Reaction: Complexity Sells

Over at IPSpace this last week, Ivan pointed to a paper by Dijkstra (and if you don’t know who that is, you need to learn a thing or two about the history of routing protocols—because history makes culture, and culture matters—or, as the tagline on this blog says, culture eats technology for breakfast). In this paper, Dijkstra points out some rather important things about computer science and programming that can be directly applied to the network engineering world. For instance, Ivan says—

People tend to forget that “doing away with the programmer” was COBOL’s major original objective. —Replace “programmer” with “networking engineer” and COBOL with SDN

I was fascinated with Ivan’s take on this paper—particularly in that complexity is an area I find interesting and very useful in my everyday life as a designer—that I went and read the original article. You should, too.

I think Ivan’s observations are spot on, but I think it’s worthwhile to actually broaden them. From where I sit, after 25 years building and breaking networks, I agree that complexity sells—but it sells for two particular reasons. The reason, as Dijkstra said all those years ago (in computer terms), is this:

Since the Continue reading

New Slack tools let you chat with bots using buttons

Slack is making it easier for people to interact with third-party services that integrate with its chat app with the launch of a new developer tool that lets bots add clickable buttons to their messages. What that means is that someone can submit an expense request to an app that's integrated into Slack, and that person's manager can then receive it -- within the chat interface -- along with buttons that let them easily approve or deny the request.  It's part of Slack's push to enhance its chat application with third-party integrations. This makes it easier for people to interact with outside services from within Slack, something the company has been emphasizing as one of its key features. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Networking Startup Rethinks Routing

The best apps to help you relax and reduce stress

Your phone is probably one of the biggest stressors in your life. It’s constantly buzzing with email alerts, text messages, news updates, sports scores, and tweets. Sure, you can turn those off, but then that means you probably just check it more often to see if you “missed anything.”A recent study from the University of Illinois found a likely link between smartphone use, stress, and overall life satisfaction. There’s other evidence that meditation and mindfulness have positive benefits, even some physical changes to the brain. The makers of the Headspace app have a clever animation that explains some of this:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Measure your employees’ results, not their time

If you think money will make your employees happier, you might be wrong. Many workers report they value autonomy over anything else. Of course, you also need to ensure your employees basic needs are met at work. But from there, the data suggests that if you instill trust and freedom in your workforce, they will thrive.Irv Shapiro, CEO of DialogTech, is a strong believer in employee autonomy, and it's something he practices at his own company. "Unless your business sells services by the hour, it makes little sense to measure your employees by the hour. Instead employers should measure their employee's success by the results they produce."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3 tips for negotiating the salary you deserve

In a recovering economy and a tight IT talent market, candidates are finding they have more leverage when negotiating salary for a new position or angling for a raise. The key to managing this tricky, nerve-wracking process is to focus on your accomplishments, achievements and your overall value to the company -- and be able to quantify those.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

10 tech giants winning the talent war on LinkedIn

The 10 most sought-after U.S. companies that use LinkedIn to attract and retain talent are also technology pioneers. The professional social network says it analyzed billions of interactions between its 433 million users to rank the top companies based on the volume of job applicants, engagement between hiring companies and potential candidates, and employee retention. ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How to lure tech talent with employee benefits, perks LinkedIn included only companies with more than 500 employees, and it based its ranking on interactions during the 12 months ending in February 2016. The company examined how often users viewed and applied for companies' job postings, the number of non-employees that attempted to view job postings and connect with the hiring companies' employees, and how long new employees stay on the job after they're hired.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers sold access to 170,000 compromised servers, many in the US

The market for hacked servers might be much larger than previously thought, with new evidence suggesting that hackers sold access to over 170,000 compromised servers since 2014, a third of them located in the U.S.The new revelation comes from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, whose researchers reported last week that a black market website called xDedic was selling remote access to more than 70,000 compromised servers for as little as US$6.Following the report, a user with the moniker AngryBirds shared several Pastebin lists of IP addresses along with dates that allegedly represented hacked servers sold on xDedic since Oct. 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers sold access to 170,000 compromised servers, many in the US

