5 things you should know about the blockchain

Talk of blockchain technology is everywhere, it seems -- but what is it, and what does it do?1. Don't call it "the" blockchainThe first thing to know about the blockchain is, there isn't one: there are many. Blockchains are distributed, tamper-proof public ledgers of transactions. The most well-known is the record of bitcoin transactions, but in addition to tracking cryptocurrencies, blockchains are being used to record loans, stock transfers, contracts, healthcare data and even votes.2. Security, transparency: the network's run by usThere's no central authority in a blockchain system: Participating computers exchange transactions for inclusion in the ledger they share over a peer-to-peer network. Each node in the chain keeps a copy of the ledger, and can trust others’ copies of it because of the way they are signed. Periodically, they wrap up the latest transactions in a new block of data to be added to the chain. Alongside the transaction data, each block contains a computational "hash" of itself and of the previous block in the chain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Learning about SDP via Google BeyondCorp

I’ve been following Google’s BeyondCorp project for a while. In fact, I was recently quoted in a Wall Street Journal blog on this topic. If you are not familiar with BeyondCorp, it is Google’s spin on what’s become known as a software-defined perimeter (SDP). SDP, also called a “black cloud” originated at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and is now being driven by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Minimizing cost of visibility

Visibility allows orchestration systems (OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenStack Heat, Kubernetes, Docker Storm, Apache Mesos, etc.) to adapt to changing demand by targeting resources where they are needed to increase efficiency, improve performance, and reduce costs. However, the overhead of monitoring must be low in order to realize the benefits.

An analogous observation that readers may be familiar with is the importance of minimizing costs when investing in order to maximize returns - see Vanguard Principle 3: Minimize cost

Suppose that a 100 server pool is being monitored and visibility will allow the orchestration system to realize a 10% improvement by better workload scheduling and placement - increasing the pool's capacity by 10% without the need to add an additional 10 servers and saving the associated CAPEX/OPEX costs.

The chart shows the impact that measurement overhead has in realizing the potential gains in this example. If the measurement overhead is 0%, then the 10% performance gain is fully realized. However, even a relatively modest 2% measurement overhead reduces the potential improvement to just under 8% (over a 20% drop in the potential gains). A 9% measurement overhead wipes out the potential efficiency gain and measurement overheads greater than 9% result in Continue reading

63% Discount on Garmin fenix 2 GPS Watch – Deal Alert

The $399.99 list price on the Garmin's fenix 2 GPS Watch is currently discounted by a staggering $200. At 63% off, you can pick this one up on Amazon for $149.99. The fenix 2 currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon by over 410 people (see reviews).The watch features high-sensitivity GPS positioning, and a 3-axis compass with altimeter and barometer, and is designed for a multi-sport athlete. Take it with you running, climbing, hiking, riding, swimming, skiing -- the fenix 2 quickly switches between feature sets. It delivers real-time performance data such as time, distance, pace, calories, speed, lap data, and heart rate (when paired with a monitor: see here). When paired with HRM-Run monitor2, fenix 2 provides feedback on Running form by measuring cadence (number of steps per minute), vertical oscillation (bounce in your Running motion), and ground contact time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

22 insults no developer wants to hear

The technology world is a bit different than the pretty, coiffed world of suits and salesdroids where everyone is polite, even when they hate your guts and think you’re an idiot. Suit-clad managers may smile and hide their real message by the way they say you’re doing “great, real great pal,” but programmers often speak their minds, and when that mind has something unpleasant to say, look out, feelings.Parsing, unpacking, and sorting the insults that developers sling takes a thick skin. No one likes being told their ideas and code are anything less than insanely great, but some slights are better than others, cutting to the core of your coding faults. In fact, a good insult can contain a road map for moving your project forward. If your rival is willing to explain what you need to do to make your code worth using, well, that’s worth putting up with someone calling you or your code “heavy,” “crufty,” or “full of anti-patterns.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to recover from disaster

Evacuation planImage by REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah Just like an evacuation plan at your home when a fire strikes, you need a disaster recovery blueprint set aside so that everyone in the company knows what to do and where to go when disaster strikes the network. Here’s a list of 10 tips that will help keep things calm.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Are IT executives blind to cybersecurity threats?

