6 headaches Apple is fixing in iOS 9

Apple’s iOS 9 has plenty of major features to look forward to, such as a more intelligent Siri, transit maps, and, and side-by-side iPad apps. Just as important, however, are the little things—the minor headaches of previous iOS versions that Apple is now getting around to alleviating.+ Read all the news from WWDC +To recap, here are six iPhone and iPad annoyances that will disappear in iOS 9:1. A less-confusing shift key Pop quiz: On the default iOS keyboard, are the letters uppercase when the shift key is gray, or white? Unless you bother to memorize, this issue has likely been a constant source of confusion since iOS 7. (The answer, by the way, is white.) As 9to5Mac notes, hitting shift in iOS 9 will toggle the letters on the keyboard between uppercase and lowercase, so there’s no ambiguity about what you’re about to type.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adobe fixes Flash Player flaws that could lead to info theft, malware attacks

Adobe Systems fixed 13 security issues in Flash Player that could lead to serious attacks, including remote code execution and information disclosure.Users should upgrade to Flash Player 18.0.0.160 for Windows and Mac, Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.466 for Linux, or Flash Player 13.0.0.292 if they are on the extended support release channel.Users of Internet Explorer on Windows 8.x and Google Chrome on Windows, Linux and Mac will receive the Flash Player update for their respective browser automatically.Adobe also released updates for the AIR runtime on Windows, Mac and Android, as well AIR SDK and Compiler, because these programs bundle Flash Player.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Two years after Snowden leaks, US tech firms still feel the backlash

Two years after the first leaks by Edward Snowden about U.S. surveillance programs, the country’s tech companies are still worried about a backlash from other governments.Several foreign governments continue to push policies requiring that data generated in their countries be stored within their borders, said Yael Weinman, vice president of global privacy policy at the Information Technology Industry Council.“We’ve all heard the metaphor—data is the new oil,” Weinman said at the Techonomy Policy conference in Washington, D.C., Tuesday. “Barriers to cross-border data-flows make doing business today ... much more difficult.”The first surveillance leaks from Snowden, a former contractor with the U.S. National Security Agency, came out two years ago, and the impact of the surveillance programs was part of the backdrop for several debates at the conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Two years after Snowden leaks, US tech firms still feel the backlash

Two years after the first leaks by Edward Snowden about U.S. surveillance programs, the country’s tech companies are still worried about a backlash from other governments.Several foreign governments continue to push policies requiring that data generated in their countries be stored within their borders, said Yael Weinman, vice president of global privacy policy at the Information Technology Industry Council.“We’ve all heard the metaphor—data is the new oil,” Weinman said at the Techonomy Policy conference in Washington, D.C., Tuesday. “Barriers to cross-border data-flows make doing business today ... much more difficult.”The first surveillance leaks from Snowden, a former contractor with the U.S. National Security Agency, came out two years ago, and the impact of the surveillance programs was part of the backdrop for several debates at the conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network Documentation Series: Logical Diagram

In this article, I will do a walk-through of a logical network diagram. As I also said in the Physical Diagram article: I prefer to use the term “logical” instead of “L3″ because it is more easily understood by somebody unfamiliar with the OSI model. It also removes the assumption (made by many non-technical people) […]

Author information

John W Kerns

John is a network and systems engineer based in the Los Angeles/San Diego area. His background is in two traditionally stovepiped skill sets; systems administration and switching/routing/security. Most of his time is spent as an implementation engineer for a medium sized SoCal VAR. You can visit his blog at blog.packetsar.com or follow him on Twitter @PackeTsar

The post Network Documentation Series: Logical Diagram appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John W Kerns.

BRKARC-3004 APIC-EM Controller Workflow and Use Cases

Presenter: Markus Harbek, CCIE, CCDE

 
Who knows what SDN stands for?

  • Still Don’t kNow
  • Still Does Nothing
  • Schnitzel Dinner Night


APIC – Application Policy Infrastructure Controller

  • Data center
  • n9000s
  • Focus on application network profile. SLA, Security, QOS, load balancing
  • Application intent

UCI – User Centric Infrastructure

APIC-EM – APIC Enterprise Module

  • Catalyst, ISR, N7k, n6k, n5k, WLAN
  • Focus on user, things, network profile, QoS, security, SLA, device
  • Application intent

Eventually, APIC and APIC-EM will have a common policy model so they can share policies across DC and enterprise. They will not integrate directly but will talk to a common policy orchestrator.

