Worth Reading: Someone is learning how to take down the Internet

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses. —Lawfare

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Presenting Technical Topics To Technical People

Fred writes, “I’ve got a conference coming up in December that I’ve been invited to speak at. This is something I’ve wanted to do for sometime. However, having never done it, I’m looking for some tips on how to get started.”

Q: What’s the best way to find a topic that is new enough to be interesting, but relevant enough to be useful?

People go to conferences hoping, among other things, to gather information that they didn’t have before. What that is will vary by audience member. Designers, architects, and C-levels who are trying to stay ahead of the curve will want to know about the future — what tech is coming and the likely impact to their business and operations. Engineers and operations — the people down in the blood and guts of IT — will be more interested in hard skills.

By “hard,” I don’t mean difficult. I mean useful tools and techniques that they can bring back to their job with them and put to use.

• When addressing a technical audience, the most engaging talks will be technical ones that go into specifics. The catch here is that most talks are in the 30 to 60 minute range. Continue reading

17% off Sensi Wi-Fi Programmable Thermostat, Alexa Compatible – Deal Alert

According to Emerson, makers of this UP500W Sensi Wi-Fi Programmable Thermostat, their customers save up to 33% in energy costs every year using programmed heating and cooling schedules. The Sensi thermostat makes it easy to remotely control and schedule the comfort of your home using your phone, tablet or PC. You can start with a preloaded schedule that reflects common daily patterns and quickly adapt it to your unique schedule, or you can use the intuitive swipe controls to build a customized daily schedule in seconds. When your schedule changes, the app gives you continuous control to make adjustments, from across the room or across the world. And because it doesn't require a “C-wire” in most applications, Sensi works with most heating and cooling systems in the US and Canada. If you're an Alexa user (Amazon Echo, Dot, etc), you'll find it's fully compatible with your "smart home". Sensi averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 2,000 customers on Amazon (read reviews). It's typical list price of $129 has been reduced to $106.88.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The many dimensions of cloud value

Do you hear that grating sound of value clash among cloud providers? It’s the sound of attempted differentiation, that reason you buy Starbucks instead of Dunkin Donuts, Peet’s or perhaps Tim Horton’s brew. Brand thinkers want us to choose something we like because they know once we do, we will stay. We’re creatures of habit. We dislike the qualification process of choosing new vendors for coffee, as well as IT gear and services.Much marketing focus is going towards incremental services bundles that make one cloud vendor seem, or actually be, better than the offerings of another. Determine the value of the cloud services you need The first smoke cloud that obscures actual value of cloud services is the dizzying value calculator. This device, when present (and it’s often missing), allows you to plug in what you predict (you can predict, can’t you?) your ongoing costs will be for a particular set of data processing needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle Goes All-In on Cloud and IaaS

Cloud can flip the 80/20 rule, CEO Mark Hurd says.

Meeting 21st Century Network Traffic Demands

Customer data traffic is exploding, demanding that today’s service providers fundamentally rethink their approaches to building data centers.

Nokia Makes Enterprise Push with Edge Computing, XaaS

Mobile Edge Computing will let enterprises connect low-latency applications at the edge of the network.

Enter the brave new world of Windows 10 license activation

Windows 10 brought a lot of changes to Microsoft's flagship desktop operating system when it debuted on July 29, 2015, and it has changed even more since then. With the release of the Anniversary Update in August (Build 1607 for Current Branch users, at Build 14393.105 as I write this), even license activation has changed. Here's what most users of the business-oriented Windows 10 Enterprise will see if they check their Activation screen:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd: We have the whole cloud stack

Few enterprise IT transformations can match the importance of today’s long migration from on-premises, client-server computing to cloud computing. This week at Oracle’s mammoth OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Oracle will make it abundantly clear that it intends to become a leader in all three flavors of cloud -- not only SaaS, where the company has already demonstrated strength, but also in PaaS and IaaS, where Oracle is a new player.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Nutanix IPO Likely to Raise $173M

Company valued at $1.64B, down from its high of $2B.

Reaction: Devops and Dumpster Fires

Networking is often a “best effort” type of configuration. We monkey around with something until it works, then roll it into production and hope it holds. As we keep building more patches on to of patches or try to implement new features that require something to be disabled or bypassed, that creates a house of cards that is only as strong as the first stiff wind. It’s far too easy to cause a network to fall over because of a change in a routing table or a series of bad decisions that aren’t enough to cause chaos unless done together. —Networking Nerd

Precisely.

