Why Should I Care About Networking?

A month ago I was asked to deliver a short presentation on “something interesting about networking” at my local university. The temptation to talk about network automation and SDN was huge, but I quickly figured out that would make no sense (the audience were students in their freshman year) and decided to talk about a fundamental question: why should a programmer care about networking.

Unfortunately the presentation wasn’t recorded, but you can browse the slide deck on the ipSpace.net public content web site.

View the presentation

Uber argues in court that drivers want independence, flexibility

Uber Technologies gathered the support of over 400 drivers across California and a law professor to back its argument in court that its platform gives its contractors the flexibility and independence they want.The ride-hailing company faces a proposed class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which aims to show that its drivers are indeed employees under the applicable legal standard, and not independent contractors. A reclassification of drivers as employees could potentially increase the costs for the company in terms of reimbursement of expenses and employee benefits.In a filing Thursday, Uber said the three complainants failed to establish that their own claims are typical of those that might be asserted by the over 160,000 drivers they seek to represent, as they signed only a handful of the 17 operative service agreements between Uber and drivers in California, and their experiences with the company’s app differ considerably from many or most drivers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google fine tunes spam catching tools

Google has reduced spam reaching inboxes to a fraction of a percent, but in the process sometimes misclassifies bulk-mailed messages like monthly statements and ticket receipts.It’s a big problem for large bulk emailers of legitimate messages. To deal with it, Google has created a toolset to help those mailers figure out what’s happening to their messages.Postmaster Tools is designed for administrators and provides information on delivery errors, spam reports and reputation, wrote Sri Harsha Somanchi, a Google product manager, in a blog post.Google is also try to make its spam filter for consumer accounts more customizable. Although people can already classify messages by specifically labeling one as spam, what is spam to one person may be considered a desired communication by another.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Datanauts 003 – Opening the OpenStack Stack

OpenStack is an open source platform for creating cloud services. Special guest Eric Wright, who leads the Toronto VMUG and Virtual Design Master competition, joins Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks to bring some clarity to this cloudy topic.

Author information

Drew Conry-Murray

I'm a tech journalist, editor, and content director with 17 years' experience covering the IT industry. I'm author of the book "The Symantec Guide To Home Internet Security" and co-author of the post-apocalyptic novel "Wasteland Blues," available at Amazon.
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The post Datanauts 003 – Opening the OpenStack Stack appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Drew Conry-Murray.

MikroTik CCR1072-1G-8S+ Review (Part 1) – hardware, specs and design use cases

 

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07/25/2015 – Thanks to Normunds @ MikroTik for sending over photos of the production CCR-1072-1G-8S+ which have now been included in the slideshow

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CCR-1072-1G-8S+ available soon @

logo-roc-noc

http://www.roc-noc.com/mikrotik/routerboard/CCR1072-1G-8Splus.html

UPDATE 7/10/2015 – MikroTik officially lists the CCR1072

http://routerboard.com/CCR1072-1G-8Splus

NOTE: The pictures in this review are of a pre-production CCR1072. The CCR1072 that is shipping has some minor differences on the mainboard and the case. MikroTik is sending updated pictures and we will post those as soon as they come in!

StubArea51.net prepares for CCR1072 performance testing in the Flowood, MS lab

Well, the long wait is finally over. According to Tom over at www.roc-noc.com, the CCR1072 will start shipping in the next 2 weeks and we will be adding it to our development lab in Flowood, MS. We were fortunate enough to get a significant amount of time with the new flagship router down in Miami at the 2015 USA MUM thanks to MT. The arrival of the CCR1072 and 80 Gbps of throughput opens up new doors for MikroTik. The CCR1072 positions MikroTik to  break into larger markets and enables competition against industry players like Cisco and Continue reading

Aruba and HP – The Remaining Pieces

Aruba-HP-LogoI wrote previously about the Aruba and HP ecosystems. You can find that post here. I also wrote about Aruba’s culture here, and although I had planned on writing about HP’s culture as I understand it, I don’t know that I need to spend too much time on that. When you look at the difference in the two ecosystems from a wireless perspective(HP is a big company with a broad portfolio), HP is a completely different animal and that HAS to affect their company culture.

Well, what really remains to talk about? I think two things. Execution and product disposition.

Execution

Ask anyone who follows the industry about HP, and you will get a variety of thoughts. However, one of them that always seems to surface is in regards to their ability to execute. There is a history of missteps regarding HP in the executive arena over the past several years. Since Meg Whitman has taken over as CEO, I think we have seen a bit more stability in that regard. When thinking about Aruba and HP combining forces for wireless, I am reminded of a comment that Andrew vonNagy made during a Tech Field Day roundtable at the Continue reading

NetDevOps: Delivering Network Levers

As a recent transition from the VAR side of the room to that of the vendor, it’s been eye opening and a great reset experience to view the world from a previously unexperienced angle. Truly.

