Comcast and TWC are (still) among the most hated companies in America

The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index for 2015 placed Comcast and Time-Warner Cable near the very bottom of all telecom and technology companies in the rankings, the researchers involved announced Tuesday.The ACSI’s ratings – on a 100-point scale – gave Comcast a score of 54 as a TV service provider and 56 as an ISP, well below the industry average of 63 in both categories. TWC received a 51 in the former category and a 58 in the latter. The ratings were based on the ACSI’s in-house analysis of survey responses from 14,000 Americans, which were collected during the first quarter of 2015.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Ransomware creator apologizes for 'sleeper' attack, releases decryption keys + Intel to buy Altera for $16.7B, eyes IoT market +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AMD skips Chromebooks, bets on Windows 10 with new Carrizo chips

Chromebooks may be hot-ticket items, but with its sixth-generation A-series chips for mainstream laptops, AMD is placing its bets on Microsoft’s Windows 10.The new chips, code-named Carrizo, will appear in laptops priced between US$400 and $800 from Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba. The first wave of laptops will become available starting in July, initially with Windows 8, and later in the year with Windows 10.The new chips include quad-core A8 and A10 processors, which have up to six GPU cores, and the faster FX chips, which have up to eight GPU cores. Some new laptops based on the chips were shown at the Computex trade show in Taipei this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook mandates stronger digital verification of apps

Facebook will require application developers to move later this year to a more secure type of digital signature for their apps, which is used to verify a program’s legitimacy.As of Oct. 1, apps will have to use SHA-2 certificate signatures rather than ones signed with SHA-1. Both are cryptographic algorithms that are used to create a hash of a digital certificate that can be mathematically verified.Apps that use SHA-1 after October won’t work on Facebook anymore, wrote Adam Gross, a production engineer at the company, in a blog post.“We recommend that developers check their applications, SDKs, or devices that connect to Facebook to ensure they support the SHA-2 standard,” Gross wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

June “Network Toolset Challenge”

My CLUS 2015 Schedule

I'm lucky enough to be heading to Cisco Live in San Diego this year to host customers from my area. When I'm not with a customer during the day I plan on attending these sessions:

Google-backed Magic Leap opens up to third-party developers

Magic Leap, the mysterious startup backed by Google that is developing a headset for augmented reality, wants outside help to create content for its device.On Tuesday, the company said it would be opening its platform to third-party developers with an SDK (software development kit) that would let developers create content for Magic Leap’s system.Magic Leap has developed what it calls a photonics light field chip, which would project 3D images directly on people’s eyes and superimpose those images over what users see in the real world. It’s designed to be superior to stereoscopic vision, which uses two different images to trick the eye into thinking something is 3D. Magic Leap thinks this “augmented” content could take any number of forms, for applications in gaming but also in storytelling and communications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pluribus DemoFriday Q&A + Video: Brownfield SDN – How to Deploy SDN Switching Within Your Existing Network

Read the post-DemoFriday Q&A and watch the video to learn what Pluribus had to say about SDN switching.

Uh, the only reform of domestic surveillance is dismantling it

Oracle brings Ghostery into Marketing Cloud to help users monitor their websites

The average company has about 70 different types of third-party code on its website but is aware of only about a third of them. The rest are hidden in services like ad networks, widgets and analytics tools, and they can bog down performance, threaten security and compromise search-engine optimization.That’s according to Ghostery, which on Tuesday announced a partnership with Oracle whereby its TrackerMap Live monitoring tool is now available to users of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Offered on the Oracle Marketing AppCloud, TrackerMap Live is designed to help reveal the interconnected ecosystem of code and third-party tags on company websites.Using TrackerMap Live, companies can pinpoint where each tag on their site comes from and see what its effects are. Along the way, they can determine whether vendors are placing unwanted or non-secure piggyback tags on their website without permission.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The White Box SDN Twitter 45

With SDN and white box news flying fast and furious through the Internet, it can be hard to keep up with really great articles. Twitter is a great place to monitor breaking White Box and SDN news, but where do you start? This blog presents a list of 45 top White Box SDN Twitter handles you should follow to keep up. The following Tweeters have their fingers on the pulse of White Boxes and SDN. See the list below or follow the whole group at Pica8’s SDN 45.

1. @bigswitch – Big Switch Networks
2. @BradCasemore – Brad Casemore
3. @capveg – Rob Sherwood
4. @CIMICorp – Tom Nolle
5. @Cloud_SDN – Cloud SDN
6. @colin_dixon – Colin Dixon
7. @craigmatsumoto – Craig Matsumoto
8. @CumulusNetworks – Cumulus Networks
9. @DanPittPaloAlto – Dan Pitt
10. @e_hanselman – Eric Hanselman
11. @ecbanks – Ethan Banks
12. @etherealmind – Greg Ferro
13. @IEEESDN – IEEE SDN
14. @ioshints – Ivan Pepelnjak
15. @IPv6Freely – Chris Jones
16. @jonisick – Joe Onisick
17. @JRCumulus – JR Rivers
18. @martin_casado – Martim Casado
19. @mbushong – Michael Bushong
20. @mitchwagner – Mitch Wagner
21. @NetworkedAlex – Alex Walker
22. @NickLippis – Nick Lippis
23. @ONLab_ONOS – Open Networking Lab
24. @ONUG_ – Open Networking User Group
25. @OpenDaylightSDN – Open Daylight Project
26. @openflow – Open Networking Foundation
27. @OpenSourceSDN – Continue reading

IPv6 DMVPN Routing

In our last article we looked at IPv6 over IPv4 DMVPN configuration, where IPv4 transport was used to tunnel IPv6 traffic. In this blog post I would like to show you how to deploy pure IPv6 DMVPN network, and even more importantly, how to enable one IPv6 Routing Protocol over another in the Cloud.

