23% off iClever Backlight Bluetooth Folding Keyboard for Smartphone, PC, or Tablet – Deal Alert

This lightweight and super portable keyboard from iClever features a compact design with full standard-size keys, but folds down into ⅓ of the size. This model has a convenient backlight feature with red, blue, or green selectable at two brightness levels, so you can type in every environment from a dimly-lit classroom to a dark airplane cabin. Its Broadcom Bluetooth module has a generous operating range of 30 feet, and connects quickly with your devices when you simply unfold the keyboard. The iClever backlit folding keyboard averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews) where its typical list price of $59.99 has been reduced 23% to $45.99. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NIPS conference: Google releases open-source, AI, 3D game-development project

Today, on the opening day of the marquee AI conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona, Google announced in a blog post the release of its DeepMind Lab project available to the AI community under open source licensing terms.Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are the next two computing platforms. DeepMind Lab is a 3D AI platform for building virtual games that bring these two platforms together in multiple dimensions. DeepMind Lab uses a special kind of AI, called machine learning (ML). And within the field of ML, it uses an advanced form of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

After warehouse staff, Amazon to replace store clerks with robots

Amazon.com is still figuring out how to use robots to fill store shelves, but it's about done with clerks. Next year, the company will open a convenience store in Seattle where shoppers can walk in, take what they want -- and leave.The Amazon Go store is on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street in Seattle, in the heart of Amazon's new campus development and a few blocks from the company's headquarters.Amazon wants people to walk in to the store and then just walk out with what they want. It's not giving the goods away, though.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Behavior analytics tools for cybersecurity move into enterprises

Behavior analytics is one of the more recent buzzwords in enterprise cybersecurity, with more than 35 vendors competing for customers, according to security analysts.Behavior analytics in cybersecurity is roughly defined as using software tools to detect patterns of data transmissions in a network that are out of the norm. The theory is that the analytics tool would detect the anomaly and alert IT managers, who would stop the unusual behavior or cyberattack.Enterprises use behavior analytics to detect intrusions that evade preventive technologies such as firewalls, intrusion-prevention systems and antivirus software. Those conventional tools match fingerprints or signatures identified in prior attacks, while behavior analytics tools study and report anomalies that are judged against a baseline of normal behavior. Among the users of behavior analytics is the National Security Agency, which uses the analytics to detect threats to its private cloud system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Behavior analytics tools for cybersecurity move into enterprises

Behavior analytics is one of the more recent buzzwords in enterprise cybersecurity, with more than 35 vendors competing for customers, according to security analysts.Behavior analytics in cybersecurity is roughly defined as using software tools to detect patterns of data transmissions in a network that are out of the norm. The theory is that the analytics tool would detect the anomaly and alert IT managers, who would stop the unusual behavior or cyberattack.Enterprises use behavior analytics to detect intrusions that evade preventive technologies such as firewalls, intrusion-prevention systems and antivirus software. Those conventional tools match fingerprints or signatures identified in prior attacks, while behavior analytics tools study and report anomalies that are judged against a baseline of normal behavior. Among the users of behavior analytics is the National Security Agency, which uses the analytics to detect threats to its private cloud system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS wants to dominate beyond the public cloud with Lambda updates

Amazon Web Services' big Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas brought a plethora of new features and upgrades to its cloud platform. But there was one key set of upgrades that set the stage for Amazon's expansion outside its own public cloud data centers.Two years ago, AWS CEO Andy Jassy made a big splash at Re:Invent when he introduced Lambda, a service that lets developers write snippets of code that execute in response to event triggers. Amazon does the work to provision servers to run that code, so developers don't have to think about the infrastructure overhead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s chatbot is reborn as Zo

Earlier this year, Microsoft tried an experiment with an AI-powered chatbot called Tay. It was an interesting concept where Tay would learn from its users. Unfortunately it turned into a PR disaster very quickly as the 4chan crowd moved in and taught it all kinds of racist and homophobic comments. Red-faced, Microsoft pulled the chatbot quickly and promised to make adjustments to its AI chatbot so that it doesn’t act like a /b/tard. Fast forward a few months, and Microsoft is ready to try again. Its new chatbot has the equally odd name of Zo. For now, Zo is available only on Kik, a chat service for mobile phones, whereas Tay was on Twitter. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Get Out While You Still Can

For years, this blog has mostly been about enterprise IT with a focus on networking. I’ll spare you the entire history because no one cares. But in short, if you dig through the archives, you’ll find content going all the way back to the beginning of 2007 when I was writing for my CCIE study blog.

Ten years, hundreds of articles, and millions of words later, I am a full-time writer and podcaster covering enterprise technology for engineers from behind a microphone and keyboard. But I don’t do that here anymore. I do that at PacketPushers.net.

Before Packet Pushers became the thing that put food in my mouth, I’d split my enterprise tech writing between this blog and that, but splitting the content just doesn’t make sense now. Thus, I’ve been putting all my enterprise tech writing under the Packet Pushers flag. Packet Pushers Interactive is my company that I co-founded, and I’m proud of it. There is no reason to straddle the fence.

