Technology Short Take #56

Welcome to Technology Short Take #56! In this post, I’ve collected a few links on various data center technologies, news, events, and trends. I hope you find something useful here.

Networking

IDG Contributor Network: This software engineering school uses blockchain technology to authenticate its graduates

Holberton School is a project-based alternative to college for the next generation of software engineers. Using project-based learning and peer learning, Holberton School's mission is to train the best software engineers of their generation. Unlike the normal models, at Holberton School, there are no formal teachers and no formal courses. Instead, everything is project-centered. The school gives students increasingly difficult programming challenges to solve, with minimal initial directions on how to solve them. As a consequence, students naturally look for the theory and tools they need, understand them, use them, work together, and help each other.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NIST publishes guidelines for SSH key management: What happens next?

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.

Secure Shell (SSH) is a tool for secure computer system management, file transfers and automation in computer and telecommunications systems. The Secure Shell protocol ships standard with every Unix, Linux and Mac system and is also widely used on Windows (Microsoft has announced plans to make it a standard component of Windows). It is also included on practically every router and mobile network base station. In many ways, the connected world as we know it runs on Secure Shell. Its keys are ubiquitously used for automating access over a network, and modern systems could not be cost-effectively managed without it.

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

IDG Contributor Network: How wireless providers are quietly cashing in on your location data

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are partnering with Big Data marketers and are actively selling, or at least getting ready to sell, data that connects consumer demographics with locations, according to an article in Advertising Age.The data lists phone subscriber location along with websites visited on mobile browsers, neighborhoods where subscribers go, and so on.Telco data-as-service This kind of telco data-as-service (TDaaS) business is currently worth $24 billion a year and will be a $79 billion business by 2020, according to 451 Research, whose numbers are quoted in the Ad Age article.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How the Internet responded to the Paris terror attacks

SolidarityImage by REUTERS/Philippe WojazerIn the hours and days following the tragic terror attacks in Paris, the Internet became a primary vehicle for not only disseminating information but also for individuals and companies to show their solidarity with the French. Check out the various ways the Internet responded to the French terror attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Anonymous just might make all the difference in attacking ISIS

In the wake of the horrific attacks in Paris, military operations against ISIS terrorist strongholds have increased. When someone hits you, it’s natural to hit back. But can you win by killing an enemy that seeks death — and when those who are killed inspire desperate others to replace them?Along with the news that the French had launched air strikes against ISIS positions came the word that the cyber-revenge group calling itself Anonymous has declared war on ISIS. I never thought I would say this, but Anonymous might be our savior. Attacking ISIS militarily is necessary, but the group has always exerted its influence through social media, using it for both fundraising and recruitment. Both activities are essential to ISIS’ continuing existence and effectiveness. The weaponry it uses in its terror campaign is expensive, and when every successful operation ends in death or the arrest of all participants, recruitment is critical.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alternative processors tapped to fulfill supercomputing’s need for speed

As world powers compete to build the fastest supercomputers, more attention is being paid to alternative processing technologies as a way to add more horsepower to such systems.One thing is clear: It is becoming prohibitive to build blazing CPU-only supercomputers, due to power and space constraints. That's where powerful coprocessors step in -- the processors work in conjuction with CPUs to conduct complex calculations in a power-efficient manner. Coprocessors are an important topic at this week's Supercomputing 15 conference in Austin, Texas. According to the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers, released on Monday, 104 systems used coprocessors, growing from 90 systems in a list released in July.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Containers get a fresh business boost from Hewlett Packard Enterprise

It would be difficult to overstate the impact container technology is having on the software-development world, so it's no wonder vendors large and small are jumping on board with tailored offerings. The latest example: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which just rolled out an entire portfolio of Docker-focused products.Making containers enterprise-ready will be a key focus over the next two years, according to Dave Bartoletti, a principal analyst with Forrester."Large users will need the same degree of control over containers that they now have over virtual machines: they need to integrate them into their development processes, monitor them, configure them, connect them to each other over the network, and assign storage and other resources," he pointed out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Police body cameras came preloaded with Conflickr

Although Conficker is old, it’s still around as cleaning up botnets takes years to complete. In a new twist, iPower Technologies reported receiving multiple police body cams that came preloaded with the Conficker worm.The body cams were Martel Electronics Frontline Cameras with GPS, which are “sold and marketed as a body camera for official police department use.” Martel said of its “elite video cameras” meant for police departments:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Millions of sensitive records exposed by mobile apps leaking back-end credentials

