NSA uses OpenFlow for tracking… its network

SANTA CLARA -- Just as the industry is becoming more comfortable with SDNs, the NSA says it’s using them too.The embattled National Security Agency, which has been surreptitiously collecting phone records on all of us for many years as part of a secret surveillance operation, is implementing an OpenFlow SDN for its own internal operations. No mention was made whether an OpenFlow SDN also supports the agency’s surveillance operations – it’s doubtful the NSA would open up on the underpinnings of its spy network.But internally, the agency faces the same issues any large enterprise IT shop faces: do more, faster and at less cost with fewer people. And with a lot of oversight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fearing net neutrality rules, Sprint stops throttling heavy data users

Sprint says it has stopped throttling its heaviest data users on congested networks, in what appears to be the first tangible benefit of the Federal Communications Commision’s new net neutrality rules.Sprint had added a throttling clause for its top 5 percent of data users last year, saying they might see slower speeds in congested areas. But the carrier has now ended this policy, The Wall Street Journal reports, saying it wanted to steer clear of the FCC’s Open Internet Order.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fearing net neutrality rules, Sprint stops throttling heavy data users

Sprint says it has stopped throttling its heaviest data users on congested networks, in what appears to be the first tangible benefit of the Federal Communications Commision’s new net neutrality rules.Sprint had added a throttling clause for its top 5 percent of data users last year, saying they might see slower speeds in congested areas. But the carrier has now ended this policy, The Wall Street Journal reports, saying it wanted to steer clear of the FCC’s Open Internet Order.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s data centers grow too fast for normal networks, so it builds its own

Google has been building its own software-defined data-center networks for 10 years because traditional gear can’t handle the scale of what are essentially warehouse-sized computers.The company hasn’t said much before about that homegrown infrastructure, but one of its networking chiefs provided some details on Wednesday at Open Network Summit and in a blog post.The current network design, which powers all of Google’s data centers, has a maximum capacity of 1.13 petabits per second. That’s more than 100 times as much as the first data-center network Google developed 10 years ago. The network is a hierarchical design with three tiers of switches, but they all use the same commodity chips. And it’s not controlled by standard protocols but by software that treats all the switches as one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twitter’s Project Lightning will be a whole new way to track events

Twitter is planning some big changes to the way people follow events using its service, with a major new feature that will group together tweets, photos and videos related to whatever’s happening in the moment.The move could make Twitter more useful for tracking current events at a time when its user growth is sagging. It’s dabbled in the area of events before, but the new initiative, dubbed Project Lightning, should make it much easier to find content related to scheduled events like the Grammys or major news events such as an earthquake.There’ll be a new button on Twitter’s mobile app that takes users to a page listing various events happening at that moment. Selecting one will take the user to a page of tweets, videos and photos related to that event. The content will be curated by Twitter staff, and users will be able to swipe through full-screen photos and videos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Skype Translator now speaks German, French

The Skype Translator beta app now can help people say “guten tag” to their friends in Germany, thanks to an update it received on Thursday.Microsoft’s real-time translation app can now provide live voice and text translations for conversations involving people who speak German and French, in addition to English, Italian, Mandarin and Spanish.For example, someone who speaks English can call up another Skype Translator user who speaks German, and each will have their side of the conversation translated into the other’s native language in real time. The app will provide both a computerized voice translation and a running text transcript that allows users to read what’s being said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cumulus Linux — The Foundation of OpenStack Automation

OpenStack is the de facto open source orchestration standard for modern cloud infrastructure. The foundational components stitch together compute, storage and, of course, networking. Linked together, these components are used for both public and private clouds all around the world. Cumulus Networks naturally fits into this ecosystem, and Cumulus Linux is the universal underlay or enabler for such deployments.

Solution Guide

Over the past two quarters, Cumulus Networks has shared solution guides for our 2.5.x releases. In this post we’re going to dive into how you can automate a proof-of-concept OpenStack deployment. For those who learn by watching, a recent video from the OpenStack Vancouver (May 2015) summit event may be helpful; the presentation summarizes all of the behind-the-scenes tasks described below.

Prerequisites

Our goal is to set up an end-to-end OpenStack deployment with the fewest interactive steps, making it as unattended as possible, and ideally taking no more than 20 minutes. The configuration scope includes all networking, server and storage components.

To facilitate a consistent architecture, we’ve imposed a few basic cabling and physical requirements. To make the PoC easy to implement, we assume no external Internet access is available — the entire solution is autonomous with all prerequisites present or cached.

