Taking a closer look at bots from Apple, Facebook and Google

"Bots" have been around for decades. Recently, however, it's become the norm for large technology companies to build, support and develop bots for a wide variety of uses. Because bots can be so many different things, it's often difficult to parse the bona fides from the wannabes — or even determine what bots do.What exactly are bots?  "A bot is an autonomous machine interface that's built to serve a purpose that traditionally was served by a human," says Michael Facemire, a principal analyst with Forrester Research.Bots can stimulate human conversation, but their greatest strength lies in the capability to simplify business processes that don't require human intervention, according to Adam Fingerman, chief experience officer at Arctouch, a mobile app design and development company. "From a utility point of view, bots will have an even bigger impact on how we work than how we live," he says.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FAQ: What the FCC’s 5G vote will mean

The FCC on Thursday will vote to identify and open new high frequency bands for use in the forthcoming 5G wave of wireless technology, clearing the way for development to continue on the next big jump in mobile data capabilities. Why? Netflix and Pokemon Go, mostly. Not exactly. Pokemon Go doesn’t use much data. Fine. It’s actually because FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler decided that now is the time to start the ball rolling on the process, which has been delayed in the past. Standards bodies and industry have begun to make noise on 5G of late, which means it’s probably a good thing that regulators like the FCC are getting in on the act.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why 50 million people can’t call 911

Undoubtedly, the most common method used to contact emergency services is simply calling 911. While that will work just fine for most of us, for the 50 million citizens in the U.S. who are deaf, are deaf-blind or have a speech disability, dialing 911 on the phone is not an option. Think about that for a second. You are deaf and experiencing a medical emergency, or witnessing one, and you can't report it, at least not in a timely or efficient manner. Wait—didn’t we solve this problem decades ago? Sort of, but as it turns out, not completely. It is true that in the 1960s scientist Robert Weitbrecht proposed the use of surplus recycled Teletype (TTY) machines for communications devices for the deaf. The TTYs were modified to allow the use of acoustic couplers, which made them easy to attach to any telephone receiver. The BAUDOT tones that they transmitted could be carried as audio on phone lines. And despite the machines being not very portable, for the first time a deaf person could reach out and communicate over phone lines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fiat Chrysler launches bug bounty program for connected vehicles

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has launched a bug bounty program to attract white-hat hackers to spot out cybersecurity flaws in its products and connected services.The program is focused on FCA's connected vehicles, including systems within them and external services and applications that link to them.The move follows the remote hack and control of a Jeep Cherokee, one of the company’s products, by security researchers. That breach led to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles last year. Fiat Chrysler is also moving quite aggressively in the area of autonomous vehicles, announcing earlier this year the joint development of self-driven minivans with Alphabet's Google Self-Driving Car Project.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fiat Chrysler launches bug bounty program for connected vehicles

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has launched a bug bounty program to attract white-hat hackers to spot out cybersecurity flaws in its products and connected services.The program is focused on FCA's connected vehicles, including systems within them and external services and applications that link to them.The move follows the remote hack and control of a Jeep Cherokee, one of the company’s products, by security researchers. That breach led to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles last year. Fiat Chrysler is also moving quite aggressively in the area of autonomous vehicles, announcing earlier this year the joint development of self-driven minivans with Alphabet's Google Self-Driving Car Project.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

netmiko support for Brocade ICX and MLXe

netmiko is a “Multi-vendor library to simplify Paramiko SSH connections to network devices,” written by Kirk Byers. It doesn’t solve all of your pain with dealing with CLI-only network devices, but it tries to at least take away the low-level hassle of setting up a connection, and handling variations with things like enable mode, line-breaks, etc.

I’ve submitted a couple of PRs over the last few days to support Brocade ICX and MLXe devices – #235, #236 and #237. These have now been merged into the master code.

This has not yet had extensive testing. Please try it out, and report any issues.

