Raising The Standard For Storage Memory Fabrics

People tend to obsess about processing when it comes to system design, but ultimately an application and its data lives in memory and anything that can improve the capacity, throughput, and latency of memory will make all the processing you throw at it result in useful work rather than wasted clock cycles.

This is why flash has been such a boon for systems. But we can do better, and the Gen-Z consortium announced this week is going to create a new memory fabric standard that it hopes will break down the barriers between main memory and other storage-class memories on

Raising The Standard For Storage Memory Fabrics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Feds want to set a trail for future AI advances

Will future developments in the realm of Artificial Intelligence be like the wild west or a more controlled situation? The real answer is probably somewhere in the middle but the government at least would like to see more measured research and development.The White House today issued report on future directions for AI called Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. In it, the report comes to several conclusions – some obvious and some perhaps less so. For example, it accepts that AI technologies will continue to grow in sophistication and ubiquity, thanks to AI R&D investments by government and industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds want to set a trail for future AI advances

Will future developments in the realm of Artificial Intelligence be like the wild west or a more controlled situation? The real answer is probably somewhere in the middle but the government at least would like to see more measured research and development.The White House today issued report on future directions for AI called Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. In it, the report comes to several conclusions – some obvious and some perhaps less so. For example, it accepts that AI technologies will continue to grow in sophistication and ubiquity, thanks to AI R&D investments by government and industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Putin denies any Russian interest in alleged US election hacking

Russian President Vladimir Putin is rejecting claims that his country is behind any U.S. election-related hacking, saying "hysteria" is fueling the allegations."This has nothing to do with Russia's interests," he said on Wednesday at an investors conference in Moscow.Putin made the comments after the U.S. publicly blamed the Russian government last Friday for hacking U.S. officials and political groups in an effort to influence the upcoming presidential election.Stolen documents from those hacks, including sensitive emails, have been leaking online over the past months, potentially hurting the election chances of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Putin denies any Russian interest in alleged US election hacking

Russian President Vladimir Putin is rejecting claims that his country is behind any U.S. election-related hacking, saying "hysteria" is fueling the allegations."This has nothing to do with Russia's interests," he said on Wednesday at an investors conference in Moscow.Putin made the comments after the U.S. publicly blamed the Russian government last Friday for hacking U.S. officials and political groups in an effort to influence the upcoming presidential election.Stolen documents from those hacks, including sensitive emails, have been leaking online over the past months, potentially hurting the election chances of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft expands HoloLens in six new global markets

Microsoft announced plans to offer its well-hyped HoloLens virtual reality headset in six new markets outside North America after what Microsoft calls "tremendous excitement and interest from developers and commercial customers and partners around the globe."Alex Kipman, technical fellow in the Windows and Devices group, made the announcement in a blog post that the company has opened pre-orders today in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Germany, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. The headset will begin shipping in those markets in late November. Interest in augmented reality (AR) and VR products has exploded this year thanks to the shipments of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets, among many others. Microsoft is late to the market, but the buzz on HoloLens has been enormous. IDC predicts global revenues for the mixed reality (MR) market will grow from $5.2 billion this year to $162 billion in 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WTF Yahoo/FISA search in kernel?

A surprising detail in the Yahoo/FISA email search scandal is that they do it with a kernel module. I thought I’d write up some (rambling) notes.

What the government was searching for

As described in the previoius blog post, we’ll assume the government is searching for the following string, and possibly other strings like it within emails:

### Begin ASRAR El Mojahedeen v2.0 Encrypted Message ###

I point this out because it’s simple search identifying things. It’s not natural language processing. It’s not searching for phrases like “bomb president”.

Also, it's not AV/spam/childporn processing. Those look at different things. For example, filtering message containing childporn involves calculating a SHA2 hash of email attachments and looking up the hashes in a table of known bad content (or even more in-depth analysis). This is quite different from searching.


The Kernel vs. User Space

Operating systems have two parts, the kernel and user space. The kernel is the operating system proper (e.g. the “Linux kernel”). The software we run is in user space, such as browsers, word processors, games, web servers, databases, GNU utilities [sic], and so on.

