Juniper swallows silicon photonics player Aurrion

With an eye towards better handling bandwidth-ravenous video streaming and data center to data center traffic, Juniper today said it would buy fabless photonics manufacturer Aurrion for an undisclosed price.“We expect that Aurrion’s breakthrough technology will result in fundamental and permanent improvements in cost per bit-per-second, power per bit-per-second, bandwidth density, and flexibility of networking systems,” said Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and CTO of Juniper Networks wrote in a blog announcing the acquisition.+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper swallows silicon photonics player Aurrion

With an eye towards better handling bandwidth-ravenous video streaming and data center to data center traffic, Juniper today said it would buy fabless photonics manufacturer Aurrion for an undisclosed price.“We expect that Aurrion’s breakthrough technology will result in fundamental and permanent improvements in cost per bit-per-second, power per bit-per-second, bandwidth density, and flexibility of networking systems,” said Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and CTO of Juniper Networks wrote in a blog announcing the acquisition.+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Video shows off purported iPhone 7 Lightning-connected EarPods

A new video might give a sneak peek at what listening to content on your iPhone 7 will be like if Apple indeed nixes the traditional 3.5mm headphone jack in its next smartphone.Speculation has been rampant this year that Apple is planning to do away with the 3.5mm headphone jack in an effort to slim down its smartphone and perhaps take more control over audio accessories by having its proprietary Lightning connector take over. In fact, a video that surfaced last week features a Lightning-to-3.5mm jack dongle to take the edge off for some users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introducing the p0f BPF compiler

Two years ago we blogged about our love of BPF (BSD packet filter) bytecode.

CC BY 2.0 image by jim simonson

Then we published a set of utilities we are using to generate the BPF rules for our production iptables: the bpftools.

Today we are very happy to open source another component of the bpftools: our p0f BPF compiler!

Meet the p0f

p0f is a tool written by superhuman Michal Zalewski. The main purpose of p0f is to passively analyze and categorize arbitrary network traffic. You can feed p0f any packet and in return it will derive knowledge about the operating system that sent the packet.

One of the features that caught our attention was the concise yet explanatory signature format used to describe TCP SYN packets.

The p0f SYN signature is a simple string consisting of colon separated values. This string cleanly describes a SYN packet in a human-readable way. The format is pretty smart, skipping the varying TCP fields and keeping focus only on the essence of the SYN packet, extracting the interesting bits from it.

We are using this on daily basis to categorize the packets that we, at CloudFlare, see when we are a target Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Adding human experts to IT security with Red Canary

News this morning from cybersecurity company Red Canary, which has just raised $6.1 million by way of a Series A funding round.Red Canary is part of a growing trend in the security world: that of adding real live humans into a security product. The particular space that Red Canary is involved in—managed detection and response—has a few players (SecureWorks and eSentire, to name a couple), all of whom try to subvert the orthodox thinking around cybersecurity with the addition of a human touch.+ Also on Network World: Black Hat: 9 free security tools for defense & attacking +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Adding human experts to IT security with Red Canary

News this morning from cybersecurity company Red Canary, which has just raised $6.1 million by way of a Series A funding round.Red Canary is part of a growing trend in the security world: that of adding real live humans into a security product. The particular space that Red Canary is involved in—managed detection and response—has a few players (SecureWorks and eSentire, to name a couple), all of whom try to subvert the orthodox thinking around cybersecurity with the addition of a human touch.+ Also on Network World: Black Hat: 9 free security tools for defense & attacking +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google fires back at age discrimination lawsuit

Google, in new federal court papers, is rebutting claims of age discrimination and its handling of two older job applicants who were rejected for positions. Google insisted in a court filing Friday that its policies "rigorously forbids discrimination of any kind," including age discrimination. It is fighting an age discrimination lawsuit filed last year by two plaintiffs who were rejected for jobs. Both are over the age of 40. One plaintiff, Cheryl Fillekes, a programmer, filed a motion in June to make this age discrimination lawsuit a "collective action" case for software engineers, site reliability engineers or systems engineers over the age of 40 who applied for a job at Google, but were rejected. That could broaden the case to include thousands of people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 Anniversary Update: The good, the bad and the ‘meh’ (with video)

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update has been a year in the making, with more than two dozen public previews made available so that we could get a taste of what was to come. As of August 2nd, it is finally here.This new version will be delivered via Windows Update -- although at the time of writing, it was not yet clear whether it would be available immediately to everyone or whether there would be a slower rollout.So after all the time, all the work and all the hype, how does it stack up? Will it improve Microsoft's one-year-old operating system, or make users regret that they upgraded?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why you need a strong authentication platform

