Virtually Artificial

I had the great pleasure of stumbling across the Wool trilogy of books last year. I haven’t been so touched by a book since The Passage – I must have a thing about the end of the world. The story is about a community that lives in a huge pill shaped structure (a silo) almost […]

Author information

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 20 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, automation, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books, is a regular contributor at DevCentral and was an F5 DevCentral MVP for 2014.

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The post Virtually Artificial appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Continue reading

Commercializing Community

No online community with a collective identity has successfully become a large business like the segregated, follower-based communities of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube. Strangely, it is the retailer Amazon (proprietor of acquired communities Twitch, Goodreads, IMDB and DPReview) who has the most sophisticated understanding of collective identity online communities of any modern mega-corp.

C.S. Lewis used to say that for each new book he read, he would read two old books — books written before he was born, preferably. The point to this seemingly odd reading habit was to avoid the blind spot — every age has a blind spot, a obsessive passion around which everything else must fall or be crushed. Much like ages, each profession also has a blind spot of the same sort.

Technology is no exception.

So what is the blind spot of the technology world? I would say it’s human nature. Engineers have a very bad habit of making people into manipulable objects — for instance, “the soul is software, and the body is hardware.” The analogy might be a good one, but it’s also, like most analogies, decidedly not the whole story.

This belief that we can build a community based Continue reading

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, July 16

Qualcomm hit with antitrust probe in EuropeQualcomm is under investigation by the European Union’s antitrust authority, which suspects the company of abusing its dominant position in the market for 3G and 4G chipsets used in smartphones and tablets. The company settled similar charges in China earlier this year. In this case, the European Commission is looking into whether the company broke antitrust rules by offering financial incentives to phone manufacturers if they made it their primary chipset supplier, and whether it sold below cost to force competitors out of the market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, July 16

Qualcomm hit with antitrust probe in EuropeQualcomm is under investigation by the European Union’s antitrust authority, which suspects the company of abusing its dominant position in the market for 3G and 4G chipsets used in smartphones and tablets. The company settled similar charges in China earlier this year. In this case, the European Commission is looking into whether the company broke antitrust rules by offering financial incentives to phone manufacturers if they made it their primary chipset supplier, and whether it sold below cost to force competitors out of the market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

You Decide

I’m lucky, my current client has me working in a so-called DevOps team, in a very progressive business unit within a large, stable enterprise. F5 Load balancers are everywhere and the ‘product’ is internet facing, I’m in my element; this is ‘my thing’. The heavy use of iRules means I get to ‘programme’ quite often […]

Author information

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 20 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, automation, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books, is a regular contributor at DevCentral and was an F5 DevCentral MVP for 2014.

TwitterLinkedIn

The post You Decide appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Continue reading

Briefing: Project Calico – BGP-driven SDN Without Overlays

The following is a "paper review" of Project Calico following a recent briefing. I've conducted a short review of the technology and business issues around the product and conclude that its unlikely to be competitive with Docker libnetwork that was announced a few weeks back or existing SDN Solutions in the market today.

The post Briefing: Project Calico – BGP-driven SDN Without Overlays appeared first on EtherealMind.

Risky Business #374 — Anti-Flash sentiment sweeps the globe

On this week's show we'll be checking in with Richard Forno on the fallout from the OPM breach. Richard has been kicking around in DC infosec circles for a long time now and he let's us know what the mood is like inside the beltway.

In this week's sponsor interview we chat with Chris Gatford of HackLabs! HackLabs is an Australia-based pentesting and consulting firm and we're speaking to Chris about the changing nature of security consultancies.

Adam Boileau, as usual, joins the show to discuss the week's news, which has been dominated by calls for the axing of the Flash plugin and the continued fallout from the Hacking Team breach.

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Over 200 Docker Meetups!