Is your company’s cybersecurity keeping you up at night?If you're an IT professional, the answer to that question is probably yes. If you're an IT executive, the answer to that question might be no – even if you work at the same company.What we're seeing, says Jack Danahy, co-founder of Barkly, a Boston-based endpoint security startup company, "is a breakdown in communication."That's what Barkly found in its "Cybersecurity Confidence Report." In it, Barkly surveyed of 350 IT professionals and found that 50 percent are not confident in their current security products or solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 biggest misconceptions about hiring data scientists

When you think of the perfect candidate for a data science role, a few preconceived notions come to mind. You want someone who is analytical, detail-oriented and intuitive -- all important qualities in a data scientist. But there is more to data science than being good with numbers -- the core of a data scientist's role involves influencing decision-makers within the business and guiding the future of the company.While there are a lot logical traits that make a good data scientist, there are plenty of skills data scientists need that don't fall under the category of data. Ziad Nejmeldeen, senior vice president and chief scientist at the Infor Dynamic Science Labs, knows this better than anyone, having hired his own data scientists and helped guide the data strategies of numerous businesses at Infor. If you hold common misconceptions about data scientists, it might be time to reevaluate your strategy, according to Nejmeldeen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3 ways IoT security concerns are taken out of context

This Saturday was like most every other day for me. I opened my RSS Internet of Things (IoT) news feed and there were three more articles telling me that consumers don’t trust IoT security. IoT security alerts have been so frequent and regular for so long now that just like a “check engine light” in an old car I am beginning to ignore them. Recently I have seen a slight pivot in the stream of warnings in the form of survey data: Data is good. More than once I have heard “In God we trust” all others bring data. But data requires analysis so let’s look at a few recent figures:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 career-killing conversations to avoid at work

No matter how progressive, open and casual your workplace, there are some conversations that should be off-limits no matter what. A new study from corporate and leadership education and training firm VitalSmarts found that of 775 respondents to a recent VitalSmarts survey on workplace behavior, 83 percent of employees witnessed their colleagues say something that has had catastrophic results on their careers, reputations and businesses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WordPress.com turns on default encryption for hosted domains

Website hosting platform Wordpress.com will automatically enable HTTPS for all the custom domain names that its users have associated with their websites.Run by Automattic, WordPress.com allows users to easily create and manage websites based on the hugely popular WordPress content management system. Users of the free service get a subdomain under wordpress.com to use as an address for their website, but paid plans allow hosting a custom domain.Implementing HTTPS for wordpress.com subdomains was fairly easy and Automattic did this in 2014. However, turning on encryption for hosted websites with custom domain names requires individual certificates for each of those domains, which posed management and cost-related problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WordPress.com turns on default encryption for hosted domains

Open source code is common, potentially dangerous, in enterprise apps

The Open Source Vulnerability Database shut down this week posed yet another security challenge for developers who routinely inject massive amounts of free off-the-shelf code into new software.As the name suggests, OSVD was a resource where non-commercial developers could look – free - for patches to known vulnerabilities.+More on Network World: 10 best cloud SLA practices+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open source code is common, potentially dangerous, in enterprise apps

Geek-themed Meme of the Week: biometric been there

Continuing what should be but hasn’t been our weekly series highlighting the better tech-related memes … Reddit Having used the thumbprint reader on my iPhone for some time now, it has become a habit of the muscle-memory variety, meaning that I quite regularly have unlocked my phone before I have completed reading an alert that had caught my attention. So, too, a user of Reddit who submitted the above meme.I am guessing that there’s probably an easy solution. But since this certainly must be among the most First World of First World Problems ever encountered, I’ve yet to invest the time to search it out. Meanwhile, it’s oddly comforting to know that I am not alone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The curious case of slow downloads

Some time ago we discovered that certain very slow downloads were getting abruptly terminated and began investigating whether that was a client (i.e. web browser) or server (i.e. us) problem.

Some users were unable to download a binary file a few megabytes in length. The story was simple—the download connection was abruptly terminated even though the file was in the process of being downloaded. After a brief investigation we confirmed the problem: somewhere in our stack there was a bug.

Describing the problem was simple, reproducing the problem was easy with a single curl command, but fixing it took surprising amount of effort.

CC BY 2.0 image by jojo nicdao

In this article I'll describe the symptoms we saw, how we reproduced it and how we fixed it. Hopefully, by sharing our experiences we will save others from the tedious debugging we went through.

Failing downloads

Two things caught our attention in the bug report. First, only users on mobile phones were experiencing the problem. Second, the asset causing issues—a binary file—was pretty large, at around 30MB.

After a fruitful session with tcpdump one of our engineers was able to prepare a test case that reproduced the Continue reading

Support for SQL Server 2005 ends Tuesday – are you ready?

Tuesday marks the end of support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and that means companies relying on it are just about out of time. There will be no more updates from Microsoft, so staying with the software could open you up to a host of risks.Microsoft encourages users to move to SQL Server 2014 or Azure SQL Database, but those aren't the only options. Either way, the transition is going to take some time. If you haven't already been working on it, the most important thing now is to act quickly to minimize the amount of time your company is left exposed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12 WiFi Vendors To Keep An Eye On

Check out these wireless vendors driving innovation in enterprise WiFi.

New products of the week 4.11.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow. ClearSlide for Gmail Key features: Available to all ClearSlide users, ClearSlide for Gmail is an easy-to-install Google Chrome app that is designed to increase salesperson productivity and improve the quality of CRM data by automatically logging all outbound emails, prospect views, and content engagement directly back to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 4.11.16

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