Alibaba to open data center in Singapore, amid $1 billion cloud push

Alibaba Group's cloud business is targeting the Southeast Asian market with a new data center that will go online in Singapore this September. The Singapore facility is Alibaba's second data center built outside China. The company has been pushing aggressively into cloud computing, with an eye toward international markets, including the U.S. Last month, Alibaba announced a US$1 billion investment to speed up those efforts. Other data centers are being planned for Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Biggest Problem of SDN

A few weeks ago I decided to join the SDN group on LinkedIn and quickly discovered the biggest problem of SDN – many people, who try to authoritatively talk about it, have no idea what they’re talking about. Here’s a gem (coming from a “network architect”) I found in one of the discussions:

The SDN local controller can punt across to remote datacenters using not only IP, but even UDP over MPLS

Do I have to explain how misguided that statement is?

Read more ...

Notes on the Ashley-Madison dump

Ashley-Madison is a massive dating that claims 40 million users. The site is specifically for those who want to cheat on their spouse. Recently, it was hacked. Yesterday, the hackers published the dumped data.

It appears legit. I asked my twitter followers for those who had created accounts. I have verified multiple users of the site, one of which was a throw-away account used only on the site. Assuming my followers aren't lying, this means the dump is confirmed.

It's over 36-million accounts. That's not quite what they claim, but it's pretty close. However, glancing through the data, it appears that a lot of the accounts are bogus, obviously made up things for people who just want to look at the site without creating a "real" account.

It's heavily men. I count 28-million men to 5 million woman, according to the "gender" field in the database (with 2-million undetermined). However, glancing through the credit-card transactions, I find only male names.

It's full account information. This includes full name, email, and password hash as you'd expect. It also includes dating information, like height, weight, and so forth. It appears to contain addresses, as well as GPS coordinates. I suspect that Continue reading

Russian cyberspies targeted punk rock band Pussy Riot

A closely watched band of suspected Russian hackers have spied on domestic targets, including two members of the outspoken punk rock band Pussy Riot.Trend Micro said the group, which it refers to as Pawn Storm, has also targeted a software developer in Russia, politicians, artists and journalists in the country.“Pawn Storm’s targets have mostly been external political entities outside of Russia, but after our analysis we found that a great deal of targets can actually be found within the country’s borders,” wrote Feike Hacquebord, a Trend Micro threat researcher, in a blog post on Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intrinsic Benefits Of Certification

I’m gearing up for a new certification effort, but after eighteen years of progressive experience in IT, a piece of paper or some new initials in my email signature was an extrinsic motivator I didn’t need. Still I found something about the entire process inviting and realized that it was the intrinsic benefits of certification […]

The post Intrinsic Benefits Of Certification appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Hackers release full data dump from Ashley Madison, extramarital dating site

AshleyMadison.com's owner said Tuesday it is examining a large batch of data posted online by hackers who breached the website last month. A group calling itself Impact Team initially posted a sample of the data online on July 19, giving the site's owner, Avid Life Media, a month to shut down AshleyMadison.com and another site, Establishedmen.com. The group in part contested the moral position of Ashley Madison, which caters to people seeking extramarital affairs.  Avid Life Media, based in Toronto, said in a statement that it is "actively monitoring and investigating this situation to determine the validity of any information posted online."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft pushes emergency update for Internet Explorer vulnerability

Windows users are encouraged to update their computers as soon as possible, after Microsoft pushed out a patch for an issue in Internet Explorer that lets attackers remotely run malicious code with whatever privileges the current user has.  The "Critical" vulnerability affects Internet Explorer versions 7 through 11 on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and Vista. Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2012 R2 and the Windows Server Technical Preview are all effected, but Internet Explorer runs in a "Enhanced Security Configuration" that should mitigate the effects of this problem. The "out-of-band" patch was released outside Microsoft's typical Patch Tuesday release cycle and allows users and administrators to update their computers quickly. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA wants low-power chips that handle high-impact applications

DARPA DARPA’s  Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program aims to make it easier, faster and cheaper to design custom circuits akin to this one, which was specially designed to provide a range of voltages and currents for testing an infrared sensor device that had been a candidate for an orbiting telescope. Heavyweight 3D imagery and complex unmanned aircraft systems are just two applications that beg for the low power, high performance custom integrated circuits the researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are looking to build.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA wants low-power chips that handle high-impact applications

DARPA DARPA’s  Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program aims to make it easier, faster and cheaper to design custom circuits akin to this one, which was specially designed to provide a range of voltages and currents for testing an infrared sensor device that had been a candidate for an orbiting telescope. Heavyweight 3D imagery and complex unmanned aircraft systems are just two applications that beg for the low power, high performance custom integrated circuits the researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are looking to build.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Anti-privacy award for most monitoring across the web goes to U.S. wireless carriers

Wireless carriers worldwide are still tracking users via "supercookies" or "perma-cookies," yet Americans are tracked by U.S. wireless carriers more than any other carrier in any other country, according to a new report by the digital rights group Access. "Injecting tracking headers out of the control of users, without their informed consent, may abuse the privileged position that telcos occupy." Those tracking headers "leak private information about users and make them vulnerable to criminal attacks or even government surveillance."It came to light in 2014 that Verizon Wireless and AT&T were injecting special tracking headers, aka "supercookies," to secretly monitor users' web browsing habits. So Access setup the "Am I being tracked?" website for users to find out if their mobile carriers were tracking the websites they visited on their phone. More than 200,000 people from 164 different countries tried out the Amibeingtracked tool; 15.3% were being tracked by tracking headers deployed by their wireless carriers. Of those, the most monitoring occurred in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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  • At Scalyr, we're analyzing multi-gigabyte server logs in a fraction of a second. That requires serious innovation in every part of the technology stack, from frontend to backend. Help us push the envelope on low-latency browser applications, high-speed data processing, and reliable distributed systems. Help extract meaningful data from live servers and present it to users in meaningful ways. At Scalyr, you’ll learn new things, and invent a few of your own. Learn more and apply.

  • UI Engineer– AppDynamics, founded in 2008 and lead by proven innovators, is looking for a passionate UI Engineer to design, architect, and develop our their user interface using the latest web and mobile technologies. Make the impossible possible and the hard easy. Apply here.

  • Software Engineer - Infrastructure & Big Data – AppDynamics, leader in next generation solutions for managing modern, distributed, and Continue reading

CUCM Dirsync Troubleshooting

One of my customer told me that one of its end user was not appearing in its CUCM database. I think it is worth to make a blogpost about it. There are already plenty of resources on the subject (Example) but I will mainly focus on the troubleshooting section here. There are 2 ways to configure your […]

Another serious vulnerability found in Android’s media processing service

Pixabay Android The Android service that processes multimedia files has been the source of several vulnerabilities recently, including a new one that could give rogue applications access to sensitive permissions.The latest vulnerability in Android's mediaserver component was discovered by security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro and stems from a feature called AudioEffect.The implementation of this feature does not properly check some buffer sizes that are supplied by clients, like media player applications. Therefore it is possible to craft a rogue application without any special permissions that could exploit the flaw to trigger a heap overflow, the Trend Micro researchers said Monday in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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