Big thank you to our Docker community for the support in helping us grow to now over 200 Docker meetup groups! Without all of the Docker meetup organizers, sponsors, speakers and attendees, none of this would be possible – we are … Continued

Intel profit falls as PC slump continues

Intel’s revenue and profit both dropped last quarter as people held off on buying new PCs ahead of the Windows 10 launch later this year.Revenue from Intel’s Client Computing Group, which sells processors for desktops, laptops and smartphones, fell 14 percent from this time last year to $7.5 billion, the chip maker said Wednesday.Its Data Center Group, which makes the Xeon server processors, performed better, but not well enough to offset the ongoing slump in the PC industry.Intel’s total revenue for the quarter ended June 27 was $13.2 billion, down 5 percent from a year earlier. Net income was $2.7 billion, down 3 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How NASA is (slowly) talking to the spacecraft snapping pictures of Pluto

How do you talk to a spacecraft that’s three billion miles away circling around Pluto? Very slowly.It’s a challenge NASA is dealing with right now. By now you’ve heard about New Horizons, the spacecraft launched in 2006 to take close-up shots of what was once the most distant planet in our solar system. So far New Horizons have sent back some of the best images we’ve ever had of Pluto and its moon Charon. NASA New Horizons has an 83-inch antenna that is sending radio waves at 1,000 to 2,000 bits per second. It takes them 4.5 hours to travel 3 billion miles back to earth. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Making use of Cisco’s labs to practice for certifications

A major hurdle for students wanting to achieve the various Cisco Certifications has always been equipment. Sure, a student could purchase a few used devices via an auction site for something like the entry-level CCENT Certification, but what about more complex certifications that might require thousands (or more) worth of gear? Rack rental companies tend to come and go and can be very unreliable. Cisco is finally really attacking this issue for students thanks to exciting virtualization technologies. This article presents some current options available today. First up is Cisco VIRL. VIRL stands for Virtual Internet Routing Labs. What makes VIRL so exciting is a low price tag for its annual subscription (approximately $150 per year with a $50 off coupon) and a decent variety of devices for virtualization. The list includes:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Software and the bogeyman

This post about the July 8 glitches (United, NYSE, WSJ failed) keeps popping up in my Twitter timeline. It's complete nonsense.

What's being argued here is that these glitches were due to some sort of "moral weakness", like laziness, politics, or stupidity. It's a facile and appealing argument, so scoundrels make it often -- to great applause from the audience. But it's not true.

Legacy


Layers and legacies exist because working systems are precious. More than half of big software projects are abandoned, because getting new things to work is a hard task. We place so much value on legacy, working old systems, because the new replacements usually fail.

An example of this is the failed BIND10 project. BIND, the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon, is the oldest and most popular DNS server. It is the de facto reference standard for how DNS works, more so than the actual RFCs. Version 9 of the project is 15 years old. Therefore, the consortium that maintains it funded development for version 10. They completed the project, then effectively abandoned it, as it was worse in almost every way than the previous version.

The reason legacy works well is the enormous regression testing Continue reading

Installing netmiko on Windows

Netmiko is a Python module by Kirk Byers that provides a wrapper around the Paramiko SSH module for doing screen scraping and CLI automation on network devices.

Paramiko has some dependencies that make installation on Windows a tad tricky. Here's a quick way to get it done:

  1. Install Anaconda.
  2. From the Anaconda shell, run "conda install paramiko".
  3. From the Anaconda shell, run "pip install scp".
  4. Install git for Windows.
  5. Clone netmiko with "git clone https://github.com/ktbyers/netmiko"
  6. cd into the netmiko directory and run "python setup.py install".
Done! Screen scrape away, and don't forget to hound your vendors for real APIs... :-)

Installing netmiko on Windows

Netmiko is a Python module by Kirk Byers that provides a wrapper around the Paramiko SSH module for doing screen scraping and CLI automation on network devices.

Paramiko has some dependencies that make installation on Windows a tad tricky. Here's a quick way to get it done:

  1. Install Anaconda.
  2. From the Anaconda shell, run "conda install paramiko".
  3. From the Anaconda shell, run "pip install scp".
  4. Install git for Windows.
  5. Clone netmiko with "git clone https://github.com/ktbyers/netmiko"
  6. cd into the netmiko directory and run "python setup.py install".
Done! Screen scrape away, and don't forget to hound your vendors for real APIs... :-)

Here’s how Google wants you to buy stuff on mobile

Google is rolling out a new service that lets users buy retail items directly from the search results page on mobile devices, in an effort to make mobile search more useful and give advertisers a new way to attract customers.A new link reading “Buy on Google” will appear in the ads that show up after users search for certain retail items. Clicking on that link will take you to a retailer-branded product page hosted by Google where you can get more information about the product, like reviews, and select item quantities. A checkout button will let you enter and save payment information, and provide a shipping address, before placing the order.Google had been rumored to be prepping the service, which it calls Purchases on Google. On Wednesday, the company talked a little more about how it will look and work, in announcements online and during a retail-focused event in New York.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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