Spectacular black hole space images

Strong gravityImage by NASABlack holes had the spotlight as the centerpiece of the gravitational waves discovery announced recently. The waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes – that were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. NASA defines black holes as places in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space and that can happen when a star is dying for example.   While black holes are basically invisible, they make for some spectacular imagery, some an artist’s interpretation, in the space matter and stars around them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 12th, 2016


Maybe this year's Mavericks can ride some gravitational waves?  

 

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  • 3.96 Million: viewers streaming the Super Bowl; 1000 kilometers: roads made of solar panels in France; 500mg: amount of chlorophyll absorbing photons in a tree;

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • cmyr: soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. 
    • aback: we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free.
    • @dotemacs: - We’re moving to Java + Spring. - Why? - Cos of threads… and scaling… - OK … what exactly…? - I’m just going by what I was told.
    • @asolove: Chaos Monkey People: every week, one randomly-selected person must take the whole week off regardless of their current work. Org must adapt.
    • @waynejwerner: we almost started using them, but couldn't find examples of not Google / Netflix using containers Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—Is the Network a Storage Problem?

In talking to our customers, CEO Rich Napolitano realized that the rapidly changing dynamics of storage have an impact on network traffic. After reading articles like this one from Enrico Signoretti at the Register on how the network may become the next bottleneck for storage, he decided to investigate further. In a blog post this week, Rich identifies how storage is changing, its impact on the network and how Plexxi solutions can enable scaled-out storage. Give it a read!

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.

SiliconANGLE: Is there a new networking solutions provider du jour for cloud architects?
By R. Danes
How does a young company compete against a behemoth competitor with an 80 percent enterprise marketshare? “We look for the agents of change,” said Plexxi, Inc.’s CEO Rich Napolitano, referring to the company’s strategy for attracting customers looking for novel IT Solutions.

Xconomy: What’s New in Boston VC Land: Assemble, Hyperplane, Pillar
By Gregory T. Huang
GV (not to be confused with GC) is Google Ventures’ new name. The firm, also bicoastal, has been moving away from seed-stage investing, according to a Wall Street Journal story. GV Continue reading

White-hat hackers key to securing connected cars

WASHINGTON -- It's a scary prospect, barreling down the highway when a hacker seizes control of your brakes and power-steering system.The specter of hacking a vehicle, potentially a matter of life and death, demands auto makers to elevate security as a priority as they develop ever-more sophisticated in-car technology, a member of the Federal Trade Commission is warning.[ Related: Senators call for investigation of potential safety security threats from connected cars ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T to run field trials of 5G wireless in Austin this year

AT&T announced today it will begin field trials of faster 5G wireless technology this summer in Austin, Texas.The 3GPP industry standard for 5G, also known as Fifth Generation wireless, is not expected to be completed until 2020, with the earliest phase completed in 2018.Wireless speeds with 5G could be 10 to 100 times faster than with 4G LTE, which generally averages in the 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps range for users downloading data.Both AT&T and Verizon have ambitious 5G rollout plans, prompted by the recent explosion of wireless video and Internet of Things connectivity. AT&T estimates that its wireless network grew 150,000% from 2007 to 2015, largely because of video traffic; more than 60% of its wireless traffic in 2015 was video.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FTC reminder: ‘Spread the word about government imposters’

Yes, you and I are waaaaay too savvy to fall for the old “I’m calling from the government and you had better pay up” trick.Unfortunately, others are not, especially among the elderly.So the Federal Trade Commission is once again asking for help getting the word out: We’re hearing from our colleagues that those pesky government imposters are at it again, using the FTC’s name to try to con people into paying them for something. Whether it’s to clean up your credit report, give you a prize, resolve a complaint against you, or pay off a debt you owe, they’re all lies. The message may be a call or an email, but it isn’t from the Federal Trade Commission, or any other federal agency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Making IPv6 Work

Wouldn’t it be nice if turning on IPv6 really was ‘press one button and the rest is magic’ easy? For some things, it is. If you’re talking about client-side, enabling an IPv4-only home service on DSL or fibre really can be this simple, because all the heavy lifting is being done inside your ISP: you’re not enabling IPv6 in the network, you’re turning on the last mile. It was knocking at your door and you just had to let it in. -via circleid

The post Worth Reading: Making IPv6 Work appeared first on 'net work.

