The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, July 22

Carmakers emerge winners in the bidding for Nokia HereNokia’s much-sought-after mapping assets, called Here, have apparently been won by a coalition of carmakers. Audi, BMW and Daimler will jointly purchase Nokia’s Here digital mapping service for roughly $2.7 billion, and they plan to invite other auto makers to take a stake in the company as well, multiple reports said on Tuesday. Uber reportedly dropped out of the bidding several weeks ago.Senators propose bill to establish cyber security standard for carsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Online ad industry tries to stamp out click fraud

The online advertising industry is marshaling a fresh effort to fight click fraud, which steals money from advertisers and undermines faith in online campaigns.The latest effort is focused on automated traffic caused by bots from within data centers that is intended to trigger ad impressions, according to the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), an industry body.TAG is going to initially use a blacklist maintained by Google that lists suspicious IP addresses of computers in data centers that may be trying to replicate human clicks on advertisements. Ad-focused technology companies, including Facebook and Yahoo, will also contribute.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

White box Internet router PoC

SDN router using merchant silicon top of rack switch describes how the performance of a software Internet router could be accelerated using the hardware routing capabilities of a commodity switch. This article describes a proof of concept demonstration using Linux virtual machines and a bare metal switch running Cumulus Linux.
The diagram shows the demo setup, providing inter-domain routing between Peer 1 and Peer 2. The Peers are directly connected to the Hardware Switch and ingress packets are routed by the default (0.0.0.0/0) route to the Software Router. The Software Router learns the full set of routes from the Peers using BGP and forwards the packet to the correct next hop router. The packet is then switched to the selected peer router via bridge br_xen.

The following traceroute run on Peer 1 shows the set of router hops from 192.168.250.1 to 192.168.251.1
[root@peer1 ~]# traceroute -s 192.168.250.1 192.168.251.1
traceroute to 192.168.251.1 (192.168.251.1), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  192.168.152.2 (192.168.152.2)  3.090 ms  3.014 ms  2.927 ms
 2  192.168. Continue reading

AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV appears headed for approval with conditions

AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV appears headed for approval, with Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission circulating to commissioners an order recommending approval, although with some conditions.The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division also announced Tuesday that it will close its investigation into the around US$48 billion deal.Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer of the Antitrust Division said in a statement that the division had concluded that the combination of AT&T’s land-based Internet and video business with DirecTV’s satellite-based video business does not pose a significant risk to competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV appears headed for approval with conditions

AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV appears headed for approval, with Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission circulating to commissioners an order recommending approval, although with some conditions.The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division also announced Tuesday that it will close its investigation into the around US$48 billion deal.Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer of the Antitrust Division said in a statement that the division had concluded that the combination of AT&T’s land-based Internet and video business with DirecTV’s satellite-based video business does not pose a significant risk to competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New York judge rules against Facebook in search warrant case

A New York judge ruled Tuesday that Facebook has no legal standing to challenge the constitutionality of search warrants served on its users, highlighting the limits to online companies’ abilities to protect user privacy.Last year, Facebook appealed a court decision requiring it to hand over data, including photos and private messages, relating to 381 user accounts. The data was sought as part of an investigation by the New York County District Attorney’s office into a disability fraud case.Other companies including Google and Microsoft filed briefs supporting Facebook’s move, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Importance of BGP NEXT_HOP in L3VPNs

In an MPLS network with L3VPNs, it's very easy for the NEXT_HOP attribute of a VPN route to look absolutely correct but be very wrong at the same time. In a vanilla IP network, the NEXT_HOP can point to any IP address that gets the packets moving in the right direction towards the ultimate destination. In an MPLS network, the NEXT_HOP must get the packets moving in the right direction but it must also point to the exact right address in order for traffic to successfully reach the destination.

