Apple’s profit slump means a pay cut for Tim Cook

Apple CEO Tim Cook's total compensation took a dive for 2016, as the company missed its financial targets for the year.The company's earnings for the year to Sept. 24 dropped 14 percent compared to a year earlier.As a result, Cook's total compensation dropped 15 percent -- despite a 50 percent rise in base salary.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Tech's biggest CEO raises and pay cuts +He certainly won't have to start eating ramen noodles -- he made US$8,747,719, after all -- but he and fellow senior executives lost out on a few million each because of the poor performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More than 10,000 exposed MongoDB databases deleted by ransomware groups

Groups of attackers have adopted a new tactic that involves deleting publicly exposed MongoDB databases and asking for money to restore them. In a matter of days, the number of affected databases has risen from hundreds to more than 10,000.The issue of misconfigured MongoDB installations, allowing anyone on the internet to access sensitive data, is not new. Researchers have been finding such open databases for years, and the latest estimate puts their number at more than 99,000.On Monday, security researcher Victor Gevers from the GDI Foundation reported that he found almost 200 instances of publicly exposed MongoDB databases that had been wiped and held to ransom by an attacker or a group of attackers named Harak1r1.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More than 10,000 exposed MongoDB databases deleted by ransomware groups

Groups of attackers have adopted a new tactic that involves deleting publicly exposed MongoDB databases and asking for money to restore them. In a matter of days, the number of affected databases has risen from hundreds to more than 10,000.The issue of misconfigured MongoDB installations, allowing anyone on the internet to access sensitive data, is not new. Researchers have been finding such open databases for years, and the latest estimate puts their number at more than 99,000.On Monday, security researcher Victor Gevers from the GDI Foundation reported that he found almost 200 instances of publicly exposed MongoDB databases that had been wiped and held to ransom by an attacker or a group of attackers named Harak1r1.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

2017: the Internet Society’s 25th Anniversary Year

Happy New Year!  Along with the excitement and expectations each new year brings, 2017 marks a significant milestone for the Internet Society. This year, we celebrate 25 years of dedication to an open, secure Internet that benefits all people throughout the world.

We all know how far the Internet has come since the early 1990’s, but today our work has never been more important. As the Internet ecosystem becomes increasingly complex, so too do the issues it faces. We have an important role to play in highlighting the challenges that need attention and in mapping out a path forward to safeguard and protect the Internet we believe in.

Ms. Kathryn Brown

Docker Storage and Infinit FAQ

Last December, Docker acquired a company called Infinit. Using their technology, we will provide secure distributed storage out of the box, making it much easier to deploy stateful services and legacy enterprise applications on Docker.

Infinit

During the last Docker Online Meetup, Julien Quintard, member of Docker’s technical staff and former CEO at Infinit, went through the design principles behind their product and demonstrated how the platform can be used to deploy a storage infrastructure through Docker containers in a few command lines.

Providing state to applications in Docker requires a backend storage component that is both scalable and resilient in order to cope with a variety of use cases and failure scenarios. The Infinit Storage Platform has been designed to provide Docker applications with a set of interfaces (block, file and object) allowing for different tradeoffs.

Check out the following slidedeck to learn more about the internals of their platform:

Unfortunately, the video recording from the meetup is not available this time around but you can watch the following presentation and demo of Infinit from its CTO Quentin Hocquet at the Docker Distributed Systems Summit:

Docker and Infinit FAQ

1. Do you consider NFS/GPFS and other HPC cluster Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 6th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Hot rods in space. The Smith Cloud plummets towards our galaxy at nearly 700,000 mph. Vroom!

