FCC to probe Verizon, AT&T over contract lock-in

The FCC announced late last week that it would investigate Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink and Frontier over highly strict service terms in wireline business service contracts, which critics say lock customers into their deals unfairly.The commission is particularly focused on the special access market, which encompasses the legacy copper links that make up part of the fabric of U.S. Internet service. The large incumbent providers under investigation control a lot of these special access links, and their competitors have been claiming for years that they’ve leveraged these localized monopolies to keep customers from jumping ship.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: IoT standards groups get ready to rumble at CES + Google to enterprises: Ditch your Microsoft contract early for us +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open Networking Needs to Be Interchangeable

OpenBuildingBlocks

We’re coming up quickly on the fall meeting of the Open Networking User Group, which is a time for many of the members of the financial community to debate the needs of modern networking and provide a roadmap and use case set for networking vendors to follow for in the coming months. ONUG provides what some technology desperately needs – a solution to which it can be applied.

Open Or Something Like It

We’ve already started to see the same kind of non-open solution building that plagued the early network years creeping into some aspects of our new “open” systems. Rather than building on what we consider to be tried-and-true building blocks, we instead come to proprietary solutions that promise “magic” when it comes to configuration and maintenance. Should your network provide the magic? Or is that your job?

Magical is what the network should look like to a user, not to the admins. Think about the networking in cloud providers like AWS and MS Azure. The networking there is a very simple model that hides complexity. The average consumer of AWS services doesn’t need to know the specifics of configuration in the underlay of Amazon’s labyrinth of the Continue reading

Irish privacy watchdog to investigate Facebook over spying allegations

The Irish Data Protection Commissioner has agreed to investigate allegations that Facebook exposes its users' personal data to mass snooping by U.S. intelligence services, following a ruling of the High Court of Ireland on Tuesday.Austrian Facebook user Maximilian Schrems filed a complaint with the DPC in 2013, in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance system.The DPC initially dismissed the complaint as "frivolous," a decision Schrems went on to challenge in the Irish high court.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

My Son’s birthday.60% discount on the CCDE preparation bundle for the first 20 people !

Today is my son’s birthday. So I decided to give 60% discount on my CCDE preparation resources bundle for the first 20 people which will be first come first serve basis and this offer stands good till end of 23th of October. This is the ultimate resource for those who study Cisco Certified Design Expert certification. Earlier… Read More »

The post My Son’s birthday.60% discount on the CCDE preparation bundle for the first 20 people ! appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

Why Would You Want to Attend a Classroom Workshop?

One of my regular subscribers wondered whether it makes sense to attend a live workshop (like the one we’re running in Miami in a few weeks) instead of listening to my webinars:

I am following your blog posts quite regularly, I’ve been a yearly subscriber for more than 3 years now and I’m even trying to attend as many webinars as I can in real time. Is there a real benefit to participate in this classroom event if we are almost aware of all your slide decks and videos?

Absolutely. Here’s what one of the attendees of a recent SDN workshop wrote when asking me whether I would be willing to do an on-site event for his company:

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Is it still possible to do phone phreaking? Yes, with Android on LTE

In the 1960s and 70s, technically savvy enthusiasts sought to game telecommunications systems to make free calls, keeping telecom engineers on their toes.That practice, known as phreaking, involved such luminaries as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and John Draper, known as Cap'n Crunch, who used a whistle from a cereal box to meddle with AT&T's long-distance trunk lines.These days, mobile operators have fully embraced the Internet and are increasingly moving voice calls over fast, packet-switched networks, known as Voice over LTE (Long Term Evolution). The advantage is higher-quality voice calls for subscribers and lower costs for operators.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cyber insurers could help drive IoT standards

Cyber insurance premiums could prove a big driver of Internet of Things standards. Machine-to-machine communication has grown up in separate silos for every industry, but as it expands in the coming years as part of the broader Internet of Things wave, standards could save a lot of cost and effort, speakers at a networking conference said Monday.  Having a common approach that works can save IoT vendors from having to reinvent the wheel, said Jim Zerbe, head of IoT product at Neustar, a real-time information services and analytics company. Security is one place that's needed, he said. For a long time, machine-to-machine security has relied on industry-specific technologies and "security through obscurity," resulting in easily hackable systems. Standard, open technologies across industries can attract armies of developers to build strong defenses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Crypto researchers: Time to use something better than 1024-bit encryption

