregated switch, focusing on the components, sources, and challenges in using disaggregated hardware and software in data center fabrics. The second live session will focus on the topologies and design concepts used in large scale data center fabrics using a single switching device as a leaf, spine and superspine switch.

Jump over to ipspace if you want to learn more.

The post Upcoming Webinar: Open Networking for Large Scale Networks appeared first on 'net work.

One Small Shop, One Extreme HPC Storage Challenge

Being at the bleeding edge of computing in the life sciences does not always mean operating at extreme scale. For some shops, advancements in new data-generating scientific tools requires forward thinking at the infrastructure level—even if it doesn’t require a massive cluster with exotic architectures. We tend to cover much of what happens at the extreme scale of computing here, but it’s worth stepping back and observing how dramatic problems in HPC are addressed in much smaller environments.

This “small shop, big problem” situation is familiar to the Van Andel Research Institute (VARI), which recently moved from a genomics and …

One Small Shop, One Extreme HPC Storage Challenge was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Adventures in GELF

If you are running apps in containers and are using Docker’s GELF logging driver (or are considering using it), the following musings might be relevant to your interests.

Some context

When you run applications in containers, the easiest logging method is to write on standard output. You can’t get simpler than that: just echo, print, write (or the equivalent in your programming language!) and the container engine will capture your application’s output.

Other approaches are still possible, of course; for instance:

In the last scenario, this service can be:

  • a proprietary logging mechanism operated by your cloud provider, e.g. AWS CloudWatch or Google Stackdriver;
  • provided by a third-party specialized in managing logs or events, e.g. Honeycomb, Loggly, Splunk, etc.;
  • something running in-house, that you deploy and maintain yourself.

If your application is very terse, or Continue reading

Polish banks on alert after mystery malware found on computers

The discovery of malware on computers and servers of several Polish banks has put the country's financial sector on alert over potential compromises.Polish media reported last week that the IT security teams at many Polish banks have been busy recently searching their systems for a particular strain of malware after several unnamed banks found it on their computers.It's not clear what the malware's end goal is, but in at least one case it was used to exfiltrate data from a bank's computer to an external server. The nature of the stolen information could not be immediately determined because it was encrypted, Polish IT news blog Zaufana Trzecia Strona reported Friday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vizio to pay $2.2 million for spying on what customers watch without consent

Whether or not Vizio is “sorry” for spying on more than 11 million people while they watch TV in the privacy of their homes is debatable – the company was proud of its ability to capture “highly specific viewing behavior data on a massive scale with great accuracy” in its Oct. 2015 IPO – but Vizio has agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle charges by the FTC. The data collection about what people were watching was occurring without users’ consent and Vizio was then sharing the data with advertisers and other companies.In the FTC’s words, “The data generated when you watch television can reveal a lot about you and your household. So, before a company pulls up a chair next to you and starts taking careful notes on everything you watch (and then shares it with its partners), it should ask if that’s O.K. with you. VIZIO wasn’t doing that, and the FTC stepped in.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Shopping for tax information

The 2016 tax season is now in full swing in the United States, which means scammers are once again assembling vast dossiers of personal data and preparing to file fraudulent tax refund requests on behalf of millions of Americans. But for those lazy identity thieves who can’t be bothered to phish or steal the needed data, there is now another option: Buying stolen W-2 tax forms from other crooks who have phished the documents wholesale from corporations. —Krebs on Security

The post Worth Reading: Shopping for tax information appeared first on 'net work.

They are young and passionate. They will rule the future Internet.

Beyond the Net Journal: Youth Observatory #1 Episode

 “The voices of young people are not heard when it comes to Internet policy” said Carlos Guerrero, project manager of the Youth Observatory. “We are the generation that has been using the Internet since we were children, and we are the ones who will be using it for the next 50 years. Our voice matters.”

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