EFF uncovers US DoJ spying on you!

From our "Your Tax Dollars At Work" department: You, my friend, are being spied on ... but you probably already knew that. But what you might not know is that besides the usual suspects, the NSA (thanks to Edward Snowden) and probably every other TLA (Three Letter Agency) with any kind of signals intelligence mission, it turns out that the Department of Justice (DoJ) has also been secretly snagging your cell phone data by overflying urban areas with light aircraft equipped with a device called a “Dirtbox,” a successor or maybe more accurately, a sibling, to an earlier device called the StingRay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microservices

Figure 1: Visibility and the software defined data center
In the land of microservices, the network is the king(maker) by Sudip Chakrabarti, Lightspeed Venture Partners, makes the case that visibility into network traffic is the key to monitoring, managing and securing applications that are composed of large numbers of communicating services running in virtual machines or containers.
While I genuinely believe that the network will play an immensely strategic role in the microservices world, inspecting and storing billions of API calls on a daily basis will require significant computing and storage resources. In addition, deep packet inspection could be challenging at line rates; so, sampling, at the expense of full visibility, might be an alternative. Finally, network traffic analysis must be combined with service-level telemetry data (that we already collect today) in order to get a comprehensive and in-depth picture of the distributed application.
Sampling isn't just an alternative, sampling is the key to making large scale microservice visibility a reality. Shrink ray describes how sampling acts as a scaling function, reducing the task of monitoring large scale microservice infrastructure from an intractable measurement and big data problem to a lightweight real-time data center wide visibility solution for monitoring, managing, Continue reading

Auditing network configurations with Nelkit

Audit Checklist Form

Even if you have tools in place to automate your network configuration, there’s a good chance that someone has made some manual changes. Perhaps some of your routers were overlooked the last time you send out that access-list, or a new site has been deployed using an old template. In those situations you want to audit the configuration of your network devices. Network configuration audit is one of the features of Nelkit.

Continue reading

Auditing network configurations with Nelkit

Audit Checklist FormEven if you have tools in place to automate your network configuration, there’s a good chance that someone has made some manual changes. Perhaps some of your routers were overlooked the last time you send out that access-list, or a new site has been deployed using an old template. In those situations you want to audit the configuration of your network devices. Network configuration audit is one of the features of Nelkit.
Continue reading

SDxCentral Weekly News Roundup — March 11, 2016

sdxcentral-news-roundup-march-11-2016 Here’s a roundup of the week’s news related to  software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) and the rest of the SDxCentral universe, starting with a few tidbits from the OCP U.S. Summit: Radisys joined the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a silver member and launched DCEngine, an OCP-based design for hyperscale data center... Read more →

Wireless Gets Serious

Drew Lentz, chair of Interop's Wireless & Mobility Track, discusses the increasing demands placed on networks as the type of clients, number of clients, and functionality changes. He explains how pressures from the Internet of Things, location-based services, and expansive campus networks are prompting new investments in wireless networks and requiring careful consideration.

Learn more about the Wireless & Mobility Track and register for Interop, May 2-6 in Las Vegas.

No, you backoff on backdoors or else

Speaking at #SXSW, President Obama threatened the tech community, telling us to backdoor our encryption ourselves or else congress will mandate a worse solution later.

No, Mr. President, it works the other way around. You'd better backoff on your encryption demands, or else the tech community will revolt, That's what's already happen with Apple's encryption efforts, as well as app developers like Signal and Wickr. Every time you turn the screws, we techies increase the encryption.

It's not a battle you can win without going full police-state. Sure, you can force Apple to backdoor its stuff, but then what about the encrypted apps? You'd have to lock them down as well. But what about encrypted apps developed in foreign countries? What about software I write myself? You aren't going to solve the "going dark" problem until you control all crypto.

If you succeed in achieving your nightmare Orwellian scenario, I promise you this: I'll emigrate to an extradition-free country, to continue the fight against the American government.

Your crypto backdoors creates a police-state beyond what even police-state advocates like Michael Hayden and Linsdey Graham can tolerate. Your point on "balance" is a lie. We've become radically unbalanced toward mass Continue reading

DARPA: Show us how to weaponize benign technologies

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was created years ago because the US didn’t want to be surprised again by any major new technological developments (specifically in response to the surprise launch of Sputnik in 1958) and ensure that the US should do any surprising.+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2015+With that in mind the agency is launching a potentially scary program called “Improv” that looks at what DARPA calls today’s “bustling tech marketplace with an inventor’s eye and imagine how easily purchased, relatively benign technologies might be converted into serious security threats.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft slips Windows 10 upgrade ads into Internet Explorer security patch

Microsoft is adding a new weapon to its aggressive Windows 10 push—or at least it appears that it is.Earlier in the week, Microsoft added what sounds a lot like an advertisement for Windows 10 to its Patch Tuesday release for Internet Explorer, bundling it in with a critical security patch. The new update affects only Windows 7 and 8.1 PCs and brings an upgrade prompt to Internet Explorer 11.In its description of update KB3146449, Microsoft says it “adds functionality to Internet Explorer 11 on some computers that lets users learn about Windows 10 or start an upgrade to Windows 10.” Or as we common folk call it, an ad.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 11th, 2016


The circle of life. Traffic flow through microservices at Netflix (Rob Young)

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please consider offering your support on Patreon.
  • 400Gbps: DDoS attack; 50,000: frames per second Mythbusters films in HD; 3,900: pages Paul Klee’s Personal Notebooks; 1 terabit: satellites deliver in-flight Internet access at hundreds of megabits per second; 18%: overall mobile market revenue increase; 21 TB: amount of date the BBC writes daily to S3; $300 million: Snapchat revenue; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Dark Territory:  Yes, he told them, the NORAD computer was supposed to be closed, but some officers wanted to work from home on the weekend, so they’d leave a port open.
    • @davefarley77: If heartbeat was a clock cycle, retrieving data from fastest SSD is equivalent to crossing whole of London on foot  @__Abigor__ #qconlondon
    • @fiddur: "Legacy is everything you wrote before lunch." - @russmiles #qconlondon
    • @BarryNL: Persistent memory could be the biggest change to computer architecture in 50 years. #qconlondon
    • @mpaluchowski: "You can tell which services are too big. That's the ones developers don't want to work with." #qconlondon @SteveGodwin
    • @danielbryantuk: "I'm not going to say how big Continue reading
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