Since IPv6 will be now also used as the underlying transport, the overall configuration of the DMVPN devices will be a little bit different from the previous example; also note that our topology was slightly modified :

Key thing here is that NBMA addresses are no longer IPv4; basically IPv6 is used everywhere, which means that our mappings on the Spokes will be always referring to v6 information.

Let’s start our configuration. We will first configure our Hub (R3), then the Spokes (R2, R4), and finally enable routing on the Overlay network. Since IPSec is optional, we will not be using it in this example (note that to protect IPv6 packets IKEv2 would have to be used, not IKEv1).

R3 (Hub) configuration. Again, everything is IPv6, including the tunnel mode. Don’t forget that link-local addresses must be always hard-coded on a given Cloud, on every device Continue reading

Computex 2015: Asus pushes luxury with new ZenPad tablets

Video

Senate passes bill to rein in NSA phone dragnet

The U.S. Senate has passed legislation intended to rein in the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic telephone records, sending the bill to President Barack Obama for his signature.The Senate’s 67-32 vote Tuesday on the USA Freedom Act restores a limited telephone records program at the NSA to resume after the old bulk collection program expired Sunday night. After Obama’s signature, the NSA will have six months to transition its phone records database to U.S. telecom carriers.The USA Freedom Act, aimed at ending bulk collection of telephone records, was needed after revelations about the program by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in mid-2013, supporters said. Some digital rights groups have blasted the bill as “fake reform,” but the bill’s limits on the NSA will help restore the U.S. public’s trust in government surveillance efforts, said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and sponsor of the bill.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senate passes bill to rein in NSA phone dragnet

The U.S. Senate has passed legislation intended to rein in the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic telephone records, sending the bill to President Barack Obama for his signature.The Senate’s 67-32 vote Tuesday on the USA Freedom Act restores a limited telephone records program at the NSA to resume after the old bulk collection program expired Sunday night. After Obama’s signature, the NSA will have six months to transition its phone records database to U.S. telecom carriers.The USA Freedom Act, aimed at ending bulk collection of telephone records, was needed after revelations about the program by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in mid-2013, supporters said. Some digital rights groups have blasted the bill as “fake reform,” but the bill’s limits on the NSA will help restore the U.S. public’s trust in government surveillance efforts, said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and sponsor of the bill.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Faster Wi-Fi is coming soon to a device near you

Wi-Fi in your home or office could get a big speed boost by the end of this year with Qualcomm's newest chip, which reaches new highs in data transfer speeds.The peak wireless data transfer speeds of the QCA9994 and QCA9984 Wi-Fi chips will reach 1.7G bps (bits per second). That speed can be achieved through single or multiple data streams from devices on an 802.11ac Wi-Fi network.MORE: Full speed ahead for 802.11ac WiFiThe speed tops Qualcomm's previous high of around 1Gbps, which it achieved in products released last year. To put the wireless speed in perspective, the data transfer speeds of a wired USB 3.0 connection peaks at 5Gbps, which in most cases is considered adequate for external hard drives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Analysis: Convergence In All The Markets as Big Acquisitions Go Down

What is the common theme ? Avago buys Broadcom, EMC buys Virtustream, Intel rumoured to buy Altera, HP buys Contextstream and Palo Alto buys Cirrosecure.

The post Analysis: Convergence In All The Markets as Big Acquisitions Go Down appeared first on EtherealMind.

Really smart phones: Now they can predict your GPA

Researchers at Dartmouth College and the University of Texas at Austin have developed an Android app that they say can predict students’ grade point averages without prior knowledge of data such as SAT scores, IQ or school track records. What’s more, the technology could have future applications for predicting employee performance.SmartGPA is a cloud-backed app that relies on embedded passive sensors as well as special algorithms that can determine behaviors by the phone user, from studying to partying to face-to-face-communications to sleep. That information can then be crunched to predict students’ GPA within 17 hundreds of a point, according to Andrew T. Campbell, who co-authored paper on the research with colleagues from Dartmouth and the University of Texas at Austin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Home heating provided by cloud servers is now a reality

One of the problems with traditional data centers has always been that the servers create a lot of heat. And that waste heat needs to be disposed of to prevent server components, switches, and other parts from overheating and malfunctioning.Various solutions have been tried over the years, including building data centers near the sea so cold sea water can be used for cooling. Facebook built a site in Sweden near the Arctic Circle to take advantage of ambient cooing—it's cold up there.And of course, expensive grid-powered air conditioning is the default solution.Data furnaces Dutch company Nerdalize reckons it's got a better answer. It suggests getting rid of data centers, distributing servers throughout communities, and using them to heat homes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to use Google’s new privacy and security tools

Google stores, manages and sometimes sells an astonishingly large and complex amount of user data. Unfortunately, that digital information isn't always kept secure or private, but Google puts some degree of control in the hands of its users. To offer you a little more control, Google this week rolled out an updated online hub designed to help manage privacy settings, called My Account, as well as a pair of tools that streamline the process of safeguarding user data.A brief history of Linux malware The My Account hub gives Google users more context on how and where their information is shared, when they can opt to remain private and the types of ads they see on Google or elsewhere online. Google redesigned My Account to display its many user settings in a more intuitive way, and the Security Checkup and Privacy Checkup tools show users how to control and manage some of the data they share with Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Get Ready for the DockerCon 2015 Conference Party