Worth Reading: The changing mobile landscape

Rather than a large pool of potential suppliers who are strongly motivated to compete with each other by building to the specifications provided by the cellular access providers, the concentration of supply has lead to a different dynamic where the platform providers are able to effectively dictate their terms and conditions to the mobile access network operators. Interestingly this, in turn, has emboldened some of the larger application providers to flex their market muscles and in turn set forth in their own direction. via circle id

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Intellectual virtue and the engineer

Plane_crash_into_Hudson_River_(crop)On the 19th of January in 2009, Captain “Sully” Sullenberger glided an Airbus A320 into the Hudson River just after takeoff from LaGuardia airport in New York City. Both engines failed due to multiple bird strikes, so the ditching was undertaken with no power, in a highly populated area. Captain Sullenberger could have attempted to land on one of several large highways, but all of these tend to have heavy traffic patterns; he could not make it to any airport with the power he had remaining, so he ditched the plane in the river. Out of the 155 passengers on board, only one needed overnight hospitalization.

There are a number of interesting things about this story, but there is one crucial point that applies directly to life at large, and engineering in detail. Here’s a simple question that exposes the issue at hand—

Do you think the Captain had time to read the manual while the plane was gliding along in the air after losing both engines? Or do you think he just knew what to do?

Way back in the mists of time, a man named Aristotle struggled over the concept of ethics. Not only was he trying to Continue reading

18 million hit by Identity theft last year

Almost 18 million people were victims of identity theft in the United States last year, with the majority of crimes targeting credit cards and bank accounts, the Department of Justice said Sunday.The figure represents 7 percent of the U.S. population aged 16 or older and is a rise of 1 million people from 2012, the last year for which the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics published a similar report.The latest report counts instances where a person experienced misuse of a financial or other account -- not simply a breach of their personal information.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 6 simple tricks for protecting your passwords Just over two in every five cases involved a credit card account and just under two in five involved a bank account.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Silent Circle aims at the enterprise market with Blackphone 2

Silent Circle's second privacy-focused device, the Blackphone 2, is designed to meet the management and security needs of enterprises, while not alienating workers who will end up using it for their personal affairs as well. The phone, launched Monday, integrates with Google's Android for Work program, which allows companies to manage and secure the Android devices of their employees. The phone also works with major device management platforms including those from MobileIron, Citrix, Good and SOTI. One of the most important new features of Blackphone 2 is called Spaces and allows users to create virtual phone environments with different security settings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Keep out ahead of shadow IT

It's time to face a cold, hard fact: The "shadow IT" parade is passing you by, and if you don't get out in front of it and lead it where you want it to go, you might get run over.Gartner projected in 2012 that marketing department spending on IT will surpass IT department spending on IT in the near future. True, that has yet to happen, but the scales keep tipping. Take a hard look at that future: You may not be in it.[ Navigate the modern hiring landscape with InfoWorld's special report, "The care and feeding of a rockstar developer." | Share your tech story and get a $50 American Express gift cheque if published. Send it to [email protected]. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ] Shadow IT has been presented as a new threat to IT departments because of the cloud. Not true -- the cloud has simply made it easier for non-IT personnel to acquire and create their own solutions without waiting for IT's permission. Moreover, the cloud has made this means of technical problem-solving more visible, bringing shadow IT into the light. In fact, Continue reading

Worth Reading: Anycast TCP

But recently, some popular CDNs have also started using anycast for HTTP traffic. This gave us hope, because their TCP connection with end users would last for a similar duration as LinkedIn’s TCP connection to our end users. A Nanog presentation in 2006 claimed that anycast works. So, to validate the assumption that TCP over anycast in the modern internet is no longer a problem, we ran a few synthetic tests. -via catchpoint

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New products of the week 09.28.2015

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.BitbucketKey features: Bitbucket Server (formerly named Stash) is a Git solution for professional teams. New capabilities include Git Mirroring for distributed team members, Large File Storage support and help in organizing complex repository structures. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 09.28.2015