The market for hacked servers might be much larger than previously thought, with new evidence suggesting that hackers sold access to over 170,000 compromised servers since 2014, a third of them located in the U.S.The new revelation comes from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, whose researchers reported last week that a black market website called xDedic was selling remote access to more than 70,000 compromised servers for as little as US$6.Following the report, a user with the moniker AngryBirds shared several Pastebin lists of IP addresses along with dates that allegedly represented hacked servers sold on xDedic since Oct. 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pica8 Scales Up to 100G Ethernet

Pica8, early pioneer of disaggregated networking and SDN, today announced a new version of their switch operating system, PicOS v2.7.1. Normally I wouldn’t note a networking OS update, but probably the biggest single update for this release is the new support for 100GigabitEthernet switches, with support for both Broadcom and Cavium / XPliant ASICs.

Currently the Hardware Compatibility List for 100G only features Broadcom-based switches but that will undoubtedly change as relative newcomer Cavium / XPliant continues to challenge Broadcom for speed, features and flexibility. I’m also curious to know whether in the future we’ll see hardware on that list using the Barefoot Tofino™ ASIC as well.

In addition to expanding the supported hardware offerings from HP Enterprise, the HCL now also features the first Dell platform to be certified. Dell and HPE are positioning themselves quite effectively as the branded whitebox solution of choice and their devices are supported by a number of software vendors now.

But why do we care about 100G Ethernet, PicOS and more advanced ASICs?

That’s right; because we always want more than we currently have. And, I suppose, because we keep on scaling our networks with more, faster servers. Sure, we’ll Continue reading

Introducing the Docker Store Private Beta

We are very excited to announce the private beta of Docker Store, a marketplace for trusted and validated dockerized software – free, open source and commercial.  

Our goals with Docker Store are designed around bringing Docker users and ecosystem partners together.

• Provide a scalable self-service system for ISVs to publish and distribute trusted and enterprise-ready content
• Provide a publishing process that validates software quality, including; security scanning, component inventory, the open-source license usage and use of best practices in image construction.
• Provide enterprise users with compliant, commercially supported software from trusted and verified publishers, that is packaged as Docker images.  
• We’ve added powerful search and browsing capabilities, including categorization.

The use and creation of dockerized content has grown exponentially in the last couple of years.  This demand on content and the expanded use of Docker within the enterprise naturally led to the need for more content, entitlement, visibility into security profiles and compliance.

Docker Store builds on the Official Images and the popularity of the Docker Hub for community  content by providing an official marketplace that provides workflows for those who wish to create and distribute content and those that wish to download content to build their Continue reading

Docker Datacenter in AWS and Azure in a few clicks

Introducing Docker Datacenter AWS Quickstart and Azure Marketplace Templates production-ready, high availability deployments in just a few clicks.

The Docker Datacenter AWS Quickstart uses a CloudFormation templates and pre-built templates on Azure Marketplace to make it easier than ever to deploy an enterprise CaaS Docker environment on public cloud infrastructures.

The Docker Datacenter Container as a Service (CaaS) platform for agile application development provides container and cluster orchestration and management that is simple, secure and scalable for enterprises of any size. With our new cloud templates pre-built for Docker Datacenter, developers and IT operations can frictionlessly move dockerized applications to an Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure environment without any code changes. Now businesses can quickly realize greater efficiency of computing and operations resources and Docker supported container management and orchestration in just a few steps.

What is Docker Datacenter?

Docker Datacenter includes Docker Universal Control Plane, Docker Trusted Registry (DTR), CS Docker Engine with commercial support & subscription to align to your application SLAs:

• Docker Universal Control Plane (UCP), an enterprise-grade cluster management solution that helps you manage your whole cluster from a single pane of glass
• Docker Trusted Registry (DTR), an image storage solution that helps securely store and manage the Docker Continue reading

Docker for the Enterprise with Docker Datacenter

Businesses today are digital and fundamentally powered by applications – software that drives revenue, engages with customers and runs their operations. The process of making that software has, until recently, been long and cumbersome.  The addition of Docker and containerization, a new software supply chain is enabled to bring agility, portability and control together into the enterprise.  From security and compliance to shipping more software faster to migrating workloads around sites for the best cost to performance ratio, Docker Datacenter is helping businesses transform their software supply chain.

