IDG Contributor Network: Ecommerce needs to up its game, says UPS

Retailers have to invest in digital tools such as inventory transparency if they want to retain customers, says shipper UPS in its new report on online shopping.If they don’t, fickle “shoppers will likely go elsewhere to more efficiently meet their needs,” the company says.UPS found that most online shoppers (58 percent) want to see a retailer’s inventory online while they are shopping, and 20 percent will check inventory status at alternate locations or on a retailer’s website when in the store.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DevOps: The Real Impact On IT Pros

In this episode of Network Matters with Ethan Banks, learn why the topic of DevOps has become so pervasive in IT media. Ethan explains what DevOps really means for most IT organizations, and how Infrastructure professionals can use concepts from DevOps to improve their own efficiency.

Leaving Fixed Function Switches Behind For Universal Leafs

There are two competing trends in platform designs that architects always have to contend with. They can build a platform that performs a specific function and does it well, or create a more generic platform that sacrifices some efficiency but does a lot of jobs well. Sometimes you try to shoot the gap between these two poles.

That is precisely what Arista Networks, the networking upstart that has serial entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim as its chief development officer, is doing with a new line of what it is calling “universal leaf” switches. The leaf switches (does one say “leafs” or “leaves” …

Leaving Fixed Function Switches Behind For Universal Leafs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

XML is toast, long live JSON

If you haven't heard much about XML lately, you're not the only one. XML has been rapidly falling out of favor with developers and has been replaced with a more flexible and faster format.XML, the Extensible Markup Language, rose from the SGML format in the 1990s. It reached the 1.0 spec in 1997 and grew from there. The primary appeal of XML is that it was ideal for transferring data between other formats. It required far fewer filters for data conversion to share data between different applications that might have their own proprietary format. That's one reason why with Office 2007, Microsoft shifted its Word and Excel file formats to XML-based format. Conversion to other formats was made much easier thanks to XML.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The PC Hardware Nerd Quiz

Separating the true nerds from the wannabesYou can tell from five feet away if a screw is used to install a power supply or an optical drive. You can recite how much cache was in a Northwood Pentium 4. If you’re that kind of nerd, you won't have any problem with our PC Nerd Quiz. Or will you? We’ve assembled a mix of challenging questions designed to separate the true nerds from the wannabes. Let's see how you do. Ready? First question... To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN as an Abstraction Layer

During the Introduction to SDN webinar I covered numerous potential definitions:

I find all of these definitions too narrow or even misleading. However, the “SDN is a layer of abstraction” one is not too bad (see also RFC 1925 section 2.6a).

Watch the video

Twitter locks some accounts after passwords exposed

Twitter said it had locked down and called for a password reset of some accounts after an unconfirmed claim of a leak of nearly 33 million usernames and passwords to the social network.The company said the information was not obtained from a hack of its servers, and speculated that the information may have been gathered from other recent breaches, malware on victim machines that are stealing passwords for all sites, or a combination of both.“In each of the recent password disclosures, we cross-checked the data with our records. As a result, a number of Twitter accounts were identified for extra protection. Accounts with direct password exposure were locked and require a password reset by the account owner,” Twitter’s Trust & Information Security Officer, Michael Coates said in a blog post on Friday. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twitter locks some accounts after passwords exposed

Twitter said it had locked down and called for a password reset of some accounts after an unconfirmed claim of a leak of nearly 33 million usernames and passwords to the social network.The company said the information was not obtained from a hack of its servers, and speculated that the information may have been gathered from other recent breaches, malware on victim machines that are stealing passwords for all sites, or a combination of both.“In each of the recent password disclosures, we cross-checked the data with our records. As a result, a number of Twitter accounts were identified for extra protection. Accounts with direct password exposure were locked and require a password reset by the account owner,” Twitter’s Trust & Information Security Officer, Michael Coates said in a blog post on Friday. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Mozilla fund will pay for security audits of open-source code

A new Mozilla fund, called Secure Open Source, aims to provide security audits of open-source code, following the discovery of critical security bugs like Heartbleed and Shellshock in key pieces of the software.Mozilla has set up a US$500,000 initial fund that will be used for paying professional security firms to audit project code. The foundation will also work with the people maintaining the project to support and implement fixes and manage disclosures, while also paying for the verification of the remediation to ensure that identified bugs have been fixed.The initial fund will cover audits of  some widely-used open source libraries and programs. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Mozilla fund will pay for security audits of open-source code

