Celebrating 25 years of wacky Ig Nobel Prize brilliance

25 years oldEach year since 1991, Improbable Research has highlighted a handful of real researchers whose work might seem goofy on the surface, but often has serious implications. The Ig Nobel prizes are awarded annually at a ceremony at Harvard University shortly before the Nobel prizes are announced. Here’s a look at a winner from each of the past 24 years, with the 2015 prize winners being announced tonight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Malware enables cheating at online poker

Online poker malware lets players cheat by getting a peek at cards held by opponents whose machines have been infected.The Trojan, called Win32/Spy.Odlanor, is typically downloaded by victims because it is disguised as installers or resources such as poker databases and poker calculators, according to the ESET WeLiveSecurity blog.“In other cases, it was loaded onto the victim’s system through various poker-related programs … such as Tournament Shark, Poker Calculator Pro, Smart Buddy, Poker Office, and others,” the blog says.Once installed it grabs screenshots of the PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker clients, letting the attackers see what cards the victim holds. In order to carry out the scam, the cheaters have to find and join the table at which the infected machine is playing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What does a next-generation WAN look like?

After years of sitting in the shadow of virtualization, SaaS, containers, and all the other exciting IT trends, the wide area network is finally getting some attention. These other trends are actually drivers for this change in many cases; while WAN architectures have remained relatively static in recent years, the applications they need to support have changed beyond recognition. This is driving the need to re-think what the WAN looks like and how it operates.The phrase 'next-generation WAN' will mean different things to different enterprises, but let's identify some of the characteristics that are starting to become more common. Some of these are new, but in many cases the next-generation WAN is a new network methodology or mindset. This can impact the technologies used, insourcing/outsourcing decisions, and functionality provided by the network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Breach Presumption: The East-West Data Center Security Problem

A recurring trend in security briefings I've taken over the last year is that breaches are assumed. If you don't assume your infrastructure has been breached, you're ignorant, and probably willfully so. Ostrich, meet sand. A weird response my brain had to this is to ponder that if we've lost the war, why are we still fighting?

Fiber bandits: FBI hunting serial fiber-cutting vandals in California

AT&T recently announced a $250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday. The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014. USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when "someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo," according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fiber bandits: FBI hunting repeated fiber-cutting vandals in California

AT&T recently announced a $250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday. The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014. USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when "someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo," according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The blame pipeline

But in a cross-discipline team, it is the team that is responsible for success or failure. Blame, if any, resides with the team itself and not the people that comprise it. That kind of insulation helps individuals rise above the fear of committing egregious errors and instead embrace the kinds of thinking needed to make new IT happen. via networking nerd

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

The Texas Tribune: Our Docker Journey

written by Daniel Craigmile, System Architect at The Texas Tribune  We’re fans of Docker at The Texas Tribune. We’ve been playing with it since well before the 1.0 release and immediately started incorporating it into our infrastructure when the first production-ready code … Continued

Managing Junos Commit Time

I’ve been working with an ISP that is going to be using a large amount of configuration in the ‘groups’ section.  The statements there will be inherited into the main configuration using the ‘apply-groups’ statement.

This is a clever way of writing commands once and having them apply to multiple parts of the configuration.  At a basic level you could match on interfaces beginning with ‘ge-‘ or ‘xe-‘ and set an MTU on them all using one group statement. This MTU setting would not appear in the main configuration unless the configuration was displayed using “show | display inheritance”. There’s a nice explanation of how groups work over at this Packetpushers blog.

The downside is that if large amounts of configuration work is done in groups, applying the config can become slow during the ‘commit’ process.  

What happens under the hood when the user issues a commit in Junos?  You can see what happens if you issue a ‘commit | display detail’.  There is an example in this KB article.   As you can see there is a lot of parsing for commit-scripts, interface ranges and apply-groups at the start.  The config in these needs to be expanded and incorporated Continue reading

Managing Junos Commit Time

I’ve been working with an ISP that is going to be using a large amount of configuration in the ‘groups’ section.  The statements there will be inherited into the main configuration using the ‘apply-groups’ statement.

This is a clever way of writing commands once and having them apply to multiple parts of the configuration.  At a basic level you could match on interfaces beginning with ‘ge-‘ or ‘xe-‘ and set an MTU on them all using one group statement. This MTU setting would not appear in the main configuration unless the configuration was displayed using “show | display inheritance”. There’s a nice explanation of how groups work over at this Packetpushers blog.

The downside is that if large amounts of configuration work is done in groups, applying the config can become slow during the ‘commit’ process.  

What happens under the hood when the user issues a commit in Junos?  You can see what happens if you issue a ‘commit | display detail’.  There is an example in this KB article.   As you can see there is a lot of parsing for commit-scripts, interface ranges and apply-groups at the start.  The config in these needs to be expanded and incorporated Continue reading

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