Sneak peek: 15 gadgets to put on your holiday wish list

Start making the list and checking it twiceThe calendar may say it’s the beginning of fall, but that won’t prevent us from giving you a sneak peek at some of the hottest devices and gadgets that will top your holiday wish list. Here’s a bunch of cool stuff that we’re hoping to get our hands on to present in our 17th annual Cool Yule Tools holiday gift guide (coming Nov. 14). Keep in mind that these devices are not yet reviewed, so we’re not giving these our official seal of approval for cool yule goodness, but rather an indication of some things that could be in the final guide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Evolving Enterprise WAN

Why Would I Use BGP and not OSPF between Servers and the Network?

While we were preparing for the Cumulus Networks’ Routing on Hosts webinar Dinesh Dutt sent me a message along these lines:

You categorically reject the use of OSPF, but we have a couple of customers using it quite happily. I'm sure you have good reasons and the reasons you list [in the presentation] are ones I agree with. OTOH, why not use totally stubby areas with the hosts being in such an area?

How about:

Cisco: Yes, cosmic radiation could have caused router bug

Yesterday we reported on the reaction to a Cisco bug report that speculated “partial data traffic loss” on the company’s ASR 9000 Series routers was possibly triggered by “cosmic radiation causing SEU soft errors.”Reaction to that contention on a Reddit forum ranged from the obvious -- acknowledgment that cosmic radiation is an issue -- to sharp-tongued skepticism and tales of the cosmic radiation villain being used as a tongue-in-cheek place-holder meaning “we really don’t know what caused the problem yet.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco: Yes, cosmic radiation could have caused router bug

Yesterday we reported on the reaction to a Cisco bug report that speculated “partial data traffic loss” on the company’s ASR 9000 Series routers was possibly triggered by “cosmic radiation causing SEU soft errors.”Reaction to that contention on a Reddit forum ranged from the obvious -- acknowledgment that cosmic radiation is an issue -- to sharp-tongued skepticism and tales of the cosmic radiation villain being used as a tongue-in-cheek place-holder meaning “we really don’t know what caused the problem yet.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Builds A Bridge Between Private And Public Power Clouds

Two years ago, when Big Blue put a stake through the heart of its impartial attitude about the X86 server business, it was also putting a stake in the ground for its Power systems business.

IBM bet that it could make more money selling Power machinery to its existing customer base and while at the same time expanding it out to hyperscalers like Google through the OpenPower Foundation while at the same time gradually building out a companion public cloud offering of Power machinery on its SoftLayer cloud and through partners like Rackspace Hosting. This is a big bet, and …

IBM Builds A Bridge Between Private And Public Power Clouds was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Docker Presents at Inaugural Cloud Field Day

Thanks to everyone who joined us last Thursday. We were really excited to participate in the first Cloud Field Day event and to host at Docker HQ in San Francisco. In watching the trend to cloud and the changing dynamics of application development, the Tech Field Day organizers, Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth started Cloud Field Day to create a forum for companies to share and for the delegates to discuss. The delegates came from backgrounds in software development, containers, networking, virtualization, storage, data and of course, cloud… As always, the delegates asked a lot of questions, kicked off some great discussions, even had some spirited debates both in the room and online, always with the end user in mind. We are looking forward to doing this again.

ICYMI: The videos and event details are now available online and also follow the conversation from Twitter with the delegates.

Centec Raises $47M to Battle Broadcom

Centec is producing Ethernet switching chips.

T-Mobile Taps Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung for 5G Tests

Although T-Mobile hasn’t talked about SDN, it is working closely with Deutsche Telekom.

How to watch the 2016 Ig Nobels

If you can't make it to the annual Ig Nobel ceremony at Harvard University on Thursday night to celebrate the most unusual and imaginative breakthroughs in science, you can follow along online instead.That includes right here, we're we've embedded code for the live webcast, which starts at 6pm, EST, Sept. 22. MORE: Why there's no Nobel Prize in ComputingTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New legislation seeks to prevent US voting systems from being hacked

A U.S. lawmaker has introduced two bills to protect voting systems from hacking, amid fears that Russian cyber spies may be interfering with this year's presidential election.Representative Hank Johnson, a Democrat serving Georgia, is proposing a moratorium on state purchases of electronic voting machines that don't produce a paper trail. His Election Integrity Act, introduced Wednesday, would also prohibit voting systems from being connected to the internet as a way to prevent online tampering.The high-profile hack of the Democratic National Committee publicized in June has citizens worried that U.S. election systems may be vulnerable, Johnson said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New legislation seeks to prevent US voting systems from being hacked

A U.S. lawmaker has introduced two bills to protect voting systems from hacking, amid fears that Russian cyber spies may be interfering with this year's presidential election.Representative Hank Johnson, a Democrat serving Georgia, is proposing a moratorium on state purchases of electronic voting machines that don't produce a paper trail. His Election Integrity Act, introduced Wednesday, would also prohibit voting systems from being connected to the internet as a way to prevent online tampering.The high-profile hack of the Democratic National Committee publicized in June has citizens worried that U.S. election systems may be vulnerable, Johnson said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mobile apps still have long way to go in state governments

