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The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, May 4

Facebook opens Internet.org platform to (almost) any content serviceStung by criticism that its Internet.org platform is a closed-off, private web masquerading as a philanthropic effort to bridge the digital divide, Facebook is opening the service to developers who meet its technical guidelines. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video that although the company started with just a few content partners, “we’ll work with anyone who wants to join us.” Facebook posted a version of the video subtitled in Hindi, aiming to reach its audience in India where the company was seen by some as trampling principles of net neutrality with Internet.org.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber’s China business could face more regulatory trouble, following police raid

Facing little work in his regular construction job, Li Gengming has become a big supporter of Uber Technologies in China.He is just one several private drivers who have signed up with the ride-hailing service in Beijing. Each day, Li picks up around 7 or 8 customers, taking about 200 yuan (US$32) from the rides altogether.“There are not enough taxis in the city, so there’s demand,” he said on Monday. “Uber is also much cheaper than taxis.”In China, however, not everyone is a fan of the service. Last Thursday, police reportedly raided Uber’s office in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, for letting private drivers operate without the needed qualifications, according to local media reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber’s China business could face more regulatory trouble, following police raid

New products of the week 05.04.15

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.CudaSign for SharePointKey features – CudaSign for Sharepoint speeds up and optimizes workflows by sending documents directly from Sharepoint to your CudaSign account without the need to download files or log into CudaSign. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 05.04.15

IPv4 Address Transfer Prices Down?

Last year I wrote about the IPv4 Address Transfer Process. Recently I was involved in another IPv4 transfer. I was surprised to see that IPv4 prices have fallen in the last year. I have done some rudimentary analysis of the APNIC transfer statistics to try to figure out why.

APNIC publishes statistics on transfers at ftp.apnic.net/public/transfers/apnic. These text files list all resource transfers that have taken place – the to & from organisation, the resource type, the date, etc. I am very interested in looking at the trends. How many transactions take place each month, and how many addresses are being transferred?

I wrote a simple Python script to do this analysis for me. It retrieves the latest statistics, and converts them into a Google chart:

(If you’re reading this via RSS, and the chart doesn’t display, you may need to click here to see the web version).

Note this does not do live updates. It is a point in time, generated using the current data at the time the script is run. If you would like to update the code to do live updates, fork it from Github here. I’d also love to update the script to Continue reading

Imagine an Android/Microsoft Franken-phone

Franken-phoneWhen it was reported that Microsoft might invest in CyanogenMod, the mobile OS built on the open-source release of the Android codebase, speculation arose as to why. Although eventually Microsoft decided not to contribute to Cyanogen, it got us thinking: What if Microsoft or someone else created a smartphone running CyanogenMod, and it had no apps by Google. Instead, it was preloaded with Microsoft equivalents. Could such a Microsoft-dominant Android smartphone be viable? Technically, we would have to say, yes. Here, we compare how Microsoft’s apps would fare as replacements for their Google counterparts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US reviews use of cellphone spying technology

Faced with criticism from lawmakers and civil rights groups, the U.S. Department of Justice has begun a review of the secretive use of cellphone surveillance technology that mimics cellphone towers, and will get more open on its use, according to a newspaper report.The cell-site simulators, also referred to by other names such as “IMSI catchers” or Stingrays, operate by fooling mobile phones into believing that they are communicating with a legitimate cellphone tower, while harvesting data from the phone including its identity, location, metadata and even content of phone transmissions, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.One of the complaints of civil rights groups is that even when targeting a single phone, the technology can collect data on other phones in the area that connect to the simulator, raising privacy issues.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Replacing Central Router with a Next-Generation Firewall?

One of my readers sent me this question:

After reading this blog post and a lot of blog posts about zero trust mode versus security zones, what do you think about replacing L3 Data Center core switches by High Speed Next Generation Firewalls?

Long story short: just because someone writes about an idea doesn’t mean it makes sense. Some things are better left in PowerPoint.

