NASA: “Wild” technology will transform aviation

It’s not often you see a button-down organization like NASA call something “wild” but that’s what the space agency is calling six concepts – ranging from adding artificial intelligence to unmanned aircraft to using electricity for propulsion -- it has picked to study to revolutionize the aviation world.+More on Network World: Hot stuff: The coolest drones+The project, known as Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) is looking to develop what NASA called “something truly historic – the buzzword is ‘transformative’ – and help crack tomorrow's biggest challenges in aviation related to fuel use, the environment, and managing global growth in air traffic.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker’s Experimental Binary

Docker is an incredibly fast-moving project. As the project grows and acquires users, making changes becomes more complex. In particular, any patch that impacts user experience is a tough call. Each feature that Docker ships is immediately adopted by hundreds … Continued

Network Break 41

Take a Network Break! Grab a coffee, a doughnut and then join us for an analysis of the latest IT news, vendor moves and new product announcements. We’ll separate the signal from the noise–or at least make some noise of our own. Sponsor: Sonus Networks This week’s show was sponsored by Sonus Networks. Sonus wants […]

The post Network Break 41 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Osaka, Japan: CloudFlare’s 35th data center

Move over Jurassic World, the long awaited sequel to our Tokyo deployment is here. Our Osaka data center is our 2nd in Japan, 5th in Asia (following deployments in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, and Seoul), and 35th globally. This latest deployment serves not only Osaka, Japan's second largest city, but also Nagoya, the 3rd largest, and the entire Keihanshin metropolitan area including Kyoto and Kobe. This means faster application delivery to the area's 30 million inhabitants, and full redundancy of traffic with our Tokyo facility. CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away from all 110 million Internet users in Japan.

The Internet in Asia

Even though Asia is home to many of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, the delivery of Internet traffic across the region is hardly seamless. Many of the incumbent telecommunications providers in the region (e.g. NTT, Tata, PCCW, Hinet, Singtel, among many others) do not interconnect with one another locally. This is another way of saying that traffic is routed poorly in the region. Traffic sent from one network in Japan, for example, may have to pass through an entirely different country or, in some instances, even the United States, Continue reading

Even among poor, mobile Web is big in Africa

Eighty-seven million people in Nigeria browse the Internet on mobile phones, according to figures from the country’s telecom regulator that confirm that even among low-income people, the mobile Web is big in Africa.Nigeria is Africa’s largest telecom market by investment and subscription, followed by South Africa and Kenya. A just-released report from the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) on April Internet usage backs up findings from other sources showing that mobile Web use is widespread, including for people in low-income households, many of them living below the poverty line.About 25 percent of the people who use mobile phones to browse the Web in Nigeria, more than 22 million users, are from low-income households, according to an NCC official.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Researchers: Graphene could help increase chip speed by 30%

Here's another use for graphene—wrap transistor wires with it and boost computer chip speeds.Scientists have discovered that replacing tantalum nitride, the existing wire sheathing material between transistors, with graphene allows chips to exchange data faster.It's yet another use for this super-material. I've written about graphene before in a post titled "Materials breakthrough promises smaller chips."Thin graphite material If you're unfamiliar with this breakthrough material, graphene is the world's most conductive substance. It's better than copper.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Researchers: Graphene could help increase chip speed by 30%

Here's another use for graphene—wrap transistor wires with it and boost computer chip speeds.Scientists have discovered that replacing tantalum nitride, the existing wire sheathing material between transistors, with graphene allows chips to exchange data faster.It's yet another use for this super-material. I've written about graphene before in a post titled "Materials breakthrough promises smaller chips."Thin graphite material If you're unfamiliar with this breakthrough material, graphene is the world's most conductive substance. It's better than copper.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A case for compromise on Uber’s ‘contractor’ legal dispute

