‘Scroogled’ architect Mark Penn to leave Microsoft

Mark Penn, Microsoft’s executive vice president of advertising and strategy, will leave the company in September to open a private equity firm.Called the Stagwell Group, Penn’s new firm raised $250 million in capital from investors including former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and could make up to $750 million in acquisitions using leverage. With that money, Stagwell will focus on investing in advertising, research, data analytics, public relations, and digital marketing services, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco to make $10 billion investment in China

Cisco plans to invest US$10 billion in China, although its sales in the country are slumping due in part to persistent security concerns surrounding U.S. technology.The investment marks a “new chapter” for the company, and it includes agreements with the Chinese government to expand in areas including research, and job creation, Cisco said on Wednesday.The $10 billion investment will be made over several years, and will help spur technology innovation in the country, Cisco said, without further elaborating. It called the move a “renewed commitment” suggesting that the investment would be added on top of its existing operational expenses in China. Cisco could not be immediately reached for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce Marketing Cloud aims to blur the lines between marketing, sales and service

Marketers have long struggled with the challenge of engaging customers across channels, but an updated version of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud could help.Unveiled on Wednesday, the new software offers several enhancements designed to give companies a single place for planning customer “journeys,” or managing their interactions with a brand across sales, service, marketing and more. It also aims to make it easier for marketers to orchestrate ad targeting across the digital advertising ecosystem.First, Marketing Cloud’s updated Journey Builder tool promises to give marketers the ability to guide customers on journeys across channels and devices and ensure that those customers always get the right message in the right place at the right time. Essentially, it does that by enabling companies to connect every interaction customers have with their brand across every department, making it easier to see and manage the overall picture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How would you use Lua scripting in a DNS server?

I'm currently putting Lua into a DNS server, and I'm trying to figure out how people would use it.

A typical application would be load-balancing. How I would do this is to create a background Lua thread that frequently (many times a second) queried an external resource to discover current server utilitzation, then rewrote the RRset for that server to put the least utilized server first. This would technically change the zone, but wouldn't be handled as such (i.e. wouldn't trigger serial number changes, wouldn't trigger notification of slave zones).

Such a thread could be used for zone backends. Right now, DNS servers support complex backends like SQL servers and LDAP servers. Instead of making the server code complex, this could easily be done with a Lua thread, that regularly scans an SQL/LDAP server for changes and updates the zone in memory with the changes.

Both these examples are updating static information. One possible alternative is to execute a Lua script on each and every DNS query, such as adding a resource record to a zone that would look like this:

*.foo.example.com. TXT $LUA:my_script

Every query would cause the script to be executed. There are some Continue reading

FCC to smack AT&T with $100M fine for choking “unlimited” data plan speeds

The Federal Communications Commission said it plans to fine AT&T Mobility $100M – the agency’s largest fine ever -- for severely slowing down data speeds for customers with unlimited data plans. The FCC’s investigation revealed that millions of AT&T customers were slowed for an average of 12 days per billing cycle, significantly impeding their ability to use common data applications such as GPS mapping or streaming video. And the company failed to adequately notify its customers that they could receive speeds slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised, the FCC stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC to smack AT&T with $100M fine for choking “unlimited” data plan speeds

The Federal Communications Commission said it plans to fine AT&T Mobility $100M – the agency’s largest fine ever -- for severely slowing down data speeds for customers with unlimited data plans. The FCC’s investigation revealed that millions of AT&T customers were slowed for an average of 12 days per billing cycle, significantly impeding their ability to use common data applications such as GPS mapping or streaming video. And the company failed to adequately notify its customers that they could receive speeds slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised, the FCC stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC plans to fine AT&T $100 million over ‘unlimited’ data plans

The Federal Communications Commission plans to fine AT&T $100 million for misleading customers by throttling speeds on the lines of millions of customers who had "unlimited" data plans.The FCC alleges that AT&T did not adequately disclose to its customers on "unlimited" data plans that their speed would slow drastically after they had reached a monthly data allowance of 5GBs. The policy began in 2011.Data speeds were significantly slowed to 512kbps from the advertised 5Gbps to 12Gbps under something AT&T called its maximum bit rate policy. That very name is clearly at odds with an unlimited plan, a senior FCC official told reporters on a conference call.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Future of Networking – Demonstrated at the AFCEA Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium

Plexxi is excited to be participating at the AFCEA Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium June 16 – 18 at the Baltimore Convention Center with our partners CloudGov and PSSC Labs in booth# 7071!

