Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 9th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


Best selfie ever? All vacation photos taken by Apollo astronauts are now online. Fakes, obvi.

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  • millions: # of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet; 8%: total of wealth in tax havens; $7.3B: AWS revenues; 11X: YouTube bigger than Facebook; 10: days 6s would last on diesel; 65: years ago the transistor was patented; 80X: reduction in # of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent since 1950; 37 trillion: cells in the human body; 83%: accuracy of predicting activities from pictures.

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @Nick_Craver: Stack Overflow HTTP, last 30 days: Bytes 128,095,601,184,645 Hits 5,795,253,218 Pages 1,921,499,030 SQL 19,229,946,858 Redis 11,752,754,019
    • @merv: #reinvent Amazon process for creating new offerings: once decision is made "write the press release and the FAQ you’ll use - then build it."
    • @PaulMiller: @monkchips to @ajassy, “One of your biggest competitors is stupidity.” Quite. Or inertia. #reInvent
    • @DanHarper7: If SpaceX can publish their pricing for going to space, your little SaaS does NOT need "Contact us for pricing" 
    • Continue reading

Old-school sexting, as in circa 1969

Sexting among today’s teenagers was the subject of an email string this morning that eventually took a turn down memory lane, courtesy of a long-time friend who wouldn’t make up stuff like this: “Which reminds me of a story from 9th grade (1969 or ‘70). I was outside the high school with a couple of friends one morning before homeroom when we noticed some kind of small piece of paper falling from a second-story window. We went over and picked it up, and it wasn’t a piece of paper after all! Rather, it was a still-developing Polaroid of a kid’s (penis) with the handwritten caption, ‘(Not-to-be-named-here kid’s penis.)’  Technology really has come a long way.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wi-Fi Alliance reaches for peace over unlicensed LTE

A Wi-Fi Alliance workshop next month could start to lay the groundwork for peace between Wi-Fi and LTE promoters who have been arguing over potential interference.If LTE and Wi-Fi can operate peacefully in unlicensed spectrum, mobile users should be able to get a better experience in in crowded areas whether they are using their carrier's service or a Wi-Fi hotspot.The group will bring together representatives of both sides and lay out proposed guidelines for coexistence between Wi-Fi and LTE on unlicensed frequencies. The workshop, on Nov. 4 in Palo Alto, California, will be the first of several such meetings, the Alliance says.The goal is to have every unlicensed LTE product tested on its ability to coexist with Wi-Fi. Those tests might be administered by the Wi-Fi Alliance or by another body, said Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of the Alliance. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘Steve Jobs’ review: Unconventional, entertaining, but incomplete

If you know enough about Steve Jobs, watching the new biopic Steve Jobs without bias is almost impossible. You can’t help think about Apple event keynotes, anecdotes from books about the late Apple CEO, the devices you use or have used that were guided by his vision.But try to leave all of that aside and appreciate Steve Jobs for what it is: entertainment. That’s where the movie succeeds, even as facts are fudged.Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (of The Social Network fame) constructed Steve Jobs around three major product launches: the Macintosh in 1984, the 1988 introduction of NeXT’s computer, and Jobs’s triumphant return to Apple with the iMac in 1998. Those three acts take place over 15 years of personal and professional strife in Jobs’s life, and that limited timeline by nature omits the growth he experienced both as a leader and as a person. This is a movie about Steve Jobs that doesn’t include the launch of the iPhone, what some might consider his greatest achievement, or even a mention of his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, and their three children together.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP, SanDisk partner to bring storage-class memory to market

Hewlett-Packard and SanDisk today announced an agreement to jointly develop "Storage Class Memory" (SCM) that could replace DRAM and would be 1,000 times faster than NAND flash.The two companies will market their SCM products for use in enterprise cloud infrastructures based on HP's memristor (a revolutionary form of resistor), which it has been developing for at least five years, and SanDisk's ReRAM memory technology.The resulting non-volatile memory technology is expected to be up to 1,000 times faster while offering up to 1,000 times more endurance than flash storage, the companies said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US won’t seek legislation against encryption

The U.S. administration will not seek legislation at this point to counter the encryption of communications by many technology services and product vendors, but will work on a compromise with industry, a senior U.S. official said Thursday. "The administration is not seeking legislation at this time," Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said in a statement before a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Comey had previously asked for a "robust debate" on encryption of communications, saying that the technology could come in the way of his doing his job to keep people safe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Single RX queue kernel bypass in Netmap for high packet rate networking

In a previous post we discussed the performance limitations of the Linux kernel network stack. We detailed the available kernel bypass techniques allowing user space programs to receive packets with high throughput. Unfortunately, none of the discussed open source solutions supported our needs. To improve the situation we decided to contribute to the Netmap project. In this blog post we'll describe our proposed changes.

network card

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Binary Koala

Our needs

At CloudFlare we are constantly dealing with large packet floods. Our network constantly receives a large volume of packets, often coming from many, simultaneous attacks. In fact, it is entirely possible that the server which just served you this blog post is dealing with a many-million packets per second flood right now.

