Arista brings network flexibility to the network switch

The terms digital, speed and agility all go hand in hand. In the digital era, companies need to make decisions and implement them quickly. This has put new pressures on the IT department to responder faster than ever before. To accomplish that, IT needs to be agile, which is why there has been such heavy investment in things such as containers, the cloud, virtualization and other technologies that make the infrastructure more dynamic. The drive to be more agile has been the primary force behind the shift to software-defined networks (SDN). SDNs increase dynamism through programmability, orchestration and network virtualization at a network level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

TLD glue sticks around too long

Recent headline grabbing DDoS attacks provoked heated debates in the DNS community. Everyone has strong opinions on how to harden DNS to avoid downtime in the future. Is it better to use a single DNS provider or multiple? What DNS TTL values are best? Does DNSSEC make you more or less exposed?

CC BY 2.0 image by Leticia Chamorro

These are valid questions worth serious discussion, but tuning your own DNS server settings is not the full story. Together, as a community, we need to harden the DNS protocol itself. We need to prepare it to withstand the toughest DDoS attacks the future will surely bring. In this blog post I'll point out an obscure feature in the core DNS protocol. It is not practical to use this "hidden" feature for DDoS mitigation now, but with a small tweak it could become extremely useful. The feature is currently unused not due to protocol problems - it's unused because of the DNS Top Level Domain (TLD) operators' apathy. If it was working it would reduce DDoS recovery time for the DNS servers under attack.

The feature in question is: DNS TLD glue records. More specifically DNS TLD glue records with Continue reading

10 most useful Slack bots

We experimented and tinkered with numerous bots that are available for Slack, the cloud messaging service meant mainly for business. (You can still use Slack for non-work reasons, particularly under the service’s free option.) Here are 10 that could be most helpful working alongside your Slack team.1. Ace: Saves your to-do list, and conducts your polls and surveysYou can build a to-do list by sending each task item as a message to this bot; it will store them, and show the list to you upon command. A task can be designated to a channel and assigned to a member in your Slack team, and labeled as prioritized (i.e. more important than others). Ace includes other functionalities: you can create simple polls and number ratings surveys with the bot, for which it will tally and provide a summary of the results of your team members’ responses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

10 most useful Slack bots

We experimented and tinkered with numerous bots that are available for Slack, the cloud messaging service meant mainly for business. (You can still use Slack for non-work reasons, particularly under the service’s free option.) Here are 10 that could be most helpful working alongside your Slack team.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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

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