Tor Messenger: Anonymous instant messaging beta released

Anyone who values their privacy will be aware of Tor, the distributed “onion routing” network that makes it possible to avoid surveillance (though it is thought that even the sophistication of the Tor system may not be enough to avoid NSA scrutiny if they really want to get the login for your Ashley Madison account). While Tor is great for hiding your browsing until now, it hasn’t been able to anonymize instant messaging. That changed yesterday with the beta release of the open source Tor Messenger. Available for Windows, Linux, and OS X the Tor Messenger:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yes, the CNBC moderation was biased

In anger over CNBC's left-wing bias, the Republican party has suspended them from moderating future debates. Is there something to this?

Yes and no. CNBC, like most of the media, has a strong left-wing bias. On the other hand, the Republicans are quick to label legitimate criticism as examples of bias.


There is an easy way to detect improper bias. The principle of journalism is that there are two reasonable sides to any debate. One side may be wrong, of course, but both sides are reasonable. Partisan bias, however, involves arguing that one side in the debate is unreasonable. When the press calls somebody a "comic book clown", then it's bias. Merely saying they are "wrong" is not bias.

That's what happened many times during the CNBC moderated debate of Republican candidates, most egregiously when they called Trump a "comic book" version of a candidate. We all know that Trump is a demagogue, that he appeals to the ignorant masses more than intelligent people. But when you drill down on Trumps ideas, what you'll find is that he's usually merely wrong rather than irrational. For example, a couple months ago, Trump was attacked in the press for saying "the constitution Continue reading

10 use cases where NoSQL will outperform SQL

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Once only used by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook, many industries are now adopting NoSQL database technology for crucial business applications, replacing their relational database deployments to gain flexibility and scalability. Here are 10 enterprise use cases best addressed by NoSQL:

* Personalization. A personalized experience requires data, and lots of it – demographic, contextual, behavioral and more. The more data available, the more personalized the experience. However, relational databases are overwhelmed by the volume of data required for personalization. In contrast, a distributed NoSQL database can scale elastically to meet the most demanding workloads and build and update visitor profiles on the fly, delivering the low latency required for real-time engagement with your customers.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Good news for hackers: People still plug found USB sticks into their computers

Of 200 USB sticks distributed at public places in Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., earlier this year, 17 percent wound up plugged into computers – some of them by IT pros - where they could have done all sorts of damage had they been loaded with malware.Not only were they plugged in, the finders followed instructions on them to email a specified address and include what they did for a living, according to a study by the IT industry association CompTIA.MORE: Sorriest network companies of 2015To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—Don’t Let Scalability Spook You

Last week, our director of product marketing, Bob Noel, penned a blog post that identified the five new networking requirements being driven by IoT and Big Data. This week, we are shining the spotlight on one of the third era of IT requirements Bob highlighted – scalability. In today’s dynamic application environments, the ability to scale gracefully to be able to handle distributed applications is critical. The network must be scaled to match demand, but the challenge (and a pain point for many) is how. Traditional “scale up” techniques were about replacing outgrown processing and storage capacity with bigger boxes and migrating data onto the new platform. Now, as the environment grows, more physical devices will be connected to the network. Providers need to think beyond adding capacity through bigger pipes and consider how to support a rapidly growing number of storage and compute nodes. It can be spooky thing to consider, but at Plexxi we make scaling your network to meet Third Era demands a treat, not a trick.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Happy Halloween!

Enterprise Networking Planet: Better Networking Through the API
By Arthur Cole
Continue reading

Black Friday, er, Black November tech deals include cheap iPads, free shipping

Online tech retailer Newegg isn’t messing around with just Black Friday anymore. It’s calling all of next month Black November as it gears up for holiday sales in what’s looking to be another all-out battle for techies’ wallets.Newegg hasn’t released specific sale information yet, but has outlined plans to kick off deals on more than 900 products Nov. 1-3, gaming bargains Nov. 4-9, a Black Friday preview sale Nov. 10-26, big savings on Black Friday (Nov. 27) itself, and then of course some more deals on Cyber Monday. More and more, we’re seeing retailers describing their holiday sales plans, in a less than detailed manner, with promises of specifics on dates to come.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Book Review: ‘The Peripheral’ By William Gibson

William Gibson is working at the height of his abilities in The Peripheral. Characters move back and forth between near present-day and an unusual post-apocalyptic future, and the book blends high-tech, visionary showpieces with themes of class, opportunity, and economic injustice.

