IDG Contributor Network: The future of virtualization: Don’t forget the so-called ‘old’

This is an exciting moment for data virtualization. The options available for virtualization are expanding, and are providing advances in processing speed around big data and data integration. This is just one of many areas around virtualization getting attention…and usually with the words "new" and "future" close by. But if the technology that pioneered virtualization – mainframes – is mentioned at all, it is usually dismissed. Why? Usually, the motivation is to serve the interests of the people who are trying to sell their product.Do you remember the classic sci-fi movie Logan's Run? In it, anyone who reaches the age of 30 meets his or her end in a public ceremony. Sometimes it feels like our industry has the same attitude towards existing software and hardware. This shortsighted approach does a disservice to technology, new and old. Let's look at the reasons why from the perspective of mainframes and virtualization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Self-healing gel breakthrough could lead to flexible electronics

The fact that circuits are not designed to flex hinders product design, causes maintenance issues in the field, and is slowing the move towards bendable, rollable gadgets.However, some scientists think they've got a solution. Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin say they've invented a healing gel that doesn't need an application of light or heat to fix a broken connection.Until now, you'd need "external stimuli" to mend cracks or breaks in circuits, Guihua Yu, the UT Assistant Professor who developed the gel, said in an article at UT News.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Self-healing gel breakthrough could lead to flexible electronics

The fact that circuits are not designed to flex hinders product design, causes maintenance issues in the field, and is slowing the move towards bendable, rollable gadgets.However, some scientists think they've got a solution. Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin say they've invented a healing gel that doesn't need an application of light or heat to fix a broken connection.Until now, you'd need "external stimuli" to mend cracks or breaks in circuits, Guihua Yu, the UT Assistant Professor who developed the gel, said in an article at UT News.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Congress joins battle against ticket bots

Some members of Congress apparently think that by passing a law, they can beat ticket bots.The response of IT experts: Good luck with that.The intentions are the best, of course. Companion bills now pending in the House and Senate are aimed at stopping online ticket scalpers by banning the use of bots – software that can buy hundreds or even thousands of tickets or reservations before the average individual buyer even gets started.But a law isn’t going to stop the scalpers, according to experts including Rami Essiad, cofounder and CEO of Distil Networks. “You’re trying to combat an enemy you can’t see,” he said. “Making it illegal doesn’t allow you to see them. There’s a lot of legislation saying it’s illegal to hack, but there’s plenty of hacking still going on.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Protocol Spotlight: DLEP

Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol is a mechanism by which link layer devices (probably radio modems) can communicate neighbor reachability information to IP routers using those radios.

Radio interfaces are frequently variable sub-rate interfaces. Path selection is a huge challenge with this sort of handoff, because not only is the available bandwidth less than the speed of the handoff interface, it's a moving target based on RF conditions from moment-to-moment. DLEP provides a flexible framework for communicating link performance and other parameters to the router so that it can make good path selection decisions.

It's obviously handy for point-to-point links, but that's not where it gets really interesting.

Consider the following network topology:


We have four routers sharing a broadcast network (10.0.0.0/24), each with a satellite backup link. Simple stuff, right?

But what if that 10.0.0.0/24 network isn't an Ethernet segment, but was really an ad-hoc mesh of microwave radio modems, and the routers were scattered among various vehicles, drones and robots?

The radios know the topology of the mesh in real time, but the routers plugged into those radios do not.

Wasting microwave bandwidth with BFD packets would be silly because it won't tell Continue reading

No more security fixes for older OpenSSL branches

The OpenSSL Software Foundation has released new patches for the popular open-source cryptographic library, but for two of its older branches they will likely be the last security updates.This could spell trouble for some enterprise applications that bundle the 0.9.8 or 1.0.0 versions of OpenSSL and for older systems -- embedded devices in particular -- where updates are rare.OpenSSL 1.0.0t and 0.9.8zh, which were released Thursday, are expected to be the last updates because support for these these two branches will end on Dec. 31, as listed in the organization's release strategy document.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker at Connect(); // 2015

Connect(); //2015, Microsoft’s virtual event devoted to developers, happened one day after DockerCon EU 2015, and started with an epic demo where Scott Hanselman deployed an ASP.NET 5 app from Visual Studio to a Docker container on Azure on Linux. … Continued

Worth Reading: Omnipath

Omni-Path, known internally by the generic code name “Storm Lake,” is a vital ingredient in Intel’s Scalable Systems Framework, which was announced earlier this year as a collection of hardware and systems software components to build parallel systems for running simulation and modeling workloads and increasingly other kinds of data analytics jobs that benefit from running on clusters with low latency and high bandwidth interconnects. via nextplatform

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

New attack campaign against SMBs uses a botnet to deliver PoS malware

A group of sophisticated attackers are repurposing penetration testing tools to break into the networks of small and medium-size businesses worldwide with the goal of infecting point-of-sale systems with malware.The new attack campaign started in September and has been dubbed operation Black Atlas by researchers from antivirus vendor Trend Micro. The attackers use a wide set of tools to scan the Internet and identify potential weak spots in the networks of various organizations, the researchers said.Their toolset includes port scanners, brute-force password guessing tools, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) scanners, remote desktop viewers and other attack applications that are easy to find on the Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enterprises Need to Improve IT Vendor Risk Management

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation given by Dr. Ron Ross, a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Ron’s areas of specialization include information security, risk management, and systems security engineering.In his presentation, Dr. Ross delivered a bit of a counterintuitive message on cybersecurity by stating, "We have to stop obsessing about threats and start focusing on asset protection." To drive home this point, Dr. Ross added, "If 90% of our bridges were failing, we’d mobilize teams of engineers right away. Yet when 90% of our IT systems are insecure, we focus a good part of our attention on external threats."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encryption backdoors will make us all more vulnerable

The author has written 29 technical books and is Managing Partner of Ascent Solutions, which provides marketing services to tech sector companies In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, one of the memes being perpetuated by “security professionals” is that the terrorists used encrypted communications, enabling them to plan and coordinate their activities without raising suspicion among the intelligence community.Now there is a knee-jerk reaction among politicians in Washington to force encryption providers to build “backdoors” into their software that would allow government agencies to easily decode communications in their effort to identify potential terrorists. They say this is essential to keeping us all safe and that we must stop crying about the loss of personal privacy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTTP/2 is here! Goodbye SPDY? Not quite yet

Why choose, if you can have both? Today CloudFlare is introducing HTTP/2 support for all customers using SSL/TLS connections, while still supporting SPDY. There is no need to make a decision between SPDY or HTTP/2. Both are automatically there for you and your customers.

Enabling HTTP/2

If you are a customer on the Free or Pro plan, there is no need to do anything at all. Both SPDY and HTTP/2 are already enabled for you. With this improvement, your website’s audience will always use the fastest protocol version when accessing your site over TLS/SSL.

Customers on Business and Enterprise plans may enable HTTP/2 within the "Network" application of the CloudFlare Dashboard.

Enabling HTTP/2 in the CloudFlare dashboard

HTTP/2 is here!

In February of 2015, the IETF’s steering group for publication as standards-track RFCs approved the HTTP/2 and associated HPACK specifications.

After more than 15 years, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) received a long-overdue upgrade. HTTP/2 is largely based on Google's experimental SPDY protocol, which was first announced in November 2009 as an internal project to increase the speed of the web.

Benefits of HTTP/2 and SPDY

The main focus of both SPDY and HTTP/2 is on performance, especially latency as perceived by the end-user while using Continue reading

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