Facebook brings payments to Messenger app

Users of Facebook’s Messenger app will soon be able to do more than just chat with friends and send them emoticons. They’ll also be able to send money.Facebook is adding a payments feature to its popular Messenger app, letting users link their debit card and send each other payments within the app. The tool is designed to be as easy as sending messages, with a “$” icon that will appear in the app. By tapping it, users can send money to the friend they’re chatting with. Recipients of the money will have to link their debit card to accept the funds.The free feature will be rolling out over the coming months in the U.S. to Messenger on Android, iOS and the desktop. Facebook made no mention of Windows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook brings payments to Messenger app

Users of Facebook’s Messenger app will soon be able to do more than just chat with friends and send them emoticons. They’ll also be able to send money.Facebook is adding a payments feature to its popular Messenger app, letting users link their debit card and send each other payments within the app. The tool is designed to be as easy as sending messages, with a “$” icon that will appear in the app. By tapping it, users can send money to the friend they’re chatting with. Recipients of the money will have to link their debit card to accept the funds.The free feature will be rolling out over the coming months in the U.S. to Messenger on Android, iOS and the desktop. Facebook made no mention of Windows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Does Juniper have too many SDNs?

After last week’s Innovation Day announcements, Juniper Networks has a range of SDN, data center fabric and data center switching products to choose from.Does it have too many? The addition of the new QFX10000 spine switch and Junos Fusion fabric may mean some product rationalization is in the works.“There is some level of complexity in product positioning,” acknowledges Juniper CEO Rami Rahim. “But if customers decide to move from one fabric or SDN to another we provide the flexibility to move with investment protection. Customers care about the attributes of the product itself. That drives their decisions more than anything else.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Does Juniper have too many SDNs?

After last week’s Innovation Day announcements, Juniper Networks has a range of SDN, data center fabric and data center switching products to choose from.Does it have too many? The addition of the new QFX10000 spine switch and Junos Fusion fabric may mean some product rationalization is in the works.“There is some level of complexity in product positioning,” acknowledges Juniper CEO Rami Rahim. “But if customers decide to move from one fabric or SDN to another we provide the flexibility to move with investment protection. Customers care about the attributes of the product itself. That drives their decisions more than anything else.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat formulates a plan for building enterprise mobile apps

Red Hat understands that developing a mobile application is not the same as building one for the desktop, which is why the company has augmented its software stack with new technologies for mobile development.“The whole Web architecture is giving way to an emerging mobile architecture,” said Cathal McGloin, Red Hat vice president of mobile platforms.Like IBM and Oracle, Red Hat has been working to extend its enterprise software portfolio so it can support mobile applications as well, particularly those that its customers develop in house.The company said Tuesday that it has completed integrating into its own software portfolio the mobile platform it acquired when it purchased FeedHenry last October. It has outlined how enterprises could use these technologies to build mobile applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat formulates a plan for building enterprise mobile apps

Red Hat understands that developing a mobile application is not the same as building one for the desktop, which is why the company has augmented its software stack with new technologies for mobile development.“The whole Web architecture is giving way to an emerging mobile architecture,” said Cathal McGloin, Red Hat vice president of mobile platforms.Like IBM and Oracle, Red Hat has been working to extend its enterprise software portfolio so it can support mobile applications as well, particularly those that its customers develop in house.The company said Tuesday that it has completed integrating into its own software portfolio the mobile platform it acquired when it purchased FeedHenry last October. It has outlined how enterprises could use these technologies to build mobile applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia unveils $10,000 autonomous driving computer

As thousands of dashcam videos on YouTube vividly demonstrate, drivers see the craziest things. Be it an angry bear, a low-flying aircraft or even a guy riding a shopping cart on the freeway, the videos make for entertaining viewing but also illustrate a problem facing developers of self-driving cars: how can you program a computer to make sense of all this?On Tuesday, chip maker Nvidia introduced a $10,000 computer that it says will allow cars to learn the right and wrong reactions to different situations, essentially figuring out what to do from experience rather than a rigid set of pre-defined situations.“Driving is not about detecting, driving is a learned behavior,” said Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a presentation at the company’s GTC 2015 conference in San Jose.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Announces Version 3 of the CCIE Wireless Blueprint

The wait is finally over and version 3 of the wireless CCIE blueprint has finally been announced.  On September 14, the new version of the written and lab exams will go live.  This will bring a very long-in-the-tooth version 2 blueprint to an end after a nearly 4-year run.  While we tearfully say goodbye to WCS, let’s take a look at what version 3 is bringing to the table.

New Lab Exam Format

First off, let’s look at what has changed in the format of the lab itself.  The wireless track is following suit with the R&S and SP tracks and including multiple sections to the lab.  The wireless lab will now begin with a 1 hour Diagnostic section, followed by a 7 hour Configuration section.

