From cosmic living-rooms to communications, NASA craving deep space public brainstorms

NASA this week said it was calling for public input on living quarters for astronauts to live in deep space as well as systems and technologies for a new Mars Orbiter.As far as the living spaces go, Congress earlier this year urged the space agency to move along its ideas for how humans would live on planets or other places far from Earth. With that pressure as a backdrop NASA said it wants US companies, universities, and non-profit organizations to offer up their best ideas for space living systems would include reliable life support systems, fire safety, atmosphere revitalization and monitoring, water processing, lighting, and fire detection and radiation protection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From cosmic living-rooms to communications, NASA craving deep space public brainstorms

NASA this week said it was calling for public input on living quarters for astronauts to live in deep space as well as systems and technologies for a new Mars Orbiter.As far as the living spaces go, Congress earlier this year urged the space agency to move along its ideas for how humans would live on planets or other places far from Earth. With that pressure as a backdrop NASA said it wants US companies, universities, and non-profit organizations to offer up their best ideas for space living systems would include reliable life support systems, fire safety, atmosphere revitalization and monitoring, water processing, lighting, and fire detection and radiation protection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why early STEM education will drive the U.S. economy

The Obama administration is continuing its push to advance math and science education this week, turning attention to early learning with the announcement of a slew of initiatives aimed at promoting the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, mathematics and engineering.[ Related: STEM education gets boost from White House ]The White House and Department of Education are positioning early STEM education as a key to the administration's goal of elevating the nation's competitive position, both by measure of student achievement and, in the longer view, by the economic and social benefits that follow from a workforce with a solid foundation in the subjects that are increasingly critical to the 21st century economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud will make U.S. immigration agency more agile

Improving the delivery of services to citizens has been one of the driving goals of government IT reform, in particular as consumers seek out more services through agency websites or applications.At the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, CIO Mark Schwartz is helping lead an overhaul of the way the agency approaches software and application development[ Related: Government wants to increase IT spending 13% in proposed budget ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud storage pioneer Bitcasa is killing its cloud storage

Bitcasa is getting out of the consumer cloud storage business, the company announced Thursday.“We are discontinuing our Bitcasa Drive service in order to focus our full attention on our growing platform business,” the company said in a short blog post, as first reported by VentureBeat. “All account owners must take action to avoid losing their files.”Users who need assistance recovering and preserving their files should use Bitcasa’s Help Center, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Popular desktop Linux distro Ubuntu has potentially serious privacy flaw

A feature in the just-released 16.04 version of Ubuntu could pose a serious threat to the privacy of desktop Linux users, according to a well-known open-source software expert.Version 16.04, the latest long-term-support release of Ubuntu, features a new package format used for installing software on an Ubuntu system, called snap. Snaps are designed to be easier for developers to construct, simpler to deploy, and able to work comfortably alongside the existing deb package format.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows 10's upgrade model temporarily wipes $1.6B from Microsoft's books | One of GNU/Linux’s most important networking components just got an update  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DevOps and deviance: How bad IT practices become accepted as normal

Peter Waterhouse, Senior Strategist, CA TechnologiesAlthough vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.How many times have you witnessed a sub-optimal IT practice that everyone else thinks is ok, then over time accepted the behavior as being just fine and dandy?Regardless of whether you lead a startup or work in an established business, we all have a tendency to accept dodgy behaviors. Even if outsiders see them as wrong, our IT teams are so accustomed to using them (without any adverse consequences) that they’re quickly established as “normal” and accepted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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.

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please consider offering your support on Patreon.
  • $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.

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