Former DHS head urges Trump to see economic dangers from cyberattacks

Last week's U.S. intelligence report tracing Russia's cyber-meddling with the 2016 presidential election is a timely reminder of the cybersecurity risks that the government and private companies face, said Tom Ridge, the nation's first secretary of Homeland Security."President-elect Trump is entering into a world fraught with hazards as never before," Ridge said in a telephone interview on Monday. "Russia is a reminder that cyberattacks are a permanent risk to individuals and countries and companies, and you must do all you can to understand the risk. It's a reminder of how serious and permanent the risk is. The risk continues to get deeper."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Token Authentication for Cached Private Content and APIs

While working to make the Internet a better place, we also want to make it easier for our customers to have control of their content and APIs, and who has access to them. Using Cloudflare’s Token Authentication features, customers can implement access control via URL tokens or HTTP request headers without having to build complex back-end systems.

Cloudflare will check these tokens at the edge before any request is relayed to an origin or served from cache. If the token is not valid the request is blocked. Since Cloudflare handles all the token validation, the origin server does not need to have complex authentication logic. In addition, a malicious user who attempts to forge tokens will be blocked from ever reaching the origin.

Cloudflare Private Content CC BY 2.0 image by zeevveez

Leveraging our edge network of over 100 data centers, customers can use token authentication to perform access control checks on content and APIs, as well as allowing Cloudflare to cache private content and only serve it to users with a valid token tied specifically to that cached asset.

Performing access control on the edge has many benefits. Brute force attempts and other attacks on private assets don't ever reach Continue reading

How U.S. intelligence agencies envision the world in 2035

By 2035, developers will have learned to automate many jobs. Investments in artificial intelligence (A.I.) and robotics will surge, displacing workers. And a more connected world will increase -- not reduce -- differences, increasing nationalism and populism, according to a new government intelligence assessment prepared just in time for President-elect Donald Trump's administration.The "Global Trends" report, unveiled Monday, is produced every four years by the National Intelligence Council. It is released just before the inauguration of a new or returning president. The council is tasked with helping to shape U.S. strategic thinking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How U.S. intelligence agencies envision the world in 2035

By 2035, developers will have learned to automate many jobs. Investments in artificial intelligence (A.I.) and robotics will surge, displacing workers. And a more connected world will increase -- not reduce -- differences, increasing nationalism and populism, according to a new government intelligence assessment prepared just in time for President-elect Donald Trump's administration.The "Global Trends" report, unveiled Monday, is produced every four years by the National Intelligence Council. It is released just before the inauguration of a new or returning president. The council is tasked with helping to shape U.S. strategic thinking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Protecting your data, protecting yourself: A first installment

Let's say—for whatever reason—you're concerned about keeping your communications safe from government prying. Assuming you aren't a high-profile target to warrant direct hacking (the United Arab Emirates allegedly tried to breach the digital defenses of human-rights activist Ahmed Mansoor on three occasions, for example), there are reasonable measures you can take to live a normal life and continue to have private thoughts and private conversations.Note that I'm not singling out any government or administration. Politics aside, we should all think like dissidents, because the tide ebbs and flows from freedom to dictatorship and from left to right all around the world. The common thread is taking smart measures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Protecting your data, protecting yourself: A first installment

Let's say—for whatever reason—you're concerned about keeping your communications safe from government prying. Assuming you aren't a high-profile target to warrant direct hacking (the United Arab Emirates allegedly tried to breach the digital defenses of human-rights activist Ahmed Mansoor on three occasions, for example), there are reasonable measures you can take to live a normal life and continue to have private thoughts and private conversations.Note that I'm not singling out any government or administration. Politics aside, we should all think like dissidents, because the tide ebbs and flows from freedom to dictatorship and from left to right all around the world. The common thread is taking smart measures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Changes in 2017

This past June when I was in North Carolina at Cisco’s CPOC lab, I learned that there was a chance–albeit a slim one, but a chance nonetheless–that a position would be opening up on the CPOC team in the fall. By that point I had been to CPOC three times and knew many of the engineers who worked there. I spoke to them to get their feedback, met with the newly-hired manager of the team, and just generally did all the things I thought I should be doing to take advantage of my time being face to face with these folks.

