DARPA targets tiny, battery-powered atomic clocks that could shield GPS outages

The scientists at DARPA will next month detail a new program the group hopes will develop small, portable, battery-powered atomic clocks with stability, repeatability, and environmental sensitivity 1,000 times better than the current generation of atomic clocks.On Feb. 1 DARPA will detail the Atomic Clocks with Enhanced Stability (ACES) program which will aim to develop clocks that must fit into a package about the size of a billfold and run on a quarter-watt of power. “Success will require record-breaking advances that counter accuracy-eroding processes in current atomic clocks, among them variations in atomic frequencies that result from temperature fluctuations and subtle frequency differences that can occur if the power shuts down and then starts up again,” DARPA stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The hidden costs of NoSQL

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

The NoSQL industry was developed quickly on the promise of schema-free design, infinitely scalable clusters and breakthrough performance. But there are hidden costs, including the added complexity of an endless choice of datastores (now numbering 225), the realization that analytics without SQL is painful, high query latencies require you to pre-compute results, and the inefficient use of hardware leads to server sprawl.

All of these costs add up to a picture far less rosy than initially presented. However, the data model for NoSQL does make sense for certain workloads, across key-value and document data types. Fortunately, those are now incorporated into multi-mode and multi-model databases representing a simplified and consolidated approach to data management.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sponsored Post: Netflix, StatusPage.io, Redis Labs, Jut.io, SignalFx, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

  • Manager - Site Reliability Engineering: Lead and grow the the front door SRE team in charge of keeping Netflix up and running. You are an expert of operational best practices and can work with stakeholders to positively move the needle on availability. Find details on the position here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/398

  • Senior Service Reliability Engineer (SRE): Drive improvements to help reduce both time-to-detect and time-to-resolve while concurrently improving availability through service team engagement.  Ability to analyze and triage production issues on a web-scale system a plus. Find details on the position here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/434

  • Manager - Performance Engineering: Lead the world-class performance team in charge of both optimizing the Netflix cloud stack and developing the performance observability capabilities which 3rd party vendors fail to provide.  Expert on both systems and web-scale application stack performance optimization. Find details on the position here https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/860482

  • Senior Devops Engineer - StatusPage.io is looking for a senior devops engineer to help us in making the internet more transparent around downtime. Your mission: help us create a fast, scalable infrastructure that can be deployed to quickly and reliably.

  • UI Engineer– AppDynamics, founded in 2008 and lead Continue reading

Worth Reading: Thoughts on the 5G Network

5G is the current title for much of the network system work in the telco industry these days. All companies, SDOs and industry fora are now working on 5G technologies. There seems to be a rough consensus on requirements and use cases, and first proposals seem to suggest that the design and the implementation will have something to do with SDN/NFV. In general, the assumptions are that 5G will be faster (thanks to better radio), larger (intended to cover more connected devices due to IoT, smart city, new markets), more flexible (network programmability), and converged (unification of mobile and fixed network access/core). -via dirk kutscher

The post Worth Reading: Thoughts on the 5G Network appeared first on 'net work.

IDG Contributor Network: Kaspersky: Ransomware doubled last year, shifted focus to enterprise

A majority of PCs in the workplace were struck by “at least one attempted malware infection” last year, cybersecurity company Kaspersky said in an overview of corporate threats observed throughout 2015 released last month.Well over half, or 58%, of PCs were infected. That’s a gain of 3% over 2014.Meanwhile, CryptoLocker attacks doubled, Kaspersky says in its press release about the report.CryptoLocker attacks are when a trojan-infected PC user receives a ransom demand to decrypt files, stop a denial of service attack, or other onerous result if the ransom isn’t paid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco lining up hyperconvergence deal?

Cisco is reportedly preparing a hyperconvergence appliance through an OEM arrangement with start-up Springpath. According to CRN and The Register, Cisco has invested an undisclosed amount in Springpath as a prelude to the introduction of a hyperconvergence appliance combining Cisco’s UCS server platform with Springpath’s software, which enables compute, storage, networking and virtualization to run on an x86 server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researcher finds flaw in Comcast XFINITY home security system

Comcast’s XFINITY Home Security System can be readily exploited so it registers that doors and windows in customers’ homes are closed when they are actually open, Rapid7 has discovered.Fixing the problem requires a software or firmware upgrade, Rapid7 says. Comcast hasn’t responded to Rapid7s November notifications about the flaw, the company says.SHOCKER! Cape Cod cops find iPhone stun gunComcast hasn’t responded to an email asking for comment, but this story will be updated when it does.The security system consists of a sensor placed at windows, doors and other locations to detect motion, and a base station. When the sensor is triggered, it notifies the base station, which alarms that there is an intrusion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IS-IS Design: Avoiding Traffic Blackholing