A new Mozilla fund, called Secure Open Source, aims to provide security audits of open-source code, following the discovery of critical security bugs like Heartbleed and Shellshock in key pieces of the software.Mozilla has set up a US$500,000 initial fund that will be used for paying professional security firms to audit project code. The foundation will also work with the people maintaining the project to support and implement fixes and manage disclosures, while also paying for the verification of the remediation to ensure that identified bugs have been fixed.The initial fund will cover audits of  some widely-used open source libraries and programs. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Perth, Australia: 80th Data Center

alt CloudFlare is excited to announce the launch of our newest data center in Perth, Australia. This expands the breadth of our global network to span 80 unique cities across 41 countries, and is our fourth data center in the Oceania region, joining existing data centers in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

Western Australia

Perth is in a fascinating location. Home to sunny beaches and the highest number of self-made millionaires in the world, it is actually geographically closer to Singapore than to Sydney (though closer to Sydney in a “networking” sense, as determined by BGP routing).

Visitors to millions of websites across Western Australia served locally can now experience a faster and safer Internet - and ISPs can reach us at the Western Australia Internet Exchange (WA-IX), one of 119 internet exchanges that we openly peer at.

alt

Latency in milliseconds from end user (Perth) to CloudFlare. Source: Cedexis


Missing letters?


Helping build CloudFlare’s network provides our team members with the opportunity to not just speed up the Internet, but also improve our sense of geography. Visitors to our offices in San Francisco, London and Singapore can get a sneak peek at our fast-changing map (with live and upcoming dots). Perth Continue reading

Woman uses ‘Hey Siri’ feature to call an ambulance and help save her child’s life

When Apple released the iPhone 6s, it included a great new Siri feature which enables users to activate the intelligent assistant via voice. Dubbed 'Hey Siri', the feature is particularly convenient because the iPhone 6s' M9 motion coprocessor is 'always listening' and thereby lets users use 'Hey Siri' even when the device isn't connected to a power source.Recently, Stacey Gleeson of Australia used the 'Hey Siri' feature to successfully call an ambulance while she was tending to her daughter Giana who had stopped breathing."I picked her up and sat down with her on the floor,” Gleeson said in an interview. “And as I checked her airways, I looked over and remembered my phone.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Highly Rated, Dramatically Discounted Adapters – Deal Alert

Logitech Bluetooth Audio Adapter for Bluetooth StreamingTake just about any traditional set of speakers and make them Bluetooth enabled for streaming audio wirelessly from your favorite device. Currently discounted 30% to $28.HDMI Female to Female High Speed Gold Plated AdapterThis straightforward adapter couples two HDMI cables together for extended length. Currently discounted 46% to $6 for a pack of two.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mea culpa: Docker’s security tool and Black Duck’s Security Checker are NOT the same

It pays to look deeply, and I didn’t. I apologize. Some days, I make mistakes. Further education says Black Duck Software’s Security Checker and the Docker Cloud Security Scanning tool aren’t the same thing. Both check vulnerabilities with the CVE database—in a quest to match inflated Docker container problems—and rate containers based on the severity of vulnerabilities and the number found.These two tools (and there are others) are designed to load and parse Docker images and run a manifest against CVEs. Here’s where things largely diverge. Note also that there are other container security tools available, and I’ll get to them in a subsequent blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In IoT’s early days, challenges, opportunities revealed

In 2010, two entrepreneurs in Boston came up with the idea of turning shipping containers into miniature plantations, and Freight Farms was born.The company’s Leafy Green Machines, outfitted with LED lights and humidity-controlled ventilation systems, provide an ideal growing climate for up to 500 heads of lettuce per week, not to mention other crops such as herbs and micro-greens.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The Most Powerful Internet of Things Companies +Since day one, the containers have been connected to the Internet so they can be monitored and managed remotely. “We’re able to improve the value of the container without customers even knowing it,” says Kyle Seaman, director of farm technology. Freight Farms remotely monitors crop production for each of its roughly 80 farms. Software updates are pushed to the Leafy Green Machines to more efficiently manage the crops, such as by adjusting temperature, humidity and lighting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The age of the GPU

Having made the improbable jump from the game console to the supercomputer, GPUs are now invading the datacenter. This movement is led by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, Baidu and others who have quietly but rapidly shifted their hardware philosophy over the past twelve months. Each of these companies have significantly upgraded their investment in GPU hardware and in doing so have put legacy CPU infrastructure on notice. The Next Platform

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