For anyone attending the AFCEA show, be sure to stop by to see the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) where they will be doing an SDN Use Case Proof of Concept (POC) demonstration. Plexxi is honored to be a featured technology in this POC.

Some of the key points and functionality highlighted in the SDN Use Case Proof of Concept Presentations video below are:

  • Automated provisioning
  • Improved end-to-end management and services delivery
  • Dynamic bandwidth reallocation and scheduling
  • Less time connected in the “box”/VM
  • Reduction in requirement for direct equipment access by personnel and management systems
  • Control plane separation from data plane

See DISA’s full SDN POC video:

The demonstration pod featured at the AFCEA show (a subset demonstration of the full video shown above) highlights how a data center network, integrated with VMware, can increase agility, decrease costs and improve security. Through workflow integration, the data center network is configured through the simple process of creating virtual machines (VMs) in vSphere. Seamless mobility is supported across the entire Continue reading

Xirrus takes aim at headaches of ‘guest’ Wi-Fi networks

It’s enough to keep you on your phone’s data connection – the annoying guest wireless network. Maybe it’s got a clunky, slow-loading web portal to navigate. Maybe the password is hard to find. Or maybe it’s entirely open, but you noticed that a seedy-looking guy over there has Wireshark open on his laptop.Wireless hardware vendor Xirrus, however, is rolling out what it’s hoping is a way to simplify Wi-Fi management and make the experience less annoying – the company this week has announced an mobile data management (MDM) suite called EasyPass.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Office 365 vs. Google for Work: A cloud comparison for small businesses + The LastPass security breach: What you need to know, do, and watch out for +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Speedier 5.4-Gigabit Wi-Fi routers coming this year

It seems like I was only just writing about the new, up-to-3.2 Gbps Wi-Fi routers, such as the drone look-alike D-Link DIR-890L.In fact, it was all of six-months ago, in my post, "Is it time to move to beamforming 802.11ac?"Well, that generation of wireless networking gear using beamforming and combining multiple bands, is about to be superseded. Microprocessor-maker Broadcom has launched new 5.4 Gbps-capable chips that will appear in routers later this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Multi-datacenter Firewall Policy Automation

secdevops

Back in that world where I reinvent the commercially available wheel, I’ve been wondering for a while about how to automate the creation of firewall policies in a multi-datacenter environment. This week I started tinkering with possible ways to achieve this, and knocked up some proof of concept code in my favorite untrendy, archaic language, Perl. Don’t say it.

The key issue is that given a firewall request (source IP, destination IP, port) it’s necessary to identify the firewalls and zones to which those rules apply, in order that rules can be automatically built in the right place(s). An additional twist I’ve seen is firewalls that have multiple routing instances, each of which maintains its own set of zones, effectively isolated from each other, even though they’re all on the same firewall.

Graphing Firewalls

I spent a while thinking about ways to model the firewall architecture, and kept on getting caught up on the firewalls with multiple routing instances. Because of the routing isolation, they behave like two separate firewalls, which makes it a little tricky to figure out the correct paths. I also wanted a solution that might also tell me which specific firewall zones were involved in the path; Continue reading

Response: The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect Or Where Have All the Good Staff Gone

Nodding my head so hard my chin is hitting my chest. "What tends to remain behind is the ‘residue’ — the least talented and effective IT engineers. They tend to be grateful they have a job and make fewer demands on management; even if they find the workplace unpleasant, they are the least likely to be able to find a job elsewhere. "

The post Response: The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect Or Where Have All the Good Staff Gone appeared first on EtherealMind.

Review: The best password managers for PCs, Macs, and mobile devices

Thanks to a continuous barrage of high-profile computer security scares and reports of cloud-scale government snooping, more of us Internet users are wising up about the security of our information. One of the smarter moves we can make to protect ourselves is to use a password manager. It's one of the easiest too.A password manager won't shield you against Heartbleed or the NSA, but it's an excellent first step in securing your identity, helping you increase the strength of the passwords that protect your online accounts because it will remember those passwords for you. A password manager will even randomly generate strong passwords, without requiring you to memorize or write down these random strings of characters. These strong passwords help shield against traditional password attacks such as dictionary, rainbow tables, or brute-force attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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