Carriers celebrate as Telecommunications Act of 1996 turns 20

The winners in a broadband industry heavily shaped by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 celebrated publicly this week, as February 8 marked the 20-year anniversary of the law taking effect.The Act – a sweeping rewrite of America’s 60+ year old laws governing phone service, media ownership, and more – substantially deregulated the telecom and media industries, causing large-scale mergers and a much more centralized landscape.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cisco boosts, broadens Catalyst switches | US government wants to sharply increase spending on cybersecurity +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Obama’s new cybersecurity agenda: What you need to know

In response to mounting cyber attacks on federal networks, President Barack Obama is seeking $19 billion for cybersecurity, more than a 35% increase over last year’s spending, and calling for a federal CISO to oversee all the upgrade of outdated and insecure cyber infrastructure.The number of information security incidents grew more than 11-fold between 2006 and 2014 to 67,168, and attacks from other countries have been on the rise.+More on Network World: Feds' primary network security weapon needs more bang+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The iconic Boeing 747 is almost 50!

Happy 47thImage by Reuters/Pascal RossignolThe 747 truly ushered in the Jumbo Jet era when it first flew for the first time this week – Feb. 9 -- in 1969. “The fuselage of the original 747 was 225 feet (68.5 meters) long; the tail as tall as a six-story building. Pressurized, it carried a ton of air. The cargo hold had room for 3,400 pieces of baggage and the total wing area was larger than a basketball court. Yet, the entire global navigation system weighed less than a modern laptop computer,” Boeing wrote of the aircraft. The massive airplane required construction of the 200 million-cubic-foot 747 assembly plant in Everett, Wash., the world's largest building by volume. Here’s a brief look at the giant of the skies:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft released 13 security bulletins for February Patch Tuesday, 6 rated critical

On February 2016 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released 13 security bulletins, six of which are rated as critical for remote code execution. The rest deal with fixing elevation of privilege, denial of service, and security feature bypass vulnerabilities.Rated critical MS16-022 resolves 23 flaws in Adobe Flash Player by updating Flash libraries in Internet Explorer 10, Internet Explorer 11, and Microsoft Edge. This patch is meant for all supported editions of Windows. It was ranked at the top of the list for patching, according to Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek, who called the patch a “packaging change” since “there is a real bulletin for it,” as opposed to a security advisory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Heterogeneous Multi-Dimensional Cloud Security

According to ESG research, 75% of organizations use public cloud services of one kind or another today (note: I am an ESG employee).  A majority (65%) use SaaS, 38% use IaaS, and 33% use PaaS.  In terms of IaaS, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still the king of the hill but many large enterprises are implementing or kicking the tires on alternatives.  Microsoft is pushing clients with enterprise client access licenses (ECAL) toward Office365 and Azure, IBM is winning SoftLayer deals with large customers, and Google Cloud Platform is gaining traction in the life sciences industry.With all of this cloud momentum, we see a new compute model evolving that ESG calls heterogeneous multi-dimensional cloud infrastructure.  Simply stated, heterogeneous multi-dimensional cloud infrastructure is sort of a hybrid cloud on steroids where enterprises have a little bit of everything – AWS, Azure, OpenStack, SoftLayers, VMware, etc., on-premise and in the public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft skills: What’s hot and what’s not?

It's a good time to be in IT. Job seekers have the advantage as employers struggle to hire tech talent in key areas such as cloud computing, mobility, security and data analytics. Companies are raising salaries and piling on the perks -- but not for every IT role.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

A Smallish List of Parse Migration Guides

Since Parse's big announcement it looks like the release of migration guides from various alternative services has died down. 

The biggest surprise is the rise of Parse's own open source Parse Server. Check out its commit velocity on GitHub. It seems to be on its way to becoming a vibrant and viable platform.

The immediate release of Parse Server with the announcement of the closing of Parse was surprising. How could it be out so soon? That's a lot of work. Some options came to mind. Maybe it's a version of an on-premise system they already had in the works? Maybe it's a version of the simulation software they use for internal testing? Or maybe they had enough advanced notice they could make an open source version of Parse? 

The winner is...

Charity Majors, formerly of Parse/Facebook, says in How to Survive an Acquisition, tells all:

Massive props to Kevin Lacker and those who saw the writing on the wall and did an amazing job preparing to open up the ecosystem.

