Using the IoT for good: Beacon of Hope project to help fight human trafficking

With their Beacon of Hope IoT app, twin sisters and social entrepreneurs America and Penelope Lopez, are taking up the fight against one of the most revolting crimes on the planet—human trafficking. In 2013, the United Nations reported that 20.9 million people have been pushed into forced labor and sex trades around the world. Ranked in the top three of fastest-growing crime categories, the same study reported modern slavery has become a booming $32 billion illicit trade. Recognizing the importance of the issue, the Lopez sisters created the Beacon of Hope project. It is the latest in their string of hackathon successes that includes an anti-bullying app and a police bodycam with facial recognition. This project began at the ground zero of hackathons, the AT&T hackathon at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which draws hackers like the Kentucky Derby draws gamblers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Fonteva to enable Salesforce app development. Doesn’t Salesforce already do that?

Salesforce is a juggernaut.In the 10 or so years since it was founded, the company has pretty much single-handedly changed the face of the software industry. Concepts such as SaaS, the cloud and enterprise application marketplaces were, if not invented, at least popularized by Salesforce.In the past decade, Salesforce has gone from being a very interesting and agile CRM vendor to being a provider of pretty much an entire enterprise software stack—from applications at the top end through to development platforms for the creation of applications. Indeed, the fact that health IT vendor Veeva was able to undertake an IPO based on a product built entirely on Salesforce's platform is testimony to what Salesforce has achieved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New point-of-sale malware Multigrain steals card data over DNS

Security researchers have found a new memory-scraping malware program that steals payment card data from point-of-sale (PoS) terminals and sends it back to attackers using the Domain Name System (DNS).Dubbed Multigrain, the threat is part of a family of malware programs known as NewPosThings, with which it shares some code. However, this variant was designed to target specific environments.That's because unlike other PoS malware programs that look for card data in the memory of many processes, Multigrain targets a single process called multi.exe that's associated with a popular back-end card authorization and PoS server. If this process is not running on the compromised machine, the infection routine exists and the malware deletes itself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New point-of-sale malware Multigrain steals card data over DNS

Security researchers have found a new memory-scraping malware program that steals payment card data from point-of-sale (PoS) terminals and sends it back to attackers using the Domain Name System (DNS).Dubbed Multigrain, the threat is part of a family of malware programs known as NewPosThings, with which it shares some code. However, this variant was designed to target specific environments.That's because unlike other PoS malware programs that look for card data in the memory of many processes, Multigrain targets a single process called multi.exe that's associated with a popular back-end card authorization and PoS server. If this process is not running on the compromised machine, the infection routine exists and the malware deletes itself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Twitter Handles 3,000 Images Per Second

Today Twitter is creating and persisting 3,000 (200 GB) images per second. Even better, in 2015 Twitter was able to save $6 million due to improved media storage policies.

It was not always so. Twitter in 2012 was primarily text based. A Hogwarts without all the cool moving pictures hanging on the wall. It’s now 2016 and Twitter has moved into to a media rich future. Twitter has made the transition through the development of a new Media Platform capable of supporting photos with previews, multi-photos, gifs, vines, and inline video.

Henna Kermani, a Software Development Engineer at Twitter, tells the story of the Media Platform in an interesting talk she gave at Mobile @Scale London: 3,000 images per second. The talk focuses primarily on the image pipeline, but she says most of the details also apply to the other forms of media as well.

Some of the most interesting lessons from the talk:

  • Doing the simplest thing that can possibly work can really screw you. The simple method of uploading a tweet with an image as an all or nothing operation was a form of lock-in. It didn’t scale well, especially on poor networks, which made it Continue reading

Worth Reading: Court rules cell phone location isn’t private information

This week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held, in United States v. Carpenter, that we lack any privacy interest in the location information generated by our cell phones. The opinion shows a complete disregard for the sensitive and revealing nature of cell site location information (CSLI) and a misguided response to the differences between the analog technologies addressed in old cases and the data-rich technologies of today.

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Illumio’s cyber assessment program helps find new attack surfaces ASAP

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing how visibility can be used to reverse the security asymmetry challenge. On Tuesday, hot security startup Illumio proved my point by announcing a cyber assessment program that uses granular visibility to identify new attack surfaces.Illumio’s Attack Surface Assessment Program (ASAP) was led by Nathaniel Gleicher, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy for the National Security Council at the White House and now the Head of Cybersecurity Strategy for Illumio. The White House obviously has the strictest of security policies, giving Gleicher the necessary level of paranoia to put together a program like this. Now, any company can benefit from his experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio’s cyber assessment program helps find new attack surfaces ASAP