Uber ought to be on top of the world. The "ride-sharing" app has already raised more than $5 billion and is worth an estimated $50 billion. Just as important, it has reached the stage of ubiquity where people use its name as a verb: "Forget driving, we'll just Uber over to the event."And yet, a dark cloud is shadowing Uber's future, along with that of many other companies riding the wave of the so-called "sharing economy." Many of those companies' business models are built around workers classified as contractors, not employees, but it seems increasingly clear that no matter how convenient for Uber and its ilk, that classification is unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny. At least not without major changes in the law and the way these sharing-economy companies do business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Operational Annoyances: SSL Intermediate Certificates

Secure Certificate

You’re asked to update the SSL certificate for movingpackets.net on a load balancer. The requestor (me, I suppose) gives you the certificate, the private key and passphrase, and the intermediate bundle file provided by the certificate authority.

movingpackets.net.crt
movingpackets.net.key
movingpackets.net-intermediate-chain.crt

You faithfully go to the load balancer, upload the files, enter the passphrase, and create a client SSL profile referencing the cert/key/chain combination I provided, and all is well. The only thing is, you have 200 VIPs on the load balancer, mostly issued by the same certification authority (CA), so don’t they nominally share the same intermediate chain? (Hint: Almost certainly, yes)

Operational Annoyance

Here is the operational annoyance. The fact that the same intermediate certificate/chain has been uploaded 200 times with different names doesn’t stop things working, but it does seem rather inefficient. As far as I can determine, the F5 LTM load balancers (for example) actually concatenate all the uploaded certificates into a single bundle file and search the bundle when a certificate is referenced. I have no idea if there’s a huge performance gain here (unlikely), but it seems logical to want to minimize that file size regardless. On other Continue reading

Network Break 41

Take a Network Break! Grab a coffee, a doughnut and then join us for an analysis of the latest IT news, vendor moves and new product announcements. We’ll separate the signal from the noise–or at least make some noise of our own.

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

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The post Network Break 41 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

New products of the week 06.22.2015

Products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Barracuda Web FilterKey features – Barracuda Web Filter now includes an improved application engine for more advanced accuracy and detection, enabling application visibilities for organizations with legacy Layer 3/Layer 4 firewalls. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cyberattack grounds planes in Poland

LOT Polish Airlines was forced to cancel 10 flights scheduled to depart from Warsaw’s Chopin airport on Sunday after hackers attacked its ground computer systems.The IT attack, which was not described in detail, left the company unable to create flight plans for outbound flights, grounding around 1,400 passengers.The company said that plane systems were not affected and aircraft that were already in the air were able to continue their flight or to land. The incident only affected the ability of planes to depart from the airport for several hours.It’s not clear what kind of attack it was and whether it was the hackers’ intention to ground planes or if the systems were taken offline as part of incident response procedures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why I Support Certifications

I’m betting that I could take my certifications off my resume and still have a fair chance at finding a job. It’s a guess, of course, and I’ve never tried any sort of an experiment towards finding out, but the point is this: at some point in your career, certifications should become just one more thing on an excellent resume, rather than the focal point of your resume. Given this, why do I still support certifications? To answer this question, I need to back up into the certification development process a bit.

One of the strangest “mind trips” I’ve ever encountered was working with the “psycho’s” (psychometricians, really, but you know how engineers are with long words) through the entire CCDE/CCAr process. The two things we were challenged constantly were:

  • What does the minimally qualified candidate look like?
  • How do you intend to test for that skill?

Both of these are hard questions.

The first question we turned into a simpler one (again, you know how engineers are): Why do I care? When someone would suggest a particular question or skill, they were immediately met with the counter — Do I care? If I were a designer working on a Continue reading

Fingerprint sensors on their way to more smartphones

Fingerprint authentication will become a lot more common on smartphones of all prices as sensors get cheaper—and Google’s integration of the technology in the next version of Android will make it much easier for app developers and service providers to make use of them.Today, fingerprint sensors are mainly available on high-end models from Apple and Samsung Electronics. But that is about to change, according to sensor manufacturers Synaptics and Fingerprint Cards.Fingerprint Cards has seen a growing interest in its technology from smartphone manufacturers in recent months, as well as a strong increase in orders. As a result, the company has raised its revenue estimate for the year from about 1.5 billion Swedish kronor (US$185 million) to 2.2 billion Swedish kronor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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