Book Report: Future Crimes

Future Crimes by Marc Goodman details the dark side of technology, examining how new technologies are used and abused for criminal purposes.  In just under 400 pages, Goodman provides some basic historical background on computer security and then guides the reader through a cybercrime journey spanning consumer, industrial, medical, and various other technologies.Fair warning to prospective readers: the story isn’t pretty. The author starts with a wake-up call about data privacy and how a plethora of companies like Facebook, Google, and OkCupid, and the $150 billion dollar data broker industry regularly collect, sell, and abuse user data.  Future Crimes also explores the current derelict world of cyber peeping toms, bullies, revenge porn, and extortion. While these crimes are already rampant today, Goodman theorizes that things will get worse with the proliferation of surveillance cameras, geo-location services, RFID tags, and wireless networking technology. The point is crystal clear: each technology innovation increases the attack surface, and cybercriminals are only too happy to exploit these vulnerabilities for profit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tower 2.3 Has Arrived

We’re happy to announce the release of Ansible Tower 2.3, our console and service that brings control, security, and delegation to your Ansible deployments.

Historically Tower has been installed with a simple setup playbook that you run with the Ansible you already have to download and install Tower. But not everyone has the luxury of access to the internet at all times.

Starting with Tower 2.3, we now offer a bundled installer for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS systems. This all-in-one installer contains everything you need to get Tower started in one bundle, including bootstrapping of Ansible for you as needed. All you need is a Red Hat or CentOS machine with access to the vendor OS repositories - no other external access required. The playbook installer is still available as well, and Tower is also still available via Vagrant image or AMI if you’d prefer to try it via that method.

As usual, this release of Tower includes a variety of bug fixes as well, including performance improvements around listing jobs and job templates.

For more information on Tower 2.3, check the release notes at: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/latest/html/installandreference/release_notes.html

To try Ansible Tower 2.3 Continue reading

OPM underestimated the number of stolen fingerprints by 4.5 million

The number of people whose fingerprints have been stolen as a result of the high-profile hack into the computer systems of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management earlier this year is now 5.6 million.The agency revised its original estimate of 1.1 million Wednesday after finding fingerprint data in archived records that had previously not been taken into account.This does not change the overall number of 21.5 million former, current and prospective federal employees and contractors whose Social Security numbers, personal information and background investigation records were exposed in the breach.The OPM announced in June that it was the target of a cybersecurity breach that resulted in the theft of personnel data including full names, birth dates, home addresses, and Social Security numbers of 4.2 million current and former government employees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OPM breach: 4.5 million more individuals open to future fingerprint abuse

Now the federal Office of Personnel Management says the number of individuals whose fingerprints were stolen is 5.6 million – up from 1.1 million – and that they can look forward to having those prints misused as criminals get better at exploiting them.OPM says, “an interagency working group with expertise in this area … will review the potential ways adversaries could misuse fingerprint data now and in the future. This group will also seek to develop potential ways to prevent such misuse. If, in the future, new means are developed to misuse the fingerprint data, the government will provide additional information to individuals whose fingerprints may have been stolen in this breach.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix Sale Options Would Likely Include Netscaler & GoToMeeting

Citrix is reportedly mulling a selloff of its entire business, or certain assets. Dell is a possible suitor.

Technology Short Take #54

Welcome to Technology Short Take #54! In this episode, I’ve gathered an odd collection of links and articles about key data center technologies. Without further ado, let’s get to the content.

Networking

• Not sure if this link belongs in Networking or in Virtualization, but we’ll stick it here since it talks about VMware NSX. Here’s a three-part series on running VMware NSX on vSphere on AWS via Ravello Systems (part 1, part 2, and part 3). This is a great way to get your feet wet with NSX without having to invest in a home lab.
• This is a bit of an older post, but I really appreciated Bob McCouch’s post on building tools versus “programming.” I think Bob really hit the nail on the head when he said that the real goal is working efficiently with high quality and low error rates. If this means you need to learn to write a script, then so be it. If it means it needs to be manual, then so be it (but please, please, do take the time to document it!).
• Dan Conde of ESG has a write-up on the role of NSX in Continue reading

Last Chance! Maximize Network Programmability with NX-API REST, NX-Toolkit, & NX-API

Join the Cisco DemoFriday on September 25th and learn how you can benefit from network programmability as you transition from legacy systems to open standard interfaces.

How will new memory technologies impact in-memory databases?

This is a guest post by Yiftach Shoolman, Co-founder & CTO of redislabs. Will 3D XPoint change everything? Not as much as you might hope...

Recently, investors, analysts, partners and customers have asked me how the announcement from Intel and Micron about their new 3D XPoint memory technology will affect the in-memory databases market. In these discussions, a common question was “Who needs an in-memory database if all the non in-memory databases will achieve similar performance with 3D XPoint technology?” Well, I think that's a valid question so I've decided to take a moment to describe how we think this technology will influence our market.

First, a little background...

