IT pros blast Google over Android’s refusal to play nice with IPv6

Two trains made of fiber, copper and code are on a collision course, as the widespread popularity of Android devices and the general move to IPv6 has put some businesses in a tough position, thanks to Android’s lack of support for a central component in the newer standard. DHCPv6 is an outgrowth of the DHCP protocol used in the older IPv4 standard – it’s an acronym for “dynamic host configuration protocol,” and is a key building block of network management. Nevertheless, Google’s wildly popular Android devices – which accounted for 78% of all smartphones shipped worldwide in the first quarter of this year – don’t support DHCPv6 for address assignment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Signs of the times: 2 unexpected ways technology is changing the world

Last week, I came across two technology stories so strange yet so compelling I felt like they should come from the Weekly World News or some schlocky science fiction novel. But no, they both showed up in the Gray Lady. Taken together, their appearance in that most mainstream of newspapers, the New York Times, points to a world where technology is forcing us to rethink just about everything we thought we knew about how things work.Forget about distracted driving First, there was this story about how Utah Valley University was so worried about students walking around campus with their noses buried in their smartphones that it created a texting-and-walking lane in a stairway in its campus life and wellness center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Signs of the times: 2 unexpected ways technoloy is changing the world

Last week, I came across two technology stories so strange yet so compelling I felt like they should come from the Weekly World News or some schlocky science fiction novel. But no, they both showed up in the Gray Lady.Taken together, their appearance in that most mainstream of newspapers, the New York Times, points to a world where technology is forcing us to rethink just about everything we thought we knew about how things work.Forget about distracted driving First, there was this story about how Utah Valley University was so worried about students walking around campus with their noses buried in their smartphones that it created a texting-and-walking lane in a stairway in its campus life and wellness center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Getting Started With Ansible for Cisco IOS

Ansible is well-known for it’s low entry threshold. All what’s required to get started is just one inventory file. However Cisco IOS devices require special considerations. Passwordless SSH RSA-based authentication is still a novelty and in most cases users are authenticated based on their passwords. Another problem is the lack of Python execution environment on IOS devices, which seriously limits the choice of Ansible modules that can be used. In this post I will show how to setup Ansible environment to control Cisco IOS devices

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The government is falling behind on application security

Government organizations are struggling when it comes to securing the computer software they use, which could partially explain the large data breaches reported in that sector over the past several years.Three out of four applications used by government organizations are not compliant with one of the primary software security policies and most of the flaws found in them never get fixed, according to a report released Tuesday by U.S.-based application security firm Veracode.The report is based on an analysis of more than 200,000 applications over the past 18 months that are used by organizations in various industries. The tests were performed using Veracode’s cloud-based application security testing platform that uses static analysis, dynamic analysis and manual penetration testing techniques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Report: ISPs slowing internet service on purpose

Major internet Service Providers (ISPs) like AT&T and Time Warner are intentionally slowing internet service for U.S. customers, according to the Guardian.The newspaper cites a study by BattleFortheNet, a pro-net neutrality activist internet group.Degraded service The report, released on Monday, "looked at results from 300,000 internet users and found significant degradations on the networks of the five largest internet service providers," the Guardian says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, June 23

Privacy group wants Uber probed for data collectionThe Electronic Privacy Information Center has complained to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about Uber’s new data collection policy: it comes into effect next month and allows the company to access a customer’s location even when the smartphone app is not actively in use, and to access the information from users’ phone address books and send out promotional materials to contacts listed there. The changes “ignore past bad practices of the company involving the misuse of location data, pose a direct risk of consumer harm, and constitute an unfair and deceptive trade practice,” EPIC said in its request for an FTC investigation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s 60Tbps Pacific cable welcomed with champagne in Japan

With bottles of bubbly and a purification ceremony, a Google-backed undersea cable was given a warm welcome on a beach in Japan last week, a critical step in building the highest capacity data link in the Pacific ever created.The 9,000-kilometer FASTER cable will have a peak capacity of 60 terabytes per second (Tbps) when it enters operation next year, joining Japan with Oregon on the West Coast of the U.S.Apart from Google, the project is backed by telecom carriers KDDI of Japan, SingTel of Singapore, Global Transit of Malaysia, China Mobile International and China Telecom Global.At the landing site in Shima, Mie Prefecture, east of Osaka, a machine pulled the cable onto the beach from an offshore cable-laying ship while stacks of armored pipes, which shield the link from anchors near the shore, were piled nearby.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Game Changer in Cloud Networking

The networking market is at an exciting pivot point, evolving away from legacy enterprise networking to the cloud. While the public cloud providers (“titans”) may take a “do it yourself” approach to engineering cloud network designs, mainstream enterprises demand a “cloudified” turnkey solution and want to emulate cloud operators. The increasingly massive scale of address tables, devices, flooding, broadcast traffic from discovery protocols, subnets and routing protocols have accelerated the need for disruption in networking workflows, making Arista a unique and welcome pioneer for customers ready to make SDN a reality.

