IBM goes all in on blockchain, offers cloud-based service

IBM is betting big on blockchain secure-records technology taking off beyond its traditional use in bitcoin and other financial transactions. The company is now offering a cloud-based service to allow developers to set up blockchain networks and test and deploy related apps.IBM announced a flurry of blockchain-related initiatives Tuesday, including developer services hosted on its Bluemix cloud. Developers can access DevOps tools to create, deploy and monitor blockchain applications on the IBM cloud, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Shared Spectrum Can Improve In-Building Cellular

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Juan Santiago By: Juan Santiago, Director of Product Management

You’ve been there before: You popped into a store and wanted to look something up on your smartphone while waiting in line. However, the cell signal shows just one lousy bar. You consider logging on to Wi-Fi but there are multiple inconvenient steps that aren’t worth the hassle while you’re waiting in line. Nope, you’ll just wait to go back outside and go somewhere else next time.

Why can’t Wi-Fi be as simple as pulling the phone out of your pocket, like cellular? Or, better yet, why can’t cellular just be everywhere Wi-Fi is, including deep inside buildings? The answer lies in a little-known fact about cellular: Your phone company owns the right to use the cellular airwaves everywhere, even if, as in the example above, it’s not actually using them where you happen to be. 

You may think that the store, realizing that you may never come back, would be willing to spend a little cash for better cell service, but it can’t. The store doesn’t own the right to use the airwaves inside its walls, thus it must work with each phone company individually to convince them to install a Continue reading

Should Technology Mirror Business?

The essence of SDN is to create a software model of the current data network business. This quantitative model is based on volumes of data: what ‘bandwidth’ resources do I have (i.e. supply), and how can I give different quantities of this ‘bandwidth’ to different users and uses (i.e. demand)? -via circleid

I’ve been in information technology since the early 1990’s, and it’s always been like this: business tells IT what to do, and IT does it. In other words, we make technology mirror business. Which is a fine formula for success, so long as you think business is the engine of innovation. The problem is innovation doesn’t come from one department or place. In fact, innovation most often comes from the intersection of two or more things. Think about it.

When did cars first start being innovative? When they combined the technology that existed in the latest horse drawn carriages with the latest in industrial technology, including internal combustion engines and assembly line production. All three of these came from someplace else—many people don’t know the idea of interchangeable parts came out of the firearms world, rather than the automotive industry. When did innovation come into the Continue reading

Naked judge’s photos used on website to promote nudist resort without his knowledge

Like it or not, you are lawfully free game to be surveilled and photographed when you leave the privacy of your house.If you commit a crime, then you should expect the police to release a surveillance video – although why the police found it important enough to release a video of Victoria Secret underwear thieves is unknown; the fact that the male and female team allegedly stole 80, then 120 sexy pairs of undies valued at $2,500 might have something to do with it.Then there’s photos, which can be taken with or without your consent, that could end up online.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Watching: The Economics of the Internet

Old economics explains the new economy well. When we buy something, we spend time and money searching for it, comparing it with other products, negotiating a price, and ensuring that we get what we paid for. This is what economists call ‘transaction costs.’ The internet dramatically reduces these costs, making it cheaper for people, businesses and governments to do business. -via the World Bank

The post Worth Watching: The Economics of the Internet appeared first on 'net work.

Sponsored Post: Swrve, Netflix, Macmillan Learning, Aerospike, TrueSight Pulse, LaunchDarkly, Robinhood, Redis Labs, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

  • Swrve -- In November we closed a $30m funding round, and we’re now expanding our engineering team based in Dublin (Ireland). Our mobile marketing platform is powered by 8bn+ events a day, processed in real time. We’re hiring intermediate and senior backend software developers to join the existing team of thirty engineers. Sound like fun? Come join us.

  • Macmillan Learning, a premier e-learning institute, is looking for VP of DevOps to manage the DevOps teams based in New York and Austin. This is a very exciting team as the company is committed to fully transitioning to the Cloud, using a DevOps approach, with focus on CI/CD, and using technologies like Chef/Puppet/Docker, etc. Please apply here.

