Worth Learning: The Power Grid

Stop mulling over the latest (now dead) command line, and learn something useful. If you work in networking, you work with electricity. But how many people really know how the power grid works? Even though I have relatives and friends who’ve worked in the power industry all their lives, I’m still learning new things about the grid, and the way it works.

Four items of interest in this area for today.

A really short and simple video

A longer, boring video with lots of presentations and details

An interesting paper on coal to data

An article giving the other side of the renewable hype

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This WAN Is Your WAN, This WAN Is My WAN

Straw Bales on Hill Landscape, Tuscany, Italy

Straw Bales on Hill Landscape, Tuscany, Italy

Ideas coalesce all the time in every vertical. You don’t really notice it until you wake up one day and suddenly everything around you looks identical. Wireless becoming the new access layer. Flash storage taking hold of the high end performance crown. And in networking we have the dominance of all things software defined. One recent development has coming along much faster than anyone could have predicted: Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN).

Automatic For The People

SD-WAN is a force in modern networking because people want simplicity. While Ivan does a great job of decoupling marketing from reality, people still believe that SD-WAN is the silver bullet that will fix all of their WAN woes. Even during the original discussions of SD-WAN technology at conferences like ONUG, the overriding idea wasn’t around tying sites together or driving down costs to the point of feasibility. It was all about making life easier.

How does SD-WAN manage to accomplish this? It’s all black box networking. Just like the fuel injector in your car. There’s no crying about interoperability or standards-based protocols. You just plug things in and it all works, even if Continue reading

Five signs an employee plans to leave with your company’s data

A global high-tech manufacturer had reached its boiling point after several of its sales reps left the company unexpectedly and took with them sales leads and other data to their new employers.The company needed to stop the thefts before they happened. So the company hired several security analysts who manually looked at the behavior patterns for all sales reps working on its cloud-based CRM system, and then matched them with the behaviors of those who ultimately quit their jobs. What they were able to correlate was startling.Sales reps that had shown a spike in abnormal system activity between weeks nine and 12 of a financial quarter generally quit at the end of week 13 – in many cases because they knew they weren’t going to meet their sales quotas, says Rohit Gupta, president of cloud security automation firm Palerra, which now works with the manufacturer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vint Cerf: ‘Sometimes I’m terrified’ by the IoT

Vint Cerf is known as a "father of the Internet," and like any good parent, he worries about his offspring -- most recently, the IoT."Sometimes I'm terrified by it," he said in a news briefing Monday at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany. "It's a combination of appliances and software, and I'm always nervous about software -- software has bugs."The Internet of Things will offer the ability to manage many of the appliances we depend on, acknowledged Cerf, who won the Turing Award in 2004. With its ability to continuously monitor such devices, it also promises new insight into our use of resources, he said.INSIDER: 5 ways to prepare for Internet of Things security threats Devices such as Google's Nest thermostat, for instance, can "help me decide how well or poorly I've chosen my lifestyle to minimize cost and my use of resources -- it can be an important tool," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vint Cerf: ‘Sometimes I’m terrified’ by the IoT

Vint Cerf is known as a "father of the Internet," and like any good parent, he worries about his offspring -- most recently, the IoT. "Sometimes I'm terrified by it," he said in a news briefing Monday at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany. "It's a combination of appliances and software, and I'm always nervous about software -- software has bugs." The Internet of Things will offer the ability to manage many of the appliances we depend on, acknowledged Cerf, who won the Turing Award in 2004. With its ability to continuously monitor such devices, it also promises new insight into our use of resources, he said. Devices such as Google's Nest thermostat, for instance, can "help me decide how well or poorly I've chosen my lifestyle to minimize cost and my use of resources -- it can be an important tool," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ashley Madison hauled to court in class action suits over data breach

Legal pressure on Ashley Madison and its parent company is picking up with more class-action lawsuits filed this week in the U.S. against the extramarital hookup site, alleging its negligence in protecting confidential user data.Suits filed in federal courts in California and Texas by people using John Doe as a pseudonym, claim for damages, alleging that Avid Life Media, the parent company based in Toronto, did not have adequate and reasonable measures to secure the data of users from being compromised, and failed to notify users in time of the breach.Avid Life Media said it had been made aware of an attack on its systems. Hacker group, Impact Team, released data last week that it claimed it had obtained from the website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How a Cisco SE Navigates Cisco.com

At the time that I'm writing this I've been working at Cisco for just over 3 years as a Systems Engineer. Prior to that I worked for multiple Cisco customers and was heavily involved in Cisco technologies. I know what a monster cisco.com is and how hard it can be to find what you're looking for.

Since starting at Cisco, the amount of time I've spent on cisco.com has shot up dramatically. Add to that studying for my CCIE and it goes up even more. In fact, cisco.com is probably the number 1 or 2 site I visit on a daily basis (in close competition with Google/searching).

After spending all this time on the site and given how vast the site is and how hard it can be to find that specific piece of information you're looking for, I'm writing this post as an aid to help other techies, like myself, use the site more effectively.

Startup takes heat over online tool that checks Ashley Madison data

A small Washington, D.C.-based startup accused of crude marketing centered around the Ashley Madison data breach said Monday it is changing its tactics amid criticism.Trustify, a 10-person company that launched in March, runs a web-based service for connecting people with private investigators for $67 an hour.Last week, it created an online tool that lets people check if their email address was in the large dump of stolen user information from the extramarital hookup site.The tool was one of many that were created after hackers released information on more than 30 million registered users of the website, one of the largest and most sensitive data breaches on record.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP serves up its open switches

HP this week unveiled networking products aligned with its strategy to disaggregate hardware and software, opening up choices for its customers.HP is introducing two new branded bare metal switches based on the Accton AS5712-54X. HP and Accton revealed their partnership in February.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Enterprise disaggregation is inevitable+The first switch is the Altoline 5712, a 10G switch, and the second is the Altoline 6712, a 40G switch. Both are powered by Intel’s Atom CPU.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Distributed Network Monitoring Boosts Visibility, Speeds Troubleshooting

Active distributed monitoring gathers network and application performance data from multiple locations to give IT better visibility and improve troubleshooting. Find out how NetBeez simplifies distributed monitoring.

The post How Distributed Network Monitoring Boosts Visibility, Speeds Troubleshooting appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Legal teams keep bending old laws to fit cybercrimes

Since cybercrime laws lag behind technology, lawyers are constantly seeking creative ways to stretch old laws to fit new crimes, such as the latest - comparing the movie-sharing app Popcorn Time to a burglar’s tool in order to press criminal charges.Lawyers for an Adam Sandler movie are arguing that Popcorn Time performs the same function as burglars’ tools in order “to commit or facilitate … a theft by physical taking,” language used in an old Oregon law about traditional burglary.The lawyers say Popcorn Time lets users violate the movie’s copyrights by enabling downloads of pirated copies, and so they are suing for the civil crime of copyright infringement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Most Apple devices lack proper security for the enterprise

Nearly half of all U.S. employees use at least one Apple device at work, but most of those gadgets lack common security protocols required by many enterprises, according to a new survey commissioned by Centrify, a company that sells enterprise security and management software for Apple products.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Free security tools you should try Last month, Centrify asked 1,004 business professionals about how they use computers and smartphones in the workplace. Respondents used a total of 1,309 Apple devices at work, including 191 Macs, 387 iPads and 731 iPhones, according to Centrify. All of the respondents were employed full-time at companies with at least 20 employees, from various industries including healthcare and financial services, according to Centrify.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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