Common challengesImage by PexelsAs the security landscape is changing, so are the business challenges that organizations are facing. With data breaches and information theft on the rise, it’s becoming even more crucial to protect your data from unwanted third parties. According to Symantec’s annual Internet Security Threat Report, up to 80 percent of breaches could be eliminated with strong authentication.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why you need a strong authentication platform

Common challengesImage by PexelsAs the security landscape is changing, so are the business challenges that organizations are facing. With data breaches and information theft on the rise, it’s becoming even more crucial to protect your data from unwanted third parties. According to Symantec’s annual Internet Security Threat Report, up to 80 percent of breaches could be eliminated with strong authentication.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3 ways annoying coworkers kill productivity

"She constantly snaps her chewing gum while talking on the phone all day to her friends.""He eats yogurt every day, and even when the cup is empty, he continues to scrape the bottom with a plastic spoon.""She wipes her nose on her sleeve.""He has a bizarre style of laughing, and seems to laugh at everything."These are real complaints about real people's coworkers sent to career coach, author and speaker Ford R. Myers -- and boy, do they sound annoying."This is definitely a hot-button issue. I get more emails about annoying co-workers than I do about any other topic -- people have a lot of pent-up frustration and anger about these behaviors, but they don't feel they have any outlet. What can they do? They want to vent and be heard, even if it's not necessarily a firing offense," Myers says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy Shield certifications begin trickling in

The U.S. Department of Commerce is not just rubber-stamping applications to join the new Privacy Shield data protection program: 24 hours after companies began certifying their compliance, the administration's website still listed no approvals.Microsoft was among the first businesses to certify that it complied with the new rules for transferring European Union citizens' personal information to the U.S. when the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration began accepting applications on Monday."We expect it to be approved in the coming days," Microsoft Vice President for EU Government Affairs John Frank wrote on a company blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy Shield certifications begin trickling in

The U.S. Department of Commerce is not just rubber-stamping applications to join the new Privacy Shield data protection program: 24 hours after companies began certifying their compliance, the administration's website still listed no approvals.Microsoft was among the first businesses to certify that it complied with the new rules for transferring European Union citizens' personal information to the U.S. when the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration began accepting applications on Monday."We expect it to be approved in the coming days," Microsoft Vice President for EU Government Affairs John Frank wrote on a company blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update’s best new features

Happy birthday, Windows 10Image by Rob SchultzMicrosoft’s planning a big bash for Windows 10’s first birthday, and you’re the one receiving presents. On August 2, the company will push out the (boringly named) Windows 10 Anniversary Update to Windows 10 PCs, and the update’s chock-full of all sorts of new goodies for you to play with—some niche, some helpful, and all free.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Crucial Role Of Wireless In Enterprise WAN

Distil Raises $21M to Improve Software and Possibly Make An Acquisition

Distil CEO mentions they are looking into another small acquisition.

Network Management: Getting Started

IDG Contributor Network: Distil Networks raises $21M to fend off the bots

We've been hearing all year about the calamitous state of venture funding. The decline in technology stocks, the revaluation of the "unicorns" and the general sense of unease about the economy (Trump, anyone?) has led to a tightening of the pure strings in venture capital land.But while the purse-strings have certainly tightened, the fact remains that venture capital companies still have cash they need to invest. The funds who give money to the VCs to invest for them certainly don't want to hear that those funds are simply sitting in a bank account awaiting deployment.And so deals are still happening—arguably a little more modestly, but happening nonetheless. A case in point is Distil Networks, which today is announcing Series C funding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Distil Networks raises $21M to fend off the bots

We've been hearing all year about the calamitous state of venture funding. The decline in technology stocks, the revaluation of the "unicorns" and the general sense of unease about the economy (Trump, anyone?) has led to a tightening of the pure strings in venture capital land.But while the purse-strings have certainly tightened, the fact remains that venture capital companies still have cash they need to invest. The funds who give money to the VCs to invest for them certainly don't want to hear that those funds are simply sitting in a bank account awaiting deployment.And so deals are still happening—arguably a little more modestly, but happening nonetheless. A case in point is Distil Networks, which today is announcing Series C funding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN and Modern Physics

I stumbled upon a great ACM article comparing challenges of distributed systems with well-known milestones of modern physics.

The modern networks are probably the ultimate distributed systems. Now take the ideas from that article and apply them to the Centralized Control Plane concept (the last time I checked the marketers were still promoting that academic marvel).