I’m currently looking at VDX support. Looks like a few oddities around detecting the prompt, and dealing with the banner. Feel free to pitch in!

US Senator has privacy concerns about Pokémon Go’s data collection

The popularity of augmented reality smartphone game Pokémon Go has raised a variety of concerns, including a warning by the National Safety Council, urging drivers not to play the game behind the wheel and asking pedestrians to be careful while playing it.U.S. Senator Al Franken, a strong privacy advocate, has raised the inevitable question about the privacy of the extensive data the game collects from its users, including children, and whether the data is used for other purposes.“I am concerned about the extent to which Niantic may be unnecessarily collecting, using, and sharing a wide range of users' personal information without their appropriate consent,” Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, wrote in a letter Tuesday to John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic, the developer of the game.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US Senator has privacy concerns about Pokémon Go’s data collection

The popularity of augmented reality smartphone game Pokémon Go has raised a variety of concerns, including a warning by the National Safety Council, urging drivers not to play the game behind the wheel and asking pedestrians to be careful while playing it.U.S. Senator Al Franken, a strong privacy advocate, has raised the inevitable question about the privacy of the extensive data the game collects from its users, including children, and whether the data is used for other purposes.“I am concerned about the extent to which Niantic may be unnecessarily collecting, using, and sharing a wide range of users' personal information without their appropriate consent,” Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, wrote in a letter Tuesday to John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic, the developer of the game.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

40% off APC Performance SurgeArrest Outlet with Phone Splitter and Coax Protection – Deal Alert

The APC Surge Arrest Performance series from APC offers the highest level of protection for your professional computers, electronics and connected devices, as well as provides surge protection for all of your data lines. The P11VT3 features 11 heavy duty outlets. Telephone and coax cable line surge suppression jacks are available to protect against dangerous surges traveling along data lines. Wiring Fault LED proactively notifies you of potentially dangerous building wiring conditions. Additional features like a ten foot power cord, safety shutters, status indicator, cord management, lifetime equipment protection policy and more make this their most complete surge offering. Over 1,100 customers on Amazon rate this item 4.5 out of 5 stars (read reviews) and Amazon indicates that its typical list price of $39.99 has been reduced by 40% to just $23.99. See this item now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

40% off APC Performance SurgeArrest Outlet with Phone Splitter and Coax Protection – Deal Alert

The APC Surge Arrest Performance series from APC offers the highest level of protection for your professional computers, electronics and connected devices, as well as provides surge protection for all of your data lines. The P11VT3 features 11 heavy duty outlets. Telephone and coax cable line surge suppression jacks are available to protect against dangerous surges traveling along data lines. Wiring Fault LED proactively notifies you of potentially dangerous building wiring conditions. Additional features like a ten foot power cord, safety shutters, status indicator, cord management, lifetime equipment protection policy and more make this their most complete surge offering. Over 1,100 customers on Amazon rate this item 4.5 out of 5 stars (read reviews) and Amazon indicates that its typical list price of $39.99 has been reduced by 40% to just $23.99. See this item now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

40% off APC Performance SurgeArrest Outlet with Phone Splitter and Coax Protection – Deal Alert

The APC Surge Arrest Performance series from APC offers the highest level of protection for your professional computers, electronics and connected devices, as well as provides surge protection for all of your data lines. The P11VT3 features 11 heavy duty outlets. Telephone and coax cable line surge suppression jacks are available to protect against dangerous surges traveling along data lines. Wiring Fault LED proactively notifies you of potentially dangerous building wiring conditions. Additional features like a ten foot power cord, safety shutters, status indicator, cord management, lifetime equipment protection policy and more make this their most complete surge offering. Over 1,100 customers on Amazon rate this item 4.5 out of 5 stars (read reviews) and Amazon indicates that its typical list price of $39.99 has been reduced by 40% to just $23.99. See this item now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An online market that offered cheap hacked servers returns

