The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, June 25

Microsoft vet throws open Snowflake data warehouseStartup Snowflake Computing has opened its cloud-based data warehouse service for business. The company, headed by Microsoft veteran Bob Muglia, is offering a service that lets companies pool all their data and workloads in a single warehouse that can be accessed by all their users. It’s also capable of taking in both structured and semi-structured data.Google brings a green data center to a coal-fired plantGoogle is building a new data center inside a former coal-fired power plant in Alabama, and is asking the regional utility to find renewable energy sources and bring them online to power the facility, the New York Times reports. It pointed out the practical reasons to use the old plant: it’s a solid building, obviously has good power lines, and also has access to lots of water needed for cooling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Florida telemarketer, under FTC watch, suffers data breach

A Florida-based computer tech support call center has suffered a data breach, with customer records being abused by fraudsters trying to get access to online bank accounts.The data breach is the latest problem for Advanced Tech Support, an inbound call center based in Boca Raton, which is run by Inbound Call Experts.Last November, those two companies and others were sued by the Federal Trade Commission in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, for allegedly duping callers into buying overpriced computer support services and unnecessary security software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft testing new Office 365 features to entice educators

Microsoft announced a private beta for a pair of new services Wednesday aimed at making its Office 365 service work better in schools.The new Classroom Hub is a website that brings together content from different Office applications into a single, central location that teachers and students can use to stay on top of what’s going on in their classes. The service can pull in notes, assignments, calendars and class materials to provide a digital home for all of the information that students need to know. Teachers will also be able to track progress on assignments and provide students with feedback and grades through the site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft testing new Office 365 features to entice educators

Microsoft announced a private beta for a pair of new services Wednesday aimed at making its Office 365 service work better in schools.The new Class Dashboard is a website that brings together content from different Office applications into a single, central location that teachers and students can use to stay on top of what’s going on in their classes. The service can pull in notes, assignments, calendars and class materials to provide a digital home for all of the information that students need to know. Teachers will also be able to track progress on assignments and provide students with feedback and grades through the site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wrap-Up: Day 2 of DockerCon 2015

DockerCon 2015 ended yesterday and we’re already missing the energy that was in the air during the conference. Once again, we’d like to thank the over 2100 attendees, 50 speakers and 70+ sponsors who contributed to make this 3rd DockerCon a … Continued

IDG Contributor Network: ISPs accused of violating net neutrality rules

The slow, buffering video stream that you're seeing during some peak hours may not be caused by the technical limitations of the internet at all, according to a pro-net neutrality activist group.BattlefortheNet says it has new evidence to prove that ISPs are deliberately slowing the internet down at the interconnections between ISPs and other networks, such as Transit Providers and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), in order to leverage fees from those other networks."AT&T is not provisioning enough ports" to accept the traffic it is requesting, S. Derek Turner of Free Press told me.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Facebook account is no longer needed for Messenger

Facebook wants to squeeze as much growth as it can out of its popular Messenger app, even if that means foregoing Facebook.While previously users had to sign up for Messenger with their Facebook accounts, now, in a few countries, it can be done with just a mobile telephone number. In the U.S., Canada, Peru and Venezuela, users who sign up this way can allow the app to sync with the contacts on their phone so they can easily find people to message.Along with the phone number, the user’s name and photo are still needed to complete the sign-up process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Check out these brand new videos on how to optimize CloudFlare

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Someone once said that the best things in life are free and I can’t agree more. I want to draw the attention of the CloudFlare community to a great resource that helps maximize the value of our product. Troy Hunt, an experienced trainer and blogger, has produced a video course on using CloudFlare. The video series is available through Pluralsight, an online training site for developers.

Because the folks at Pluralsight think that this is a great resource, the video tutorials are being offered to everyone for a week absolutely for free.

So what can you expect to learn? The course kicks off by explaining what CloudFlare brings to the table, and then sets up a site on CloudFlare, including configuring the name server records with your DNS provider. All of this helps get things up and running quickly. Then it gets deeper.

One module of the course is devoted to understanding more about SSL and further strengthening the implementation. For example, CloudFlare’s SSL rates high on the Qualys SSL Labs Test and scores an “A” right out of the box. But you can make it better – an “A+” – just by enabling HSTS. However, you really want to Continue reading

DockerCon Vendor Briefings

At DockerCon 2015 in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to meet with a few vendors in the Docker ecosystem. Here are some notes from my vendor briefings.