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

  • 3 of top 5: Stackoverflow questions are about Git; 3,000: four-passenger cars could serve 98 percent of NYC taxi demand; 44%: US population lives within 20 miles of Amazon fulfillment center; 72%: Amazon customers shopped using mobile device; 110%: increase in industrial control system attacks; 455: Number of scripted television series aired this year; $28.5 billion/yr: App downloads on iOS;

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @ValaAfshar: Number of robots working in Amazon warehouses: 2016: 45,000 / 2015: 30,000 2014: 15,000 / 2013: 1,000 — @JonErlichman
    • @jason_kint: updated duopoly #s. new IAB data came out yesterday. easy to run vs earnings for goog and fb, it's evident everyone else is zero sum game. 
    • rb2k_: I also haven't seen one [company in Germany] that isn't riddled with MBA grads that mainly push Jira tickets around.
    • Joe McCann: The best software developers I know are always hacking over the holidays. True story.
    • @kaffeecoder: Sigh. Async vs blocking protocol is irrelevant. What matters is communicating Continue reading

Posit: Private Cloud Has Less Lock-In

Posit: A private cloud has less lock-in than a public cloud because realistic, practical alternatives exist and migration is possible

  • Moving between public cloud services is practically impossible.
  • It may never be possible.
  • Your business process is hostage to a third party and completely outside of your control from a timeline, cost and change view
  • Consider, your business is under threat and cutting costs is imperative. Your cloud provider is forcing a migration to a updated service and you have fixed time period to complete the upgrade process. You must spend to maintain service. Control is lost
  • Loss of control is a lock in

In private cloud, you have some greater degree of control over these issues. Its a tradeoff.

Addendum: 20170106-17:30

  1. Take for examples, the collapse of public clouds by VMware, Cisco, HPE, Verizon etc. All of these are forcing your business to undertake an activity outside of your control.
  2. Amazon is quite ruthless about forcing customers to fit its technology. Machines are force rebooted, products are deprecated and discontinued reguarly.
  3. Azure if forcing upgrades on its SQL products as a rapid pace, often beyond what customers are able to handle (they don’t have the resources to change their systems).

Continue reading

25% off 100-pack iCloth Screen Cleaning Wipes for Electronics – Deal Alert

These screen cleaning cloths from iCloth currently average 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 800 people (read reviews) and its list price is currently discounted 25% to $18.74 for a pack of 100, individually packaged. The aerospace-grade soft fabric wipes are made from high quality and extremely low-linting Dupont Sontara fabric, and are premoistened with a purified water-based formula containing a isopropyl alcohol (not harmful ethyl alcohol) and proprietary ingredients that are safe on all sensitive optics and specialty coatings. So they are ideal for tablets, smartphones and laptops, but will work equally well on your sensitive eyewear. iCloth wipes are made in America, and come with a money-back-guarantee if you're not satisfied. See the discounted 100-pack now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: DRM versus civil liberties

Imagine a world where your Internet-connected car locks you in at the behest of its manufacturer—or the police. Where your media devices only let you consume mass media, not remix it to publish a counter-narrative or viral meme. Where your phone is designed to report on your movements and communications. Where your kid’s toy tells them it’s their friend, then talks about how much it loves sponsored products and transmits everything it hears in your home back to its manufacturer. Where your phone stops working if the police or the manufacturer ask it to. Where these backdoors are vulnerable to hacking, so anyone with the right resources can take advantage of them. —CircleID

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The post Worth Reading: DRM versus civil liberties appeared first on 'net work.

CES 2017: Random ramblings from my second day here

The International CES trade show is so big now that you can’t possibly see everything on display here, even if you had superpowers like Iron Man (speaking of Iron Man, there was a very cool Iron Man-branded massage chair on display). For the most part on Day 1 (officially now, although it’s my second full day of meetings and booth visits), I stuck to the Sands Expo Center, which featured mainly Smart Home products, robots, 3D printers, kid tech, fitness tech and wearables. The Sands Expo also features the Eureka Park section, a whole floor dedicated to startups that brings a LOT of people to its very narrow aisles. I can’t tell whether a product or company is very popular because of the crowds or because they (probably) pack them in tight to give them the appearance of popularity (probably a little bit of both).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco, HPE led $88B enterprise infrastructure market in ’16, Synergy says

