DARPA moves ahead with radical vertical takeoff aircraft

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency took one step further in building a radically different vertical take off and landing or VTOL aircraft that can fly fast and carry a big load.Specifically DARPA awarded Aurora Flight Sciences the $89 million prime contract for Phase 2 of the agency’s Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program which looks to: Achieve a top sustained flight speed of 300 kt-400 kt Raise aircraft hover efficiency from 60% to at least 75% Present a more favorable cruise lift-to-drag ratio of at least 10, up from 5-6 Carry a useful load of at least 40% of the vehicle’s projected gross weight of 10,000-12,000 pounds +More on Network World: The iconic Boeing 747 is almost 50!+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP will Announce ProLiant Hyperconverged This Month

Just in case you wondered why HP doesn’t have an hyperconverged system, here is what Meg Whitman said this quarter investors call: Looking forward, you can expect this momentum and investment in innovation to continue. Later this month, we will announce a new market-changing hyper-converged offering based on our industry-leading ProLiant virtualization server. Our new […]

The post HP will Announce ProLiant Hyperconverged This Month appeared first on EtherealMind.

A Deep Dive Into DNS Packet Sizes: Why Smaller Packet Sizes Keep The Internet Safe

Yesterday we wrote about the 400 gigabit per second attacks we see on our network.

One way that attackers DDoS websites is by repeatedly doing DNS lookups that have small queries, but large answers. The attackers spoof their IP address so that the DNS answers are sent to the server they are attacking, this is called a reflection attack.

Domains with DNSSEC, because of the size of some responses, are usually ripe for this type of abuse, and many DNS providers struggle to combat DNSSEC-based DDoS attacks. Just last month, Akamai published a report on attacks using DNS lookups against their DNSSEC-signed .gov domains to DDoS other domains. They say they have seen 400 of these attacks since November.

To prevent any domain on CloudFlare being abused for a DNS amplification attack in this way, we took precautions to make sure most DNS answers we send fit in a 512 byte UDP packet, even when the zone is signed with DNSSEC. To do this, we had to be creative in our DNSSEC implementation. We chose a rarely-used-for-DNSSEC signature algorithm and even deprecated a DNS record type along the way.

Elliptic Curves: Keeping It Tight

Dutch mathematician Arjen Lenstra famously talks Continue reading

Relatives of victims, law enforcement groups support FBI in iPhone unlocking case

Law enforcement groups and family members of victims of December's San Bernardino mass shooting have backed the FBI and opposed Apple in the court fight over an iPhone used by one of the shooters.Family members of the shooting victims "seek to remind all parties of the terrible crime -- an act of terrorism -- the United States must investigate to its fullest," wrote lawyers for family members of five victims and one witness to the shooting. "Ultimately, this is a situation where no stone can be left unturned."Much of the debate over the FBI's demands of Apple assistance has focused on the "potentially global ramifications" of Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym's Feb. 16 order requiring Apple to comply, but there's a law enforcement investigation to consider, the lawyers added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—Case Study: Perseus

If you’ve been following us on the blog or social media, you know that we announced a partnership with Perseus last week to help expand their global reach into 29 sites across the globe. Perseus has built the world’s largest SDN-based on demand services network, allowing them to quickly offer new products and services while enabling new deployments at a rapid pace. They needed a vendor that could offer the agility and flexibility to deliver services very rapidly and cross the globe, controlling the speed of execution, delivery and operating expenses. Light Reading reporter Mitch Wagner explored the partnership in detail last week and our CEO Rich Napolitano penned a case study on the Plexxi blog as well. Both pieces illustrate how Plexxi is helping to build (and scale) next-generation networks of tomorrow.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!

InfoWorld: What hyperscale storage really means
By Rob Whiteley
Let’s be clear: Hyperscale isn’t about how large you are. Organizations don’t have to be huge to leverage hyperscale solutions. But that’s exactly what many IT infrastructure, operations, and devops pros think when they first learn about hyperscale. The Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 4th, 2016


Presented for your consideration: Drone Units of the U.S Armed Forces

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please consider offering your support on Patreon.
  • 16 terabytes: new Samsung SSD; 1%: earned income from an on-demand platform; $35: PI 3 has 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM and WiFi; 1.5 million messages per second: Netflix cache replication;

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @jzawodn: all right.. everything on one disk in one computer: 15TB SSD
    • @jaykreps: The disadvantage is that the needs of most companies are really different from Google's. Depth vs breadth thing.
    • Eliezer Sternberg: The brain tries to maximize the efficiency of our thinking by recognizing familiar patterns and anticipating them.
    • david-given: I would love to have a modernised Ada. With case sensitivity. And garbage collection (a lot of the language semantics are obviously intended to be based around having a garbage collector. 
    • @tyler_treat: You're not even building microservices if you have things operating in lockstep and tightly coupled interactions and data models.
    • cognitive electronic warfare: using artificial intelligence to learn in real-time what the adversaries’ radar is doing and then on-the-fly create a new jamming profile. That whole process of sensing, learning and adapting is Continue reading

‘Serious risk’ that Apple-made iPhone cracking code will leak

Security experts yesterday said that there is a "serious risk" that the special iPhone-cracking software sought by the FBI would fall into the wrong hands if Apple is forced to assist the government in accessing the data on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters."Keeping the Custom Code secret is essential to ensuring that this forensic software not pose a broader security threat to iOS users," seven security experts said Thursday in a "friends-of-the-court" brief filed with a California federal court. "But the high demand [for this software] poses a serious risk that the Custom Code will leak outside of Apple's facilities."+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Apple v. FBI – Who’s for, against opening up the terrorist’s iPhone +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Five things you need to know about ransomware

Over the past few years millions of PCs from around the world have been locked or had their files encrypted by malicious programs designed to extort money from users. Collectively known as ransomware, these malicious applications have become a real scourge for consumers, businesses and even government institutions. Unfortunately, there's no end in sight, so here's what you should know.It's not just your PC that's at riskMost ransomware programs target computers running Windows, as it's the most popular operating system. However, ransomware applications for Android have also been around for a while and recently, several variants that infect Linux servers have been discovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cerber ransomware sold as a service, speaks to victims

A new file-encrypting ransomware program called Cerber has taken creepiness for victims, but also affordability for criminals, to a new level.In terms of functionality Cerber is not very different than other ransomware threats. It encrypts files with the strong AES-256 algorithm and targets dozens of file types, including documents, pictures, audio files, videos, archives and backups.The program encrypts file contents and file names and changes the original extensions to .cerber. It can also scan for and encrypt available network shares even if they are not mapped to a drive letter in the computer.Once the encryption process is done, Cerber will drop three files on the victim's desktop named "# DECRYPT MY FILES #." They contain the ransom demand and instructions on how to pay it. One of those files is in TXT format, one is HTML and the third contains a VBS (Visual Basic Scripting).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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