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.BitbucketKey features: Bitbucket Server (formerly named Stash) is a Git solution for professional teams. New capabilities include Git Mirroring for distributed team members, Large File Storage support and help in organizing complex repository structures. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NIST joins fight against cybercrime

The Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is awarding roughly $3.7 million for three pilot projects designed to make online transactions more private and secure. This fourth round of recipients of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) grants will, respectively, pilot technologies designed to safeguard tax returns, secure medical information and protect online storage. The NSTIC, which unites the public and private sectors, launched in 2011. The new grantees are: MorphoTrust USA (Billerica, Mass., $1,005,168)MorphoTrust’s second NSTIC pilot grant will focus on preventing the theft of personal state tax refunds in multiple states. MorphoTrust will leverage trust created during the online driver licensing process, which includes biometrics and more, to build trustworthy electronic IDs. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Learn SDN with Virtual Routers and Switches

Bryan would love to get hands-on SDN experience and sent me this question:

I was recently playing around with Arista vEOS to learn some Arista CLI as well as how it operates with an SDN controller. I was wondering if you know of other free products that are available to help people learn.

Let’s try to do another what-is-out-there survey.

Read more ...

Happy 5th Birthday, CloudFlare!

CloudFlare customers recorded videos to celebrate our first five years

Today is September 27, 2015. It's a rare Super Blood Moon. And it's also CloudFlare's birthday. CloudFlare launched 5 years ago today. It was a Monday. While Michelle, Lee, and I had high expectations, we would never have imagined what's happened since then.

In the last five years we've stopped 7 trillion cyber attacks, saved more than 94,116 years worth of time, and served 99.4 trillion requests — nearly half of those in the last 6 months. You can learn more from this timeline of the last five years.

Celebrating by doing the impossible

CloudFlare's Network in China

Every year we like to celebrate our birthday by giving something seemingly impossible back to our users. Two years ago we enabled on our Automatic IPv6 Gateway, allowing our users to support IPv6 without having to update their own servers. Last year we made Universal SSL support available to all our customers, even those on our free plan. And this year, we announced the expansion across Mainland China, building the first truly global performance and security platform.

Internet Summit & Party

We celebrated in San Francisco last week with CloudFlare's first Internet Summit Continue reading

Could VW scandal lead to open-source software for better automobile cybersecurity?

After Volkswagen used software that manipulated exhaust values and defeated emissions tests, it has affected 11 million VW diesel cars built since 2008. A 2007 letter from VW parts supplier Bosch warned Volkswagen not to use the software for regular operations; in 2011, a Volkswagen technician raised concerns about the illegal practices in connection with the emissions levels.“We should be allowed to know how the things we buy work,” Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and technologist told the New York Times. “Let’s say everybody who bought a Volkswagen were guaranteed the right to read the source code of everything in the car. 99% of the buyers would never read anything, but out of the 11 million people whose car was cheating, one of them would have found it. And Volkswagen would have been caught in 2009, not 2015.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Closing out Projects

We put a lot of energy into new projects. We argue about the design, we plan the cutover, we execute it…and then we move on. But decommissioning the old system is critical part of any project. It’s not over until you’ve switched off the old system.

Years ago I was involved in the buildout of a new network. The new network was a thing of beauty. A clear design, the best equipment, redundant everything. It was replacing a legacy network, one that had grown organically.

The new network was built out. Late one night the key services were cut over, and things were looking good. Everyone was happy, and we had a big party to celebrate. The project group disbanded, and everyone moved on to other things. Since the project was closed out, funding & resources stopped. Success, right?

Except…the old equipment was still running. A handful of applications were left on the old network. Some annoying services used undocumented links between the networks. Even worse, disused WAN links were still in place, and still being billed for.

The problem was that the project was officially ‘over.’ Who’s responsible for finishing off that last bit of cleanup?

I’ve seen similar things in Continue reading

Geek Joke of the Week

When encryption is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir rapelcgvba *.If you don't get it or you have a better joke, drop me a note ... * (mouse over, don't click) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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