More than 43,000 sign petition against U.S. encryption-breaking bill

More than 43,000 people have signed a petition against proposed U.S. legislation that would require tech companies to break into their users' encrypted data when ordered to by a judge.The proposal, from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, would require smartphone OS developers and other tech vendors to assist law enforcement agencies by breaking their own security measures.CREDO Action, a progressive activist group, launched a petition opposing the Compliance with Court Orders Act on Tuesday, and more than 43,000 people had signed it by early Thursday afternoon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More than 43,000 sign petition against U.S. encryption-breaking bill

More than 43,000 people have signed a petition against proposed U.S. legislation that would require tech companies to break into their users' encrypted data when ordered to by a judge.The proposal, from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, would require smartphone OS developers and other tech vendors to assist law enforcement agencies by breaking their own security measures.CREDO Action, a progressive activist group, launched a petition opposing the Compliance with Court Orders Act on Tuesday, and more than 43,000 people had signed it by early Thursday afternoon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle Steps With Moore’s Law To Rev Exadata Database Machines

Absorbing a collection of new processing, memory, storage, and networking technologies in a fast fashion on a complex system is no easy task for any system maker or end user creating their own infrastructure, and it takes time even for a big company like Oracle to get all the pieces together and weld them together seamlessly. But the time it takes is getting smaller, and Oracle has absorbed a slew of new tech in its latest Exadata X6-2 platforms.

The updated machines are available only weeks after Intel launched its new “Broadwell” Xeon E5 v4 processors, which have been shipping …

Oracle Steps With Moore’s Law To Rev Exadata Database Machines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cumulus, Dell, Red Hat Demo Linux as Full Stack SDDC

Cumulus Networks

Cumulus Networks announced today that in conjunction with Dell and Red Hat, it has created a 300+ node OpenStack pod using standard open source DevOps tools to manage the deployment from top to bottom (i.e. from the spine switch down to the compute node). I thought that was interesting enough to justify a quick post.

All Linux, All The Time

I visited with Cumulus Linux as part of Networking Field Day 9 and learned two very important things:

  1. Cumulus co-founder, CEO (at the time), and now CTO, JR Rivers makes a mean cup of espresso;
  2. The culture at Cumulus is all about standards. It was expressed repeatedly that Cumulus want to ensure that their linux is absolutely standard, so the file system hierarchy should be the standard, configuration files should be where they normally are, and so forth. A system that doesn’t follow those guidelines becomes a special snowflake that can’t be supported by regular tools and, as you’ll see, this attitude has paid dividends in this solution.

The idea of this software stack demo is to take linux-based switches (Dell brite-box Cumulus-certified hardware running the Cumulus Linux OS) and connect in linux-based compute resources (Dell PowerEdge servers running Continue reading

Cyberattack could knock out huge swath of US electric grid, lawmakers say

The U.S. government is not prepared for a cyberattack on the electrical grid that takes out power over a large area for weeks, or even months.A widespread, long-lasting power outage caused by a cyberattack may be unlikely, but the U.S. government needs to better plan for the possibility, Representative Lou Barletta, a Pennsylvania Republican, said Thursday.With some experts worried that a coordinated cyberattack could lead to widespread power outages lasting for several months, the federal government should offer more help to state and local governments planning to deal with the aftermath, Barletta said during a hearing before a subcommittee of the House of Representatives Transformation and Infrastructure Committee.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cyberattack could knock out huge swath of US electric grid, lawmakers say

The U.S. government is not prepared for a cyberattack on the electrical grid that takes out power over a large area for weeks, or even months.A widespread, long-lasting power outage caused by a cyberattack may be unlikely, but the U.S. government needs to better plan for the possibility, Representative Lou Barletta, a Pennsylvania Republican, said Thursday.With some experts worried that a coordinated cyberattack could lead to widespread power outages lasting for several months, the federal government should offer more help to state and local governments planning to deal with the aftermath, Barletta said during a hearing before a subcommittee of the House of Representatives Transformation and Infrastructure Committee.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The complexity required for robustness, often goes against robustness

In the past few months we have seen major outages from United Airlines, the NYSE, and the Wall Street Journal. With almost 5,000 flights grounded, and NYSE halting trading the cost of failure is high. When bad things happen IT personal everywhere look at increasing fault tolerance by adding redundancy mechanisms or protocols to increase robustness. Unfortunately the complexity that comes with these additional layers often comes with compromise.

The last thing your boss wants to hear is, “The network is down!”. Obviously it’s your job to prevent that from happening, but at what cost? Many of us enjoy twisting those nerd knobs, but that tends to only harbor an environment with unique problems. I too fear the current trend of adding layer after layer of network duct tape to add robustness, or worse, to try and fix shortcomings in applications. NAT, PBR, GRE, VXLAN, OTV, LISP, SDN… where does it end!?