StackEngine

StackEngine describes themselves as enterprise-grade container application management. They tout features like being able to compose Docker applications using a drag-and-drop interface, deploy containers across multiple hosts, and provide automation—all with the sort of controls that enterprise IT groups are seeking. That’s all well and good, but the key problem in my mind is that these are features Docker is seeking for themselves. Docker Compose offers the ability to specify applications. True, there’s no GUI (yet). Alas, StackEngine can translate their GUI application design into YAML, but it doesn’t comply with Docker Compose. Thus, it ends up being more competitive than complimentary, in my opinion. Docker Swarm and the upcoming Docker Network address some of StackEngine’s deployment functionality, and if Project Orca takes off as an official effort—well, let’s just say I hope that StackEngine has more planned. This is not to say that StackEngine isn’t a well-engineered solution offering real value; rather, this is to say that StackEngine appears to be, unfortunately, in the crosshairs for functionality Docker is aiming Continue reading

Pressure mounts in EU to treat Facebook and Twitter as critical infrastructure

Pressure is mounting in the European Union to subject companies including Google, Twitter, eBay and Facebook to the same critical IT infrastructure security requirements as banks or energy networks.EU lawmakers want providers of essential services in industries including banking, health care, transport and energy to protect their networks from hackers, and to disclose data breaches to the authorities.The European Commission, which proposed the draft Network and Information Security Directive two years ago, also wants it to cover enablers of key Internet services, such as e-commerce platforms, Internet payment gateways, social networks, search engines, cloud computing services and app stores. The European Parliament, however, rejected their inclusion in the critical infrastructure rules last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI: CryptoWall ransomware plague rising

As the sad and sometimes scary examples of the scam known as ransomware propagates, the FBI this week said the CryptoWall variant is rapidly becoming the swindle of choice by criminals.The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said between April 2014 and June 2015, it received 992 CryptoWall-related complaints, with victims reporting losses totaling over $18 million. And its not just user PCs that are being targeted, a growing number of victims are being hit with ransomware that locks down mobile phones and demands payments to unlock them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to build your own public key infrastructure

A major part of securing a network as geographically diverse as CloudFlare’s is protecting data as it travels between datacenters. Customer data and logs are important to protect but so is all the control data that our applications use to communicate with each other. For example, our application servers need to securely communicate with our new datacenter in Osaka, Japan.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by kris krüg

Great security architecture requires a defense system with multiple layers of protection. As CloudFlare’s services have grown, the need to secure application-to-application communication has grown with it. As a result, we needed a simple and maintainable way to ensure that all communication between CloudFlare’s internal services stay protected, so we built one based on known and reliable protocols.

Our system of trust is based on a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) using internally-hosted Certificate Authorities (CAs). In this post we will describe how we built our PKI, how we use it internally, and how to run your own with our open source software. This is a long post with lots of information, grab a coffee!

Protection at the application layer

Most reasonably complex modern web services are not made up of one monolithic Continue reading

Critical flaw in ESET products shows why spy groups are interested in antivirus programs

Several antivirus products from security firm ESET had a critical vulnerability that was easy to exploit and could lead to a full system compromise.The discovery of the flaw, which has now been patched, comes on the heels of a report that intelligence agencies from the U.K. and the U.S. are reverse engineering antivirus products in search for vulnerabilities and methods to bypass detection.The vulnerability in ESET products was discovered by Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy and was located in their emulator, the antivirus component responsible for unpacking and executing potentially malicious code inside a safe environment so that it can be scanned.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista brings cloud-scale automation to enterprises and service providers

The term "software defined networking" (SDN) certainly means different things to different people. To the giant web companies, SDN means having the ability to create custom network software to enable functions that are unique to that organization. This requires dedicated software engineers and a networking team large enough to run and support the custom networks. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 companies that have the resources, size, and scale for this model of SDN to make sense.For businesses below this tier – service providers and enterprises – SDN means the promise of automation and cloud scale but also a high level of complexity, sometimes more complexity than the original network. A good rule of thumb for IT initiatives is that solutions should never be more complicated than the problem they're intended to solve. This is one reason SDN deployments have been slow despite the fact that almost every organization I talk to today is interested in the technology. For SDNs to become pervasive in the non-web-scale tier, they must become easier to deploy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Operational Annoyances: SSL Certificates and Keys

SSL Key

You’re asked to update the SSL certificate for movingpackets.net on a load balancer. The requestor (me, in this case) gives you the certificate file. I don’t need to give you the intermediate certificate bundle because you’re going to use the checkcert tool to sort that out. I also tell you to use the same private key as for the last certificate. How do you know that the old private key works with the new public certificate?

Checking SSL Certificates and Keys

My good friend OpenSSL can help us match a certificate and key. The basic premise is that the modulus of both the key and the cert file should be the same. The openssl commands to do this are:

# openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in microsoft.com.crt
Modulus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

# openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in microsoft.com.key
Modulus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

Are they the same? Did you check every byte? The lazy way to do this, then, is to take an md5 hash of the output and compare those instead; it’s little easier and while there’s a remote chance that two non-equal moduli could have the same md5 hash, it’s pretty unlikely. And so:

# openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in microsoft. Continue reading
1 … 3,398 3,399 3,400 3,401 3,402 … 3,819