Then I flew home, subscribed to the “new jobs at Cisco mailing list” and waited.

And then, one day, it was posted: CPOC Technical Projects Systems Engineer. I immediately sent a message to my wife who responded as only she knows how:

Val_CPOC_job_reaction.png
Excitement :-)

Five short interviews later I was offered the job!

This brings me to change #1: As of this month (January), I am no longer a Systems Engineer with Cisco Systems Canada. I am now a Systems Engineer on the CPOC team reporting to a manager in the US.

Beyond the basic level of Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The futility of fighting future technologies

Last year, I flew to Calgary, Canada, to host an executive roundtable on behalf of Intel and two partner organizations. I got off the plane, pulled out my phone and opened my Uber app.It has become my standard travel routine. Except this time, there were no Uber cars to be had—bylaw changes in 2015 forced the transportation company to cease operations. The fees imposed were too much, the company said.One of the sponsoring vendor executives opened the meeting by asking, “What’s up with Calgary? Do you guys want to stay stuck in the past?”+ Also on Network World: How to be a CTO in the age of digital disruption (and live to tell about it) + The Calgary city council has since approved new bylaws that "make the city's licensing fee structure more favourable for the company," CBC News reported. And Uber is operating again in the city.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Before you select a visual collaboration platform, ask yourself these questions

Once you’ve realized how important it is to invest in a digital workplace and have secured the budget you need to move forward with your plan, it’s time to begin looking for a collaboration solution to support this new way of work.Ultimately, the goal is to bring your people, content and technology together in a single, unified content-experience platform that promotes effective team collaboration. To get there, you’ll need to move beyond conventional collaboration applications, which typically include only file sharing or chat, to a more comprehensive solution that includes visual collaboration. But with so many new visual collaboration platforms emerging, how can you decide which one best suits your needs?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dictionary: optic boom

optic boom

A flash produced when electrons move faster than light, akin to the boom of supersonic jets. Breaking the “light barrier” sounds like sci-fi, but physicists say it can happen in graphene sheets. The discovery could spark development of optical circuits a million times faster than silicon chips.

Link: The 21 Best New Words of 2016 | WIRED https://www.wired.com/2016j/12/21-best-new-words-2016/

The post Dictionary: optic boom appeared first on EtherealMind.

The best Android phones that fit every budget

Top Android phones from 2016Image by Google, HTC, MotorolaToday, it is nearly impossible for smartphone manufacturers to build a bad phone. Component makers and the supply chain that serve the manufacturers have amazing momentum. It is the same momentum that drove PCs to market share leadership in the 1990s. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX and SRM: Disaster Recovery Overview and Demo

In this post, I’ll briefly expand on the benefits of utilizing NSX as part of a disaster recovery (DR) solution. For additional information check out my prior multi-site and disaster recovery with NSX posts on the VMware Network Virtualization blog. Additionally, I recently presented at 2016 US VMworld and Europe VMworld on multi-site and disaster recovery solutions and recorded sessions can be viewed here: US VMworld, Europe VMworld.

Prior NSX Multi-site and Disaster Recovery Posts:

With disaster recovery, two challenges in general are:

  1. Recovering the application with the same IP address at the recovery site; this is important because typically there are other dependencies on this IP address such as possibly security, load balancer configs, DNS, application dependencies, etc.

  2. Ensuring security for the application is in place for the application upon disaster recovery; traditional solutions rely on manually updating or syncing security policies across the protected and recovery sites which is Continue reading

Happy New Year

Hi Everyone,

I wish you all a Happy New Year!

