Prophylactic Network Security

Trojan Defender

This week’s comedy gold was listening to a conversation emanating from a nearby inhabitant of our corporate cube accomodations, where one of my colleagues, Bob, was explaining to another coworker, George, the reasoning behind the decision to deploy firewalls to a particular new location.

Roughly summarized, the argument was this:

George, deploying a firewall is like having sex.

(No; I confess I had not anticipated ever typing that particular sentence, and I hope I never have to type it again.)

When you want to have sex, you decide whether you want a baby, and thus you choose whether or not to use contraception. If you don’t use contraception, while there’s no guarantee that a baby will arrive, there’s a real good chance that it will, so don’t be surprised if it does. Contraception isn’t perfect, but it at least reduces the likelihood of having a baby.

I confess I was laughing hard as I listened to the explanation because it’s an inspired analogy. However, buried somewhere in my subconscious was an Australian voice saying something like All these security products are a waste of money. It’s cheaper to save the money you would have spent, deal with a breach Continue reading

DARPA $2M contest looks to bring AI to wireless spectrum provisioning

Getting mobile devices to more intelligently access and use the ever-tightening wireless spectrum will be the goal of a new public competition from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.The defense research agency recently announced a $2 million Grand Challenge called the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) and said the primary goal of the contest was to infuse radios with “advanced machine-learning capabilities so they can collectively develop strategies that optimize use of the wireless spectrum in ways not possible with today’s intrinsically inefficient approach of pre-allocating exclusive access to designated frequencies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A very cool twist on optical communications

University of Ottawa researchers say their discovery that a twisted optical beam in a vacuum travels more slowly than the speed of light could be a boon for quantum computing and communications, and could benefit enterprise IT shops down the line.Their research, which began in late 2013, is outlined in the paper "Observation of subluminal twisted light in vacuum," published in The Optical Society's Optica journal.MORE: 10 of today's really cool network & IT research projectsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A very cool twist on optical communications

University of Ottawa researchers say their discovery that a twisted optical beam in a vacuum travels more slowly than the speed of light could be a boon for quantum computing and communications, and could benefit enterprise IT shops down the line.Their research, which began in late 2013, is outlined in the paper "Observation of subluminal twisted light in vacuum," published in The Optical Society's Optica journal.MORE: 10 of today's really cool network & IT research projectsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ping on You! – small weekend web/CGI project

For best article visual quality, open Ping on You! – small weekend web/CGI project directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

After a few previous web programming endeavors (both here on networkgeekstuff.com with SDN programming and in real life job) I had a taste to develop “something” and since I am a network geek, I wondered what I have needed in the past as network tools that would ideally be placed on the internet. So I came to the very basic list of things like ping, nslookup or putty as tool accessible only via a browser.

So without more delay, I give you first beta release of Ping on You! – pingonyou.com the list of current features is:

  • ping
  • nslookup
  • wget (for http response checks)
  • whois / ripe database

Here is a quick view how it looks when you try to ping google’s public DNS service on 8.8.8.8, since in the background a linux like ping tool is used, you have the same output:

web_view_beta

Additionally, here are some features that I plan to do when I get more time, however no release date right now because there are much more complex than the above ones:

[minipost] Windows partition editing with diskpart

For best article visual quality, open [minipost] Windows partition editing with diskpart directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

This will really be a micro-post as I only want to document this for my benefit. This is a way how to change partition table for disks, or USB sticks. In my example, I had a linux live boot USB stick that I needed to quickly convert into a usable storage USB stick with NTFS under windows and of course the visual GUI tools under My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management was not having full visibility on all partitions that the linux created on this USB stick, so this is how to actually do partitioning on windows.

So without more delay, this is an example how to clean the USB stick partition table and reformat it for windows use:

  1. start command prompt as Administrator and type “diskpart”
  2. enter “list disk”
  3. enter “select disk X”, where X is the and number of your USB stick ( ergo “select disk 1″ )
  4. enter “clean”
  5. enter “create partition primary”
  6. enter “select partition 1″
  7. enter “active”
  8. enter “format quick fs=ntfs”
  9. enter “assign”
  10. enter “exit”  to leave diskpart

In summary, short, but hopefully useful minipost for someone.

For IT, climate change means preparing for disaster

IT managers understand the hazards of heat inside data centers. But what about outside it?Cordell Schachter, the CTO of the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT), who went through Hurricane Sandy in 2012, says climate trends will increasingly impact IT operations."At one time, you could go through a whole career without facing one of those situations" -- something like a Sandy -- said Cordell. But he now believes if "you have a career spanning more than a decade" you may see one or two major weather events.Scientists are increasingly connecting extreme weather events to man-made climate change. Insurance claims are rising.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Small cell deployment to rapidly grow, says report

Small cells, the low-powered radio access nodes, are being deployed at ever increasing rates, says a study. Sixty-percent of enterprises will have deployed the signal-enhancing devices by the end of 2017, the Small Cell Forum says. It commissioned the study from Nemertes Research. The study, published in February, discovered that 14% of businesses have already introduced the technology. The reason for the growth is to fulfill a need for better mobile coverage in hard to reach spots not covered by regular mobile service. + ALSO: 10 top reasons for integrating Wi-Fi radios in small cellular cells +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 3.28.16