The kernel has raw access to the machine, memory, network devices, graphics Continue reading

Reality, Virtually sets record for largest AR/VR hackathon

More than 400 participants, mentors, workshop speakers, judges and sponsors convened at the Reality, Virtually AR/VR hackathon sponsored by the MIT Media Lab last weekend, setting a hackathon record with 75 open-source project submissions.The winners were KidCity VR and Waypoint Rx.KidCity VR, built by Anish Dhesikan, Jacqueline Assar, Theji Jayaratne, Emily Pascual and Kachina Stude, is an HTC Vive educational application for children and parents to play together in virtual reality (VR). The team won $5,000 from Samsung’s Global Innovation Center for the best VR applicationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The truth about cybersecurity certifications

It’s a common trait amongst cybersecurity professionals. When they meet each other, discuss their qualifications with prospective employers, or print their business cards, there is often an alphabet soup of initials by their names, specifying the many certifications they’ve achieved.Now, some of these certifications are certainly worthwhile, but over the last few years, the entire industry has gone gaga with dozens of new cybersecurity certifications offered by for-profit organizations. This has led to a marketing push with a consistent message that more certifications equate to more money, knowledge and opportunities for cybersecurity professionals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Truth About Cybersecurity Certifications

It’s a common trait amongst cybersecurity professionals.  When they meet each other, discuss their qualifications with prospective employers, or print their business cards, there is often an alphabet soup of initials by their names, specifying the many certifications they’ve achieved.Now some of these certifications are certainly worthwhile but over the last few years, the entire industry has gone gaga with dozens of new cybersecurity certifications offered by for-profit organizations.  This has led to a marketing push with a consistent message that more certifications equate to more money, knowledge, and opportunities for cybersecurity professionals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Truth About Cybersecurity Certifications

It’s a common trait amongst cybersecurity professionals.  When they meet each other, discuss their qualifications with prospective employers, or print their business cards, there is often an alphabet soup of initials by their names, specifying the many certifications they’ve achieved.Now some of these certifications are certainly worthwhile but over the last few years, the entire industry has gone gaga with dozens of new cybersecurity certifications offered by for-profit organizations.  This has led to a marketing push with a consistent message that more certifications equate to more money, knowledge, and opportunities for cybersecurity professionals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The ultimate data center throne

What happens when fans of the Game of Thrones TV series work at a company that makes power equipment?This: Eaton The Eaton ePDU G3 Throne Behold the Eaton ePDU G3 Throne. Compare it to the original Iron throne, pictured here. Eaton commissioned a North Carolina artists to design the chair and then workers constructed it out of 35 rack power distribution unit. It has a total of 821 outlet receptacles. Now that’s a throne with some power capacity. Check out a slideshow of how the Throne was built here. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The ultimate data center throne

What happens when fans of the Game of Thrones TV series work at a company that makes power equipment?This: Eaton The Eaton ePDU G3 Throne Behold the Eaton ePDU G3 Throne. Compare it to the original Iron throne, pictured here. Eaton commissioned a North Carolina artists to design the chair and then workers constructed it out of 35 rack power distribution unit. It has a total of 821 outlet receptacles. Now that’s a throne with some power capacity. Check out a slideshow of how the Throne was built here. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Datanauts 055: All About Scaling Out

The Datanauts delve into the nitty-gritty of how scale-out works for servers, networking, and storage; what it means for application design and operations; and how vendors, open source projects, and cloud services are positioning themselves in a scale-out world. The post Datanauts 055: All About Scaling Out appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Legacy TLS cipher support in Firefox

After upgrading Firefox recently, I noticed that I could no longer access certain embedded devices via HTTPS. It seems that recent versions of Firefox and Chrome no longer support certain TLS ciphers due to recently discovered vulnerabilities. That's all well and good, except the error returned offers no recourse if you need to connect anyway.

firefox_error.png

Firefox returns the error SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP with no option to temporarily allow connectivity. (Chrome reports a similar error named ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH.) Presumably, this choice was made by the developers with the intention of forcing people to upgrade outdated devices. Unfortunately, in order to upgrade an out-of-date device, we typically must first be able to connect to it. I wasted a fair bit of time digging up a solution, so I figured I'd document the workaround here for when I inevitably run into this problem again a year from now and have forgotten what I did.

Continue reading · 12 comments

Legacy TLS cipher support in Firefox

After upgrading Firefox recently, I noticed that I could no longer access certain embedded devices via HTTPS. It seems that recent versions of Firefox and Chrome no longer support certain TLS ciphers due to recently discovered vulnerabilities. That's all well and good, except the error returned offers no recourse if you need to connect anyway.

firefox_error.png

Firefox returns the error SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP with no option to temporarily allow connectivity. (Chrome reports a similar error named ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH.) Presumably, this choice was made by the developers with the intention of forcing people to upgrade outdated devices. Unfortunately, in order to upgrade an out-of-date device, we typically must first be able to connect to it. I wasted a fair bit of time digging up a solution, so I figured I'd document the workaround here for when I inevitably run into this problem again a year from now and have forgotten what I did.

Continue reading · 16 comments