At DockerCon in Seattle, business of all sizes are sharing their stories Dockering for transformation in development, CI and production environments for all kinds of apps.  In this post, I wanted to highlight those companies who are using Docker Datacenter.

HealthDirect Australia: Docker in Production, Look No Hands!

Healthdirect Australia was a long time open source Docker user who in the last year transitioned to a Docker Datacenter environment to gain the benefit of having out of the box integrations of a full Docker supported stack.  Scott Coulton, the lead architect (and also Docker Captain and DockerCon speaker!) is the driving force behind deploying and running the applications Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Why smartphones struggle with 911

When it comes to 911, a dichotomy of functionality seems to exist. We have apps to organize our lives, link us to friends and summon our favorite pizza delivery dude. Despite this, providing 911 centers anything more than very coarse location granularity remains a challenge.Apps promoting personal safety do exist. They claim to provide access to 911 through virtual panic buttons. Many also notify friends and family, which oddly enough are often in no position to provide any help or assistance. “Oh my gosh! Fletch is in trouble in Cucamonga, California! Let’s do something! Wait, we’re in New Jersey and have no idea who to call in Cucamonga or what to tell them!”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This IS your grandma’s Internet: Samsung plans to invest in IoT

In the future, everything will be connected -- even your grandparents.That's what Samsung Electronics is counting on as it draws up a four-year plan to invest US$1.2 billion in U.S. IoT startups and research.The company sees the Internet of things as a way to provide dementia care and to help millions of elderly people live independently, using a range of devices including some akin to fitness trackers."We can keep people out of hospitals and nursing homes," Samsung CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon said at a company event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. "As our populations live longer, these benefits and cost savings for society cannot be ignored."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

128 Technology Raises $36M to Simplify Virtual Routers

Session-aware and deterministic routers are the key.

Worth Reading: One-fourth of malware comes from sharing

This report took up where we last off last quarter on our cloud malware research, in which we found that 4.1 percent of enterprises had at least one sanctioned cloud app laced with malware. This quarter that number has risen to 11.0 percent, or nearly triple since last quarter. This is before counting unsanctioned apps, which we are researching and will incorporate into future reports. -Cloud Security Alliance

The post Worth Reading: One-fourth of malware comes from sharing appeared first on 'net work.

Say hello to Fedora 24, a Linux OS for a containerized world

Say hello to Fedora 24, a Linux OS for a containerized worldImage by The Fedora ProjectFedora 24 is the first 2016 release from the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, and it made its debut on Tuesday. Included in the software are several key new features for enterprises. Here's a look at some of the highlights.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech groups say FBI shouldn’t be allowed to do mass hacking

Congress should block proposed changes to rules governing U.S. law enforcement investigations that could give law enforcement agencies new authority to hack thousands of computers, several tech and advocacy groups said.Congress should stop the proposed changes, approved by the Supreme Court in April, that would allow judges to issue warrants for hacking and surveillance in cases where investigators don't know the target computer's location, a coalition of 50 tech trade groups, digital rights groups, and tech companies said in a letter sent Tuesday to congressional leaders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech groups say FBI shouldn’t be allowed to do mass hacking

Congress should block proposed changes to rules governing U.S. law enforcement investigations that could give law enforcement agencies new authority to hack thousands of computers, several tech and advocacy groups said. Congress should stop the proposed changes, approved by the Supreme Court in April, that would allow judges to issue warrants for hacking and surveillance in cases where investigators don't know the target computer's location, a coalition of 50 tech trade groups, digital rights groups, and tech companies said in a letter sent Tuesday to congressional leaders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here