Nasdaq to use blockchain to record shareholder votes

Add shareholder voting to the list of applications for blockchain technologies.Later this year, Nasdaq plans to record stockholders' electronic votes on its own blockchain system for companies listed on one of its exchanges. By digitizing the entire process, it expects to speed and simplify the proxy voting process.Blockchains -- the best known of which is the public ledger of bitcoin transactions -- are distributed records of events, each block in the record containing a computational "hash" of itself and of the previous block, so that all are connected like links in a chain.A hash, or digest, is a short digital representation of a larger chunk of data. Hash functions are designed so that calculating (or verifying) the hash of a chunk of data takes little computing power, while creating data with a particular hash is computationally expensive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Looking forward to ContainerWorld2016 next week!


Container technology has been there for years but is now picking steam thanks to Docker. Container packaging, image registry hosting for containers has directly affected both use and adoption of this technology. "Cloud Native" applications are being designed and written with the direct intent of running them on containers. Today I see containers in the same "boat" as virtualization years ago. Virtualization started slowly in the late 90's and has sprawled massively moving into every datacenter out there. It brought about a massive change in the way hardware resources were consumed making it highly cost effective. Virtualization was technology only used by linux pro's till it was made easy by companies to consume. The story with containers seem to be the same.

A linux container is a virtualization environment (VE) created using kernel support. It provides process isolation and resource isolation/allocation through cgroups (control groups). Docker is a tool that wraps programs to run as isolated processes in its own filesystems. There are various posts out there explaining the differences between docker and a linux container. One big advantage that containers give is the flexibility to move between various hosts quickly and easily.We've now moved Continue reading

Henry Ford and Incident Response

In the early 1900s, Henry Ford was intent on making the Model T an affordable car for the masses. To do so, he had to figure out a way to vastly improve the company’s manufacturing efficiency in order to reduce consumer prices. Ford solved this problem by adopting a modern manufacturing assembly line based upon four principles: interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and reducing wasted efforts. While incident response is a bit different from automobile manufacturing, I believe that CISOs should assess their IR processes and take Ford’s four principles to heart. Here’s how I translate each one for IR purposes: Interchangeable parts. In Ford’s world, interchangeable parts meant that components like steering wheels and bumpers could be used to assemble all types of cars and thus keep the line moving. In IR, interchangeable parts mean that all detection tools should be based on published APIs so that each one can interoperate with all others. It also means embracing standards like STIX and TAXII for threat intelligence exchange so data can be easily consumed or shared. Finally, interchangeable IR parts calls for the creation and adoption of cybersecurity middleware that acts as a higher-level abstraction layer for Continue reading

Pwn2Own contest puts $75,000 bounty on VMware Workstation bypass

The Pwn2Own hacking contest will return in March, pitting researchers against the most popular browsers and operating systems. The novelty: Contestants can win a $75,00 prize for escaping a VMware virtual machine.Contestants will be able to exploit Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome on fully patched versions of 64-bit Windows 10 and Apple Safari on OS X El Capitan. System or root-level privilege escalation pays extra, as does escaping from the virtual machine.Every year, Pwn2Own, at the CanSecWest security conference, has slightly modified rules, and 2016 is no different. Adobe Reader, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer are no longer on the contest's target list. Adobe Flash remains, but only the version that comes bundled with Microsoft Edge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brocade @ MWC Barcelona 2016

Brocade Mobile CTO, Kevin Shatzkamer, recently provided a radio show preview of what to expect at Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona.  One of the big themes is expected to be 5G along with the services and new business models it will enable for the mobile industry. We are all familiar with the existing... Read more →

Padding oracles and the decline of CBC-mode cipher suites

Padding oracles and the decline of CBC-mode cipher suites

At CloudFlare, we’re committed to making sure the encrypted web is available to everyone, even those with older browsers. At the same time, we want to make sure that as many people as possible are using the most modern and secure encryption available to them. Improving the cryptography used by the majority requires a coordinated effort between the organizations building web browsers and API clients and those working on web services like CloudFlare. Cryptography is a two-way street. Even if we support the most secure cryptographic algorithms for our customers, web visitors won’t get the benefit unless their web client supports the same algorithms.

In this blog post we explore the history of one widely used cryptographic mode that continues to cause problems: cipher block chaining (CBC). We’ll explain why CBC has proven difficult to use safely, and how recent trends in the adoption of secure ciphers by web clients have helped reduce the web’s reliance on this technology. From CloudFlare’s own data, we’ve seen the percentage of web clients that support safer cipher modes (such as AEAD) rise from under 50% to over 70% in six months, a good sign for the Internet.

What’s in a block cipher?

Ciphers Continue reading

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