Dancing on the grave of Flash

I’ll be honest. I hate Flash. I loathe Flash. I abhor Flash. And these are educated feelings. Flash is tremendously insecure, has no way of managing updates across a fleet of computers, is needlessly inefficient, chews up battery life, is as proprietary and closed a system as they come in an era where we have rich and stable open Web standards, and in general is a tax on the Web experience. I could not be happier to see Flash go.Opinions vary about exactly when Flash died. A minor but vocal group, consisting largely of Web advertisers, still says it’s alive. (Think again, folks.) Some attribute the final nail in Flash’s coffin to the decision by video giant YouTube in September to stop delivering video content to users of modern browsers with Flash and instead use the cross-platform open standard HTML5. (YouTube had to wait until better buffering technology arrived in the HTML 5 standard so that the provider could switch bit rates for streaming video on demand for less buffering as the traffic shape required.) Others say it’s when Google disabled Flash-based advertising in Chrome and developed a tool that let AdWords, its advertising platform, automatically convert Continue reading

New products of the week 10.12.2015

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.JIRA Service Desk 3Key features: now a standalone product built on the JIRA platform with added ITIL-ready capabilities. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sit Stand Desk Setup

I work from home these days. Therefore it’s important that I have a decent desk setup. My previous setup was pretty crappy, but I only worked from home part-time. I’ve been using a standing desk at home, and wanted to move to a sit/stand model for full-time use. Here’s what I did.

Desk & Monitor Arrangement

I bought the Cubit Highrise desk, with a 1200mm x 700mm surface. This is a New Zealand-made manual height-adjustable desk. The adjustable legs allow for the height to be set anywhere between 660 and 1060mm. I paid $660NZD including shipping, from Total Office. That was the best deal at the time.

I added a Fleximounts L02 monitor stand. This is a desk-mounted monitor stand, with two gas spring arms. One arm has a tray for my MBPr laptop, the other has an LG IPS236 23″ monitor. It cost me $134USD including shipping. It’s in USD because I picked it up on one of my recent trips to San Jose.

I also use a wireless Apple keyboard and an Apple Magic Trackpad.

How’s it working out?

I’ve been very happy. My previous setup was a crappy desk with a platform added to get it to standing height. That Continue reading

CCNA RS Workbook

Hi everyone,

People that know me know that I have always been keen on giving back to the community and helping people in their studies. On that note, I have decided to start creating content for a CCNA RS workbook which will be published online. The goal is to take the blueprint and cover one item from the blueprint in each post.

I hope this will be helpful for people in their CCNA studies.

NANOG 65 Report

NANOG 65 was once again your typical NANOG meeting: a set of operators, vendors, researchers and others, meeting over 3 days, this time in Montreal in October. Here’s my impressions of the meeting.

Apple draws cloudy line on use of root certs in mobile apps

Apple's removal of several apps from its mobile store on Thursday shows the challenges iOS developers can face when app guidelines shift.Among the apps removed was Choice, developed by the Palo Alto-based company Been. The app interrupted encrypted traffic streams sent to a handful of companies, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Pinterest, in order to block in-app ads.Apple said the apps, which it did not name, used root digital certificates that could expose data to untrusted sources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

TPP will outlaw security research done without permission, lead to destroyed devices

If you don’t have a DVD or Blu-ray ripper and you want one, then you should consider buying one immediately because tools that assist in the circumvention of DRM could be banned if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is ratified. Of course if the finalized TPP text, leaked by WikiLeaks, is ratified, then you could be criminally liable if you circumvent Digital Rights Management. While a worse-case scenario might involve copyright infringement as the TPP sets a copyright term to life plus 70 years, the judicial authorities could also “order the destruction of devices and products found to be involved in the prohibited activity.” The TPP is “all we feared,” according to the EFF.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Winston Churchill on IPv6

While researching for another blog post, I stumbled upon this speech by Winston Churchill:

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline Books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong -these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Obviously mr. Churchill wasn't talking about IPv6 but about way more serious matters… but it's also obvious he was right abut the unteachability of mankind.

Infosec is good people

For all that we complain about drama in our community, we are actually good people. At a small conference yesterday, I met "Kath". She just got her degree in advertising, but has become disillusioned. Her classes in web development and app development has shown her how exploitative online advertising can be. ("PHP has made me cry" -- yes, it's made all of us cry at some point).

She's felt alone, as if it were only her who that those feelings, then she discovered the EFF, and privacy activists like Yan (@bcrypt) who have been fighting for privacy. Kath grew up in the middle of nowhere in Texas, and went to college in another middle-of-nowhere place in Texas. Being a muggle, she's never heard of infosec before -- but she got a ticket and flew to New York to attend this little infosec conference where Yan was speaking. (Well, that and also to apply for the NYU graduate program in media).

She found things she didn't expect. She found, for example, how she can contribute, using her skills in usability to make crypto and privacy better for users. She also found a community that was accepting and approachable. Advertising is a Continue reading

SDN Warriors



SDN Warriors Facebook Group is an open group for any Network Engineer who wants to transform to become SDN & NFV Architect, Network Programmability Engineer and Network DevOps. The group is run by mentors who are currently transforming ourselves and willing to help others to do the same. We have the skills and experiences with various SDN solutions, we have done SDN & NFV projects, we have hosted SDN Hackathon event, we have even created our own SDN products.
Non-SDN related topics will be banned, and please use English only
https://www.facebook.com/groups/sdnwarriors/

Why is double opt-in still not used by everyone?!

Out there in the big wide world there are, beside me, unfortunately, a few other people named “Mark Gibbs” and a number of these individuals don’t know their Gmail addresses. This is a problem as I am the proud owner of “[email protected]” and have been since the start of Gmail while they are not. The trouble with these people is they keep giving my Gmail address to organizations they deal with and more than a few of these organizations fail to do the one thing that they should be doing when it comes to building an email relationship with a customer: Verifying the customer’s email address.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dismal PC business contraction continues; no bounce yet from Windows 10

As expected, Windows 10 provided little if any bounce to PC shipments in the just-concluded September quarter, researchers at IDC and Gartner said yesterday. "Not in terms of driving volume, no," said Loren Loverde of IDC in a Friday interview when asked about Windows 10's impact. "The main inhibiting concern has been the continuing free upgrade." Rival research firm Gartner concurred. "The focus of the Windows launch in the quarter was to upgrade to Windows 10 on existing PCs, rather than ship on new PCs," the company said in a statement. Both IDC and Gartner pegged third-quarter PC shipments as down from the same period in 2014, although they differed slightly on the extent of the contraction. IDC said that shipments declined 11% year-over-year, while Gartner said it was closer to 8%. IDC put shipments at 71 million, Gartner, at 74 million. Part of the difference is how each defines the category: IDC does not include tablets with detachable keyboards, such as Microsoft's Surface Pro, while Gartner does.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dow Jones & Co. discloses breach, incident likely related to Scottrade

On Friday, in a letter to customers, the CEO of Dow Jones & Co. disclosed a data breach affecting 3,500 people. Based on public details, the incident seems similar to a breach reported by Scottrade last week that impacted 4.6 million investors. In his letter, Dow Jones Chief Executive William Lewis said that law enforcement officials informed the company about the potential breach in late July. After bringing in outside help, an investigation turned up a confirmation that the systems housing the customer data was accessed – but there is no proof that data was exfiltrated. The investigators also determined that the attackers had access to the system between August 2012 and July 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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