Five arrested in JPMorgan hacking case

U.S law enforcement officials have arrested five individuals who reportedly were involved in the high-profile 2014 computer hacking of JPMorgan.Three of the individuals were arrested for stock manipulation while the other two were arrested for running an illegal Bitcoin exchange, according to the FBI.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In Q2, Yahoo spent a pretty penny to achieve unusual growth

Yahoo reported on Tuesday an uncharacteristic rise in revenue for the second quarter, but it came with a hefty sum spent on boosting its search traffic.Total sales for the period ending June 30 were US$1.24 billion, up 15 percent from the previous year. In the company’s announcement, CEO Marissa Mayer called it the most substantial growth in revenue in nearly nine years.Yahoo’s revenue from search ads and display ads both grew, at rates of 22 percent and 15 percent, respectively.It would appear that Mayer’s efforts to turn around the struggling Internet portal have begun to pay off. Yahoo has struggled in recent years to grow its ad sales and attract users to its various online properties.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In Q2, Yahoo spent a pretty penny to achieve unusual growth

Yahoo reported on Tuesday an uncharacteristic rise in revenue for the second quarter, but it came with a hefty sum spent on boosting its search traffic.Total sales for the period ending June 30 were US$1.24 billion, up 15 percent from the previous year. In the company’s announcement, CEO Marissa Mayer called it the most substantial growth in revenue in nearly nine years.Yahoo’s revenue from search ads and display ads both grew, at rates of 22 percent and 15 percent, respectively.It would appear that Mayer’s efforts to turn around the struggling Internet portal have begun to pay off. Yahoo has struggled in recent years to grow its ad sales and attract users to its various online properties.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

To Cisco-backed Sensity, lights are just IoT waiting to happen

Cisco Systems is tightening its relationship with Sensity Systems, a Silicon Valley startup that wants buildings and cities now adopting LED lighting to embrace the Internet of Things.Sensity makes sensors and computers designed to be integrated with LED lights that can go into existing outdoor light fixtures. With Sensity’s gear, the fixtures can do more than light up the streets and parking lots where they’re installed. Its cameras, thermometers and other sensors can tell a lot of stories about what’s going on under the lights. Parking, security and pedestrian traffic are key applications.As lighting owners move to LED to save energy, Sensity wants to usher them into the age of IoT and data analysis. It estimates there are about 4 billion outdoor light fixtures around the world and most will be converted to LED over the next 10 to 15 years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

To Cisco-backed Sensity, lights are just IoT waiting to happen

Cisco Systems is tightening its relationship with Sensity Systems, a Silicon Valley startup that wants buildings and cities now adopting LED lighting to embrace the Internet of Things.Sensity makes sensors and computers designed to be integrated with LED lights that can go into existing outdoor light fixtures. With Sensity’s gear, the fixtures can do more than light up the streets and parking lots where they’re installed. Its cameras, thermometers and other sensors can tell a lot of stories about what’s going on under the lights. Parking, security and pedestrian traffic are key applications.As lighting owners move to LED to save energy, Sensity wants to usher them into the age of IoT and data analysis. It estimates there are about 4 billion outdoor light fixtures around the world and most will be converted to LED over the next 10 to 15 years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft reports first quarterly loss since 2012 after Nokia write-down

Microsoft has reported its first quarterly loss in three years, largely as a result of a $7.5 billion write-down for its acquisition last year of Nokia’s devices and services business.Microsoft’s net loss for the quarter, the fourth of its fiscal year, was $3.2 billion, compared to $4.6 billion in profit during the same period a year earlier, the company announced Tuesday. That translated into a loss of $0.40 a share. Microsoft’s quarterly revenue declined more than 5 percent year over year to $22.2 billion. The news comes after a few tumultuous weeks for the company. Microsoft announced two weeks ago that it was cutting 7,800 jobs to streamline its smartphone hardware business.  The company also transferred technology and employees from the Bing Maps team to Uber and sold part of its display advertising business to AOL.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some Impressions from Open Networking Summit 2015

I’ve used the Open Networking Summit (ONS 15) the last few years as part of my education plan to re-tool for the word of SDN and NFV. You can too – the ONS posts videos from most of the sessions (except those that cost a few extra $$.) While I think it’s worth attending the show for the hallway conversations alone, I think you can pick up a lot from just watching the sessions.

I plan a few posts about things I learned at the show; to start, this post hits a few highlights about a few speakers and topics that made a particularly strong impression.

Quick Aside

Sorry it took a while to make this post. This blog site got infected, and I've spent all my blog time working to overcome the problem. Should be back on track now!

 

Small Appetizers

To get rolling, here are a few big observations from the show – things that might not jump out at you if you just cherry pick a few of the videos to watch.

First, Open Source software rules. Open Daylight was of course prominently mentioned, but so was ONOS. But it wasn’t just an Continue reading

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