Currently im very busy studying for my 2nd attempt at the CCDE Practical exam.
I have it booked for the next slot, which is February 22nd in London.

Thankfully there are more and more material available for the CCDE than just a year ago. One of my primary sources are the study group which I have mentioned before, which Daniel (lostintransit.se) and I started way back.

Im also going through the INE scenarios as well as LiveLessons available through a Safari subscription. Those are really good and I highly recommend them.

One of the primary things im practicing at the moment is picking up business requirements from a given scenario. This is quite hard as im at heart an implementation-focused guy. But its good to learn something new and very useful.

If you are not following it just yet, I can highly recommend the “Unleashing CCDE” site on Cisco Learning Network (https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/unleashing-ccde). There are alot of good posts there on how to pick up these “soft” skills.

I will keep the blog updated with my study progress through February and we’ll see what happens February 22nd ?

Take Care.

/Kim

Device Configurations Are Not a Good Source of Truth

One of my subscribers sent me this question after watching the second part of Network Automation Tools webinar (or maybe it was Elisa Jasinska's presentation in the Data Center course):

Elisa mentions that for a given piece of data, there should be “one source of truth”. It gets a bit muddled when you have an IPAM tool and Git source control simultaneously. It is not hard to imagine scenarios where these get out of sync especially if you consider multi-operator scenarios.

Confused? He provided a simple scenario:

Read more ...

Privacy legislation reintroduced for mail older than 180 days

A bill has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require that law enforcement agencies get a warrant before they poke around users’ emails and other communications in the cloud that are older than 180 days.The Email Privacy Act, reintroduced on Monday, aims to fix a loophole in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allowed the government to search without warrant email and other electronic communications older than 180 days, stored on servers of third-party service providers such as Google and Yahoo.“Thanks to the wording in a more than 30-year-old law, the papers in your desk are better protected than the emails in your inbox,” digital rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy legislation reintroduced for mail older than 180 days

A bill has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require that law enforcement agencies get a warrant before they poke around users’ emails and other communications in the cloud that are older than 180 days. The Email Privacy Act, reintroduced on Monday, aims to fix a loophole in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allows the government to search without warrant email and other electronic communications older than 180 days, stored on servers of third-party service providers such as Google and Yahoo. “Thanks to the wording in a more than 30-year-old law, the papers in your desk are better protected than the emails in your inbox,” digital rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NAT is a firewall

NAT is a firewall. It's the most common firewall. It's the best firewall.

I thought I'd point this out because most security experts might disagree, pointing to some "textbook definition". This is wrong.

A "firewall" is anything that establishes a barrier between some internal (presumably trusted) network and the outside, public, and dangerous Internet where anybody can connect to you at any time. A NAT creates exactly that sort of barrier.

What other firewalls provide (the SPI packet filters) is the ability to block outbound connections, not just incoming connections. That's nice, but that's not a critical feature. Indeed, few organizations use firewalls that way, it just causes complaints when internal users cannot access Internet resources.

Another way of using firewalls is to specify connections between a DMZ and an internal network, such as a web server exposed to the Internet that needs a hole in the firewall to access an internal database. While not technically part of the NAT definition, it's a feature of all modern NATs. It's the only way to get some games to work, for example.

There's already more than 10-billion devices on the Internet, including homes with many devices, as well as most mobile phones. Continue reading

Watch Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone and change the world

10 years ago today, Steve Jobs delivered one of the most masterful product introductions in history when he unveiled the iPhone. Though the idea that Apple was working on a phone had been making its way through the rumor mill over the preceding few months, what the iPhone actually delivered to the table surpassed even the most optimistic of expectations.With a multitouch display and intuitive access to the entire web via mobile Safari, the iPhone instantly changed the way people used their smartphones. And that's not to say nothing of the App Store which went live in July of 2008 and quickly turned the smartphone industry on its head.Apple earlier today, naturally, celebrated 10 years of the iPhone with a special splash page on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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