So, what of this blog?

EthanCBanks.com will be where I write about…

  • General technology. For example, I’m into the Garmin & Apple ecosystems. I read a lot about alt-energy. I cover many other nerdy topics with my friend Eric Sutphen on the weekly Citizens Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Dangers of the New UK Investigatory Powers Act

There is an old adage that trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. When it comes to the Internet and its users, the same holds true. For average Internet users, trust in the Internet has to be built. They have to gain confidence in the safety of their private information online. When a user’s private online information is made public, they lose trust in the Internet and its services. —The Internet Society

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Traffic Pattern Attacks: A Real Threat

Assume, for a moment, that you have a configuration something like this—

db-key-traffic-attack

Some host, A, is sending queries to, and receiving responses from, a database at C. An observer, B, has access to the packets on the wire, but neither the host nor the server. All the information between the host and the server is encrypted. There is nothing the observer, B, can learn about the information being carried between the client and the server? Given the traffic is encrypted, you might think… “not very much.”

A recent research paper published at CCS ’16 in Vienna argues the observer could know a lot more. In fact, based on just the patterns of traffic between the server and the client, given the database uses atomic operations and encrypts each record separately, it’s possible to infer the key used to query the database (not the cryptographic key). The paper can be found here. Specifically:

We then develop generic reconstruction attacks on any system supporting range queries where either access pattern or communication volume is leaked. These attacks are in a rather weak passive adversarial model, where the untrusted server knows only the underlying query distribution. In particular, to perform our attack Continue reading

Global Mentor Week: Thank you Docker Community!

Danke, рақмет сізге, tak, धन्यवाद, cảm ơn bạn, شكرا, mulțumesc, Gracias, merci, asante, ευχαριστώ, thank you Docker community for an incredible Docker Global Mentor Week! From Tokyo to Sao Paulo, Kisimu to Copenhagen and Ottowa to Manila, it was so awesome to see the energy from the community coming together to celebrate and learn about Docker!

Docker Global mentor week

Over 7,500 people registered to attend one of the 110 mentor week events across 5 continents! A huge thank you to all the Docker meetup organizers who worked hard to make these special events happen and offer Docker beginners and intermediate users an opportunity to participate in Docker courses.

None of this would have been possible without the support (and expertise!) of the 500+ advanced Docker users who signed up as mentors to help newcomers #LearnDocker.

Whether it was mentors helping attendees, newcomers pushing their first image to Docker Hub or attendees mingling and having a good time, everyone came together to make mentor week a success as you can see on social media and the Facebook photo album.

Here are some of our favorite tweets from the meetups:

 

Google launches Trusted Contacts location sharing app

How do you feel about sharing your location with “trusted contacts”? From Google’s point of view, its new Trusted Contacts app will “help you feel safe and give your friends and family peace of mind.”The “personal safety app” will work even if your phone is offline.Google software engineer Minh Nguyen explained: Here’s how it works: Once you install the Android app, you can assign “trusted” status to your closest friends and family. Your trusted contacts will be able to see your activity status — whether you’ve moved around recently and are online — to quickly know if you're OK. If you find yourself in a situation where you feel unsafe, you can share your actual location with your trusted contacts. And if your trusted contacts are really worried about you, they can request to see your location. If everything’s fine, you can deny the request. But if you’re unable to respond within a reasonable time-frame, your location is shared automatically and your loved ones can determine the best way to help you out. Of course, you can stop sharing your location or change your trusted contacts whenever you want.To read this article in full or Continue reading

Google launches Trusted Contacts location sharing app

How do you feel about sharing your location with “trusted contacts”? From Google’s point of view, its new Trusted Contacts app will “help you feel safe and give your friends and family peace of mind.”The “personal safety app” will work even if your phone is offline.Google software engineer Minh Nguyen explained: Here’s how it works: Once you install the Android app, you can assign “trusted” status to your closest friends and family. Your trusted contacts will be able to see your activity status — whether you’ve moved around recently and are online — to quickly know if you're OK. If you find yourself in a situation where you feel unsafe, you can share your actual location with your trusted contacts. And if your trusted contacts are really worried about you, they can request to see your location. If everything’s fine, you can deny the request. But if you’re unable to respond within a reasonable time-frame, your location is shared automatically and your loved ones can determine the best way to help you out. Of course, you can stop sharing your location or change your trusted contacts whenever you want.To read this article in full or Continue reading

Amazon’s biggest re:Invent cloud announcements

IoT, Machine Learning and trucking data into the cloudImage by AmazonAWS’s 2016 re:Invent conference is a wrap, and if you missed any of the news check out the biggest announcements Amazon made in Las Vegas. From data analytics tools to machine learning platforms and new IoT functions, there was a lot to digest. Amazon will even truck your data into its cloud!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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