Software Driven Cloud Networking Trends

To appreciate the need for SDN and cloud solutions one must step back and understand why the cloud network is dramatically different from legacy networking.

First, in a cloud, everything is dynamic. Resources become available and go off-line, users are logging in and out, and workloads are going up or down depending on compute needs. This is a fundamental difference of cloud versus static computing in enterprises.

Second, cloud data centers are much larger than typical enterprise datacenters and can contain tens, even hundreds of thousands of servers. Legacy management practices and policies that are used in smaller datacenters don’t apply to clouds since Continue reading

Alibaba sells off 11Main US e-commerce site to focus on China

Alibaba Group has decided to sell off its 11Main e-commerce site in the U.S., as part of its focus on attracting foreign brands to its China business.OpenSky, a U.S.-based online retail company, will be taking over 11Main. “This joining of forces will help drive sales worldwide,” Alibaba said on Tuesday.As part of the deal, Alibaba has also sold its Auctiva and Vendio properties to OpenSky, in exchange for a minority stake of 37.6 percent in the U.S. company.11Main, which launched last year, represented an Alibaba foray into the U.S. market. The site was, however, a small operation and offered goods from boutique merchants, rather than competing head-on with Amazon or eBay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RubyGems DNS flaw now patched after second try

A revised patch has been released for a flaw in the distribution platform for Ruby applications, RubyGems, which could be used to deliver malware to someone trying to download a program.RubyGems lets people search for a “gem,” which is a packaging format for Ruby applications and code libraries. Ruby developers publish a gem when an application is ready.Security researchers from Trustwave found a problem with the platform. When people search for a gem, RubyGems uses a DNS (Domain Name System) SRV record request to find a server hosting a particular gem.The request, however, “does not require that DNS replies come from the same security domain as the original gem source,” according to a writeup, which Trustwave plans to release on its blog on Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Liveblog: Docker Networking

This is a liveblog of the Docker Networking breakout session. This session is led by Madhu Venugopal and Jana Radhakrishnan, both formerly of Socketplane (and now with Docker following the acquisition). They are introduced by John Willis, also formerly of Socketplane and well-known within the DevOps community.

Some display issues plague the session at the beginning, so it appears that Murphy’s Law is back with a vengeance.

Madhu starts out the session with an overview of why networking (in particular Docker networking) is so important. Networking is vast and complex, and networking is an inherent part of distributed applications. Therefore, it’s important to make networking developer-friendly and application-driven. He shares a vision: “We’ll do for networking what Docker did for compute”. So what are the goals from this vision?

  • Make “network” and “service” top-level objects
  • Provide a pluggable networking stack
  • Span networks across multiple hosts
  • Support multiple platforms

Libnetwork is a key part of this effort. It was open-sourced in April, with over 200 pull requests and 200 GitHub stars. Windows and FreeBSD ports are in progress. Libnetwork is part of the Docker 1.7 release with limited functionality, allowing users to test it before it is fully enabled in Continue reading

Liveblog: Secret Session (Docker Plugins)

This is the “Top Secret Docker Session led by Gordon the Turtle,” which is really a session on Docker Plugins. However, since Docker Plugins were only announced this morning during the general session, the title for this session had to be obscured. On stage are ClusterHQ (Luke Marsden), Glider Labs (Jeff Lindsay), and Weaveworks (Alexis Richardson).

Marsden starts the session with a brief history of the Docker Plugins project, and how it grew out of Powerstrip. Marsden reiterates that he said Powerstrip would be successful if they would “throw it away” in 6 months. Four months later, the Docker Plugins project is now officially announced, and Powerstrip is no longer necessary.

Marsden next turns the stage over to Jeff Lindsay. Lindsay talks about why the Docker Plugins project is so important—every customer is unique, and customers want/need the freedom to choose the right solution to use the tools that best solve their particular problem(s).

Jeff Lindsay turns it over to Alexis Richardson, who outlines the core requirements for Docker Plugins. Richardson outlines 3 requirements, but he doesn’t have a slide that lists those requirements, so I couldn’t capture them. Plugins today are limited to storage and networking, but that isn’t Continue reading

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