Civil liberties groups oppose bill ending NSA’s bulk phone records program

Legislation intended to end the U.S. National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic telephone records is drawing opposition from several unlikely sources, digital and civil rights groups.The USA Freedom Act, approved last Thursday in a 25-2 vote by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, doesn’t go far enough to protect privacy, several digital rights groups and government whistleblowers said in a letter to members of Congress.The USA Freedom Act would result in “minimal reforms” to the NSA telephone records program, said the letter, sent Wednesday by CREDO Action, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, the Republican Liberty Caucus and other groups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco’s Chambers: A retrospective

You don’t become one of the most admired and successful CEOs in Silicon Valley and in all of business by doing many things wrong.Sure, there were missteps along the way for Cisco during the 20 year leadership of John Chambers. But they are outnumbered by the successes and overshadowed by the company’s sustained growth over those two decades.“The growth of the company, from what it was to what it became,” will be the highlight of Chambers’ career, says Glenn O’Donnell, a Forrester Research analyst. “Cisco is one of the great success stories of Silicon Valley. That will be his legacy.”Chambers will step down on July 26. His successor is Chuck Robbins, a 17-year Cisco veteran and currently the senior vice president of worldwide operations, responsible for direct and indirect sales. That was the same role Chambers had in 1995 when he was named CEO, having come to Cisco from Wang Laboratories in 1991.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix’s iPad mouse arrives next week

Apple iPad users will soon be able to interact with Citrix Systems’ virtual Windows apps using a mouse.When Citrix unveiled a prototype of the X1 mouse in January, the company wasn’t sure it would become a real product. But the high level of interest the mouse has generated convinced the company to develop it commercially. It will be launched on May 12 at Citrix’s Synergy conference.Citrix has received positive feedback from organizations of different sizes that want the mobility of an iPad and the security of its application virtualization platform XenApp, Chris Fleck, vice president of Emerging Solutions, said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ZTE’s bezel-less phone tosses away black border for more touchscreen function

Will bezel-less phones be the next big thing?China’s ZTE certainly thinks so. On Wednesday, the company’s Nubia brand unveiled the Z9, a product that comes without the black border found on so many smartphone screens.I had a chance to try out the device, and found both pros and cons with the product. On the plus side, the Z9 truly is a bezel-free device. The 5.2-inch screen extends across the glass surface from edge to edge, where it curves down to meet the phone’s protective metal frame.As a result, the phone does feel a bit more compact in terms of its width, which measures 68.3mm (2.7 inches). Some might be concerned that the lack of bezels will make the phone hard to use. Touchscreens, after all, tend to be sensitive, and any over-gripping could be misread as actual inputs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA will award you $5,000 for your finest Mars city idea

NASA this week said it would look to the public for cool ideas on how to build a sustainable environment on Mars with the best plan earning as much as $5,000.With the Journey to Mars Challenge, NASA wants applicants to describe one or more Mars surface systems or capabilities and operations that are needed to set up and establish a technically achievable, economically sustainable human living space on the red planet. Think air, water, food, communications systems and the like.+More on Network World: 15 reasons why Mars is one hot, hot, hot planet+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bridging,Provider Bridging,Provider Backbone and Shortest Path Bridging

I received an interesting comment to my last post on networkcomputing  It was about Avaya’s SPB and how it served in the core of the network at the Sochi Olympics. For those who are not familiar with acronym, SPB stands for Shortest Path Bridging and it is used for large scale bridging in the data… Read More »

The post Bridging,Provider Bridging,Provider Backbone and Shortest Path Bridging appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

IPv6 — Still No Love?

When IPv6 becomes a business problem, and not a technical one, it will start seeing serious adoption in the enterprise. A lack of available IPv4 addresses and expensive aftermarket pricing might start driving North America towards broad IPv6 adoption. Finally.

PSA: Linux Does RPF Checking

Twice now I've "discovered" that Linux hosts (even those that aren't doing IP forwarding) do Reverse Path Forwarding checks on incoming traffic.

Both times this has come up was in the context of a multicast application. It resulted in a conversation that went like this:
Application Person: Hey Chris, what's up with the network? My application isn't receiving any traffic.
Me: Um... The routers indicate they're sending it to you. The L3 forwarding counters are clicking. The L2 gear indicates it has un-filtered all of the ports between the router and your access port. Are you sure?
Application Person: My application says it's not arriving.
Me: I now have tcpdump running on your server. The traffic is arriving. Here are the packets. Do they look okay?
In the end, it turns out that the network was operating perfectly fine. The requested traffic was being delivered to the server, on the interface that requested it. It was the routing table within the Linux host that was screwed up.