Since the Linux Kernel can't really handle a large volume of packets, we need to work around it. During packet floods we offload selected network flows (belonging to a flood) to a user space application. This application filters the packets at very high speed. Most of the packets are dropped, as they belong to a flood. The small number of "valid" packets are injected back to the kernel and handled in the same way Continue reading

Apple removes apps from store that could spy on your data traffic

Apple on Thursday removed several apps from its store that it said could pose a security risk by exposing a person's Web traffic to untrusted sources.The company recommended deleting the apps but did not name them, which may make it hard for people to know which apps put their data at risk.The apps in question installed their own digital certificates on a person's Apple mobile device. It would enable the apps to terminate an encrypted connection between a device and a service and view the traffic, which is a potential security risk.Most websites and many apps use SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Security Layer), a protocol that encrypts data traffic exchanged with a user. SSL/TLS is a cornerstone of Web security, ensuring data traffic that is intercepted is unreadable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alibaba sets up second data center in the US in $1B cloud expansion

Continuing the expansion of its AliCloud cloud computing business, Alibaba Group is setting up a second data center in Silicon Valley.The Chinese company said customers could apply from Monday for  services from the data center, which will span over 10 cloud services including Elastic Compute Service, offering scalable computing services, an Analytic Database Service that provides real-time, high-concurrency online analytical processing, and a Cloud Monitor System using an open platform for the real-time monitoring of sites and servers.Alibaba did not respond to a request for more information on the new data center.The company said earlier this year that it was investing US$1 billion in its cloud computing business.  It launched its first data center in Silicon Valley in March, confirming its ambitions to enter the U.S. market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Risky Business #386 — Katie Moussouris on the (groan) disclosure debate

On this week's show we're checking in with Katie Moussouris of HackerOne. She's an ex Microsoftie who's spent something like a decade working on vulnerability disclosure policies. She even helped get a vuln disclosure ISO standard ratified!

And she'll be joining us this week to discuss disclosure politics, I guess you'd call it... for those of us who've been around infosec for a while, most of us would rather stick our face in a blender than talk about it, but Katie will be along to point out why people should fight their "disclosure debate fatigue" and get involved.

read more

Many vulnerabilities in older Huawei 3G routers won’t get patched

Huawei doesn't plan to patch more than a dozen models of 3G routers that have severe software vulnerabilities.The flaws could allow an attacker to change DNS (Domain Name System) settings, upload new firmware without logging into the device and conduct a denial-of-service attack.The models of affected routers, distributed by ISPs in 21 countries, are now considered out of Huawei's support cycle, said Pierre Kim, a security researcher who found the issues and listed the models on his blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brocade BNA API

Brocade Network Advisor (BNA) has a REST API for accessing Fibre Channel-related data. The documentation includes a sample Python script showing how to connect to the API to retrieve Fabric info. The script given only works with Python 3.x. It’s also a pain to copy out of the documentation as you end up with a few extra characters in there. Here’s a version that will work with Python 2.7. I’ve also made a few other modifications – in this one, you can set the BNA IP, Username & Password at the top of the script.  I’ve also made it PEP8-compliant.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import httplib
import json
import sys

BNAServer = "10.200.5.181"
BNAUsername = "Administrator"
BNAPassword = "password"

# Create HTTPConnection object and connect to the server.
connection = httplib.HTTPConnection(BNAServer)

###########################
# Log in to Network Advisor
###########################

# Send login request
connection.request(
    'POST',
    '/rest/login',
    headers={
        "WSUsername": BNAUsername,
        "WSPassword": BNAPassword,
        "Accept": "application/vnd.brocade.networkadvisor+json;version=v1"}
    )

print()
print("Sending login request to Network Advisor...")

# Get the response
response = connection.getresponse()
# Display the response status print()
print ("Status= ", response.status)
# If successful (status = 200), display the returned session token
if response.status  Continue reading
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