IBM takes a pragmatic approach to enterprise AI

When it comes to helping enterprises reap the potential benefits of AI, IBM has honed a well-learned, practical approach that differs from that used by many of its competitors.“Our pragmatism is one of our important differentiators, too, because we know—through years of implementing and adapting AI capabilities for thousands of clients—that the journey to using the technology effectively is as important as the ultimate end-goal, especially for the mission-critical enterprises we work with,” said Tarun Chopra, vice president of IBM product management, Data and AI. That journey can include myriad issues such as determining the best use of the massive amounts of data available to large enterprises, perhaps integrating that data with cloud-based applications, and effectively applying the right AI models to get the best results.To read this article in full, please click here

Hands-on guide: How to scan and block container images to mitigate SBOM attacks

According to OpenLogic’s Open Source Adoption and Expansion in 2022 Report, the adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) across all sizes of organizations is rising with 40% of respondents stating an increase of OSS software over the previous year and 36% reporting a significant increase in OSS software usage. The increase in OSS adoption can be attributed to a number of factors including access to the latest innovations, reduction in costs and frequent product updates. However, leveraging community contribution introduces the potential for malicious code to be attached. For example, a series of 2022 case studies conducted by the Package Analysis project, part of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), details a number of malicious packages from widely used repositories such as PyPi and NPM. Therefore, it is essential to determine the vulnerabilities in any container image before its deployment into the environment. Calico Cloud’s Image Assurance capabilities enables Vulnerability Assessment for any image. We often hear this referred to as Image Scanning.

Looking for vulnerabilities in images

In order to assess the posture of container images the components that make up an image must be broken down. We refer to this inventory as the Software Bill of Materials Continue reading

Berkeley Lab Opens Bidding For Future NERSC-10 Exascale System

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the key facilities of the US Department of Energy that drives supercomputing innovation and that spends big bucks so at least a few vendors will design and build them, has opened up the bidding on its future NERSC-10 exascale-class supercomputer. …

Berkeley Lab Opens Bidding For Future NERSC-10 Exascale System was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Learn How to Conquer Lateral Cybersecurity Risks at RSAC 2023

In a world without neatly defined network perimeters, lateral security—means detecting and mitigating threats from malicious actors who are already inside your network—is the new front in cybersecurity. To detect lateral threats, businesses need comprehensive visibility into what’s happening inside their IT estates, not just around them. They need to see every packet and every process at every endpoint.

At the upcoming RSA conference in San Franciso, we’ll be highlighting how VMware technologies like Project Northstar help organizations conquer lateral security threats. Keep reading for a sneak peek of what to expect from the VMware team at the event, and join us at RSA Conference from April 24-27 2023 at Moscone Center, North Expo Booth#5644 in San Francisco to check out the latest innovations in cloud networking and security for yourself.

Lateral Movement is the New Cyber Battleground

VMware security strategy consists of five key pillars, and we’ll be showing off all of them at the RSA Conference:

• Networking Security with NSX
• Carbon Black XDR
• Secure the Hybrid Workforce
• VMware SASE and SD-WAN
• Modern Apps Security

We’ll demonstrate these concepts at our booth by walking visitors through use cases and demos, allowing attendees to explore Lateral Security defense strategies Continue reading

HS046 What Do We Do About China ?

HS046 What Do We Do About China ?

The new geopolitical reality means that China is part of IT Strategy. The supply chain is changing, joint ventures are limited and more.

The post HS046 What Do We Do About China ? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

BrandPost: Why SD-WAN will play a bigger role in multicloud networking

By Scott Raynovich, Founder and Chief Analyst, Futuriom. Fact: SD-WAN will play a key role as more enterprises adopt multicloud to host applications. Is your organization ready?One of the trends developing in 2023 is the increased need for networking that can facilitate hybrid and multicloud connectivity. As cloud services proliferate, organizations are looking for more efficient ways to build cloud-based networking services to connect multiple clouds.As networking and IT managers embark on their multicloud journey, they are expected to solve several challenges for their stakeholders. This includes connecting remote workers, hybrid workers, branch offices, multiple cloud services, and possibly Internet of Things (IoT) devices – all with the same network.To read this article in full, please click here

Consent management made easy and clear with Cloudflare Zaraz

Depending on where you live you may be asked to agree to the use of cookies when visiting a website for the first time. And if you've ever clicked something other than Approve you'll have noticed that the list of choices about which services should or should not be allowed to use cookies can be very, very long. That's because websites typically incorporate numerous third party tools for tracking, A/B testing, retargeting, etc. – and your consent is needed for each one of them.

For website owners it's really hard to keep track of which third party tools are used and whether they've asked end users about all of them. There are tools that help you load third-party scripts on your website, and there are tools that help you manage and gather consent. Making the former respect the choices made in the latter is often cumbersome, to say the least.

This changes with Cloudflare Zaraz, a solution that makes third-party tools secure and fast, and that now can also help you with gathering and managing consent. Using the Zaraz Consent Manager, you can easily collect users’ consent preferences on your website, using a consent modal, and apply your consent policy Continue reading

Making home Internet faster has little to do with “speed”

More than ten years ago, researchers at Google published a paper with the seemingly heretical title “More Bandwidth Doesn’t Matter (much)”. We published our own blog showing it is faster to fly 1TB of data from San Francisco to London than it is to upload it on a 100 Mbps connection. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed much. When you make purchasing decisions about home Internet plans, you probably consider the bandwidth of the connection when evaluating Internet performance. More bandwidth is faster speed, or so the marketing goes. In this post, we’ll use real-world data to show both bandwidth and – spoiler alert! – latency impact the speed of an Internet connection. By the end, we think you’ll understand why Cloudflare is so laser focused on reducing latency everywhere we can find it.

