iPhone power plug knock-offs are a fire hazard

Sorry for the Daily Mail-like clickbait headline, but there's no simple way to say it. Chartered Trading Standards Institute, a U.K. group that's similar to the Consumer Product Safety Commission here in the U.S., issued a warning that 99 percent of the third-party Apple chargers do not meet proper shielding standards. The group tested 400 of these counterfeit Apple chargers and found only three of them were properly shielded to prevent a fatal electric shock or spark a fire Leon Livermore, CEO of Chartered Trading Standards Institute, told the BBC that shoppers should buy electrical goods only from trusted suppliers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 hiring trends for 2017

Hiring is a challenge for CIOs, and it won’t get much easier in the coming year, particularly for IT departments that are trying to fill key security and networking roles.Two staffing and recruiting firms that specialize in IT – Robert Half Technology and TEKsystems – each released research this week that offers a glimpse of what’s expected on the hiring front in 2017. Here are some highlights from their respective reports.1. Don’t expect widespread salary gains A majority of IT leaders – 63% – expect overall 2017 IT salaries to stay the same compared to 2016 rates, and 1% expect salaries to decrease in the coming year. Just 36% of IT leaders say they plan to increase overall IT salaries in 2017, according to TEKsystems’ annual IT Forecast.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

LSA issue #December 9, 2016 at 02:27PM

There is a popular saying that you don't need to be a programmer to automate your network. Might be true, though you definitely won't succeed in automation tasks without basic Regular Expressions knowledge, that you should take for granted.Sad thing that regular expressions are not an easy nut to crack, and with this post we

US mulls rules for airlines that plan in-flight Wi-Fi voice calls

The U.S. Department of Transportation is considering making it mandatory for airlines to inform passengers before purchasing tickets if they will allow voice calls using mobile wireless devices on board their aircraft, thus hoping to placate customers who could object to having co-passengers talking away on their phones in an enclosed space.An alternative measure would be to ban all voice calls on domestic and international flights to or from the U.S., the DOT said in a proposal for which it has asked for comments within 60 days of publication of the notice on the Federal Register.The Federal Communications Commission already bans the use of mobile devices on certain radio frequencies on board aircraft, including for voice calls, but it has not prohibited calls using the Wi-Fi network or other means, according to the DOT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. Bumps Exascale Timeline, Focuses on Novel Architectures for 2021

It has just been announced that there has been a shift in thinking among the exascale computing leads in the U.S. government underway—one that offers the potential of the United States installing an exascale capable machine in 2021, but of even more interest, a system based on a novel architecture.

As Paul Messina, Argonne National Lab Distinguished Fellow and head of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) tells The Next Platform, the roadmap to an exascale capable machine (meaning one capable of 50X the current 20 petaflop capability machines on the Top 500 supercomputer list now) is on a seven-year, …

U.S. Bumps Exascale Timeline, Focuses on Novel Architectures for 2021 was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Georgia says it’s traced an attempted voter hack to DHS

Georgia's secretary of state says the state was hit with an attempted hack of its voter registration database from an IP address linked to the federal Department of Homeland Security. The allegation by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is one of the more bizarre charges to come up in the recent spate of alarms about voting-system hacks. He said in a Facebook post on Thursday that he had been made aware of the failed attempt to breach the firewall protecting Georgia's voter registration database. The attack was traced to an Internet Protocol address associated with DHS, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Georgia says it’s traced an attempted voter hack to DHS

Georgia's secretary of state says the state was hit with an attempted hack of its voter registration database from an IP address linked to the federal Department of Homeland Security. The allegation by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is one of the more bizarre charges to come up in the recent spate of alarms about voting-system hacks. He said in a Facebook post on Thursday that he had been made aware of the failed attempt to breach the firewall protecting Georgia's voter registration database. The attack was traced to an Internet Protocol address associated with DHS, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Technology Short Take #74

Welcome to Technology Short Take #74! The end of 2016 is nearly upon us, and it looks as if there will be only one more Technology Short Take before the end of the year. So, let’s get on with the content—time is short!

Networking

  • If you haven’t heard of Apstra, David Varnum has a great introduction to Apstra available on his site.
  • Will Robinson talks about how to structure your Ansible playbooks in the context of using Ansible to control your network gear.
  • This is an interesting project to watch, I think—it’s porting OVN (Open Virtual Network) from a “traditional” OvS back-end to an IOVisor-based back-end (IOVisor implements the data plane in eBPF).
  • If you’re interested in playing around with OVN, I’ve built a Vagrant-based environment running OVS/OVN 2.6.0 on Ubuntu 16.04. Have a look here.

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time, but I’ll stay alert for content to include in the future.