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing how visibility can be used to reverse the security asymmetry challenge. On Tuesday, hot security startup Illumio proved my point by announcing a cyber assessment program that uses granular visibility to identify new attack surfaces.Illumio’s Attack Surface Assessment Program (ASAP) was led by Nathaniel Gleicher, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy for the National Security Council at the White House and now the Head of Cybersecurity Strategy for Illumio. The White House obviously has the strictest of security policies, giving Gleicher the necessary level of paranoia to put together a program like this. Now, any company can benefit from his experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio’s cyber assessment program helps find new attack surfaces ASAP

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing how visibility can be used to reverse the security asymmetry challenge. On Tuesday, hot security startup Illumio proved my point by announcing a cyber assessment program that uses granular visibility to identify new attack surfaces.Illumio’s Attack Surface Assessment Program (ASAP) was led by Nathaniel Gleicher, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy for the National Security Council at the White House and now the Head of Cybersecurity Strategy for Illumio. The White House obviously has the strictest of security policies, giving Gleicher the necessary level of paranoia to put together a program like this. Now, any company can benefit from his experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Difference between in-store, online prices probably not what you think

Sure, online shopping is generally more convenient than going to the store for your purchases, but prices are pretty much the same three quarters of the time, according to a new MIT study.MIT Sloan Professor Alberto Cavallo cleverly went the crowdsourcing route to gather some of his data by having 370 recruits use a scanning app to check barcodes for prices on a random set of 10 to 50 products in physical stores in 10 countries. That information, along with online price data at multi-channel retailers (so no Amazon or eBay), was fed into the MIT Billion Prices Project database for analysis. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automating Change With Help From Fibonacci

FibonacciShell

A few recent conversations that I’ve seen and had with professionals about automation have been very enlightening. It all started with a post on StackExchange about an unsuspecting user that tried to automate a cleanup process with Ansible and accidentally erased the entire server farm at a service provider. The post was later determined to be a viral marketing hoax but was quite believable to the community because of the power of automation to make bad ideas spread very quickly.

Better The Devil You Know

Everyone in networking has been in a place where they’ve typed in something they shouldn’t have. Whether you removed the management network you were using to access the switch or created an access list that denied packets that locked you out of something. Or perhaps you typed an errant debug command that forced you to drive an hour to reboot a switch that was no longer responding. All of these things seem to happen to people as part of the learning process.

But how many times have we typed something in to create a change and found that it broke more than we expected? Like changing a native VLAN on a trunk and bringing down Continue reading

A Baker’s Dozen, 2015 Regional View

Our Baker’s Dozen blog focuses on the top global Internet providers as measured by quantity of transited IP space.  If your market is not truly global, it pays to consider your provider options by region, country or even city.  Our Internet Intelligence product suite is designed around helping our customers understand the structure, performance and reliability of the Internet regardless of their geographic scope or potential providers.  In other words, there is a lot more to consider than just a top global list by a single metric.  To explore this topic further, we’ll look one geographic level deeper into the Internet Intelligence – Transit rankings for the top-5 providers by continent.  As we’ll see below, these can vary considerably from our top global list and even include other players with a more regional focus.  Let’s take a quick look.

 

AF-f

At the end of 2015, Cogent (AS174) was ranked  as the #4 global provider by our metric, but it closed the year as #1 in Africa, opening up a wide margin over Level 3 (AS3356), its nearest competitor on the continent.  Cogent started transiting a sizeable number of new prefixes from South Africa’s Continue reading

First Guest Speaker in Building Next-Generation Data Center Course

When I started thinking about my first online course, I decided to create something special – it should be way more than me talking about cool new technologies and designs – and the guest speakers are a crucial part of that experience.

The first guest speaker is one of the gurus of network design and complexity, wrote numerous books on the topic, and recently worked on a hardware-independent network operating system.

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Cloud review: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Joyent

The message from the cloud has always been simple: Surrender your cares, IT managers, and we’ll handle everything. Forget about skinning your knuckles installing servers, double-checking diesel backups, or fretting about 1,000 or 10,000 things that could go wrong. Give us a credit card number and your data. We’ll do the rest.There are options for the teams doing data analytics. Microsoft offers a number of big data crunching services that are integrated with the Azure cloud. Once you upload your data, the algorithms are ready to go. You push a few buttons and fancy graphs and deep insights pour out. Similarly, you can tap the power of Watson and predictive analytics tools on IBM’s Bluemix. Amazon offers a narrower set of machine learning capabilities, tailored to developers and business analysts. Google’s machine learning service was recently made available in a limited preview.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

As Intel shifts its focus to the cloud, it commands its PC products to fight—or die

Right now, inside Intel’s headquarters, a deadly serious game of “Gladiator” is pitting Intel’s client products against one another. During its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, Intel said it now expects the PC market to decline in the “high single digits” throughout all of 2016, rather than the mid-single-digit drop it previously expected. IDC and Gartner said recently that the PC market dropped between 10 and 12 percent during the first quarter. “Our projection of the PC market...is more cautious than third-party estimates,” chief financial officer Stacy Smith told analysts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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