IS-IS, a link state routing protocol, requires careful attention during network design in order to avoid traffic blackholing. In the topology below, IS-IS routing protocol is used. The primary path is the blue link. Using IS-IS, the overload bit signals the BGP. If the overload bit is set on Router B, Router A does not use router B as […]

The post IS-IS Design: Avoiding Traffic Blackholing appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Flaws in Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security: System fails to warn homeowners of intruders

Rapid7 disclosed serious flaws in Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security system which thieves or thugs could exploit to break into homes while the homeowners continue to receive 'it’s-all-good' messages even as an intruder moves about the house. Even worse, there currently is no fix.Comcast customers might be induced to sign up for one of the Xfinity Home Security packages as the company suggests options like being able to check in on your kids, your pets, and “the things you love most.” With Xfinity Home Security, Comcast said you can “Sit back. Relax. You’re in control.” But today Rapid7 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Xfinity Home Security, flaws that can cause the security system to fail to sense motion and instead continue to report “All sensors are intact and all doors are closed. No motion is detected.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security ‘net: Student privacy in focus

Student Privacy in Focus

Driving your market back to the earliest age possible is a tried and true marketing technique — and technology companies are no different in this regard. Getting people hooked on a product at an early age is a sure fire way to build a lifelong habit of preference for that one brand, and for usage in general. Perhaps, though, we should be concerned when it comes to social media. As “edtech” makes its way into our schools, should we be concerned about the privacy of our children? Via CDT:

Schools have largely embraced education applications, websites, and devices (collectively referred to as “edtech”) as a means for improving classroom instruction and administration. 71 percent of parents report their child uses technology provided by schools for educational purposes. In most cases this means more data is being collected on students. However, US privacy law has not kept pace with the rapid adoption of technology and data collection in schools. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), our existing student privacy law, is outdated and there are no sector-specific privacy laws that focus on edtech.

How effective is anonymization, anyway? A good bit of research is showing Continue reading

Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security vulnerable, fail open flaw leaves homes exposed

Researchers at Rapid7 have disclosed vulnerabilities in Comcast's Xfinity Home Security offerings. The flaws cause the system to falsely report that a home's windows and doors are closed and secured, even if they've been opened.Comcast's Xfinity Home Security system is one of the many next-generation alarm systems that are app controlled and promise to deliver real-time alerts and notifications to homeowners.However, researchers at Rapid7 have discovered flaws that would cause Comcast's system to falsely report that a home's doors and windows are closed and properly secured, even if they've been opened. In addition, the flaws also mean that Comcast's system would fail to sense an intruder's motion in the home.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google fixes dangerous rooting vulnerabilities in Android

Google has fixed a new batch of vulnerabilities in Android that could allow hackers to take over devices remotely or through malicious applications.The company released over-the-air firmware updates for its Nexus devices Monday and will publish the patches to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository by Wednesday. Manufacturers that are Google partners received the fixes in advance on Dec. 7, and will release updates according to their own schedules.The new patches address six critical, two high and five moderate vulnerabilities. The most serious flaw is located in the mediaserver Android component, a core part of the operating system that handles media playback and corresponding file metadata parsing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX and Split and Smear Micro-Segmentation

While external perimeter protection requirements will most likely command hardware acceleration and support for the foreseeable future, the distributed nature of the services inside the data center calls for a totally different set of specifications.

Some vendors have recently claimed they can achieve micro-segmentation at data center scale while maintaining a hardware architecture. As I described in my recent article in Network Computing, this is unlikely because you have to factor in speed and capacity.

To quickly recap the main points describing the model in the article:

  • Our objective is for all security perimeters to have a diameter of one—i.e. deploying one security function for each service or VM in the data center—if we want to granularly apply policies and limit successful attacks from propagating laterally within a perimeter. A larger diameter implies we chose to ignore all inter-service communications within that perimeter.
  • This objective is impossible to achieve with our traditional hardware-based perimeters: The service densities and the network speeds found in current data center designs overrun any hardware-based inline inspection models.
  • The solution resides in “splitting and smearing” security functions across thousands of servers. This requires an operational model capable of managing large scale distributed functions Continue reading

Datacenter Design: Shortest Path Bridging

IEEE 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) uses IS-IS as an underlying control plane mechanism that allows all the links in the topology to be active. In sum, it supports layer 2 multipath. SPB is used in the datacenter; however, it can also be used in the local area network. In this article, Figure-1 will be used to […]

The post Datacenter Design: Shortest Path Bridging appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

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