Just for clarity, this post contains my own views. Period.

What is so apparent and this falls perfectly inline with Matt Oswalt’s floweringly hilarious post, is we’re moving to a period where sexy has to be real and functional. It could be an easy button (something that makes your life easier as an operator of network infrastructure) or an insight shared with your customer that results in infrastructure being used or consumed slightly differently to solve a real business problem. After all, the infrastructure wouldn’t exist without the business requirement to consume it. The days of huge world changing massive behemoth solutions has died a death. Why would an enterprise change their entire operational procedures and practices just because “MEGA SOLUTION-TRON” can make an omelette? The NOC team doesn’t even eat omelettes!

Take the story of Software Defined Networking. Starting out as a centralised control-plane for distributed data paths and being churned up by the stampeding vendor crusades, it’s now a $variable that covers Continue reading

Two US telecom companies to pay $3.5 million for data breach

Two sister mobile and telecom service providers will pay a combined US$3.5 million after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission found that they were storing customers’ personal data on unprotected servers accessible over the Internet.TerraCom and YourTel America failed to adequately protect the personal information of more than 300,000 customers, the FCC said. The settlement stems from a 2013 incident when an investigative reporter found customer records from the companies’ low-income Lifeline programs online, the agency said in an October 2014 proposal to fine the companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Two US telecom companies to pay $3.5 million for data breach

Two sister mobile and telecom service providers will pay a combined US$3.5 million after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission found that they were storing customers’ personal data on unprotected servers accessible over the Internet.TerraCom and YourTel America failed to adequately protect the personal information of more than 300,000 customers, the FCC said. The settlement stems from a 2013 incident when an investigative reporter found customer records from the companies’ low-income Lifeline programs online, the agency said in an October 2014 proposal to fine the companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OPM hackers stole data on 21.5m people, including 1.1m fingerprints

Investigators have tallied up the number of records stolen in an attack on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and it’s bigger than anyone thought.The agency has concluded “with high confidence” that hackers got away with sensitive information including Social Security numbers on 21.5 million people—almost everyone who underwent a background security investigation for a government job through OPM since 2000.The majority of records, some 19.7 million, were for background investigation applicants while an additional 1.8 million were from nonapplicants—friends and family of applicants who would also be investigated as part of the process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why incumbent ISPs should be worried about the broadband market

The broadband market has been rocked by a handful of major unexpected developments over the past few years, from Google suddenly stepping into the market with significantly faster broadband at much lower prices to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) removing nearly all legal barriers to municipal broadband projects.The fallout from the FCC's ruling is beginning to gain some steam, with a 101-city coalition called Next Century Cities aiming to smooth the path for municipalities to bring affordable, gigabit-speed broadband to their cities.See also: Inside the bold plan to bring gigabit fiber to Detroit While the success stories are much more well-known, such as Chattanooga, Tennessee's long-running municipal gigabit fiber network, others have failed in spectacular fashion, like the city of Provo, Utah, whose municipal broadband project struggled before the city ultimately sold its existing fiber to Google for $1. This nationwide group could help provide access to information and expertise on broadband deployment to ensure the taxpayer money devoted to such a project doesn't go to waste.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GAO: Early look at fed’s “Einstein 3” security weapon finds challenges

When it comes to the government protecting all manner of state and personal information, the feds can use all the help it can get. One of the most effective tools the government has is the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS), known as “EINSTEIN.” In a nutshell EINSTEIN is a suite of technologies intended to detect and prevent malicious network traffic from entering and exiting federal civilian government networks. +More on Network World: NASA’s cool, radical and visionary concepts+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bitglass boosts security for data in public-cloud apps

Bitglass has boosted the protection it offers cloud-based applications, now supporting fully searchable AES 256 encryption without degrading the speed of searches.The company has received a U.S. patent on the technology it is using to deliver the searchable encryption and that is now available through its security-brokering service.The service is designed for corporate customers who want to use cloud software as a service (SaaS) but who don’t want their data stored unsecured in the cloud.A gateway on customers’ sites encrypts data that is headed to the cloud, then uploads only an encryption prefix or handle to the cloud itself. When an authorized person wants to use the cloud app, the app sends down the handle to the gateway. The gateway uses the handle as an index to find the full version of the encrypted data and decrypts it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The curious case of Google Street View’s missing streets

With the arrival of El Capitan on Google Street View last month, you can now haul yourself virtually up one of the most famous rock faces in the world. Navigating certain streets in urban areas, however, can still be a challenge.As Google expands Street View into ever more exotic places, it appears to have a problem in many of the towns and cities where the service has been available for years. Look closely at any major city, especially the residential areas, and Street View is littered with hundreds, even thousands, of little gaps. And although it’s hard to be sure, the problem may be getting worse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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