First, we should quickly define bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted at any single time. It’s the maximum throughput, or capacity, of the communications link between two servers that want to exchange data. Usually, the bottleneck – the place in the network where the connection is constrained by the amount of bandwidth available – is in the “last mile”, either the Continue reading

Measuring network quality to better understand the end-user experience

You’re visiting your family for the holidays and you connect to the WiFi, and then notice Netflix isn’t loading as fast as it normally does. You go to speed.cloudflare.com, fast.com, speedtest.net, or type “speed test” into Google Chrome to figure out if there is a problem with your Internet connection, and get something that looks like this:

If you want to see what that looks like for you, try it yourself here. But what do those numbers mean? How do those numbers relate to whether or not your Netflix isn’t loading or any of the other common use cases: playing games or audio/video chat with your friends and loved ones? Even network engineers find that speed tests are difficult to relate to the user experience of… using the Internet..

Amazingly, speed tests have barely changed in nearly two decades, even though the way we use the Internet has changed a lot. With so many more people on the Internet, the gaps between speed tests and the user’s experience of network quality are growing. The problem is so important that the Internet’s standards organization is paying attention, too.

From a high-level, there are three grand network Continue reading

IPv6 Addressing on Point-to-Point Links

One of my readers sent me this question:

In your observations on IPv6 assignments, what are common point-to-point IPv6 interfaces on routers? I know it always depends, but I’m hearing /64, /112, /126 and these opinions are causing some passionate debate.

(Checks the calendar) It’s 2023, IPv6 RFC has been published almost 25 years ago, and there are still people debating this stuff and confusing those who want to deploy IPv6? No wonder we’re not getting it deployed in enterprise networks ;)

IPv6 Addressing on Point-to-Point Links

One of my readers sent me this question:

In your observations on IPv6 assignments, what are common point-to-point IPv6 interfaces on routers? I know it always depends, but I’m hearing /64, /112, /126 and these opinions are causing some passionate debate.

(Checks the calendar) It’s 2023, IPv6 RFC has been published almost 25 years ago, and there are still people debating this stuff and confusing those who want to deploy IPv6? No wonder we’re not getting it deployed in enterprise networks ;)

Tracing function calls

Sometimes you want to see functions of a library, as they’re called. I know of two ways of doing this.

Let’s have a super simple test program:

#include<iostream>
#include<unistd.h>

void func1() {}
void func2() {}

int main()
{
  std::cout << "Hello world\n";
  func1();
  func2();
  func1();

  // Wait a bit for bpftrace to be able to aquire the function name.
  // Not applicable for something that doesn't exist.
  sleep(1);
}

bpftrace

Start a bpftrace in one terminal, and run the program in another.

$ sudo bpftrace -e 'uprobe:./a.out:func* { print(func); }'
Attaching 2 probes...
func1()
func2()
func1()

GDB

$ gdb a.out
[…]
(gdb) rbreak func.*
[…]
(gdb) commands
Type commands for breakpoint(s) 1-3, one per line.
End with a line saying just "end".
>silent
>bt 1
>cont
>end
(gdb) r
Starting program: […]/a.out
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".
#0  0x0000555555555215 in _GLOBAL__sub_I__Z5func1v ()
Hello world
#0  0x000055555555516d in func1() ()
#0  0x0000555555555174 in func2() ()
#0  0x000055555555516d in func1() ()
[Inferior 1 (process 424744) exited normally]
(gdb)

Which to use?

bpftrace is lower (but Continue reading

What’s the Enterprise Impact of Microsoft’s Open-Sourced SONiC?

How to create netstat aliases to help focus on network activity

The netstat command provides a tremendous amount on information on network activity. With the -s option (netstat -s), it will display summaries for various protocols such as packets received, active connections, failed connections and a lot more. While the data is extensive enough to make you dizzy, the more you get used to what the command's output looks like, the more you'll become familiar with what to expect and maybe even get better at spotting what's unusual. In this post, we're going to look at various portions of the netstat -s command's output using crafted aliases to make it easier.To read this article in full, please click here

How to create netstat aliases to help focus on network activity

The netstat command provides a tremendous amount on information on network activity. With the -s option (netstat -s), it will display summaries for various protocols such as packets received, active connections, failed connections and a lot more. While the data is extensive enough to make you dizzy, the more you get used to what the command's output looks like, the more you'll become familiar with what to expect and maybe even get better at spotting what's unusual. In this post, we're going to look at various portions of the netstat -s command's output using crafted aliases to make it easier.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 426: NetBox Labs Raises $20 Million; Intel Foundry, Arm Team Up To Make SoCs

Network Break 426: NetBox Labs Raises $20 Million; Intel Foundry, Arm Team Up To Make SoCs

This week's Network Break discusses NetBox Labs's $20 million funding round and why it spun itself out of NS1's IBM acquisition, Intel Foundry and Arm teaming up on SoC manufacturing, why Amazon sees headwinds for public cloud spending (and why the opportunity is still huge), how the juice-jacking threat got hyped, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 426: NetBox Labs Raises $20 Million; Intel Foundry, Arm Team Up To Make SoCs appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How to Take a Wireless-First Approach to Enterprise Network Design

The Future of SD-WAN and Fixed Cellular Connections