HP promises warranty on overclocked desktops popular with gamers

Gamers will be able to overclock and add more horsepower to HP’s signature gaming desktop without worrying about invalidating their warranties.The Envy Phoenix Desktop is among a number of newly redesigned desktops announced by HP on Monday. The towers have a premium look with an aluminum finish on the chassis, where HP had previously used plastic.For the first time, HP is offering Intel Core i5 and i7 chips that can be overclocked with its top-line Envy Phoenix desktop PC. That means gamers can increase computer performance by raising the CPU clock speed, which can be handy when running demanding games. These chips are often incorporated into home-built PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Walking with Packets: Traceroute Through MPLS Cloud

Think about this for a minute: An MPLS network with a two Provider Edge (PE) routers and some Provider (P) routers. The P routers have no VRFs configured on them and therefore have no routes whatsoever for any of the customer networks. A customer then does a traceroute from one of their sites, across the MPLS cloud, and into one of their other sites. The traceroute output shows the P routers as hops along the path.

How is it possible for the P routers to reply to the traceroute if they don't have routes back to the customer network?

iPhone 7 rumor rollup: Double cameras and Tattoo phobia

Terry Johnston/Flickr Just as I was deciding between going with an Apple Watch tattoo or one of the old Fantasy Island TV show star Tattoo on my wrist, comes confirmation from Apple that ink on your wrist indeed can much up heart rate readings on your new Apple timepiece. Oh well, back to the iPhone 7 rumor rollup for me...To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 rumor rollup: Double cameras and Tattoo phobia

Decapsulation ERSPAN Traffic With Open Source Tools

Cisco Encapsulated Remote SPAN (ERSPAN) feature allows to monitor traffic on one or more ports and send the monitored traffic to one or

Decapsulation ERSPAN Traffic With Open Source Tools

Cisco Encapsulated Remote SPAN (ERSPAN) feature allows to monitor traffic on one or more ports and send the monitored traffic to one or more destination ports. Traffic is encapsulated into GRE tunnel and routed via network to ERSPAN destination. Any device that supports ERSPAN can be used as ERSPAN destination. It might be another Cisco device or Linux with installed software that can decapsulate GRE traffic.

The goal of this article is to show methods and tools for decapsulation of ERSPAN traffic. For this purpose I have built simple lab that consists of a Cisco CSR 1000v router and two Linux boxes. Core Linux represents a network host and generates network traffic (ICMP) that is going to be monitored. It is connected to the port GigabitEthernet1 of the Cisco router. The router is configured to monitor traffic on the port Gi1 and it sends traffic encapsulated in GRE tunneling protocol to IP address 10.230.10.1. It is the IP address of the ERSPAN destination configured on Linux Security Union. Security Onion is a unique Linux distro for intrusion detection, network security monitoring, and log management based on Ubuntu however any other Linux distro can be used.

Picture 1 - ERSPAN Lab Topology

Below is an example of ERSPAN Continue reading

MPLS VPN

Thought I would put this on here, makes use of an MPLS backbone which allows for multiple VRF's to exist.Original blog post which covers

50 000 Page views of orhanergun.net between March-May 2015

This blog received 50 000 page views between 1 of March and 1 th of May.I shared you couple more metrics from the site stats in addition to Pageviews. Since at the same time two classes I teach ( Pre-CCDE and CCDE ) in addition to my other jobs, I couldn’t update the blog since… Read More »

The post 50 000 Page views of orhanergun.net between March-May 2015 appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

LIFTTT gives IFTTT location-awesomeness

In my last article I mentioned If This Then That, a service I covered over a year ago. If you’ve used IFTTT you can skip to the next paragraph … IFTTT is a service that connects other services together allowing you to define triggers (“If This”) and actions (“Then That”) so you can do things that would otherwise require a lot of programming and, most likely as a consequence, a lot of swearing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Misfit Shine: The best fitness tracker

Want to track your health? You need to get the right gear to do this and a product I’ve been testing, the Misfit Shine, offers an outstanding combination of pricing, functionality, and ease-of-use.With the explosion of digital health monitoring products, the “quantified self” movement has moved away from its bio-hacker roots into the mainstream and Apple’s recent release of Health with iOS 8 underlined this change. And this brings up to the three issues that have, to date, limited who can use the tech:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quick tool: NetSetMan

I work as a consultant for many clients, often jumping from different networks. Management networks sometimes don’t have a DHCP server, in some networks I have a special IP address assigned to access some devices, in other networks I need…