ProPublica shines harsh light on AT&T-ization of American Red Cross

Former AT&T executive Gail McGovern gets credit for longevity at the American Red Cross -- she walked into a messy situation in 2008 and has served as CEO since -- but she and her pack of AT&T cronies mainly get taken to task throughout a thorough new ProPublica article on the charity's struggles. Not only has McGovern failed to turn around the financial fortunes of Red Cross, but her management organization's style has hurt morale and limited the charity's effectiveness in aiding Americans, according to the report.(ProPublica, if you don't know, is a nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom, and has been examining the travails of Red Cross over the past couple of years in conjunction with NPR.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Running devstack older than Kilo release

The famous network topology diagram as seen in Juno - Openstack (My preference over the one in Kilo/Liberty)
With the Liberty release already out, Openstack has EOL'ed other older releases. The only supported releases now are - Kilo, Liberty and the upcoming Mitaka. By supported I mean active branches with patches going into them.

Juno and older code is now represented as tags and may or may not be supported by the individual project teams. However thanks to subversioning and git, you can check out code of juno or older releases by using tags now.

 #git tag -l  --> Lists the tags present in the repository.  
 #git checkout tags/ -b    --> Checkout code from a tag.

All stable older releases have now been named following the convention "-eol" in all of the openstack projects on github. With these changes, if you'd like to run an older component of any of openstack projects especially on devstack you now have to make some changes. Now you might ask as to why would anyone run something old. I personally like the stick diagram representation of neutron network topology over the newer elastic movable/flash cloud diagram and so preferred to runt the Continue reading

Why the FAA’s new drone rules fall short

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released rules governing the registration of drones yesterday that left me slack-jawed – first with disbelief, then with fear. The rules show that the FAA is oblivious to either the risks of drones or the technological measures that could mitigate the risks, or both.The rules are simple and apply to drones that weigh between 0.55 pounds (250 grams) and less than 56 pounds (approximately 25 kilograms) including payloads. Beginning on December 21, drone owners must voluntarily register their drones with the FAA and pay a $5 fee, which will be waived for the first 30 days. Drone owners who fail to register face stiff penalties: a fine of up to $27,500 for civil violations, and a fine of up to $250,000 and up to three years in prison for a criminal violation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What security research shows for 2015

The year in security researchImage by CSOSecurity researchers were busy in 2015 — almost as busy as the criminals whose work they studied.Among the notable numbers this year: Low tech 'visual hacking' proves to be successful nine times out of ten, most websites had at least one serious vulnerability for 150 or more days, click fraud costs businesses $6.3 billion a year in wasted ad money, and oh so much more!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Small Massachusetts town will offer blazing 2Gbps fiber Internet for $40 a month

Leverett, Mass., will improve its existing fiber-optic network by the start of the new year, boosting peak speeds from one gigabit to two gigabits, and dropping the price from $45 per month to $40, according to a report in the local Recorder newspaper.A small town in central Massachusetts, just north of Amherst, Leverett has fewer than 2,000 residents, making it among the smallest in the country with its own municipal gigabit fiber network.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dell maneuvers toward EMC takeover with no rivals in sight + F5 Networks brings back retired CEO after successor resigns over "personal conduct"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Response: Adobe Profits Show Cloud is Expensive For Consumers

Adobe reports massive increase in revenue and profits on the back of moving to the cloud. First, let’s have a look at the numbers. Adobe reported a record $1.31 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 22 percent year over year increase. It disclosed record annual revenue of $4.8 billion. Mind you these are significant, but the big number to […]

The post Response: Adobe Profits Show Cloud is Expensive For Consumers appeared first on EtherealMind.

Attacks using TeslaCrypt ransomware intensify

Over the past two weeks security researchers have seen a surge in attacks using a file-encrypting ransomware program called TeslaCrypt, known for targeting gamers in the past.TeslaCrypt first appeared in March and stood out because over 50 of the 185 file types it targeted were associated with computer games and related software, including game saves, custom maps, profiles, replays and mods -- content that users might have a hard time replacing.In April researchers from Cisco found a weakness in TeslaCrypt's encryption routine and created a tool that could decrypt files affected by some versions of the program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Few Cybersecurity Predictions for 2016

I’m a bit reluctant to blog about 2016 cybersecurity predictions as it seems like everyone is getting into this act.  Alas, this end-of-year tradition used to be the exclusive domain of the analyst community and a few industry beacons but now it seems like every security tools vendor in the world is reaching out to me to tell me what they see in their crystal ball. So with some hesitancy, here are a few of the things I expect to see after the proverbial ball drops (in no particular order):1.       Greater focus on cyber supply chain security.  Enterprise CISOs realize that strong cybersecurity extends beyond the corporate LAN and that cyber-attacks and data breaches could easily start with third parties with access to the network.  The OPM and Target breaches are two examples where cyber-adversaries simply compromised trusted business partners and used them as a beachhead to penetrate their targets.  At the same time, we’ve seen in increase in malware hiding in firmware, system BIOS, device drivers, etc., so servers, routers, storage devices, and network appliances could all introduce malicious code into an otherwise pristine environment.  I expect CISOs to extend Continue reading

Pentagon wants $12 billion to ‘kick the crap out of’ iWorld geeks from foreign regimes

What do you do if you are worried about killer robots? If you are the Pentagon and those killer robots belong to the Chinese and Russians, then you propose a $12 to $15 billion budget to fund your own AI army and next-gen weapon technology.The Pentagon’s plan for new tech, according to Reuters, will include “wearable electronics, exoskeletons, greater use of drones and manned aircraft working together, and mother ships that would send out mini-drones to execute military missions.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IncludeOS is now free and open source!

IncludeOS

Alfred Bratterud is Assistant Professor and PhD scholar at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science where he is currently working full time leading the development of IncludeOS at the NetSys research group.

We’ve finally lifted the lid on IncludeOS, just in time for the IEEE CloudCom paper presentation recently. A preprint of the paper is available from our repo. However, we’ve done quite a lot of work since the paper was written, so here’s an update on what IncludeOS is now, and what you can expect in the near future.

It’s a bit like a JVM, but for x86 C++

A Java Virtual Machine is a portable language runtime environment. Java is portable across hardware architectures and operating systems because it uses a common instruction set. Once you’ve started a Java program, you can’t log into it (unless your program itself provides the facilities), and you can’t boot up any other programs inside it.

IncludeOS is like a safe language runtime for C++ programs, compiled into the x86 instruction set. This has the obvious advantage of removing one layer of abstraction, compared to Java: with hardware virtualization the code will execute directly on the CPU. Like with Continue reading

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