It’s actually possible for entities with vast computing resources – such as the NSA and major national governments - to compromise commonly used Diffie-Hellman key exchange groups, so it’s time for businesses to switch to something else like elliptic curve cryptography, researchers say.“It’s been recommended to move from 1024-bit [encryption] for a long time, and now there are very concrete risks of not doing that,” says Nadia Heninger, an assistant professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who is an author of a paper titled “Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice”.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DEF CON drink-off — for science!

The DEF CON hacking conference is a mixture of techies and drinkers. I propose we exploit this for science. Specifically, we should take a look at vodka. Vodka is just ethanol and water with all taste removed by distillation and filtering. We can answer two important questions.

  1. Poorly made, cheap vodka lets too much of the (bad) flavor through. Can this be improved by running it through a filter? (Such as a cheap Brita water filter).
  2. Well-made vodka should be indistinguishable from each other. Can people really taste the difference? Or are they influenced by brands?

We need to science the shit out of these questions with a double-blind taste test. DEF CON is a perfect venue for getting a statistically relevant number of samples. We should setup a table in a high-traffic area. We'll ask passersby to taste a flight of several vodkas and to rate them.

I suggest the following as the set of vodkas to test.

1. Smirnoff, by far the market leading vodka in America, a "mid-shelf" vodka at $22 for a 1.75 liter bottle.
2. Grey Goose, the third most popular vodka in America, a "top-shelf" vodka for $58 a 1.75 liter bottle.
Continue reading

Tricky new malware replaces your entire browser with a dangerous Chrome lookalike

Security researchers have discovered a fiendish form of browser malware that stands in for your copy of Google Chrome and hopes you won’t notice the difference.As reported by PCRisk, the “eFast Browser” works by installing and running itself in place of Chrome. It’s based on Google’s Chromium open-source software, so it maintains the look and feel of Chrome at first glance, but its behavior is much worse.First, makes itself the default and takes over several system file associations, including HTML, JPG, PDF, and GIF, according to MalwareBytes. It also hijacks URL associations such as HTTP, HTTPS, and MAILTO, and replaces any Chrome desktop website shortcuts with its own versions. Essentially, eFast Browser makes sure to open itself at any opportunity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Robots that make mistakes may be more useful, study says

Robots will have to be flawed if they are to create successful working relationships with humans, new research has found."Judgmental mistakes, wrong assumptions, expressing tiredness or boredom, or getting overexcited," will help humans "understand, relate to and interact" with robots more easily, Mriganka Biswas of the University of Lincoln in Britain says in an article on the university's website.Biswas has been conducting a study for a PhD on how humans interact with robots. Supporting caregivers Robots are increasingly being used to support caregivers, the article says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Target’s newest security problem: Pranksters taking over PA to blast X-rated audio

Back in September, Brian Krebs reported on a confidential Verizon security assessment of Target’s network done shortly after the company was breached in 2013; Verizon consultants found Target was using weak or default passwords, had failed to deploy critical security patches, were running outdated services and other basic security problems. Target is having trouble again, but this time it’s with pranksters “exploiting holes” in Target’s PA system. It could have been done as an early Halloween prank, except this wasn’t the first time X-rated audio has blasted from a Target store’s PA system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy watchdogs give EU, US three months to negotiate new Safe Harbor deal

European data protection authorities have given the European Commission and national governments three months to come up with an alternative to the Safe Harbor agreement swept away two weeks ago by a ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union.But any new agreement must protect the personal data of European citizens from massive and indiscriminate surveillance, which is incompatible with EU law, the data protection authorities making up the Article 29 Working Party said late Friday.Since the CJEU ruled on Oct. 6 that the Safe Harbor agreement between the Commission and U.S. authorities did not offer necessary legal guarantees, businesses that relied on it for the transfer of their customers' or employees' private personal information from the EU to the U.S. have been doing so in something of a legal vacuum.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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