Google and Microsoft agree to end regulatory battles

Google and Microsoft have agreed to end their long-running regulatory battles and stop complaining to government agencies about each other.Microsoft had been one of the leading companies calling for governments to investigate Google over potential antitrust violations in recent years. Earlier this year, though, Microsoft withdrew its support for FairSearch, a coalition of companies pushing the EU to file formal antitrust complaints against Google.The announcement of the new agreement between the two companies comes just two days after the European Commission filed new antitrust charges against Google related to packaging its apps on Android phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 22nd, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


A perfect 10. Really stuck that landing. Nadia Comaneci approves.

 

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  • $1B: Supercell’s Clash Royale projected annual haul; 3x: Messenger and WhatsApp send more messages than SMS; 20%: of big companies pay zero corporate taxes; Tens of TB's RAM: Netflix's Container Runtime; 1 Million: People use Facebook over Tor; $10.0 billion: Microsoft raining money in the cloud; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @nehanarkhede: @LinkedIn's use of @apachekafka:1.4 trillion msg/day, 1400 brokers. Powers database replication, change capture etc
    • @kenkeiter~ Full-duplex on a *single antenna* -- this is huge.  (single chip, too -- that's the other huge part, obviously) 
    • John Langford: In the next few years, I expect machine learning to solve no important world issues.
    • Dan Rayburn: By My Estimate, Apple’s Internal CDN Now Delivers 75% Of Their Own Content
    • @BenedictEvans: If Google sees the device as dumb glass, Apple sees the cloud as dumb pipes & dumb storage. Both views could lead to weakness
    • @JordanRinke: We need less hackathons, more apprenticeships. Less bootcamps, more classes. Less rockstars, more mentors. Develop people instead of product
    • @alicegoldfuss: Nagios screaming / Continue reading

How contact centers can benefit from SD-WANs

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach. The single location contact/call center of years past would have had little need for Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology. But today’s call/contact centers for customer service, technical support, outgoing call banks and other use cases are almost always multi-location and usually global, and the right SD-WAN solution can improve reliability and the customer experience while lowering costs. Call centers were among the first adopters of VoIP, at least within the call center network, and they have historically used MPLS in the WAN, very often dual MPLS networks. While the latter is expensive, the approach has been needed to maintain reliability and call quality.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How contact centers can benefit from SD-WANs

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.The single location contact/call center of years past would have had little need for Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology. But today’s call/contact centers for customer service, technical support, outgoing call banks and other use cases are almost always multi-location and usually global, and the right SD-WAN solution can improve reliability and the customer experience while lowering costs.Call centers were among the first adopters of VoIP, at least within the call center network, and they have historically used MPLS in the WAN, very often dual MPLS networks. While the latter is expensive, the approach has been needed to maintain reliability and call quality.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook bug hunter stumbles on backdoor left by hackers

When Orange Tsai set out to participate in Facebook's bug bounty program in February, he successfully managed to gain access to one of Facebook's corporate servers. But once in, he realized that malicious hackers had beaten him to it.Tsai, a consultant with Taiwanese penetration testing outfit Devcore, had started by mapping Facebook's online properties, which extend beyond user-facing services like facebook.com or instagram.com.One server that caught his attention was files.fb.com, which hosted a secure file transfer application made by enterprise software vendor Accellion and was presumably used by Facebook employees for file sharing and collaboration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook bug hunter stumbles on backdoor left by hackers

When Orange Tsai set out to participate in Facebook's bug bounty program in February, he successfully managed to gain access to one of Facebook's corporate servers. But once in, he realized that malicious hackers had beaten him to it.Tsai, a consultant with Taiwanese penetration testing outfit Devcore, had started by mapping Facebook's online properties, which extend beyond user-facing services like facebook.com or instagram.com.One server that caught his attention was files.fb.com, which hosted a secure file transfer application made by enterprise software vendor Accellion and was presumably used by Facebook employees for file sharing and collaboration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some People Don’t Get It: It Will Eventually Fail

Mark Baker left this comment on my Stretched Firewalls across Layer-3 DCI blog post:

Strange how inter-DC clustering failure is considered a certainty in this blog.

Call it experience or exposure to a larger dataset. Anything you build will eventually fail; just because you haven’t experienced the failure yet doesn’t mean that the system will never fail but only that you were lucky so far.

Read more ...

There is NO IPv6 Standard

Geoff Huston highlights that the IETF has never completed their standard process. One hundred and forty-six of these RFCs are Informational, four of these are Historic, 23 are Experimental, five are Best Current Practice and the remaining 193 are Standards Track documents. Of these 193 documents, 24 are already obsoleted, 164 are Proposed Standards, just five […]

The post There is NO IPv6 Standard appeared first on EtherealMind.

NANOG 67 Hackathon

Sponsored by:

Join us for the NANOG 67 Hackathon -- a one-day event Sunday, June 12, 2016, at the Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park. 

The NANOG 67 Hackathon will bring network operators together in a room to develop new ideas and hacks for automating production internet networks.  Tools and software beyond those provided by vendors and existing open-source projects are needed to keep those networks up and running. By gathering together at NANOG 67 to collaboratively hack on code or hardware, develop ideas, and documentation we can open the possibilities of holistic network management through automation.  And we will have fun while doing it!

