First Internet ecommerce was at least 1990

This article from FastCompany claims that the first Internet e-commerce transaction was 1994. This isn't true. The site "cdconnection.com" was selling CDs online since 1990. Well, they claim 1990, I don't know what evidence they have. But I personally can remember buying CDs on their site for over a year before I switched jobs in mid-1994 (so probably at least 1993).

I write this up because it's apparently an important concern when Internet e-commerce was "invented", so I'm writing up what I witnessed. It's a silly competition, of course, since Internet e-commerce is such an obvious idea that nobody can "invent" it. Somebody probably accepted payments for things online even before that. But, as of 1993 when I purchased music, CDconnection was a well-honed business, a "site", with an interface, with a wide selection, using Telnet with V100 commands to format the screen.






US Marshals jump into ‘Cyber Monday’ mania

OK so it’s not Amazon, Target or Wal-Mart Cyber Monday sales but the US Marshals are offering up what it calls “Cyber Monday” auctions for ill-gotten-booty.“Cyber Monday is generally thought to be the start of the online holiday shopping season. We would like to encourage shoppers who are already online in search of bargains to consider stopping by our auction website to bid on forfeited assets,” said Jason Wojdylo, Chief Inspector of the U.S. Marshals Service Asset Forfeiture Division in a statement. These online auctions are designed to generate proceeds from ill-gotten gains to give back to victims, he stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon shows off hybrid drone prototype for Amazon Prime Air service

Amazon showed off its new prototype drone to be used in its future Prime Air service, which will deliver packages up to five pounds in the time it takes to get a pizza delivered, “in 30 minutes or less.”Former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson said in the Amazon Prime Air video that eventually there will be a “whole family of Amazon drones, different designs for different environments.”That won’t happen until Amazon has FAA approval, as the company explained in several of its FAQs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Assuming the worst is not the best assumption

It was too bad to be true, but I should have known that assuming the worst was not the best assumption. I was driving the “other” car, the Saab, on the way back from the METNAV shop around eight in the morning. Since the shop was located in the middle of the three runways, this meant I had to drive across the 18 taxiway, along the white lines painted between the C-141’s, C-130’s, KC-10’s, F-4’s, and sometimes other odds and ends, and then past the Tower, off the flightline, and onto the “surface streets.” As I was coming off a call at around three in the morning, I wasn’t in uniform. For some reason, I hadn’t driven my normal car — a white Jeep — so the folks in the Tower certainly wouldn’t recognize me.

So when the SP flipped his lights on and pulled in behind me, I was worried. Just as the lights came on, I remembered something really important: I had forgotten to put my sticker on the car. You see, to drive on the flightline, you had to have a sticker on your car. There were various colors for the different areas you could gain Continue reading

Security for the New Battlefield

What will be our security challenge in the coming decade? Running trusted services even on untrusted infrastructure. That means protecting the confidentiality and integrity of data as it moves through the network. One possible solution – distributed network encryption – a new approach made possible by network virtualization and the software-defined data center that addresses some of the current challenges of widespread encryption usage inside the data center.

VMware’s head of security products Tom Corn recently spoke on the topic at VMworld 2015 U.S., noting, “Network encryption is a great example of taking something that was once a point product, and turning it into a distributed service—or what you might call an infinite service. It’s everywhere; and maybe more importantly it changes how you implement policy. From thinking about it through the physical infrastructure—how you route data, etcetera—to through the lens of the application, which is ultimately what you’re trying to protect. It eventually becomes really a check box on an application.”

VMware NSX holds the promise of simplifying encryption, incorporating it directly so that it becomes a fundamental attribute of the application. That means so as long as it has that attribute, any packet will be Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How the tech industry could overtake the auto industry

Processing power may be more important than horsepower in future cars, consultant firm KPMG said in a recent report on the rapidly changing auto industry.KPMG's report on automotive innovation, released last week, says that many "aggressive players are now entering the connectivity space."That list includes "not only makers of chips, pipes, receivers, and software, but also data aggregators and content providers."Changing landscape Two big ones are Apple and Google. Their investment capacity and economies of scale are significantly larger than the incumbent automakers, KPMG thinks. That means auto-makers risk being trampled.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BlackBerry quits Pakistan over government surveillance demands

BlackBerry has decided not operate in Pakistan after Nov. 30, rather than let the local government intercept communications on its enterprise services, the company said Monday.The Pakistani government wanted the ability to monitor all BlackBerry Enterprise Service traffic in the country, including every BES e-mail and BES BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) message, BlackBerry's Chief Operating Officer Marty Beard wrote in a blog post on Monday. BlackBerry has been under pressure in many countries including neighboring India to provide access to data on its enterprise services to law enforcement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

KVM Performance Limits for virtual CPU cores

When using open-source network simulators that use KVM as a virtualization tool, each node in the network simulation is actually a KVM virtual machine so the maximum supported number of nodes in a network simulation is the same as the maximum number of KVM virtual machines that can run on the host computer.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no single authoritative statement about the maximum number of KVM virtual machines that can run on a host computer. Most information I could find about KVM limits does not publish absolute limits but, instead, recommends best practices.

In this post, I will synthesize the information available from many different sources into a single recommendation for the maximum number of KVM-based nodes that can run in an open-source network simulator running on a single host computer.

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