The greater the complexity of failover, the greater the risk of failure. We often forget the lessons of our mentors, but keeping the network as simple as possible has always been best practice. As Dijkstra said, “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work Continue reading

Brave Software’s browser is illegal, newspapers claim

The number of websites barring access to users of Adblock Plus has been growing as of late. The latest that I found is Listverse, an interesting site full of top 10 lists similar to Cracked.com but without the snark. It’s become the latest site I frequent that no longer displays its content if you have an ad blocker enabled. But at least it’s safer than Forbes.Still, denying you content is one thing, but threatening legal action is another. The Financial Times reports 17 members of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) have sent a cease and desist letter to Brave Software and its founder, former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, over the company’s self-titled ad-blocking browser.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Women in Computing group taps Princeton routing, SDN researcher as Athena Lecturer

Jennifer Rexford, a professor of engineering and Computer Science Department chair at Princeton University, has been named the 2016-17 Athena Lecturer by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing in honor of her contributions to computer science.The Princeton and University of Michigan grad was recognized for her work in improving Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and for contributions that have paved the way for software-defined networks (SDNs). Before joining Princeton’s faculty, Rexford worked for AT&T Labs on Internet measurements and traffic engineering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Women in Computing group taps Princeton routing, SDN researcher as Athena Lecturer

Jennifer Rexford, a professor of engineering and Computer Science Department chair at Princeton University, has been named the 2016-17 Athena Lecturer by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing in honor of her contributions to computer science.The Princeton and University of Michigan grad was recognized for her work in improving Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and for contributions that have paved the way for software-defined networks (SDNs). Before joining Princeton’s faculty, Rexford worked for AT&T Labs on Internet measurements and traffic engineering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sharp’s robot smartphone coming in May for $1,800

Japan's Sharp will launch in May a smartphone that's built into a humanoid robot. Or is it a humanoid robot with a built-in smartphone?The Robohon is said to be the world's first mobile robotic phone -- and judging from the price and slightly unwieldy form factor could also be the last.It's 19.5 centimeters (7.7 inches) tall and weighs 390 grams (13.8 ounces), making it several times the size and weight of a conventional smartphone, and it will cost 198,000 yen, which is just over US$1,800 and more than double the price of a high-end iPhone.But those shortcomings are more than made up in cuteness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chrome abandons XP, Vista and older versions of OS X

Google yesterday released Chrome 50, and as promised last year, dropped support for Windows XP and Vista, along with three older editions of Apple's OS X.The upgrade to Chrome 50 will not be recognized or downloaded by personal computers running Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X Snow Leopard, OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion. Those operating systems debuted between 2001 (XP) and 2012 (Mountain Lion). Users of those OSes will be permanently stuck on Chrome 49, getting neither upgrades to new versions nor security patches for newly discovered vulnerabilities.Together, Windows XP and Vista powered 13.6% of all Windows PCs in March, or about one in seven systems. Meanwhile, Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion powered 10.7% of all Macs last month, according to data from U.S.-based analytics firm Net Applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: DigitalOcean on a stratospheric growth path, scoops up cash

DigitalOcean is a confusing sort of a vendor. Every time the list of leading public cloud vendors comes out, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is #1, with Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Platform and IBM SoftLayer fighting for the bridesmaid slots. We never hear of DigitalOcean in those reviews. That is partly because some people argue about what constitutes cloud and whether DigitalOcean should really be there.While these semantic arguments about "true" and "false" clouds go on, however, DigitalOcean has quietly (and not so quietly) been building scale. The company is growing rapidly, indeed, two years ago there had been around 1.5 million Droplets (its term for cloud servers) launched. Today, that figure has grown some 800 percent to 13 million. The company has around 700,000 all-time users and is adding 20,000 customers per month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook’s React Native could succeed where other cross-platform frameworks have failed

At the F8 developer conference earlier this week, Facebook reported an unprecedented 85 percent reuse of code attributable to React Native on its internally developed Android and iOS Ads Manager app.On top of that, the company announced that Microsoft will port React Native to run on Windows 10, Windows phones and Xbox One. And Samsung announced it would port React Native to its Tizen OS that runs on many devices, including wearables and smart TVs.That is significant considering cross-platform frameworks have such a bad reputation that developers often joke that Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damn lies and then there is cross-platform.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AV software: “I’m not quite dead yet”

If you are a cybersecurity professional, you’ve probably read the quote, “AV is dead” hundreds or even thousands of times. The thought here is that antivirus software is no longer effective at blocking modern exploits and malware, thus its useful lifespan is effectively over. Now, when any technology is declared “dead,” it is usually an industry analyst (like me) who makes this type of provocative statement. I remember the analyst declaration “mainframe is dead” from the early 1990s and the more recent refrain portending the death of the PC. In this case, however, many people attribute the “AV is dead” soundbite to a former Symantec VP quote in the Wall Street Journal, which seems to give it more credibility. After all, if Symantec, the market leader, thinks AV is dead, then it sure as heck must be.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU plan to collect, not share, air traveler data is ‘absurd’

Air passengers entering or leaving the European Union will have their movements kept on file by police authorities from 2018 under draft legislation approved by the European Parliament.Critics, however, say a lack of provisions to share the data severely limits the plan's usefulness.Airlines running flights into or out of the EU must hand over the data to national Passenger Information Units (PIUs) that will hold the data for law enforcers. Member states may choose to gather data from travel agencies and to retain information about passengers on flights within the EU too.However, there will be no centralized EU database of arriving and departing passengers, and no automatic sharing of data between the various national PIUs. With open land borders between countries in the Schengen Area, and no mandatory collection of information on intra-EU flights, it will be difficult for investigators to use the data to determine whether a person of interest is in the EU.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU plan to collect, not share, air traveler data is ‘absurd’

Air passengers entering or leaving the European Union will have their movements kept on file by police authorities from 2018 under draft legislation approved by the European Parliament.Critics, however, say a lack of provisions to share the data severely limits the plan's usefulness.Airlines running flights into or out of the EU must hand over the data to national Passenger Information Units (PIUs) that will hold the data for law enforcers. Member states may choose to gather data from travel agencies and to retain information about passengers on flights within the EU too.However, there will be no centralized EU database of arriving and departing passengers, and no automatic sharing of data between the various national PIUs. With open land borders between countries in the Schengen Area, and no mandatory collection of information on intra-EU flights, it will be difficult for investigators to use the data to determine whether a person of interest is in the EU.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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