Registration for the Hackathon is open on a space-available basis to all interested attendees of NANOG 67.  All skill levels are welcome, but participants are expected to actively participate in the hacks.  The theme of the Hackathon is holistic network management through automation.  Proposals of hacks will be solicited from registrants and published prior to NANOG 67 to allow the forming of teams of 1-6 individuals to work on hacks. And several example hacks will be available for inspiration.  A standardized hacking environment for prototyping will be provided or teams are welcome to Continue reading

Amazon Dash Button Events On A Catalyst

Lots of folks are detecting Amazon Dash button events by watching for ARP traffic with python.

I took a slightly different approach by watching for the button's MAC address with an EEM applet.

My Mac 'n Cheese button speaks on the network twice with each push: once right when it's pushed, and then a second time about 40 seconds later.

The applet sleeps for 60 seconds after it's fired to ensure that the button only creates a single event with each press.

 event manager applet macNcheese  
event mat mac-address 00bb.3a4b.5a01 type add maxrun 90
action 1 syslog msg "It's Mac N Cheese time!"
action 2 cli command "enable"
action 3 cli command "copy https://username:password@some_server/path/to/events.php^V?eventtype=MAC%20N%20CHEESE%20TIME! null:"
action 4 wait 60
action 5 cli command "clear mac address-table dynamic address 00bb.3a4b.5a01"

event mat refers to "mac address table" changes. This applet fires only when the button's address is added to the table. Without the add keyword, the event would fire twice, once when the entry is added, and again when the entry is removed from the switch L2 filtering table.

I'm triggering an external event by hitting a web server that's already configured to receive Continue reading

The Importance of System Hardening

locksystemhardening

Most operating systems are not very secure out of the box and favor convenience and ease of use over security. IT Security professionals may not agree with a vendor’s user friendly approach to their OS, but that does not mean they have to accept it. There are steps that can be taken to harden a system and eliminate as many security risks as possible

System Hardening Examples

The most basic hardening procedure is to change the vendor default user name and password. You would be surprised how many vendor default access codes can found with a simple Google search!

System hardening can include configuration settings to remove unnecessary services, applying firewall rules, enforcing password complexity, setting failed login thresholds, and system idle time outs.

System hardening can also include installing an anti-virus program, forwarding logs to a centralized log management solution, and applying vendor released system patches.

Basically system hardening is a way to lock down the Operating System before the system goes into production. The hardening guides can not only detail the steps to follow to secure a system, but can complement any system deployment guides. Along with the list of procedures to follow to improve system security the hardening Continue reading

Junos and DHCP relay

There are two different ways to configure DHCP in Junos, bootp helper and dhcp relay. These work in very different manner, bootp helper is being phased out and is not supported for example in QFX10k. Behaviour of bootp helper is obvious, it works like it works in every other sensible platform. Behaviour of dhcp-relay is very confusing and it's not documented at all anywhere.

If it's possible in your platform to configure bootp helper, do it. If not, complain to Junos about dhcp-relay implementation and ask them to fix it. The main problem with dhcp-relay implementation is that once you've configured it, you're punting all dhcp traffic in all interfaces. Normal transit traffic crossing your router is subject to this punt, so transit customers will experience larger jitter and delay of packets being punted and almost certainly reordering, because the non-dhcp packet that came after but was not subject to punt will be forwarded first. Technically reordering does not matter, as long as it does not happen inside a flow, but it's not desirable.

How the sequence of operation works in Junos for dhcp-relay:

  1. Transit packet touches ingress NPU
  2. After L2 lookup, before L3 lookup ingress NPU punts the transit Continue reading

Tips for hiring the right remote worker

Interviewing remote workers is much different than hiring for a traditional, on-site position. In addition to the usual questions about knowledge, hard skills and experience, interviewing candidates for a remote position must take into account commitment, ability to work independently, oral and written communication skills, conflict resolution, motivation and technology prowess."There are some differences to look for when you're hiring remote workers. You need to emphasize constant communication, availability and collaboration skills, as well as the ability to work independently, to solve problems and resolve conflicts and be able to gauge productivity," says Madhav Bhandari, head of growth at cloud productivity management and time tracking software company Hubstaff.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple’s iBooks Store and iTunes Movies shut down by Chinese government

A Chinese regulator is said to have ordered Apple to shut down its iBooks Store and iTunes Movies only six months after the services were launched in the country.The action against Apple in a country, which it rates as its second largest market by revenue after the U.S., came from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, reported The New York Times, quoting two persons who spoke on the condition of anonymity.U.S. tech companies have been under pressure to comply with Chinese Internet regulations and censorship, with some Internet services like Facebook and Twitter blocked in the country.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows phones’ free-fall may force Microsoft to push harder on Windows 10 adoption

Poor little Windows phone could have a bigger effect on Microsoft's business than you'd think. As the company's mobile device strategy continues to disintegrate, Microsoft may feel compelled to push harder on Windows 10 adoption and paid services to prove it can survive without a viable smartphone—and that could be bad news for consumers. The raw numbers are shocking: Microsoft sold a minuscule 2.3 million Lumia phones last quarter, down from 8.6 million a year ago. Phone revenue declines will only “steepen” during the current quarter, chief financial officer Amy Hood warned during a conference call. That’s dragged down Microsoft’s results as a company, too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here