APIC-EM is really focussed on brownfield deployments because the assumption is that customers already have networks up and running hat APIC-EM needs to integrate into. APIC-EM won’t cconfigure OSPF and STP today, things like that, because they’re more than likely already running.

Imperative Control

  • Baggage handlers at an airport follow sequences of simple, basic instructions

Declarative control

  • ATC tells where to take off from but not how to fly the plane
  • ATC tells the “what”
  • Pilot figures out the “how” part
  • In the network, this would be like the admin wanting segmentation between tenants, controller decides which technology Continue reading

HP will pay $100 million to settle Autonomy-related lawsuit

The ongoing saga surrounding HP’s ill-fated Autonomy acquisition continued on Tuesday with the company’s announcement that it will pay $100 million in a settlement agreement with PGGM Vermogensbeheer B.V.Dutch PGGM Vermogensbeheer is the lead plaintiff in the securities class action arising from the impairment charge taken by HP following its acquisition of Autonomy.HP acquired the British software maker in 2011 for $11.7 billion. The following year, HP announced the $8.8 million impairment charge as a result of what it called “accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures” in Autonomy’s financial statements. HP shareholders filed suit that same year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft outlines Internet of Things plans for Windows 10

At the Computex show in Taipei last week, Microsoft outlined its plans for the Internet of Things (IoT) and how both Windows 10 and Azure will play a part in the strategy.The IoT news was just one of many announcements made as part of a bigger keynote by Nick Parker, corporate vice president of the OEM Division at Microsoft, who was joined by Tony Prophet, corporate vice president for Windows and Search Marketing, and Roanne Sones, general manager of Windows Engineering.Prophet discussed Microsoft's goal of having 1 billion devices running Windows 10 in the next two to three years. The first partner in that ambitious project is Toshiba, which will build "next-generation Windows- and Azure-powered IoT solutions."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Five things Apple is doing to please developers

Apple had lots to offer developers at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. Headline improvements included a new version of the soon to be open sourced Swift programming language and upgraded frameworks for creating more advanced Watch apps.Developers have played a key part in making Apple the hugely successful company it is today, and with the announcements made in San Francisco on Monday the company hoped to lay the groundwork for developers to be more effective and build better apps. The company’s developer programs were merged into a single one, called the Apple Developer program, but that was just the start:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple’s 14 most important announcements at WWDC 2015

WWDC 2015Apple on Monday kicked of WWDC with its standard keynote address. Per usual, the event was chock full of exciting and surprising announcements that touched on all things iOS, Mac, and Apple Watch. From a brand new music service to an Apple Watch SDK, there's a whole lot of information to digest, and both developers and Apple enthusiasts alike will have a lot to look forward to in the coming months. Here are a few of the more important announcements Tim Cook and co. made yesterday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automatic Ansible Inventory with Vagrant

Yesterday, I posted about using Vagrant to learn Ansible, in which I showed you one way to combine these two tools to make it easier to learn Ansible. This is a combination I’m currently using as I continue to explore Ansible. Today, I’m going to expand on yesterday’s post by showing you how to make Vagrant automatically build an Ansible inventory for a particular Vagrant environment.

As you may already know, the Vagrantfile that Vagrant uses to instantiate and configure the VMs in a particular Vagrant environment is just Ruby. As such, it can be extended in a lot of different ways to do a lot of different things. In my case, I’ve settled on a design pattern that involves a separate YAML file with all the VM-specific data, which is read by the Vagrantfile when the user runs vagrant up. The data in the YAML file determines how many VMs are instantiated, what box is used for each VM, and the resources that are allocated to each VM. This is a design pattern I’ve used repeatedly in my GitHub “learning-tools” repository, and it seems to work pretty well (for me, at least).

Using this arrangement, since I Continue reading

Cybercriminals increasingly target point of sales systems

The data breach landscape could look very different in the future with the increased adoption of chip-enabled payment cards in North America—but for now point-of-sale systems account for the majority of breaches there, compared to a tiny minority in other regions of the world.Hacked point-of-sale (PoS) terminals were responsible for 65 percent of the data compromises investigated by security firm Trustwave last year in North America, compared to only 10 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa and 11 percent in the Asia and Pacific region. Worldwide, the company investigated 574 breaches, half of them in the U.S.The difference between PoS breach numbers in North America and other regions is largely due to a payment card standard called EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa), which mandates the use of electronic chips in cards for antifraud protection. These are also called Chip-and-PIN or Chip-and-Signature cards and they have only recently started to be introduced in the U.S. and Canada.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here