7 Linux predictions for 2017

What the Linux world can expect in 2017Image by ThinkstockLast year I made a set of predictions of events that I thought would happen in the tech world (focused primarily on Linux and free software). I was mostly right. This has emboldened me to make another set of predictions for 2017. I have no inside knowledge on any of these—I am basing this entirely on the twin scientific principles of star maths and wishy thinking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 12.5.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Wyse 5060 Thin ClientImage by DellTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Beyond Scale to Flexible Cloud Networking

In the early 2000’s a new generation of smartphones revolutionized the cell phone industry, eliminating the market for “flip phones,” introducing new tools and completely redefining “phones” to universal internet devices. New companies rose and old ones adapted or failed. In 2015, a new generation of electric cars (Tesla being the most well-known), were introduced...
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How to survive the death of Flash

Seven years ago, Steve Jobs launched the once-popular Abode Flash into a long, slow death spiral when he announced that Flash would not be installed on any of his cutting-edge products, particularly the iPad and iPhone. Jobs argued that Flash was slow, cumbersome, battery intensive, incompatible with touch-screens, and had massive security issues.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

An Adobe Flash flashback

Flash-backRemember when the web pages were static and boring. And then along came Macromedia Flash. All of a sudden web pages were jumping and hopping with animation delivered by Flash. The multimedia platform has been on a long, slow decline over the past five years, but Flash remains embedded in many of the Internet’s most popular web sites. Here’s a look at some of the key events in the life of Flash. (Read the full story of Flash's demise.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to survive the death of Flash

Seven years ago, Steve Jobs launched the once-popular Abode Flash into a long, slow death spiral when he announced that Flash would not be installed on any of his cutting-edge products, particularly the iPad and iPhone. Jobs argued that Flash was slow, cumbersome, battery intensive, incompatible with touch-screens, and had massive security issues.Since then, Flash has fallen out of favor for a number of very good reasons. First, it remains a serious security concern. Second, around five years ago, Adobe announced that Flash would not be available for mobile devices, which is where Internet users were headed. And third, HTML5 emerged in 2014 as an adequate replacement for Flash as a development platform for multimedia applications such as animation and games.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Automating Cisco Nexus Switches with Ansible

For the past several years, the open source [network] community has been rallying around Ansible as a platform for network automation. Just over a year ago, Ansible recognized the importance of embracing the network community and since then, has made significant additions to offer network automation out of the box. In this post, we’ll look at two distinct models you can use when automating network devices with Ansible, specifically focusing on Cisco Nexus switches. I’ll refer to these models as CLI-Driven and Abstraction-Driven Automation.

Note: We’ll see in later posts how we can use these models and a third model to accomplish intent-driven automation as well.

For this post, we’ve chosen to highlight Nexus as there are more Nexus Ansible modules than any other network operating system as of Ansible 2.2 making it extremely easy to highlight these two models.

CLI-Driven Automation

The first way to manage network devices with Ansible is to use the Ansible modules that are supported by a diverse number of operating systems including NX-OS, EOS, Junos, IOS, IOS-XR, and many more. These modules can be considered the lowest common denominator as they work the same way across operating systems requiring you to define the Continue reading

Pastor: Toyota salesman stole wife’s nude photos from phone, sent pics to swingers’ site

Have you ever handed your phone over to someone you didn’t know so that he or she could verify data you have saved in an app? A minister and his wife did and their story is a disturbing cautionary tale as to why you shouldn’t hand your phone over to anyone.The following information comes from a lawsuit (pdf) against Toyota and a specific dealership as well as a Dallas Morning News report.Pastor Tim Gautreaux and his wife, Claire, were interested in buying a Prius from Texas Toyota of Grapevine. They had taken the dealership’s advice and used an app to get pre-approved for financing via Capital One Financial Corporation. An internet car salesman claimed he needed to show the pre-approved financing information in the app to his manager. The pastor unlocked his phone and handed it over.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pastor: Toyota salesman stole wife’s nude photos from phone, sent pics to swingers’ site

Have you ever handed your phone over to someone you didn’t know so that he or she could verify data you have saved in an app? A minister and his wife did and their story is a disturbing cautionary tale as to why you shouldn’t hand your phone over to anyone.The following information comes from a lawsuit (pdf) against Toyota and a specific dealership as well as a Dallas Morning News report.Pastor Tim Gautreaux and his wife, Claire, were interested in buying a Prius from Texas Toyota of Grapevine. They had taken the dealership’s advice and used an app to get pre-approved for financing via Capital One Financial Corporation. An internet car salesman claimed he needed to show the pre-approved financing information in the app to his manager. The pastor unlocked his phone and handed it over.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Artificial intelligence, instrumental convergence, and photos of cats

