What Are The Problems with Broadcom Tomahawk? We Don’t Know

One of my readers has customers that already experienced performance challenges with Tomahawk-based data center switches. He sent me an email along these lines:

My customers are concerned about buffer performance for packets that are 200 bytes and under. MORE IMPORTANTLY, a customer informed me that there were performance issues when running 4x25GE connections when one group of ports speaks to another group.

Reading the report Mellanox published not so long ago it seems there really is something fishy going on with Tomahawk.

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Mozilla wants US to disclose to it first any vulnerability found in Tor by government hackers

Mozilla has asked a court that it should be provided information on a vulnerability in the Tor browser ahead of it being provided to a defendant in a lawsuit, as the browser is based in part on Firefox browser code.“At this point, no one (including us) outside the government knows what vulnerability was exploited and whether it resides in any of our code base,” wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla, in a blog post Wednesday.Mozilla is asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in the interest of Firefox users to ensure that the government must disclose the vulnerability to it before it is revealed to any other party, as any disclosure without advance notice to Mozilla will increase the likelihood that the exploit will become public before Mozilla can fix any associated vulnerability in Firefox.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mozilla wants US to disclose to it first any vulnerability found in Tor by government hackers

Mozilla has asked a court that it should be provided information on a vulnerability in the Tor browser ahead of it being provided to a defendant in a lawsuit, as the browser is based in part on Firefox browser code.“At this point, no one (including us) outside the government knows what vulnerability was exploited and whether it resides in any of our code base,” wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla, in a blog post Wednesday.Mozilla is asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in the interest of Firefox users to ensure that the government must disclose the vulnerability to it before it is revealed to any other party, as any disclosure without advance notice to Mozilla will increase the likelihood that the exploit will become public before Mozilla can fix any associated vulnerability in Firefox.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introducing HTTP Testing in ToDD

Now that ToDD has been in the public arena for two months, one of the things I’m happiest about is the fact that testing in ToDD is totally flexible. Thanks to the concept of testlets, ToDD doesn’t have an opinion on the specifics of your tests - all of that logic is contained within the testlet. I believe there’s real value in going further than simple “ping” tests when validating that your network is working as you expect.

Introducing HTTP Testing in ToDD

Now that ToDD has been in the public arena for two months, one of the things I’m happiest about is the fact that testing in ToDD is totally flexible. Thanks to the concept of testlets, ToDD doesn’t have an opinion on the specifics of your tests - all of that logic is contained within the testlet. I believe there’s real value in going further than simple “ping” tests when validating that your network is working as you expect.

Introducing HTTP Testing in ToDD

Now that ToDD has been in the public arena for two months, one of the things I’m happiest about is the fact that testing in ToDD is totally flexible. Thanks to the concept of testlets, ToDD doesn’t have an opinion on the specifics of your tests - all of that logic is contained within the testlet.

I believe there’s real value in going further than simple “ping” tests when validating that your network is working as you expect. Customers aren’t pinging you - they’re using your applications. To that end, I have introduced a new testlet to the ToDD project that makes HTTP calls and reports on application-level metrics.

There are some very real advantages to testing HTTP reachability instead of settling for simple “ping” tests. In addition to verifying network connectivity, HTTP testing also ensures that the web application is also up and able to produce the desired status code. We’re also able to get some insight into performance at the application level.

In my initial presentations on ToDD, I talked about a use case for being able to “keep your SaaS providers honest” by making HTTP requests against the services you use in a distributed manner:

Continue reading

Introducing HTTP Testing in ToDD

Now that ToDD has been in the public arena for two months, one of the things I’m happiest about is the fact that testing in ToDD is totally flexible. Thanks to the concept of testlets, ToDD doesn’t have an opinion on the specifics of your tests - all of that logic is contained within the testlet.

I believe there’s real value in going further than simple “ping” tests when validating that your network is working as you expect. Customers aren’t pinging you - they’re using your applications. To that end, I have introduced a new testlet to the ToDD project that makes HTTP calls and reports on application-level metrics.

There are some very real advantages to testing HTTP reachability instead of settling for simple “ping” tests. In addition to verifying network connectivity, HTTP testing also ensures that the web application is also up and able to produce the desired status code. We’re also able to get some insight into performance at the application level.