The post Book Review: ‘The Peripheral’ By William Gibson appeared first on Packet Pushers.

All CoinVault and Bitcryptor ransomware victims can now recover their files for free

If your computer was infected with the CoinVault or Bitcryptor ransomware programs you're in luck -- at least compared to other ransomware victims. Chances are high that you can now recover your encrypted files for free, if you still have them.Researchers from Kaspersky Lab and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service have obtained the last set of encryption keys from command-and-control servers that were used by CoinVault and Bitcryptor, two related ransomware threats.Those keys have been uploaded to Kaspersky's ransomware decryptor service that was originally set up in April with a set of around 750 keys recovered from servers hosted in the Netherlands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA: “Great Pumpkin” asteroid to zip by Earth on Halloween

NASA says the Halloween flyby of a 1,300-foot-wide asteroid will offer professional and non-skilled sky watchers an up-close – by celestial criteria – look at a pretty large piece of space rubble.+More on Network World: How to protect Earth from asteroid destruction+The asteroid, 2015 TB145 will fly past Earth at a safe distance slightly farther than the moon's orbit on Oct. 31 at 10:01 a.m. PDT (1:01 p.m. EDT). According to the catalog of near-Earth objects (NEOs) kept by the Minor Planet Center, this is the closest currently known approach by an object this large until asteroid 1999 AN10, at about 2,600 feet in size, approaches at about 1 lunar distance (238,000 miles from Earth) in August 2027, NASA stated in a release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 30th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


Movie goers Force Crashed websites with record ticket presales. Yoda commented: Do. Or do not. There is no try.
  • $51.5 billion: Apple quarterly revenue; 1,481: distance in light years of a potential Dyson Sphere; $470 billion: size of insurance industry data play; 31,257: computer related documents in a scanned library; $1.2B: dollars lost to business email scams; 46 billion: pixels in largest astronomical image; 27: seconds of distraction after doing anything interesting in a car; 10 billion: transistor SPARC M7 chip; 10K: cost to get a pound in to low earth orbit; $8.2 billion: Microsoft cloud revenue; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @jasongorman: A $trillion industry has been built on the very lucky fact that Tim Berners-Lee never thought "how do I monetise this?"
    • Cade Metz: Sure, the app [WhatsApp] was simple. But it met a real need. And it could serve as a platform for building all sorts of other simple services in places where wireless bandwidth is limited but people are hungry for the sort of instant communication we take for granted here in the US.
    • Adrian Hanft: Brand experts insist that success comes from promoting your Continue reading

Is DDoS Mitigation as-a-Service becoming a defacto offering for providers?

Republished from Corero DDoS Blog 

It’s well known in the industry that DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent and increasingly debilitating, turning DDoS mitigation into a mission critical initiative. From the largest of carriers to small and mid-level enterprises, more and more Internet connected businesses are becoming a target of DDoS attacks. What was once a problem that only a select few dealt with is now becoming a regularly occurring burden faced by network operators.

In my daily engagements with various customers of all shapes and sizes, it’s truly interesting to see how the approach to DDoS mitigation is changing. Much of this is the result of DDoS mitigation services shifting from a “nice to have” technology to a “must-have”, essential in order to maintain business continuity and availability.

When I built DDoS mitigation and detection services for Verizon back in 2004, the intent was to offer value-add revenue producing services to offer subscribers, in an effort to build out our security offerings. For many years, this concept was one that pretty much every provider I worked with was looking into; build a service with the intent of generating new revenue opportunity from customers when traditional avenues such as Continue reading

Cisco’s Lancope acquisition aims to improve network security from the inside out

Enterprise IT has gone through many major shifts over the past several decades. The industry currently sits in the midst of another major transformation as more and more businesses are striving to become digital organizations. The building blocks of the digital era are technologies like cloud computing, mobility, virtualization, and software defined networking, which are significantly different than legacy technologies.But what about security? In addition to new IT tools and processes, businesses need to think about how to secure the digital enterprise. While the technologies listed above allow us to work and serve customers in ways we never could before, they also create new security vulnerabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

1 … 3,277 3,278 3,279 3,280 3,281 … 3,854