Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 13th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


Gorgeous picture of where microbes live in species. Humans have the most. (M. WARDEH ET AL)

  • 14.3 billion: Alibaba single day sales; 1.55 billion: Facebook monthly active users; 6 billion: Snapchat video views per day; unlimited: now defined as 300 GB by Comcast; 80km: circumference of China's proposed supercolider; 500: alien worlds visualized; 50: future sensors per acre on farms; 1 million: Instagram requests per second.

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Adam Savage~ Lesson learned: do not test fire rockets indoors.
    • dave_sullivan: I'm going to say something unpopular, but horizontally-scaled deep learning is overkill for most applications. Can anyone here present a use case where they have personally needed horizontal scaling because a Titan X couldn't fit what they were trying to do? 
    • @bcantrill: Question I've been posing at #KubeCon: are we near Peak Confusion in the container space? Consensus: no -- confusion still accelerating!
    • @PeterGleick: When I was born, CO2 levels were  ~300 ppm. This week may be the last time anyone alive will see less than 400 ppm. 
    • @patio11: "So I'm clear on this: our business is to employ Continue reading

Intralinks is built from the ground up for secure enterprise file sharing and collaboration

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Close to 20 years ago I was working with a company in the process of a blockbuster merger with a competitor. The company set up numerous closed-door "clean rooms" at headquarters where teams from both companies could work through the details of the proposed deal. Scores of people from the target company came to town and lived in hotels for weeks on end.Those of us not on the merger team watched daily as boxes of documents were carted into the clean rooms. We assumed the boxes contained each company's most sensitive business information. The people in those rooms were charged with deciding if the merger was the right thing to do. They hoped the answers would be found in those precious documents. Apparently they were because the merger went through.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Continuous integration tools can be the Achilles heel for a company’s IT security

Some of the most popular automated software building and testing tools used by developers have not been designed with security in mind and can open the door for attackers to compromise enterprise networks.These so-called continuous integration (CI) tools allow developers to automatically create software builds when code changes are contributed by developers to a central repository. The creation of these builds, which are used for quality control, is coordinated by a CI master server based on predefined rules and done on CI slave machines.If hackers manage to access a CI master server, they can steal proprietary source code, but also gain the ability to execute commands on all the machines that operate as CI slaves, security researcher and penetration tester Nikhil Mittal said Friday in a presentation at the Black Hat Europe security conference in Amsterdam. "This access could be used for lateral movement to get access to more machines."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Scientists developing high-performing battery for electric cars and drones

Lithium-oxygen batteries will be 10 times as energy-dense as the lithium-ion technology we're using today. It will be significantly lighter than anything we've seen to date.Why the obsession with weight reduction in batteries?Weight is an issue in vehicle battery chemistry because the heavier a vehicle is, the more power you need to propel it. Which means you need more batteries. That results in more weight, and it becomes an ever-decreasing circle.Diminishing returns As things stand now, you can't just keep adding more powerful batteries, because they add weight and size, and actually result in that diminishing return.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 offbeat, odd, and downright weird places you’ll find Linux

The OS that took over the worldImage by David Marsh/FlickrLet's just get this out of the way: this isn't the year of Linux on the desktop. That year will probably never arrive. But Linux has gotten just about everywhere else, and the Linux community can take a bow for making that happen. Android, based on the Linux kernel, is so prevalent on mobile devices that it makes the longstanding desktop quest seem irrelevant. But beyond Android there are a number of places where you can find Linux that are truly odd and intriguing, and by "places" we mean both strange devices and weird geographical locations. This slideshow will show you that it's always the year of Linux pretty much everywhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

QOTW: Ignorance

Contrary to folk wisdom, ignorance is usually not blissful. Generally, it produces the very opposite of bliss. Just ask the frightened hiker lost in some remote mountain blizzard who never paid attention to his Boy Scout instruction; or ask the new employee who never did her math homework, frantically trying to figure out the correct change for customers; or, worse yet, ask the frustrated and annoyed patrons waiting in the ever-increasing line as this new employee bumbles one purchase after another.
Phillip Dow, Virtuous Minds

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Worth Reading: The Cryptech Project

The Snowden and subsequent revelations have called into question the integrity of some of the implementations of basic cryptographic functions and of the cryptographic devices used to secure applications and communications on the Internet. There are serious questions about algorithms and about implementations of those algorithms in software and particularly in hardware. … To fill this need the CrypTech project is developing an open-source hardware cryptographic engine design that meets the needs of high assurance Internet infrastructure systems that use cryptography. via the cryptech project

The post Worth Reading: The Cryptech Project appeared first on 'net work.