RPF Checks
Reverse Path Flow checking is a feature that checks to make sure that a packet's ingress interface is the one that would be used to reach the packet's source. If a Continue reading

Lawmakers move to end warrantless surveillance of US residents

A new bill in Congress would require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants before targeting U.S. residents in searches of electronic communications collected by the National Security Agency.The End Warrantless Surveillance of Americans Act, introduced Tuesday by three members of the House of Representatives, would end the so-called surveillance back door that allows the FBI and other agencies to search U.S. emails, texts and other data swept up in NSA surveillance of overseas communications.+ A REVIEW: Government can exploit loopholes for warrantless surveillance on Americans +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Snake, the original mobile game, is coming to Android and iOS

The 90's nostalgia bubble is actually producing something useful – the return of Snake, the classic game made popular on some of Nokia's earliest popular cellphones.The Verge reported today that the mobile game's original creator, former Nokia design engineer Taneli Armanto, has partnered with Finnish video game studio Rumilus Design for Snake Rewind, which will feature updated graphics and gameplay, including a new feature that seems like heresy – "the ability to rewind if you crash your snake," according to the report. Where I come from, if you crash the Snake, you're out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Two “Network As Code” Domains

You’ve probably heard the term “network programmability” at this point. You probably also heard it equated to anything to do with code, automation, and networking. This was not always the case.

Network programmability really first hit the big time back in 2011 in the early days of the public OpenFlow discussion. That phrase was almost universally understood to be a data plane concept - because it was describing the revolutionary ideas brought up by abstracting away a forwarding pipeline. “You mean I can program my network device directly?” Network programmability.

I was inspired by a thread that my friend Josh kicked off with this tweet:

An interesting dialogue followed, and I felt compelled to address the problem caused by marketing departments muddying the waters of what would otherwise be a very simple idea.

Now obviously it’s too late to “right the wrong” that resulted from marketing and journalism engines chugging at full steam trying to make every technical term and phrase utterly useless. However, I would like Continue reading

The Two “Network As Code” Domains

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series DevOps for Networking

You’ve probably heard the term “network programmability” at this point. You probably also heard it equated to anything to do with code, automation, and networking. This was not always the case.

Network programmability really first hit the big time back in 2011 in the early days of the public OpenFlow discussion. That phrase was almost universally understood to be a data plane concept – because it was describing the revolutionary ideas brought up by abstracting away a forwarding pipeline. “You mean I can program my network device directly?” Network programmability.

I was inspired by a thread that my friend Josh kicked off with this tweet:

An interesting dialogue followed, and I felt compelled to address the problem caused by marketing departments muddying the waters of what would otherwise be a very simple idea.

Now obviously it’s too late to “right the wrong” that resulted from marketing and journalism engines chugging at full steam trying Continue reading

SD-WAN with Viptela

Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is bubbling up to be one of the prime use cases of SDN. The vendors that fall into the SD-WAN bucket often include Glue Networks, Nuage, Viptela, CloudGenix, VeloCloud, etc. As you dive into each of the solutions from the vendors, you may realize that some are truly unique technologically and some may just be offering a better way to manage existing wide area networking equipment (which is still a huge value add).
                                                                                                                                                       Read More

The only Apple Watch review you really need to see: Kids have at it…

Tech pundits and Apple fanboys/fangirls have shared their views on the new Apple Watch in recent weeks, but The Fine Brothers bring you the only review you really need to see: A seven-and-a-half-minute YouTube videos in which kids have their say.This is a twist on the usual Fine Brothers videos, as they usually try to stump today's youth with yesterday's technology, as they did here with Walkmans ("Video makers torture kids with unexplained Walkmans"). One kid says he's speechless upon identifying the Apple Watch, but the rest are certainly not....To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Show 235 – HP IMC BYOD Solution – Sponsored

HP Networking's Juliano Forti & Chris Young talk with Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks about how HP handles BYOD through integration with HP's Intelligent Management Center platform.

Author information

Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 3M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Show 235 – HP IMC BYOD Solution – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

IDG Contributor Network: The UK is ‘running out of internet,’ pundit says

The United Kingdom, which is ranked on a GDP basis just behind France, Germany, and Japan – which in-turn are out-ranked only by the U.S. and China – is going to run out of internet soon, and might need to ration it, according to Andrew Ellis, a professor in optical communications at Aston University in Birmingham, England. The web will collapse because existing fiber optic cables can't accept any more data, and telcos can't afford to keep laying more fiber, Ellis has said recently. In any case, pumping data through cables is using up the country's power supply, Ellis says. At the current rate of growth, the web will consume the country's power supply within 20 years, he reckons.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Configuration management 101

Configuration management, without a doubt this is probably one of those things we all do, but to what end do we perform configuration management though? Usually configuration begins and sometimes ends with backing up and storing those configuration files but how much further can or should we go with configuration? Backing and storing configuration files […]
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