  • DevOps Engineer at Robinhood. We are looking for an Operations Engineer to take responsibility for our development and production environments deployed across multiple AWS regions. Top candidates will have several years experience as a Systems Administrator, Ops Engineer, or SRE at a massive scale. Please apply here.

  • Senior Service Reliability Engineer (SRE): Drive improvements to help reduce both time-to-detect and time-to-resolve while concurrently improving availability through service team engagement.  Ability to analyze and triage production issues on a web-scale system a plus. Continue reading

Mobile Network Slicing with Smart Mobile Cloud

This blog is co-authored with Bill Kaufman, Group Manager SDN Planning, Coriant As outlined in a recent blog on mobile operator challenges, there are a number of business and technical challenges mobile operators face in today’s environment.  As consumers and businesses demand more from their mobile operators, the existing proprietary, hardware-centric mobile networks make it... Read more →

Xen’s latest hypervisor updates are missing some security patches

The Xen Project released new versions of its virtual machine hypervisor, but forgot to fully include two security patches that had been previously made available.The Xen hypervisor is widely used by cloud computing providers and virtual private server hosting companies.Xen 4.6.1, released Monday, is flagged as a maintenance release, the kind that are put out roughly every four months and are supposed to include all bug and security patches released in the meantime."Due to two oversights the fixes for both XSA-155 and XSA-162 have only been partially applied to this release," the Xen Project noted in a blog post. The same is true for Xen 4.4.4, the maintenance release for the 4.4 branch that was released on Jan. 28, the Project said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Identifying the security pitfalls in SDN

Software-defined networks can be a boon to savvy organizations, offering opportunities to cut administrative costs while increasing network agility. But SDN technology can also create security risks, and how you manage those risks can mean the difference between a successful implementation and a disastrous one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Should you worry about the Internet of Hackable Things?

If 2015 was the year of the Internet of Things, 2016 could be the year of the hacked Internet of Things. That could mean a lot of headaches for CIOs, whether they're fans of these new devices themselves or will be dealing with employees connecting them at work and managing the potential security exposure that brings. "The issue to date is that devices are vulnerable just by the fact that they exist and can connect to the Internet," says Jerry Irvine, member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Cybersecurity Leadership Council and CIO of Prescient Solutions. "Anybody can get to a device if you don't secure them properly." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to prevent shadow IT

Stopping the armchair IT folksImage by Mette1977 What do complex IT policies, outdated software and lack of IT-supported services have in common? They all contribute to shadow IT, which occurs when employees circumvent procedures to use unapproved services and software. The last thing employees want to do when working on a project is check in with the IT department, so how can IT provide employees with necessary resources so shadow IT is no longer an issue? These InfoSec professionals share their suggestions for preventing shadow IT before it becomes the new normal. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia

Our media is surprisingly Orwellian, and it's not always due to government control. People practice "doublethink" at their own volition, without a Thought Police. Social media (Twitter, Facebook) are instituting their own private Thought Police. Online journalism now means that the press is free to edit old articles, to change past reporting to conform to new political realities.

Consider the example in the book 1984 regarding the ongoing war between the three superstates of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia (representing English, Russian, and Chinese empires respectively).

At the start of the book, Oceania is at war with Eurasia. They have always been at war with Eurasia. That's the political consensus, and all historic documents agree. However, Winston Smith (the protagonist) remembers a time five years ago when Oceania was instead at war with Eastasia. Winston Smith struggles with philosophical idea of "truth". Which is more true, what everyone knows and what's in the newspapers, or the memories within his head?

Then Ocean's allegiance switched back again. On the sixth day of Hate Week, as crowds gathered to denounce Eurasia, the Party switched enemies to Eastasia. In a particularly rousing speech against their enemy, the speaker was handed a slip of paper, Continue reading
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