Despite more and more companies outsourcing workloads to the public cloud, legacy technology stalwarts Cisco and HPE remain the most popular enterprise infrastructure vendors, new estimates from Synergy Research suggest. Synergy tracked enterprise infrastructure spending across seven categories for the 12 months leading up to the end of Q3 2016: Data center servers; switches & routers; network security; voice systems, WLAN; UC Apps and telepresence. In aggregate it estimates revenues were $88 billion across these segments, with spending down about 1% from the same time period in 2015. +MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: This company is transferring 50 Petabytes of data to Amazon's cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco, HPE led $88B enterprise infrastructure market in ’16, Synergy says

Despite more and more companies outsourcing workloads to the public cloud, legacy technology stalwarts Cisco and HPE remain the most popular enterprise infrastructure vendors, new estimates from Synergy Research suggest. Synergy tracked enterprise infrastructure spending across seven categories for the 12 months leading up to the end of Q3 2016: Data center servers; switches & routers; network security; voice systems, WLAN; UC Apps and telepresence. In aggregate it estimates revenues were $88 billion across these segments, with spending down about 1% from the same time period in 2015. +MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: This company is transferring 50 Petabytes of data to Amazon's cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MP on SpecTechUlar’s “6 Blogs for 2017” List

While I’m giving out good wishes, I’d like to also give a shout out and a thank you to Mark Silver at SpecTechUlar for including me on his list of “6 Blogs All Product and IT Specialists Should Add to Their 2017 Reading List.”

6 Blogs All Product and IT Specialists Should Add to Their 2017 Reading List

I fear that Mark has discovered my secret as he points out that  “[my] eccentric personality definitely shows through in this technology blog.” I quite like that 😉

SpecTechUlar

Thank you, Mark, for the kind words and the inclusion on your list! Mark works as a Product Manager for WalkMe, and runs the SpecTechUlar blog, pulling together interesting stories and best practices about technology and product management written by himself and other guest authors. He has found some amazing images for his blog posts, and even a glance at the home page pulls you in to the articles (I should learn from this!).

Thanks, Mark; I enjoyed discovering SpecTechUlar too, and I think many of my readers may also enjoy visiting.

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at MP on SpecTechUlar’s “6 Blogs for 2017” List and give me a share/like. Thank you!

ERSPAN on Comware

The Comware documentation doesn't spell it out clearly, but it's possible to get ERSPAN-like functionality by using a GRE tunnel interface as the target for a local port mirror session.

This is very handy for quick analysis of stuff that's not L2 adjacent with an analysis station.

First, create a local mirror session:

 mirroring-group 1 local

Next configure an unused physical interface for use by tunnel interfaces:

 service-loopback group 1 type tunnel  
 interface <unused-interface>  
  port service-loopback group 1  
  quit

Now configure a GRE tunnel interface as the destination for the mirror group:

 interface Tunnel0 mode gre  
  source <whatever>  
  destination <machine running wireshark>  
  mirroring-group 1 monitor-port  
  quit

Finally, configure the source interface(s):

 interface <interesting-source-interface-1>  
  mirroring-group 1 mirroring-port inbound  
 interface <interesting-source-interface-2>
  mirroring-group 1 mirroring-port inbound

Traffic from the source interfaces arrives at the analyzer with extra Ethernet/IP/GRE headers attached. Inside each GRE payload is the original frame as collected at a mirroring-group source interface. If the original traffic with extra headers attached (14+20+4 == 38 bytes) exceeds MTU, then the switch fragments the frame. Nothing gets lost and Wireshark handles it gracefully.

Three Months with Google Fiber

I'm one of the lucky few to benefit from Google Fiber's recent expansion into new regions (before they nixed the whole thing). I've had the service fire three months now and figured I should write up my experience with it thus far.