That's impressive. It seems clear the folks at Parse weren't on board with Facebook's decision, but they certainly did everything possible to make the best Continue reading

The Myth of Chargeback

 

Cash Register

Cash register by the National Cash Register Co., Dayton, Ohio, United States, 1915.

Imagine a world where every aspect of a project gets charged correctly. Where the massive amount of compute time for a given project gets labeled into the proper department and billed correctly. Where resources can be allocated and associated to the projects that need them. It’s an exciting prospect, isn’t it? I’m sure that at least one person out there said “chargeback” when I started mentioning all these lofty ideas. I would have agreed with you before, but I don’t think that chargeback actually exists in today’s IT environment.

Taking Charge

The idea of chargeback is very alluring. It’s been on slide decks for the last few years as a huge benefit to the analytics capabilities in modern converged stacks. By collecting information about the usage of an application or project, you can charge the department using that resource. It’s a bold plan to change IT departments from cost centers to revenue generators.

IT is the red headed stepchild of the organization. IT is necessary for business continuity and function. Nothing today can run without computers, networking, or phones. However, we aren’t a visible part Continue reading

Cisco fires off recall on fire prone switches

Cisco is recalling Ethernet switches that pose a potential fire hazard because of damage to the source wiring that can cause a short. The company issued a field notice last week on the situation, which affects its IE5000 industrial Ethernet switches.From the field notice: Potential damage to the source wiring can cause a short to the metal enclosure/barrier. This could lead to a potential electrical and/or fire safety hazard for the end user.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Java-based Trojan was used to attack over 400,000 systems

A cross-platform remote access Trojan that's being openly sold as a service to all types of attackers, from opportunistic cybercriminals to cyberespionage groups, has been used to attack more than 400,000 systems over the past three years.The RAT (Remote Access Tool/Trojan), which depending on the variant is known as Adwind, AlienSpy, Frutas, Unrecom, Sockrat, jRat or JSocket, is evidence of how successful the malware-as-a-service model can be for malware creators.Adwind is written in Java, so it can run on any OS that has a Java runtime installed including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Android. The Trojan has been continuously developed since at least 2012 and is being sold out in the open via a public website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Technology ‘net 0x1339ED1: Cloudy Business Cycles

The cloud is definitely having an impact on business cycles, but how much? There are at least two sides to this story; let’s take a look at both. First there is the continued growth of Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to the Next Platform, this chart represents the various options for the growth of AWS over the next decade or so:

aws-financials-revenue-forecast-log

It looks like, based on this projection, that AWS can keep growing at a fairly strong pace for a while yet longer. Of course, there are many factors that might impact this growth. For instance, one thing the original post points out is that recessions slow down spending in fixed IT and drive up spending in flexible IT. A recession, then, might improve the bottom line for AWS. The opposite of this, however, is that when companies can afford to build infrastructure, they tend to. There are, believe it or not, still justifications for building your own data center, especially if you can afford it.

There are other points to consider, however, as well, in the relationship between the network and business cycles. For instance, if open source and white box start bleeding out of the largest networks into Continue reading

Current p2p trends threatening enterprise security

Security threats from peer to peer (p2p) communication are nothing new, but they are becoming more sophisticated. From ransomware and botnets, these threats are a global threat that continue to evolve in more sophisticated ways. If security teams aren’t looking for them, they may go undetected, which could be costly for the enterprise.The TrendLabs Security Intelligence blog has been talking about ransomware and CryptoLocker threats for the better part of this and the last decade. In his August 2015 post, Macro Threats and Ransomware Make Their Mark: A Midyear Look at the Email Landscape, Maydalene Salvador, noted that the number of spammed messages in 2014 was nearly 200 billion emails.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

E-Rate Dollars Can Now Be Used To Take Advantage of SDN with VMware NSX

The need for substantive network security in schools has never been greater. According to ID vmw-phto-nsx-erate-420x276-tnAnalytics, more than 140,000 minors are victims of identity fraud per year—and when their data is exposed, it is misused more frequently. One reason for this is that minors’ clean credit reports can make them extra attractive to identity thieves.

“The educational space is extremely concerned about ensuring [that] Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about students, and their respective data, is kept safe, secure, and only used for the learning environment,” says Jason Radford, head of operations for IlliniCloud. Continue reading

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