Salesforce takes another swing at Microsoft with chatbot building tools

Companies have another set of tools at their disposal to build chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has begun touting a new LiveMessage service that's aimed at connecting his company's Service Cloud with messaging services like Facebook Messenger and SMS.  Benioff is pitching the new service as a way to turn messaging apps into a user interface for Salesforce, in addition to serving as a tool for connecting people with their friends. It will power bots, in addition to direct communications between service representatives and customers. Right now, LiveMessage works with SMS, and it will be expanded to work on Facebook Messenger later this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper CEO: On the cusp of transforming economics of optical networking

Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim believes his company’s recent purchase of silicon-photonics vendor Aurrion may lead to a major cost reduction for high-speed networking gear.Rahim says he thinks “we are potentially on the cusp of a real breakthrough that will transform the economics of the optics in networking equipment, which obviously will be of great interest to anybody that is building a large, mission-critical network.”The big benefit for customers will be a better price per bit per second in Juniper’s high-speed networking gear, Rahim said in a phone interview during a break from the company’s NXTWORK 2016 (see highlights of the audio interview below). “It will also help Juniper in maintaining its long-term objective for growth margins of our products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper CEO: On the cusp of transforming economics of optical networking

Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim believes his company’s recent purchase of silicon-photonics vendor Aurrion may lead to a major cost reduction for high-speed networking gear.Rahim says he thinks “we are potentially on the cusp of a real breakthrough that will transform the economics of the optics in networking equipment, which obviously will be of great interest to anybody that is building a large, mission-critical network.”The big benefit for customers will be a better price per bit per second in Juniper’s high-speed networking gear, Rahim said in a phone interview during a break from the company’s NXTWORK 2016 (see highlights of the audio interview below). “It will also help Juniper in maintaining its long-term objective for growth margins of our products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenStack Newton serves up a heaping helping of scalability

The next release of OpenStack made its debut on Thursday with a raft of new features for better scalability and resiliency.Architectural and functional barriers can make it difficult for companies to scale their clouds up or down across platforms and geographies, but OpenStack's 14th release -- dubbed Newton -- does away with many of those limitations. The open source cloud-building software now includes improved scaling capabilities in its Nova, Horizon, and Swift components, its makers say.New improvements bolster the horizontal scale-out of Nova compute environments, while others add convergence by default in the Heat orchestration service as well as multi-tenancy improvements in Ironic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenStack Newton serves up a heaping helping of scalability

The next release of OpenStack made its debut on Thursday with a raft of new features for better scalability and resiliency.Architectural and functional barriers can make it difficult for companies to scale their clouds up or down across platforms and geographies, but OpenStack's 14th release -- dubbed Newton -- does away with many of those limitations. The open source cloud-building software now includes improved scaling capabilities in its Nova, Horizon, and Swift components, its makers say.New improvements bolster the horizontal scale-out of Nova compute environments, while others add convergence by default in the Heat orchestration service as well as multi-tenancy improvements in Ironic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Drones could help with disasters like Hurricane Matthew

Weather disasters like Hurricane Matthew are pushing wireless carriers to test drones and other unmanned aircraft that can act as wireless hot spots for 4G LTE connections to help emergency responders. Verizon announced Thursday it had just completed a simulation in Cape May, N.J., using unmanned planes to act as flying hot spots for 4G LTE connections. First responders could use those hot spots to communicate in remote places where wireless antennas were lost or unavailable. [Here's a video of the AT&T test.]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The best and worst ways to look for a job

Some of the 10 traditional job hunting methods that follow have a pretty good record and will repay you for time spent pursuing them. But others have a really terrible record and are a waste of your time and energy. The success rate figures cited are a mash of studies I’ve seen, plus, where no studies have been done, my own impressions over the past 45 years of working with job hunters or career changers and writing “What Color Is Your Parachute?” —Market Watch

The post Worth Reading: The best and worst ways to look for a job appeared first on 'net work.