A website that offered access to hacked servers for as little as $6 is back online.The market, called xDedic, went down last month on June 15 right after security firm Kaspersky Lab publicly exposed it. Access to more than 70,000 compromised servers from governments, businesses and universities had been sold through the site, in the two years it was in operation.Kaspersky Lab, however, reported its finding to law enforcement agencies and said that “several major” internet service providers helped shut the site down.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An online market that offered cheap hacked servers returns

A website that offered access to hacked servers for as little as $6 is back online.The market, called xDedic, went down last month on June 15 right after security firm Kaspersky Lab publicly exposed it. Access to more than 70,000 compromised servers from governments, businesses and universities had been sold through the site, in the two years it was in operation.Kaspersky Lab, however, reported its finding to law enforcement agencies and said that “several major” internet service providers helped shut the site down.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BRKARC-3300 – IOS-XE: Enabling the Digital Network Architecture

Presented by Muhammad A Imam, Sr Manager Technical Marketing Engineering

Brand new session!

The goal of the session is to give an understanding of IOS-XE Denali 16.x.

“How many have downloaded 16.x?” — maybe 10% put up their hands

The upcoming 16.3 (target for this month) will support Cat 3850,3650, ISR, and ASR 1000.

The original operating system on the AGS, back in 1986, was simply called “Operating System”. There are still parts of Operating System in IOS today (scary!!).

IOS-XE (code name BinOS) came around in 2007 on the ASR 1000. In 2010, IOS-XE (code name Nova) was released for the Cat4k. These two editions of XE were similar, but different and were written by different engineering teams.

The vision for IOS-XE Denali is a single code base across Cisco enterprise platforms. Benefits include: similar features, consistent version numbers, consistent release schedule, consistent test and validation of releases, consistent commands (eg “show platform …”).

“We are changing the way we write code” –Muhammad; code is being pulled out of the IOSd blob and written as a subsystem within IOS-XE (over time).

Crimson database:

  • New component in Denali
  • Maintains state for subsystems
  • Holds configuration
  • Continue reading

BRKRST-2042 — Highly Available Wide Area Network Design

Presented by: David Prall, Communications Architect, Cisco For reference, David is the “father of IWAN”. This session was not what I was expecting. I was expecting design and architecture, but it was all about features in IOS and IOS-XE (eg, FHRPs, talked about routing protocol timers, PfRv3, BFD). I guess I need to pay more attention to the session code (RST == routing; ARC == architecture).

Knights Landing Will Waterfall Down From On High

With the general availability of the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us.

We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than …

Knights Landing Will Waterfall Down From On High was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

BRKNMS-2701 – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Prime Infrastructure

Presenters:

  • Lewis Hickman, Consulting Systems Engineer
  • Jennifer Valentine, Systems Engineer


Quick survey in the room: 60-70% of attendees running PI 3.x; 10-20 PI 2.x; some still on LMS.

“There are 37 different ‘Cisco Prime’ products” — Lewis

“Cisco Prime” isn’t a product; “Cisco Prime Infrastructure” is. Cisco Prime is a family of products.

PI traces its lineage back to 1996: CWSI > Cisco Works LMS > Cisco Prime LMS > WCS > NCS > Prime Infrastructure.

“1232 SysObjIds supported in PI today” — Lewis (aka, 1232 different devices supported by PI)

Two people (only!!) in the room running Network Analysis Module.

UCS Server Assurance module: enables mgmt of UCS servers; will integrate into vCenter and map VMs to physical hosts for you. 

Operations Center: manager of managers for PI

Licensing in PI 3.x:

  • One license for Lifecycle and Assurance now
  • Different license files for different device types
  • Different device types require a specific number of “tokens”
  • When a license is installed in PI 3.x, it gets converted into the appropriate number of tokens
  • As you add devices to PI, it draws down on the number of free tokens in the pool
  • Hint: You don’t Continue reading
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