Thousands of mobile applications, including popular ones, implement cloud-based, back-end services in a way that lets anyone access millions of sensitive records created by users, according to a recent study.The analysis was performed by researchers from the Technical University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology in Darmstadt, Germany, and the results were presented Friday at the Black Hat Europe security conference in Amsterdam. It targeted applications that use Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) frameworks from providers like Facebook-owned Parse, CloudMine or Amazon Web Services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How ISIS could use video games, messaging apps to evade surveillance

A new report sheds some light on how terrorists, particularly those with the Islamic State (ISIS) involved in last week's deadly attacks in Paris, manage to communicate in an age when most communications tools are susceptible to government surveillance.The most interesting is how the group can use video game platforms, specifically Sony's PlayStation 4, to relay messages between members. A Buzzfeed News report quoted Belgium's federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon, who had explained at an event prior to the Paris attacks that communications on a device like the PlayStation 4 could be more difficult to monitor than those on encrypted messaging apps, such as WhatsApp.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

9ish Low Latency Strategies for SaaS Companies

Achieving very low latencies takes special engineering, but if you are a SaaS company latencies of a few hundred milliseconds are possible for complex business logic using standard technologies like load balancers, queues, JVMs, and rest APIs.

Itai Frenkel, a software engineer at Forter, which provides a Fraud Prevention Decision as a Service, shows how in an excellent article: 9.5 Low Latency Decision as a Service Design Patterns.

While any article on latency will have some familiar suggestions, Itai goes into some new territory you can really learn from. The full article is rich with detail, so you'll want to read it, but here's a short gloss:

Country wide outage in Azerbaijan

AZoutageIt doesn’t happen often that a country with hundreds of prefixes is affected by a massive outage, however earlier today this unfortunately happened to Azerbaijan. Starting at 12:04 UTC approximately 94% of the prefixes out of Azerbaijan became unreachable.  At the time of writing the outage is still active.
The event was reported on @bgpstream and details plus a replay can be found here: https://bgpstream.com/event/7981

The image below shows the impact on traffic from Azerbaijan to OpenDNS. It’s clear that almost all of the traffic from Azerbaijan disappeared at the time of outage.

Traffic from Azerbaijan

Traffic from Azerbaijan

The main Internet Service provider in Azerbaijan is AS29049, Delta Telecom Ltd. The majority of the country relies on Delta Telecom for connectivity to the rest of the Internet.  The outage is reportedly the result of a fire damaging the equipment of Delta Telecom. As a result all routes for AS29049, Delta Telecom Ltd. and all of the networks that rely on Delta Telecom disappeared from the Internet.

The graph below shows the number of prefixes observed in the BGP routing tables for Azerbaijan. Clearly visible is the drop in reachable networks starting at 12:04.

Visisble BGP prefixes for Azerbaijan

Visible BGP prefixes for Azerbaijan

Networks out of Continue reading

Intel’s fastest chip ever will appear in supercomputers next year

There's been a slight delay, but the latest version of Intel's fastest processor ever will finally reach supercomputers early next year.The Xeon Phi chip, code-named Knights Landing, offers an array of new technologies that collectively deliver performance breakthroughs. The chip is also a springboard for new memory, I/O and storage technologies destined to reach desktops and laptops in the coming years.Intel didn't provide details on the first supercomputers with Knights Landing. The U.S. Department of Energy, however, said that the chip will be used in Cori, a 9,300-core supercomputer that will be deployed in the latter half of 2016 at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, California.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ted Koppel discusses the inevitable cyberattack on U.S. infrastructure

Ted Koppel, anchor of ABC TV’s “Nightline” for 25 years, from 1980-2005, is the author of “Lights Out,” which argues that not only is the nation’s critical infrastructure at grave risk of a catastrophic cyber attack that could leave as much as a third of the nation without electricity for months or even a year, but that there is no government plan to respond to such an attack.[ ALSO ON CSO: Read our review of the book and if the industry agrees with Koppel ]Koppel spoke briefly with CSO earlier last week about those issues:What kind of feedback on your book are you getting from information security professionals? Do they think you’ve overstated the risk or not?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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