My VMX installation guide

My VMX installation guide - VMX-installguide.pdf I'm currently writing the 2nd Edition of the MX Series book. In this new edition, I wrote a chapter dedicated to VMX. The 2nd edition of the book will be released in few months: stay tuned :) ! I spent...

My VMX installation guide

My VMX installation guide - VMX-installguide.pdf I'm currently writing the 2nd Edition of the MX Series book. In this new edition, I wrote a chapter dedicated to VMX. The 2nd edition of the book will be released in few months: stay tuned :) ! I spent...

My VMX installation guide

My VMX installation guide - VMX-installguide.pdf I'm currently writing the 2nd Edition of the MX Series book. In this new edition, I wrote a chapter dedicated to VMX. The 2nd edition of the book will be released in few months: stay tuned :) ! I spent...

Defining “Gray Hat”

WIRED has written an article defining “White Hat”, “Black Hat”, and “Grey Hat”. It’s incomplete and partisan.

Black Hats are the bad guys: cybercriminals (like Russian cybercrime gangs), cyberspies (like the Chinese state-sponsored hackers that broke into OPM), or cyberterrorists (ISIS hackers who want to crash the power grid). They may or may not include cybervandals (like some Anonymous activity) that simply defaces websites. Black Hats are those who want to cause damage or profit at the expense of others.

White Hats do the same thing as Black Hats, but are the good guys. The break into networks (as pentesters), but only with permission, when a company/organization hires them to break into their own network. They research the security art, such vulnerabilities, exploits, and viruses. When they find vulnerabilities, they typically work to fix/patch them. (That you frequently have to apply security updates to your computers/devices is primarily due to White Hats). They develop products and tools for use by good guys (even though they sometimes can be used by the bad guys). The movie “Sneakers” refers to a team of White Hat hackers.

Grey Hat is anything that doesn’t fit nicely within these Continue reading

5G wireless slowly, carefully taking shape

5G wireless is coming, but it has a lot of challenges to overcome, and we’re not going to be enjoying its blazing speeds until 2020 at least. But, at cable industry group CableLabs’ InformED Wireless event on Wednesday in New York, several experts helped provide new hints about the shape of the technology to come.One of the biggest hurdles, it seems, is physics – 5G is going to be a millimeter-wave technology, operating at a much higher frequency than existing Wi-Fi. That’s great if the goal is to move a lot of information quickly – 5G speeds could top 6Gbps in the field – but it raises the issue of range.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5G wireless slowly, carefully taking shape

5G wireless is coming, but it has a lot of challenges to overcome, and we’re not going to be enjoying its blazing speeds until 2020 at least. But, at cable industry group CableLabs’ InformED Wireless event on Wednesday in New York, several experts helped provide new hints about the shape of the technology to come.One of the biggest hurdles, it seems, is physics – 5G is going to be a millimeter-wave technology, operating at a much higher frequency than existing Wi-Fi. That’s great if the goal is to move a lot of information quickly – 5G speeds could top 6Gbps in the field – but it raises the issue of range.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Will OpenStack Stay Disreputable?

“Keeping It Dirty”

I’ve lived in Durham, North Carolina since 1999 — I love it here, and I’ve finally found home. It’s been recognized as Tastiest Town, a Different Kind of Silicon Valley and one of the Best Places to Live. But it wasn’t always like that. Durham rose up from the ashes of failed tobacco and textile industries to a modern hub of medicine, research, and high-tech firms. Despite Durham’s rise over the past 10 years, non-Durhamites around the Research Triangle remember the Durham of old and are skeptical of it’s newfound success and reputation as a progressive yet gritty town.

Screen Shot 2016-04-13 at 12.04.10 PM

The parallels between the rise of Durham’s revitalization and OpenStack’s popularity are uncanny. You still hear the following comments today:

“Why do you live in Durham, are you crazy?”
“How can you trust OpenStack community developers and run it in production?”

Enterprises continue to be skeptical of OpenStack’s production worthiness, but many companies are betting their businesses on this project. DreamHost, a Cumulus Linux customer, has been running a state-of-the-art OpenStack deployment for over two years. They automate their entire data center with Chef, leveraging Infrastructure as Code principles. Many others use standard DevOps Continue reading

Hyperscalers And Clouds On The Xeon Bleeding Edge

Hyperscalers and cloud builders are different in a lot of ways from the typical enterprise IT shop. Perhaps the most profound one that has emerged in recent years is something that used to be only possible in the realm of the most exotic supercomputing centers, and that is this: They get what they want, and they get it ahead of everyone else.

Back in the day, before the rise of mass customization of the Xeon product line by chip maker Intel, it was HPC customers who were often trotted out as early adopters of a new processor technology and usually

Hyperscalers And Clouds On The Xeon Bleeding Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Senators release official draft of federal encryption legislation

The first proposed federal encryption legislation has been released, and had it been established law earlier this year Apple would have had to provide the help the FBI asked for in accessing encrypted data on the iPhone used by a terrorist in San Bernardino.The draft published by Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California calls for encryption vendors and others to obey court orders that command them to deliver intelligible versions of encrypted data or to provide technical assistance to make it intelligible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senators release official draft of federal encryption legislation

The first proposed federal encryption legislation has been released, and had it been established law earlier this year Apple would have had to provide the help the FBI asked for in accessing encrypted data on the iPhone used by a terrorist in San Bernardino.The draft published by Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California calls for encryption vendors and others to obey court orders that command them to deliver intelligible versions of encrypted data or to provide technical assistance to make it intelligible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft is boosting security through hardware in Windows 10 PCs, phones

The burden of Microsoft's efforts to secure Windows 10 is now falling on PC, tablet, and smartphone makers.Microsoft is making a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 a minimum requirement on most Windows 10 devices. Starting July 28, the company will require device manufacturers shipping PCs, tablets and smartphones to include TPM 2.0.TPM has been available for years, mostly on business PCs. TPM 2.0 provides a hardware layer to safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container.The TPM requirement "will be enforced through our Windows Hardware Certification program," Microsoft said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft is boosting security through hardware in Windows 10 PCs, phones

The burden of Microsoft's efforts to secure Windows 10 is now falling on PC, tablet, and smartphone makers. Microsoft is making a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 a minimum requirement on most Windows 10 devices. Starting July 28, the company will require device manufacturers shipping PCs, tablets and smartphones to include TPM 2.0. TPM has been available for years, mostly on business PCs. TPM 2.0 provides a hardware layer to safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container. The TPM requirement "will be enforced through our Windows Hardware Certification program," Microsoft said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Something strange just happened with North Korea’s Internet

Ever since North Korea directly connected to the Internet in 2010, there's been a lot of interest in how the world's most closed country maintains and uses the link.It connects a handful of Web sites in Pyongyang serving propaganda to the world and allows foreigners in the country largely unfiltered access to the Internet. It also provides monitored access to an unknown number of senior officials, scientists, and university students.Yet for everything we've learned, there's still a lot we don't know and now there's a new mystery: Last week, the country's sole Internet link with the rest of the world went down for about three hours. It was the longest outage of the year and meant the entire country was disconnected from the Internet, according to monitoring by Dyn Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This big-data startup combines AI with human savvy to help make sense of your data

Turning data into insight is one of the top business challenges today, and it becomes especially tricky when the data in question is unstructured. Artificial intelligence has a mixed track record there, but a young startup aims to get better results by bringing humans back into the picture.Spare5 on Wednesday released a new platform that applies a combination of human insight and machine learning to help companies make sense of unstructured data, including images, video, social media content, and text messages. The result, it says, are "game-changing insights delivered cost-effectively and at scale."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here