Matt-Blog Correct Pic

For our first Continue reading

Google opens up on its SDN

At this week’s Open Network Summit, Google spoke for the first time publicly about its custom data center network. For nearly a decade, we’ve been hearing, reading and writing about how Google was building its own switches and writing its own software to handle the tremendous traffic load on its search engine and applications because vendor offerings were either not up to the task, too expensive, or both.This week we found out how they did it. In a keynote presentation at ONS, Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow and Technical Lead for Networking, described the company’s data center network architecture, capabilities and capacity for a rapt audience thirsting for information on software-defined networking implementations and experiences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fitbit IPO pumps up the heart rate of investors

Fitbit sprinted into Wall Street in its debut as a public company Thursday, as its shares opened 52 percent higher than the price that the wearables company had set for them.Priced at US$20 on Wednesday, the stock instead opened at $30.40. Earlier in the week Fitbit had increased the price range of its IPO to $17 to $19 from the original range of $14 to $16.With its shares trading for around $30, Fitbit is worth approximately $6 billion dollars.Fitbit’s wearables collect health and fitness data, including calories burned and steps walked. While smartwatches also offer these features, some analysts are bullish about fitness trackers, saying that they generally have simpler user interfaces, longer battery lives and lower prices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU faces IT staff shortfall of 825,000, redoubles training

The European Union faces a huge shortfall of qualified IT staff in Europe by 2020, prompting EU countries to redouble efforts to offer technology training.There are not enough IT specialists graduating in Europe to fill all jobs, creating a digital skills gap that could lead to 825,000 vacancies in the sector five years from now, according to figures released by the European Commission on Thursday.The news comes as four more countries join a program begun in 2013 to increase opportunities for workers to learn IT skills across the EU.Almost 24 million of the EU’s 500 million inhabitants are looking for work, according to Commission figures, yet businesses are having difficulty finding skilled IT workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Outlook for iOS, Android get enhanced management features

Microsoft updated its Outlook apps for iOS and Android Thursday to let system administrators have greater control over how employees use corporate email accounts.The update brings support for the company’s Intune mobile application management solution and a Conditional Access feature that requires users enroll in mobile device management before getting their Office 365 email through Outlook. Administrators can deploy the Outlook app to devices that are enrolled in a company’s Intune system, and then manage them under a custom policy.That policy can include a variety of limitations, like preventing users from copying corporate email content to applications or other email accounts that aren’t managed by the company and encrypting data from the Outlook app. At the same time, the profile can be set up so that personal email accounts added to the Outlook app aren’t managed under corporate policy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 historic tech items that were rescued from the trash

Image by Brian Dunnette CC BY 2.0All technology, sooner or later, becomes obsolete at which point it’s often simply disposed of in one way or another and forgotten about. Sometimes that piece of technology is a one-of-kind or is historic for some other reason but its importance isn’t recognized at the time and it’s lost for good. Every once in a while, though, a historic piece of hardware or software is saved from such an inglorious fate through the hard work of those who appreciate its historic value or thanks simply to dumb luck. Use the arrows above to read about 6 historic tech items that were literally pulled out of a dumpster, landfill, or recycling center - or were rescued just before they made it into one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 productivity tips for Chromebook power users

Chromebook productivity tipsImage by Koman90 via WikimediaChromebooks are more than toy computers for running the Chrome Web browser. Google’s rapid development of Chrome OS has given the cloud-based operating system a significant set of power-user tools to help make you more productive and to ensure your data is secured.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Go has a debugger—and it’s awesome!

Something that often, uh... bugs1 Go developers is the lack of a proper debugger. Sure, builds are ridiculously fast and easy, and println(hex.Dump(b)) is your friend, but sometimes it would be nice to just set a breakpoint and step through that endless if chain or print a bunch of values without recompiling ten times.

CC BY 2.0 image by Carl Milner

You could try to use some dirty gdb hacks that will work if you built your binary with a certain linker and ran it on some architectures when the moon was in a waxing crescent phase, but let's be honest, it isn't an enjoyable experience.

Well, worry no more! godebug is here!

godebug is an awesome cross-platform debugger created by the Mailgun team. You can read their introduction for some under-the-hood details, but here's the cool bit: instead of wrestling with half a dozen different ptrace interfaces that would not be portable, godebug rewrites your source code and injects function calls like godebug.Line on every line, godebug.Declare at every variable declaration, and godebug.SetTrace for breakpoints (i.e. wherever you type _ = "breakpoint").

I find this solution brilliant. What you get out Continue reading

Anger

"

I suppose that when one hears a tale of hideous cruelty anger is quite the wrong reaction, and merely wastes the energy that ought to go in a different direction: perhaps merely dulls the conscience which, if it were awake, would ask us, “Well, what are you doing about it? How much of your live have you spent in really combating this?”

" C.S. Lewis —

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