Security of “high-impact” federal systems not exactly rock-solid

In the face of relentless attacks – via malware, DDOS and malicious email – the defenses that protect the nation’s most “high impact” systems are spotty at best and could leave important programs open to nefarious activities, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.+More on Network World: Not dead yet: 7 of the oldest federal IT systems still wheezing away+At issue here the GAO wrote is the weakness of “high impact” system protection because the government describes those “that hold sensitive information, the loss of which could cause individuals, the government, or the nation catastrophic harm,” and as such should be getting increased security to protect them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft cozies up to Linux containers

At Dockercon this week many vendors are singing the praises of their platforms being ideally suited to run application containers. One company with a particularly strong showing at the conference has been Microsoft though, which announced today it is further integrating Docker’s container management products into its Azure cloud portfolio.Microsoft’s container-related announcements at Dockercon include:-Docker Datacenter, the container management platform product is now available as a service in the Azure public cloud marketplace. This is a big deal because it allows customers to run Docker Datacenter on their own premises, and in the public cloud. This is not an exclusive agreement however; Docker Datacenter is also available in Amazon Web Service’s cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: 60 Limit and the CCDE

So how hard can it be to earn a CCDE? It’s just a rubber stamp to show that you have been working in design for a number of years, isn’t it? Well not quite. You have to really prove your experience and knowledge in a number of fields, encompassing a variety of roles that not every candidate would have been fortunate enough to have undertaken prior to gaining that prestigious CCDE number. -Cisco Learning

The post Worth Reading: 60 Limit and the CCDE appeared first on 'net work.

Over 80% off Essential Speed Reading Bundle – Deal Alert

You know that stack of books you’ve been meaning to tackle, but thought you never had the time? The Essential Speed Reading Bundle comes with a 3-year subscription to Spreeder and 7 Speed Reading EX, two tools proven to boost reading speeds. Spreeder is a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) e-reader that presents any digital text at a natural speed that reduces eye movement and increases comprehension. Meanwhile, 7 Speed Reading EX is a speed reading software that trains you to read up to 3.417 times faster through video tutorials and comprehension exercises. Retailing for $146.95, the Essential Speed Reading Bundle is available on sale for $19, almost 90% off its original price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce steps up its push to make everyone an app developer

Salesforce has already rolled out several tools that aim to let business users create their own mobile apps, and on Tuesday it unified them into a suite and added some new services on the back end.The new App Cloud Mobile suite includes Salesforce's Lightning app creation tools, which require little to no coding and are supposed to make it easy enough for everyday business people to create their own iPhone and Android applications.It also includes the development services of Force and Heroku, and the ability to bring Wave Analytics and Lightning Snap-ins to any mobile app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Momentum Mesmerizes and Threatens

The Docker platform for Linux containers is growing fast -- but what does it mean for the ecosystem?

Samsung’s IoT Business To Grow With $1.2B Investment

Company joins IBM, GE and others making big-dollar investments in IoT.

47% Off Canon All-In-One Printer with Mobile Tablet Printing with Airprint and Google Cloud Print capabilities – Deal Alert

This all-in-one printer from Canon allows you to print with many powerful options including AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Morphia and the Canon PRINT app. You can even print photos from Instagram or Facebook directly from your smartphone or tablet. The printing quality is remarkable with deeper black and vivid reds. This printer currently averages 4 out of 5 stars (read reviews). With the current 47% discount, its regular list price of $149.99 has been reduced to $78.98. Learn more and check out the buying options on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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