Instagram gets more Twitter-y with trending photos

Instagram, the popular app for sharing photos with friends, is broadening the reach of those photos.On Tuesday, the Facebook-owned app significantly expanded its service with new features around search and trending topics. The changes are aimed at letting users discover photos and videos related to popular events and places, and letting users more easily find photos taken in particular places.The changes are aimed at making Instagram not just an app to see friends’ photos, but an app for seeing other people’s photos related to local or global events. The changes put Instagram’s app more squarely in competition with Twitter, already known for its real-time feed of tweets around events, including photos and videos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Liveblog: DockerCon 2015 Day 2 General Session

This is a liveblog from the day 2 general session at DockerCon 2015. I was running late from some early morning meetings (sorry folks), so I wasn’t able to catch the first part of the general session (about the first 15 minutes or so). Here’s what I was able to capture.

Chris Buckley, Director of DevOps at Business Insider, took the stage to provide an overview of how Business Insider (BI) started using Docker. Buckley provides some “lessons learned”:

  1. Building for production first was grandiose was misguided.
  2. Porting it back to development wasn’t the right approach.

This led BI to Fig (now Docker Compose), which led to a decrease in the time it took to get a development environment up and running. With the combination of Vagrant and Docker, BI was able to reduce that to just a couple of hours. When BI revisited production apps, they turned to use Upstart/SysV scripts for containers, but this wasn’t quite the right fit. BI turned back to Puppet, building a parameterized Puppet class to create containers, links, set environment options, and define dependencies on other containers/services starting first.

Before Docker, the workflow was developers to GitHub to Jenkins, which then pushed to Continue reading

Adobe patches zero-day Flash Player flaw used in targeted attacks

Adobe Systems released an emergency security update for Flash Player Tuesday to fix a critical vulnerability that has been exploited by a China-based cyberespionage group.Over the past several weeks, a hacker group identified as APT3 by security firm FireEye has used the vulnerability to attack organizations from the aerospace, defense, construction, engineering, technology, telecommunications and transportation industries.The hacking group targeted the companies with generic phishing emails that contained a link to a compromised server, researchers from FireEye said in a blog post Tuesday. The server used JavaScript code to profile potential victims and then served the Flash exploit to the ones meeting attackers’ criteria, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Silver Peak Launches EdgeConnect SD-WAN Product

Silver Peak gets into the SD-WAN market with Unity EdgeConnect, a new product that aims to make it easier to provision, manage, and monitor WAN connectivity for remote and branch offices.

Author information

Drew Conry-Murray

I'm a tech journalist, editor, and content director with 17 years' experience covering the IT industry. I'm author of the book "The Symantec Guide To Home Internet Security" and co-author of the post-apocalyptic novel "Wasteland Blues," available at Amazon.

The post Silver Peak Launches EdgeConnect SD-WAN Product appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Drew Conry-Murray.

Docker: Ready for Production

DockerCon Day 1 was filled with several exciting announcements, including the Open Container Project, Docker Network, Docker Platform 1.7, and container runtime runC.  DockerCon Day 2 builds on this, with an emphasis on the solutions that we are building on that complement the … Continued

Arista Gets An SDN Strategy With CloudVision

In 2014, Arista was telling me that SDN was "Still Don't kNow" and "Still Does Nothing". In 2015, Arista releases their CloudVision™ SDN controller for cloud networks.

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.

The post Arista Gets An SDN Strategy With CloudVision appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Wrap-up: Day 1 of DockerCon 2015

Wow, what an awesome start to DockerCon 2015! With over 2100 attendees, yesterday was a great day of Docker learning, meeting the global Docker community, and more! Inspiration from @solomonstre: innovation requires making tools available; programming enables creativity. #dockercon pic.twitter.com/POgyDGEt8M … Continued

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

Continue reading

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