Container networking: To overlay or not to overlay

One of the key decisions in designing a compute infrastructure is how to handle networking.

For platforms that are designed to deliver applications, it is now common knowledge that application developers need a platform that can execute and manage containers (rather than VMs).

When it comes to networking, however, the choices are less clear. In what scenarios are designs based on single layer preferable vs. overlay networks ?

The answer to this question is not a simplistic one based on “encapsulation overhead”; while there are overlay networking projects that do exhibit poor performance, production ready solutions such as OpenContrail have performance characteristics on both throughput and PPS similar to the Linux kernel bridge implementation. When not using an overlay, it is still necessary to use an internal bridge to demux the container virtual-ethernet interface pairs.

The key aspect to consider is operational complexity!

From a bottoms-up perspective, one can build an argument that a network design with no encapsulation that simply uses an address prefix per host (e.g. a /22) provides the simplest possible solution to operate. And that is indeed the case if one assumes that discovery, failover and authentication can be handled completely at the “session” layer (OSI model).

I’m familiar with a particular compute infrastructure where this is the Continue reading

Test-Driven Network Development with Michael Kashin on Software Gone Wild

Imagine you’d design your network by documenting the desired traffic flow across the network under all failure conditions, and only then do a low-level design, create configurations, and deploy the network… while being able to use the desired traffic flows as a testing tool to verify that the network still behaves as expected, both in a test lab as well as in the live network.

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Ransom attacks likely to fade as small email providers resist

The spate of cyberattacks against email providers is likely to pass with time as they refuse to pay ransoms. But that doesn't mean the attacks haven't cost them. Since early this month, the list of companies that have been attacked has grown longer: first ProtonMail of Switzerland, followed by HushMail, RunBox, VFEmail, Zoho and FastMail of Australia. The companies have typically received extortion requests by email asking for 10 or 20 bitcoins in exchange for not being subjected to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks involve sending a large amount of data traffic to a company's network, causing the service to choke and go offline.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t trust that USB drive!

Picture this: You go to a trade show and you collect your allocation of freebies: Teeshirts, hats, USB drives, and so on. You get  back to your room or, more likely, you get back to your office and you start sorting out your haul of tschotskes. You plug one of the nerd sticks into your computer and then this happens: Suddenly your day has taken a nosedive. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybercriminals turn to video ads to plans malware

Cybercriminals have been delivering malware through online display ads for years, but they appear to be making headway with a new distribution method: video advertisements.Both methods of attack, known as malvertising, can have a broad impact and are a major headache for the ad industry. A single malicious advertisement, distributed to several highly trafficked sites, can expose tens of thousands of computers to malware in a short time.Some ad networks and publishers have taken steps to vet their ads more thoroughly, but criminals are constantly on the lookout for weaknesses.An attack detected about two weeks ago shows how cybercriminals are showing more interest in creating malicious video ads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybercriminals turn to video ads to plant malware

Cybercriminals have been delivering malware through online display ads for years, but they appear to be making headway with a new distribution method: video advertisements. Both methods of attack, known as malvertising, can have a broad impact and are a major headache for the ad industry. A single malicious advertisement, distributed to several highly trafficked sites, can expose tens of thousands of computers to malware in a short time. Some ad networks and publishers have taken steps to vet their ads more thoroughly, but criminals are constantly on the lookout for weaknesses. An attack detected about two weeks ago shows how cybercriminals are showing more interest in creating malicious video ads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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