In the awards winning short story, Cat Pictures Please, by Naomi Kitzer, an artificial intelligence with a predilection for cats photos inhabiting some unspecified system has taken to manipulating people to see if it can change their lives for the better. It’s a clever story that raises several interesting issues about what the nature of an A.I. might be and one of the biggest concerns the A.I.’s fondness for pictures of cats. This fondness is understandable as cats can be very entertaining. Consider this video …  Wasn’t that cute? Anyway, in Kitzer’s story, cat pictures are the A.I.’s source of pleasure in a manner that isn’t fully articulated, something that’s fine for the purposes of fiction. On the other hand, in the real world, such an interest by an A.I. could have very different consequences due to something called instrumental convergence, which is defined on Wikipedia as:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Will autocrats ever learn? – The Internet Blackout in Gambia

Will autocrats ever learn? - The Internet Blackout in Gambia

On Wednesday afternoon, Cloudflare and other Internet companies noticed that the West African country of The Gambia had dropped off the Internet - the day before the presidential election that was planned to be held there on Thursday, December 1st. This is not unprecedented. The Ugandan government blocked access to Facebook and WhatsApp during its recent election. Internet blocking by governments has also been seen in Gabon. Even Ghana toyed with the idea earlier this year.

Gambia has a population of 1.8 million people, and according to World Internet Stats, Internet penetration is growing fast and is almost 20%. The latest statistics indicate that at least ten percent of Gambians are using Facebook. As shown in the graph below, on Thursday, the Gambian government cut off access to the global Internet and for 39 hours hundreds of thousands of Gambians were unable to use online services on which they rely every day.

Will autocrats ever learn? - The Internet Blackout in Gambia

All the networks in Gambia disappeared from the global routing tables. This could have been caused by a soft reconfiguration of Internet routers; or by a physical powering down of telecommunications equipment. At this point, we do not know. What we do know is that we Continue reading

Russia claims it foiled a cyber attack from a foreign spy service

The Russian government claims to have foiled a "large-scale" cyber attack from foreign intelligence services meant to destabilize the country’s financial system.The government’s Federal Security Service made the statement on Friday without blaming a specific country, but said the attack was meant to be carried out on Dec. 5 against a number of major Russian banks.The hack would have also included the use of social media and SMS text messages to circulate posts claiming a crisis in Russia’s financial system. Several dozen cities in the country had been targeted, the Federal Security Service claimed, stating it had already neutralized the threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russia claims it foiled a cyber attack from a foreign spy service

The Russian government claims to have foiled a "large-scale" cyber attack from foreign intelligence services meant to destabilize the country’s financial system.The government’s Federal Security Service made the statement on Friday without blaming a specific country, but said the attack was meant to be carried out on Dec. 5 against a number of major Russian banks.The hack would have also included the use of social media and SMS text messages to circulate posts claiming a crisis in Russia’s financial system. Several dozen cities in the country had been targeted, the Federal Security Service claimed, stating it had already neutralized the threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is This A Server Slowdown, Or Increasing Efficiency?

If you happen to believe that spending on core IT infrastructure is a leading indicator of the robustness of national economies and the global one that is stitched, somewhat piecemeal like a patchwork quilt. From them, then the third quarter sales and shipments of servers is probably sounding a note of caution for you.

It certainly does for us here at The Next Platform. But it is important, particularly if we have in fact hit the peak of the X86 server market as we mused about three months ago, to not get carried away. A slowdown in spending …

Is This A Server Slowdown, Or Increasing Efficiency? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel’s silence on Optane SSDs raises questions about launch and focus

There's a lot of excitement about Intel's superfast Optane SSDs, but products won't be on shelves this year as the chipmaker had earlier promised.Intel is currently making Optane in a factory in China, and production will "ramp" up next year, said Stacy Smith, executive vice president of manufacturing, operations, and sales at Intel.Smith declined to comment on when Optane products will hit the market, maintaining a consistent pattern of silence among Intel executives on the topic. He spoke at the Credit Suisse 20th Annual Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Scottsdale, Arizona this week.Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said sample Optane products will ship to more testers next year, and that "it’s really a 2018 ramp for that product," according to a transcript of an October earnings call, posted on Seeking Alpha.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What it Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service

Amazon Web Services might be offering FPGAs in an EC2 cloud environment, but this is still a far cry from the FPGA-as-a-service vision many hold for the future. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable offering in terms of the bleeding-edge Xilinx accelerator. The real success of these FPGA (F1) instances now depends on pulling in the right partnerships and tools to snap a larger user base together—one that would ideally include non-FPGA experts.

In its F1 instance announcement this week, AWS made it clear that for the developer preview, there are only VHDL and Verilog programmer tools, which are very …

What it Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

The NSA and Skilz: Turning spying on you into a video game

What could possibly be creepier than a government organization (such as the NSA) having nearly unlimited access to your private, personal information (including access to your webcam)? Turns out, the answer is: when it gets turned into a video game. And it appears, they have done this. On Dec. 1, 2016, Wikileaks released a collection of documents relating to the German parliament inquiry of the cooperation between the German foreign intelligence agency (the BND) and the United States’ NSA. One particular document (pdf) within that collection caught my attention. It appears to be a report from an official at the European Cryptologic Center (ECC) from April 13, 2012, detailing how they can improve usage of Xkeyscore (XKS) to collect information about people. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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