The Installation

Google Fiber announced that it would be expanding to the Raleigh-Durham metro area, known locally as "The Triangle", in January 2015. It's been a long game of hurry-up-and-wait since then, watching crews laying fiber all over town without hearing a peep from Google regarding availability. But in the fall of 2016, people were finally able to start signing up for service. Here's how my installation went.

September 3

Google Fiber registration opens! I sign up for service and pay a paltry $10 deposit, which gets credited toward my first bill. Over the next couple weeks, various utilities swing by to mark their lines in the ground. (Here's the color code for utility markings in the US, if you're curious.)

September 24

Google's contractor arrives on site to lay fiber from the curb to my house and to many of my neighbors' houses. Surprisingly, they cut my trench by hand, possibly due to the steep Continue reading

Three Months with Google Fiber

I'm one of the lucky few to benefit from Google Fiber's recent expansion into new regions (before they nixed the whole thing). I've had the service fire three months now and figured I should write up my experience with it thus far.

The Installation

Google Fiber announced that it would be expanding to the Raleigh-Durham metro area, known locally as "The Triangle", in January 2015. It's been a long game of hurry-up-and-wait since then, watching crews laying fiber all over town without hearing a peep from Google regarding availability. But in the fall of 2016, people were finally able to start signing up for service. Here's how my installation went.

September 3

Google Fiber registration opens! I sign up for service and pay a paltry $10 deposit, which gets credited toward my first bill. Over the next couple weeks, various utilities swing by to mark their lines in the ground. (Here's the color code for utility markings in the US, if you're curious.)

September 24

Google's contractor arrives on site to lay fiber from the curb to my house and to many of my neighbors' houses. Surprisingly, they cut my trench by hand, possibly due to the steep Continue reading

Three Months with Google Fiber

I'm one of the lucky few to benefit from Google Fiber's recent expansion into new regions (before they nixed the whole thing). I've had the service fire three months now and figured I should write up my experience with it thus far.

The Installation

Google Fiber announced that it would be expanding to the Raleigh-Durham metro area, known locally as "The Triangle", in January 2015. It's been a long game of hurry-up-and-wait since then, watching crews laying fiber all over town without hearing a peep from Google regarding availability. But in the fall of 2016, people were finally able to start signing up for service. Here's how my installation went.

September 3

Google Fiber registration opens! I sign up for service and pay a paltry $10 deposit, which gets credited toward my first bill. Over the next couple weeks, various utilities swing by to mark their lines in the ground. (Here's the color code for utility markings in the US, if you're curious.)

September 24

Google's contractor arrives on site to lay fiber from the curb to my house and to many of my neighbors' houses. Surprisingly, they cut my trench by hand, possibly due to the steep Continue reading

Mac’s share falls to five-year low

Apple's Mac share of personal computers worldwide fell to a five-year low in December, mimicking the company's own numbers that have portrayed a four-quarter sales slowdown.According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Apple's desktop and notebook operating system -- formerly OS X, now macOS -- powered just 6.1% of all personal computers last month, down from 7% a year ago and a peak of 9.6% as recently as April 2016.Net Applications measures operating system user share -- an estimate of the proportion of all personal computer owners who run a device powered by a specific OS -- by counting systems whose browsers reach websites of its clients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft closes the door on Visual Studio’s Team Rooms

Microsoft's Team Room collaboration capability for application lifecycle management soon will be no more. Instead, developers will need to rely on other options, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams.The company said this week that Team Rooms is to be deprecated from the on-premise Visual Studio Team Foundation Server at the next major version, and from the online Visual Studio Team Services platform later this year.[ Give yourself a technology career advantage with InfoWorld's Deep Dive technology reports and Computerworld's career trends reports. GET A 15% DISCOUNT through Jan. 15, 2017: Use code 8TIISZ4Z. ] "We don't have a name yet for this release, but it will be the version beyond TFS 2017 and associated updates," Microsoft's Ewald Hofman, TFS program manager, said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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