Security

Using OVN with KVM and Libvirt

In this post, I’m going to discuss how to use OVN (Open Virtual Network; part of the Open vSwitch project) with KVM and Libvirt to provide virtual networking for KVM-based virtual machines. This post will build on some concepts around OVS and Libvirt that I’ve discussed previously; be sure to review the OVS posts and Libvirt posts on this site for more details and prerequisite knowledge.

I’ll structure this discussion around 2 key steps:

  1. Setting up OVN
  2. Integrating KVM/Libvirt into OVN

Note that I’m not going to discuss setting up KVM/Libvirt, as that’s something I’ve covered previously and is well-documented.

Ready? Let’s jump in!

Setting up OVN

The biggest “challenge” here is package availability—many Linux distributions don’t have packages available for OVS 2.6.0, which is the first release with non-experimental support of OVN. If you’re an Ubuntu user, then you can use the Ubuntu Cloud Archive for the OpenStack “Newton” release, which includes OVS/OVN 2.6.0 packages. For other distributions, you’ll probably need to compile from source. In that case, the OVS installation documentation is quite accurate and usable.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume you’re using Ubuntu 16.04 and will pull packages Continue reading

AMD packs more horsepower into GPUs with new Radeon ReLive software

AMD has called its latest Crimson edition the GPU software update of the year and rightfully so. Called Crimson ReLive, it squeezes more horsepower out of the latest Polaris and older Fury GPUs and makes gaming and VR experiences more compelling. The Crimson ReLive edition is a must-have for AMD GPU owners. Prominent games like Batman Arkham Knight and Deus Ex: Mankind will look and perform better, and VR images will look much sharper on headsets. There are many new features in Crimson ReLive. An interesting feature is Radeon Chill, which keeps the GPU cool by cutting down on the excessive frame rate in games. Essentially, it analyzes the performance of games and adjusts the frame rate without affecting a game's visuals and performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Skyhigh Networks adds threat protection and data loss prevention capabilities to the cloud  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Every time I read the quarterly Cloud Adoption & Risk Report published by Skyhigh Networks, I come across some tidbit of information that truly surprises me. What is it in the Q4 2016 report that has me so astounded? Consider this: Fewer than half (42%) of cloud providers explicitly specify that customers own the data they upload to the service. The rest of the providers either claim ownership over all data uploaded, or don’t refer to data ownership at all in their terms and conditions, leaving it open to controversy if service is discontinued.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Talos: Zeus spawn “Floki bot” malware gaining use, cyber-underworld notoriety

Cisco’s Talos security group this week warned that a variant of trojan monster Zeus has begun to garner a following in the cyber-underworld as a hard-to-detect attack mechanism.“[Floki bot] is based on the same codebase that was used by the infamous Zeus trojan, the source code of which was leaked in 2011. Rather than simply copying the features that were present within the Zeus trojan ‘as-is’, Floki Bot claims to feature several new capabilities making it an attractive tool for criminals,” Talos wrote.+More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1996+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Talos: Zeus spawn “Floki bot” malware gaining use, cyber-underworld notoriety

Cisco’s Talos security group this week warned that a variant of trojan monster Zeus has begun to garner a following in the cyber-underworld as a hard-to-detect attack mechanism.“[Floki bot] is based on the same codebase that was used by the infamous Zeus trojan, the source code of which was leaked in 2011. Rather than simply copying the features that were present within the Zeus trojan ‘as-is’, Floki Bot claims to feature several new capabilities making it an attractive tool for criminals,” Talos wrote.+More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1996+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Talos: Zeus spawn “Floki bot” malware gaining use, cyber-underworld notoriety

Cisco’s Talos security group this week warned that a variant of trojan monster Zeus has begun to garner a following in the cyber-underworld as a hard-to-detect attack mechanism.“[Floki bot] is based on the same codebase that was used by the infamous Zeus trojan, the source code of which was leaked in 2011. Rather than simply copying the features that were present within the Zeus trojan ‘as-is’, Floki Bot claims to feature several new capabilities making it an attractive tool for criminals,” Talos wrote.+More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1996+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IEEE-USA wants Trump to end H-1B lottery

The IEEE-USA intends to urge President-elect Donald Trump to quickly replace the random H-1B lottery with a system that gives priority to companies that pay the best wages.This proposal would also move large H-1B users to the back of the visa distribution line. For this to happen, all it would take is an executive order by the president, the engineering group says.Separately, the IEEE-USA also wants Trump to prod the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate what it claims is discrimination against U.S. workers by H-1B visa-using companies. This discrimination occurs when U.S. workers are replaced by visa-holding workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Binge Watching Makes You Stupid

Binge is the new black. That’s what Netflix, and other media outlets tell us as they rev up for the holiday season. Are your in-laws too much? Kids driving you nuts? Had enough holiday cooking, cleaning, and entertaining? Well, take a break from real life and the stresses of the holidays and focus on something less confrontational: television. —Acculturated

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