In my initial presentations on ToDD, I talked about a use case for being able to “keep your SaaS providers honest” by making HTTP requests against the services you use in a distributed manner:

The Continue reading

Outlook for Mac will soon let you resize images and try new fonts

Microsoft is revamping the email editor in Outlook for Mac, providing new options for working with images and adding new fonts.The biggest change is the ability to resize and rotate images. If you insert a very large image, for instance, you'll soon be able to make it more reasonably-sized for email recipients.Users are also getting access to a broader set of fonts, font colors, bulleted lists and other formatting options.The changes will roll out in mid-May, Microsoft says, starting with people who are part of the Office Insider early release program. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud: Just what the doctor ordered

Two of the most risk averse industries are health care and financial services. Yesterday I wrote about how banks are increasingly using public IaaS cloud services. A new study this week finds that health care are warming to the cloud too.Two years ago HIMSS Analytics and Level 3 found that 22% of health care providers planned to use cloud for back-office functions. This year, the number more than doubled to 46.7%. Just over one in three respondents said they have some sort of patient engagement tools hosted in the cloud. Another popular use case for cloud was Health Information Exchanges.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft has given its Sunrise Calendar app a sunset date

The Sunrise Calendar app will be sunsetting on Aug. 31, the team behind it announced in a blog post Wednesday. In the next few days, the app will no longer be available from the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.Users will have a few months to keep using it without support, before the company switches off the service at the end of August. This is happening because Microsoft acquired the company behind Sunrise last year and put its team to work on improving Outlook instead.According to the blog post, working on Outlook means the Sunrise team doesn't have time to support the app they created. They've been integrating popular features from Sunrise into different versions of Outlook, including a recently-released Calendar Apps feature on iOS and Android that lets users bring information from outside services into their Outlook calendar. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Yes, you should always update your software

We have all received those annoying interruptions to our work — yes, the dreaded “update your software” message. Updates can be cumbersome — they can force you to stop what you’re doing, restart your computer, or change the interface you were working in upon the restart. But as unfun as they might be, they are an essential part of strong digital hygiene and one of the most important steps you can take to protect and secure your personal devices. -via CDT

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Android users can now quickly translate text in any app

Android users can now get text translated in any app on their phone thanks to an update to Google Translate released Wednesday.The app now has a new Tap to Translate feature that lets people select text in one language, copy it, and with the tap of a button, see it in another language. It's designed to make it easier for folks to quickly get translations without having to go through a whole process of switching apps and pasting the text into Google Translate. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Smartphone tracking apps raise security, privacy and legality questions

When it comes to smartphone tracking applications that help parents or employers to track the location of their children or perhaps monitor them by intercepting communications, few would argue the merits of such as system. But when those same kinds of apps are used to surreptitiously monitor employee activities, or the behavior of your wife or boyfriend, well, things get a little creepy and possibly illegal.+More on Network World: The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years+The watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this waded into the smartphone tracking app quagmire and found lots of contradictory information on the topic by looking at 40 smartphone tracking apps and analyzing their websites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Smartphone tracking apps raise security, privacy and legality questions

When it comes to smartphone tracking applications that help parents or employers to track the location of their children or perhaps monitor them by intercepting communications, few would argue the merits of such as system. But when those same kinds of apps are used to surreptitiously monitor employee activities, or the behavior of your wife or boyfriend, well, things get a little creepy and possibly illegal.+More on Network World: The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years+The watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this waded into the smartphone tracking app quagmire and found lots of contradictory information on the topic by looking at 40 smartphone tracking apps and analyzing their websites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Old SAP vulnerability scares Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security has issued an alert about a 6-year-old SAP vulnerability that’s still being exploited enough that DHS deems it worthy of special note.But the responsibility for being vulnerable lies with SAP users. “This is a responsibility that falls on SAP customers' information security teams, service providers and external audit firms,” according to an FAQ about the vulnerability that was put out by Onapsis, an SAP-security vendor.And the company is right. The fixes should have been applied by now, since SAP has issued them. SAP issued the following statement about the patches:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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