But what are we to do about it. Tom’s Take is that we need to push back on applications. This, also, I completely agree with. But this only brings us to another problem—how do we make the case that applications need to be rewritten to work on a simpler network? The simple answer is—let’s teach coders how networks really work, so they can figure out how to better code to the environment in which their applications live. Let me be helpful here—I’ve been working on networks since somewhere around 1986, and on computers and electronics since Continue reading

Explaining security automation and its evolving definitions

Explaining security automation and its evolving definitions

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.There’s been a lot of talk about security automation, but it’s increasingly unclear what is what. For example, a Network World article on security automation last year focused mostly on threat detection, a Gartner report on Intelligent and Automated Security Controls focused on the threat intelligence component, and another recent piece referenced security automation simply as “the automation of cybersecurity controls.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Explaining security automation and its evolving definitions

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.There’s been a lot of talk about security automation, but it’s increasingly unclear what is what. For example, a Network World article on security automation last year focused mostly on threat detection, a Gartner report on Intelligent and Automated Security Controls focused on the threat intelligence component, and another recent piece referenced security automation simply as “the automation of cybersecurity controls.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s New in Tower 3: Installer

In July, we released Ansible Tower 3. This blog series is a deep dive into some of the new aspects of Tower. We've reworked Tower to make it simpler and easier to automate your environments and share your automation solutions. For a complete overview of the Tower 3 updates, check out this post by Bill Nottingham, Director of Product.

Installer configuration in Tower

Before we look at what's new, let’s remember the < 3.0 installer - referred to hereafter as the legacy installer. The legacy installer configuration was designed to be ran by users without Ansible knowledge.

This requirement led to the two step process:

Step 1:
./configure prompts the user for the needed configuration information to setup Tower. This includes things like: tower mode (i.e. single machine, remote database, HA), ssh connection information, and service passwords. The Ansible variable file, tower_setup_conf.yml, is generated to be consumed by the ./setup.sh script.

tower_setup_conf.yml
admin_password: password
database: internal
pg_password: BQgA2Z43jv86dzjDEswH7K75LAwufzSXbE7jUztq
primary_machine: localhost
redis_password: S3tab7QfWe2e92JEB9hNNFUunV4ircg3EdRdjpxP

Step 2:
./setup.sh wraps the Ansible install.yml, backup.yml, and restore.yml playbooks and passes in the appropriate run-time flag to include the previously generated configuration variable file and manage the generated logs. The . Continue reading

Oracle is also getting in on the chatbot revolution

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison ordered himself some new business cards on stage at the company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sunday, just by having a conversation. As part of his keynote address to attendees, Ellison took the time to show off a new set of tools for creating intelligent chatbots that integrate with Oracle's software. It's aimed at making it easier for businesses to build bots that let users connect with their enterprise software, and help businesses connect with consumers. Chatbots are a hot topic in the tech industry, with companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Slack all building tools that companies can use to create intelligent, automated conversation partners. Their growing popularity comes down to a few factors, including the proliferation of smartphones, fast internet connections and messaging apps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Changes in HPE Networking: Gillai Leaving, Arista Scaling

Saar Gillai plans to leave HPE at year's end.

Worth Reading: Your comfort zone may destroy the world

Journalism has been on life support since the advent of social media, but this past year we have witnessed the quick, painful death of truth, and it may be gone forever. Put a comfortable lie in an echo chamber, and nobody will challenge it. It will reverberate until it is accepted as actually true. Then, the willfully ignorant will shout it as loudly as they can. It may be their truth, but that does not make it true. —Shelly Palmer

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IDG Contributor Network: Desktop use off 11% in past year. Winner: smartphones

Co-workers peering at their smartphones more than ever isn’t an optical illusion, and you’re not imagining seeing a bunch of shiny bald pates or lustrous weaves of hair where there were once friendly faces. Smartphone use increased more over the past year compared to tablets and PCs.That’s among the tidbits in a new comScore study on application use.Other revelations from the report corroborate why audible alerts from smartphones are less common and it's become unusual to hear the beeps of text messages in some places—such as commuter railway cars: Large numbers of people are rejecting notifications, comScore suggests in research it published this month. “Push notification fatigue” is to blame, it says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco discloses PIX firewall, IOS software security holes

Cisco has warned of a high priority security hole in its IOS software that could have let attackers snatch memory contents from a variety of products that could lead to the disclosure of confidential information. +More on Network World: Cisco buys into containers with Container X acquisition+ Specifically Cisco said the vulnerability is due to “insufficient condition checks in the part of the code that handles [Internet Key Exchange] IKEv1 security negotiation requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IKEv1 packet to an affected device configured to accept IKEv1 security negotiation requests.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here