Spammers prefer Trump over Clinton, but are rapidly losing faith in Trump

Whatever difficulties Donald Trump may be having with white college-educated women, African Americans, Latinos, hawkish conservatives and the co-hosts of “Morning Joe,” he’s far and away the favorite presidential candidate of at least one demographic group: spammers. However, he seems to have lost significant support among that group as well. These conclusions are drawn from a year’s worth of data assembled by Network World Test Alliance member Joel Snyder, a senior partner at Opus One in Tucson, Ariz. Opus One has been testing anti-spam products for more than a decade, and, as the following chart shows, Trump-related spam has dwarfed Clinton-related spam over the past year … only less so as the campaign has worn on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS and AT&T Partner to Combine Cloud with Networking

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

What CSOs can learn from the Yahoo breach

In the latest episode of Security Sessions, CSO Editor-in-chief Joan Goodchild talks about the implications of the Yahoo data breach, in which up to 500 million accounts were hacked. Joining Goodchild in the discussion is Kevin O'Brien, CEO and founder of GreatHorn, who offers advice to CSOs and other IT security leaders on ways to learn from this particular breach.

Network Security Market Continues To Surge

FCC to vote on strict privacy rules for ISPs in late October

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will push forward with controversial privacy regulations that would require broadband providers to get customer permission before using and sharing geolocation, browsing histories, and other personal information.Broadband providers have complained the proposal puts stronger privacy rules in place for them than for internet companies like Google and Facebook. But FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has scheduled a final vote on the regulations for Oct. 27.Broadband customers should have the ability to make informed decisions about their privacy, and the rules are designed to help them, FCC officials said in a press briefing,To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cable and telecom are rivals again with new IoT networks

Comcast and the biggest U.S. carriers are taking their long-running rivalry to the internet of things.The country's largest cable company and telecommunications giants, Verizon and AT&T, have been fighting each other for years in home broadband, business internet service and wireless access. Now they're set to compete over LPWANs, the low-power, wide-area networks that could connect many of the IoT devices of the future.On Wednesday, Comcast said it would launch trials of one LPWAN technology, LoRa, with an eye to deploying networks across the markets it covers in the next 18 to 30 months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia, Ericsson Land 5G Operator Deals

Nokia also purchased a U.S. startup with a technology that promises to make base stations more energy efficient.

OpenStack Newton Addresses Containers and Bare Metal

Networks get a starring role in OpenStack's 14th release.

Announcing New Features To Help Hosting Providers Run Their Own Reliable DNS Infrastructure

Over the last six years, we’ve built the tooling, infrastructure and expertise to run a DNS network that handles our scale - we’ve answered a few million DNS queries in the few seconds since you started reading this.

DNS is the backbone of the internet. Every email, website visit, and API call ultimately begins with a DNS lookup. Internet is built on DNS, so every hosting company, registrar, TLD operator, and cloud provider must be able to run reliable DNS.

Last year CloudFlare launched Virtual DNS, providing DDoS mitigation and a strong caching layer of 100 global data centers to those running DNS infrastructure.

Today we’re expanding that offering with two new features for an extra layer of reliability: Serve Stale and DNS Rate Limiting.

Serve Stale

Virtual DNS sits in front of your DNS infrastructure. When DNS resolvers lookup answers on your authoritative DNS, the query first goes to CloudFlare Virtual DNS. We either serve the answer from cache if we have the answer in cache, or we reach out to your nameservers to get the answer to respond to the DNS resolver.

Even if your DNS servers are down, Virtual DNS can now answer on your behalf Continue reading

Juniper Takes Software Security Down to the Switch

Next-gen security arrives under the ‘SDSN’ moniker.

Ansible Container 0.2.0 Release

We’re excited to announce the release of Ansible Container 0.2.0. The last few months have been exciting. We’ve been working at a fever pitch to add new features, build examples, and resolve issues, while at the same time we’ve seen the interest level and participation rate of the project steadily grow. It’s been amazing, and we’re grateful to all those that helped by opening issues, contributing code, and spreading the word. Thank you!

Throughout this release cycle we heard from a number of users that being able to reuse existing Ansible content was critical. We focused on that, making Ansible roles a key part of this release. We came up with several enhancements that make it easy to access existing Ansible roles during the container build process. We added a feature to assist in retrofitting existing roles to be ‘container aware' and we looked to the future and imagined new ways roles could enhance the process of building and sharing containers.

Accessing Existing Roles

We heard several times that incorporating existing Ansible roles into the container build process needed to be easier. We solved this by creating a method for accessing roles from the local file system as Continue reading

Troubleshooting Slow Business Applications

5G Core & Network Slicing Will Be Hot Topics at SDN World Congress

Network slicing and virtualization are going to be key pillars of 5G.