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. Harmony Breach AnalyticsKey features: The Harmony Breach Analytics platform reads customer log data to provide contextually-aware threat intelligence and retrospective analysis. This reduces SOC and SIEM workloads by providing threat intelligence customer specific. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Petya ransomware overwrites MBRs, locking users out of their computers

It's hard enough for non-technical users to deal with ransomware infections: understanding public-key cryptography, connecting to the Tor anonymity network and paying with Bitcoin cryptocurrency. A new malicious program now makes it even more difficult by completely locking victims out of their computers.The new Petya ransomware overwrites the master boot record (MBR) of the affected PCs, leaving their operating systems in an unbootable state, researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro said in a blog post.The MBR is the code stored in the first sectors of a hard disk drive. It contains information about the disk's partitions and launches the operating system's boot loader. Without a proper MBR, the computer doesn't know which partitions contain an OS and how to start it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adding Git and Docker Machine Awareness to OS X

In this post I’m going to share how to add some Git and Docker Machine “awareness” to your OS X Bash prompt. This isn’t anything new; these tricks are things that Bash users have been employing for years, especially on Linux. For most OS X users, though, I think these are tricks/tools that aren’t particularly well-known so I wanted to share them here.

I’ll divide this post into two sections:

  1. Adding Git awareness to your Bash prompt
  2. Adding Docker Machine awareness to your Bash prompt

Please note that I’ve only tested these on El Capitan (OS X 10.11), but it should work similarly for most recent versions of OS X.

Before I get started, allow me to explain what I mean by “awareness”:

  • For Git, it’s the ability to show the currently checked-out Git branch in your Bash prompt as well as tab completion for Git commands, branches, and remotes.
  • For Docker Machine, it’s the ability to show the currently-active machine (made active via eval $(docker-machine env <name>)) in your Bash prompt as well as tab completion for most Docker Machine commands and machines.

Ready? Let’s get started!

Adding Git Awareness to your Bash Prompt

To add some Continue reading

California Nurds by Katy Sperry

Katy Perry

California Nurds

I know a place
Where the tech is truly awesome
Smart network folks; all clustered
inside CA’s borders

Cablin’ guys and gals
Running fibers to the servers.
We’re all hard core geeks, we are
certified nerf herders.

You may think you are sad,
But nothing comes close
To the silicon coast
Santa Clara’s just mad, you can’t
help your nerd lust
Oooooh Oh Oooooh

California nurds;
we are incredible!
Armed with Flukes,
we’re testing non stop.
Wi Fi smarts
so hot
we’ll melt your antenna
Oooooh Oh Oooooh

California nurds,
we like telemetry;
But we don’t
like SNMP.
West Coast time is lame
so we use UTC
Oooooh Oh Oooooh

We love unicorns, shooting
rainbows from their rear ends.
We’re Software Defined, running
everything in Python.

–John Herbert, with sincere apologies to Katy Perry

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at California Nurds by Katy Sperry and give me a share/like. Thank you!

Test-Driving OSPF on RouterOS – Interoperability

So I wrote about OSPF on RouterOS in my previous post. It was a nice experiment to learn about routing protocols. I wanted to take it a little further and test Interoperability of RouterOS with other open source solutions. This post is an update from the previous one and I will add OSPF neighbor nodes … Continue reading Test-Driving OSPF on RouterOS – Interoperability

Test-driving OSPF on RouterOS

I came across RouterOS by MikroTik© which provides advances routing protocol support. What is more amazing is they provide a RouterOS in a virtual form-factor called Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) that can be installed on hypervisors like KVM/VirtualBox/VMware. Please look at licensing model at http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CHR#CHR_Licensing This is perfect for learning purposes and experimenting at home. … Continue reading Test-driving OSPF on RouterOS

How the media really created Trump

This NYTimes op-ed claims to diagnose the press's failings with regard to Trump, but in its first sentence demonstrates how little press understands the problem. The problem isn't with Trump, but with the press.

The reason for Trump is that the press has discarded its principle of "objectivity". Reasonable people disagree. The failing of the press is that they misrepresent one side, the Republicans, as being unreasonable. You see that in the op-ed above, where the very first sentence decries the "Republican Party’s toxic manipulation of racial resentments". In fact, both parties are equally reasonable, or unreasonable as the case may be, with regards to race.

The article suggests the press should have done more to debunk Trump in the"form of fact checks and robust examination of policy proposals". But the press doesn't do that for Democrats, so why should a Republican candidate they don't like get singled out? No amount of attacking Trump sticks because the press is blatantly unfair.

Hillary clearly is complicit in the "Benghazi" affair, because she led the charge to inject weapons into Libya to take down Ghadaffi, then ignored Chris Steven's efforts to clean up the mess. Hillary's use of her own Continue reading
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