The motivation of Intel and Micron is clear -- DRAM is expensive and hasn’t changed much during the last few years (as shown below). In addition, there are currently only three major makers of DRAM on the planet (Samsung Electronics, Micron and SK Hynix), which means that the competition between them is not as cutthroat as it used to be between four and five major manufacturers several years ago.

DRAM Price Trends

CloudFlare Raises $110M with Promise to Eliminate Lots of Hardware

A five-year-old upstart garners investments from Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm and sets its sights on competing with Amazon Web Services.

Former Gigamon CEO Raises $7M for a Different Type of Security Monitoring

Datiphy watches how data is being used — a managed service that's being turned into a software product for the U.S. market.

Thousands of iOS apps infected by XcodeGhost

The impact of iOS app developers unknowingly using a rogue version of the Xcode development tool is turning out to be greater than initially thought: early reports listed just 39 apps that had been trojanized with the tool, but security researchers have since identified thousands more.On Friday, security research firm Palo Alto Networks reported that 39 apps found in the App Store had been compromised after their developers -- most of them located in China -- used a rogue version of Xcode that had been distributed on forums. Xcode is a development tool for iOS and OS X apps provided by Apple.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: How the IETF is fixing its open standards process

A number of changes have been put in place in the last year to improve the speed at which the IETF can operate. This final post in my series on open standards and open source models examines these changes, along with the tradeoffs. via network computing

The post Worth Reading: How the IETF is fixing its open standards process appeared first on 'net work.

Alcatel-Lucent BGP configuration tutorial. Part 2 – BGP policies. Community

Reaction: Interoperate or Die

Ethan has an excellent post up on Interoperate or Die. Herewith, a few thoughts in response.

From my perspective, the importance of open standards in the world of network engineering can hardly be overstated. As networks become more complicated (or complex, depending on what word you want to use), having consistent interfaces will become increasingly important. Think of the old IP model — every transport runs on top of IP, and IP runs on top of every physical/link layer. Using IP as a “choke point” built a “wasp waist,” a single API everyone on both sides of the narrow point in the protocol layer could talk to.

in recent years, we’ve forgotten the wasp waist. We’ve built everything over HTTP, and everything over Ethernet over IP, and everything over GRE over IP, and… The entire stack, above IP, is a hornet’s nest of convoluted caverns and side halls pointing, apparently, everywhere at once (like the guy from the forest in The Point, above).

If you think of IP as an API (which is really what it is), the point is to have a single layer API between any two interacting systems. This creates a clean interaction surface that helps you to Continue reading

Cisco VIRL: More Than A Certification Study Lab

VSAN: As Always, Latency Is the Real Killer

When I wrote my stretched VSAN post, I thought VSAN uses asynchronous replication across WAN. Duncan Epping quickly pointed out that it uses synchronous replication, and I fixed the blog post.

The “What about latency?” question immediately arose somewhere in my subconscious, but before I could add that thought to the blog post (because travel), Anders Henke wrote a lengthy comment that totally captured what I was thinking, so I’m including it in its entirety:

Cisco said to plan China partnership to boost market access

Following in the footsteps of some other U.S. companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel, Cisco Systems is planning to tie up with a Chinese partner for joint development and better access to the local market, according to a newspaper report.The networking equipment company is planning to announce a partnership with server maker Inspur Group during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Seattle on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.Cisco said Tuesday it declined to comment on rumors related to any specific announcements or companies. Company spokesman Nigel Glennie said the company is optimistic about the opportunities for its China team, and is open to local partnerships playing a role in its future strategy. The company has done business in China for over 20 years and learned the importance of having the right relationships, he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco said to plan China partnership to boost market access

Following in the footsteps of some other U.S. companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel, Cisco Systems is planning to tie up with a Chinese partner for joint development and better access to the local market, according to a newspaper report.The networking equipment company is planning to announce a partnership with server maker Inspur Group during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Seattle on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.Cisco said Tuesday it declined to comment on rumors related to any specific announcements or companies. Company spokesman Nigel Glennie said the company is optimistic about the opportunities for its China team, and is open to local partnerships playing a role in its future strategy. The company has done business in China for over 20 years and learned the importance of having the right relationships, he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

I gave $10 to every presidential candidate

Python and IPython

I recently came across IPython while reading some Python development blogs.  IPython is an alternative to the standard Python shell that offers some additional features.  When I first read about IPython, I was a little confused because many people refer to it as the ‘Python interactive shell’.  While IPython is an interactive shell, it is not the Python interactive shell.  For instance, we can enter the Python interactive shell just by typing ‘python’ on our Python development box…

So, what we really did here was invoke the Python interpreter in interactive mode.  In this mode, commands can be read from the TTY and directly interpreted.  So for example, we can do something like this…

The Python code we type is directly interpreted and we get the output we would expect.  So instead of using the Python interpreter to run a .py script, we could do it all directly from the interpreter.  So the example from our Python up and running post works just as well in interactive mode as it did when run as a script…

So that’s Python interactive mode.  Now, let’s talk about IPython.  The first thing we Continue reading