A new survey released this week reveals that while a little more than half of state CIOs surveyed consider mobile devices and apps an essential or high priority, relatively few state government apps are mobile ready or are being used by employees and external users on mobile devices.The 2016 State CIO Survey: The Adaptable State CIO, released at the annual National Association of State CIO (NASCIO) conference this week in Orlando and produced by NASCIO, accounting/consulting firm Grant Thornton and trade association CompTIA, covers a range of topics beyond mobile, including cybersecurity, the internet of things, cloud computing and hiring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Baking Specialization into Hardware Cools CPU Concerns

As Moore’s Law spirals downward, ultra-high bandwidth memory matched with custom accelerators for specialized workloads might be the only saving grace for the pace of innovation we are accustomed to.

With advancements on both the memory and ASIC sides driven by machine learning and other workloads pushing greater innovation, this could be great news for big datacenters with inefficient legions of machines dedicated to ordinary processing tasks—jobs that could far more efficient with more tailored approaches.

We have described this trend in the context of architectures built on stacked memory with FPGAs and other custom accelerators inside recently, and we …

Baking Specialization into Hardware Cools CPU Concerns was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: The lean and antifragile data center

Cloud is a new technology domain, and data centre engineering is still a developing discipline. I have interviewed a top expert in cloud infrastructure, senior leader and consultant, Pete Cladingbowl of Skozo. He has a vision of the ‘lean’ data centre and a better kind of Internet for users to reach it. He also has a roadmap for how these can be practically realised. The key is to apply established theories of value flow from more mature industries. —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: The lean and antifragile data center appeared first on 'net work.

IDG Contributor Network: IoT security: Intel EPID simplifies authentication of IoT devices

Did you know that over 75 million tourists visit the United States every year? Or that the Transport Security Administration (TSA) screens over 2 million people daily? The TSA processes 150 passengers per security lane. Imagine the public outrage if it took 20 minutes to screen a passenger and the process publicly disclosed personal information. That’s the average time and result of installing an IoT device today. What lessons can be applied from security screenings to accelerate IoT device adoption? How can the authentication and installation of new IoT devices be streamlined?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: IoT security: Intel EPID simplifies authentication of IoT devices

Did you know that over 75 million tourists visit the United States every year? Or that the Transport Security Administration (TSA) screens over 2 million people daily?The TSA processes 150 passengers per security lane. Imagine the public outrage if it took 20 minutes to screen a passenger and the process publicly disclosed personal information. That’s the average time and result of installing an IoT device today.What lessons can be applied from security screenings to accelerate IoT device adoption? How can the authentication and installation of new IoT devices be streamlined?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can Wi-Fi and LTE-U live together? The tests are ready

The moment of truth has arrived for a hotly contested project to make sure LTE and Wi-Fi can share the same frequencies.On Wednesday, the Wi-Fi Alliance released a test plan for LTE-Unlicensed products, which would bring 4G cellular to unlicensed spectrum bands that Wi-Fi users depend on. The group also said it is qualifying an independent lab where LTE-U vendors can take their equipment for testing.LTE-U could give smartphones and other cellular devices more frequencies to use, potentially bringing better service to more users in crowded areas. But some makers and operators of Wi-Fi gear, including cable operators using Wi-Fi to compete with mobile carriers, warn that the new technology could crowd out Wi-Fi and hurt its performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Talos: Spam at levels not seen since 2010

Spam is back in a big way – levels that have not been seen since 201o in fact. That’s according to a blog post today form Cisco Talos that stated the main culprit of the increase is largely the handiwork of the Necurs botnet, stated the blog’s author Jaeson Schultz.+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)+“Many of the host IPs sending Necurs' spam have been infected for more than two years. To help keep the full scope of the botnet hidden, Necurs will only send spam from a subset of its minions. An infected host might be used for two to three days, and then sometimes not again for two to three weeks. This greatly complicates the job of security personnel who respond to spam attacks, because while they may believe the offending host was subsequently found and cleaned up, the reality is that the miscreants behind Necurs are just biding their time, and suddenly the spam starts all over again. At Talos, we see this pattern over, and over again for many Necurs-affiliated IPs,” he wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Talos: Spam at levels not seen since 2010

Spam is back in a big way – levels that have not been seen since 201o in fact. That’s according to a blog post today form Cisco Talos that stated the main culprit of the increase is largely the handiwork of the Necurs botnet, stated the blog’s author Jaeson Schultz.+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)+“Many of the host IPs sending Necurs' spam have been infected for more than two years. To help keep the full scope of the botnet hidden, Necurs will only send spam from a subset of its minions. An infected host might be used for two to three days, and then sometimes not again for two to three weeks. This greatly complicates the job of security personnel who respond to spam attacks, because while they may believe the offending host was subsequently found and cleaned up, the reality is that the miscreants behind Necurs are just biding their time, and suddenly the spam starts all over again. At Talos, we see this pattern over, and over again for many Necurs-affiliated IPs,” he wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here