The Diagnostic section is similar to what was done in R&S and SP.  This section tests your ability to assess and diagnose issues in a network without any access to the devices themselves.  Basically, you are given access to a number of pieces of information (emails, topology diagrams, logs, etc) that describe an issue and give the needed information to figure out the root cause.  You Continue reading

CCIE Data Center Rack Rental Scheduling Changes

In an effort to make our CCIE Data Center Rack Rentals have a better fair scheduler, we’ve implemented a new QoS policy for them as follows:

  • Users can have a maximum of 3 concurrent sessions scheduled
  • Sessions can be a maximum of 9 hours apiece
  • Maximum hours per month limit is now removed
  • Base sessions (Nexus 7K/5K) and add-ons (UCS/SAN & Nexus 2K/SAN) are now 8 tokens per hour

Note that these changes will only affect new session bookings, not any sessions that you already have reserved.

For those of you looking for more dedicated rack time I would suggest to look into our CCIE Data Center Bootcamp, where students get 12 days of 24/7 access to all hardware platforms in our racks (Nexus 7K/5K/2K, MDS, & UCS).

Happy Labbing!

Twitter adds tool to report tweets to the police

Twitter has added a tool to help users report abusive content to law enforcement, which could aid in removing the most threatening posts as Twitter ramps up its efforts to combat harassment.The tool has been incorporated into the existing process for flagging abusive content or tweets. After reporting abusive or threatening content to Twitter, users have an option to receive an emailed summary of the report. The report would include the flagged tweet and its URL, the time at which it was sent, and the user name and account URL of the person who posted it.The report, aimed at law enforcement, would also include a link to Twitter’s guidelines on how authorities can request non-public user account information from Twitter. The idea is that after seeing a report, law enforcement might feel compelled to take further action.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5G faces technical, political hurdles on the way to offering multigigabit speeds

For 5G to be successful, the whole telecom industry has to re-evaluate how networks work and are developed. Multiple challenges, both political and technical, have to be overcome before the technology can become a reality.“Availability of spectrum is obviously a big thing,” said Gerhard Fettweis, who heads a Vodafone-sponsored program at the Dresden University of Technology.The amount of spectrum allocated to 5G will determine how fast networks based on the technology will eventually become. If they are to reach multiple gigabits per second, which proponents are already promising, operators are going to need a lot more bandwidth than they have today. A first step in securing that will hopefully be taken at the World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva in November, according to Fettweis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EMET security tool updated to prevent VBScript God Mode attacks

Microsoft updated its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), a free exploit prevention tool, to protect against attacks that attempt to bypass Internet Explorer’s sandbox using VBScript.Microsoft first released EMET 5.2 last week, but re-released it Monday to fix issues that some customers experienced when running the tool in conjunction with Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1.The new version offers protection against so-called VBScript God Mode attacks, which rely on a method documented last year that can bypass anti-exploitation mechanisms like Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Control-Flow Integrity (CFI).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ansible Fundamentals Webinar

If you missed our Ansible Training webinar today, or were not able to sign-up before it filled up, we were able to record the session. If you were able to attend, we hope you enjoyed it and learned about how to use Ansible.

We'll be announcing the next session soon, so follow us on Twitter for updates.

Skip ahead to 11:24 to view the training.

We also have an Ansible Tower webinar scheduled for later this month.

Ansible Tower Webinar March 26 - 2PM EST

 

Use Cases and Requirements for Service Centric SDN Management and Orchestration

Use Cases and Requirements for Service Centric SDN Management and Orchestration


by Cengiz Alaettinoglu, CTO - March 17, 2015

Ever since we unveiled our SDN MANO (management and orchestration) prototype at the Cisco Live event last May, we have been demonstrating it to many service providers, industry analysts, and partners. The response has been very positive due to the simplicity and depth of our approach, facilitated by the 10+ years of rich analytics in our arsenal. Aside from demonstrating the prototype, we have also been collecting SDN MANO requirements. The feedback indicates SDN MANO needs to be service centric.

Currently, Packet Design has the right foundation for service centric SDN monitoring and management, including the real-time topology, both current and predictive future traffic matrices, and the service awareness that these devices, paths and traffic flows encompass. Using these ingredients, we compute shortest and constraint-based non-shortest paths for these services.

For us and for the industry, the next step is service activation and policy. For example, for one of our mobile operator customers, the main use of these traffic-engineered paths is fast-re-route. When a link (or a router/switch) fails, they would like to pre-setup a bypass path so that packets are Continue reading

Yes, I still have an answering machine

This morning I mentioned my telephone answering machine in passing and a colleague reacted as though I had just confessed to still having an 8-track in my car.“You must be the last person on the planet to still be using one,” he said dismissively.In fact, I am not. It took me all of two attempts to find another colleague who also still has an honest-to-goodness physical answering machine.A bit of Googling failed to produce any statistics, but it did uncover a New York Times story reporting on what was then a relatively new phenomenon of answering-machine ownership by consumers. It was published in 1982, which -- pardon me for living -- doesn’t seem all that long ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It’s a smartphone world, everyone else just lives in it

It doesn't take perfect vision to see that smartphones and mobile computing are the hottest part of the modern technology infrastructure. Open your eyes almost anywhere in the world and it's instantly obvious that mobile devices are continuing to revolutionize…well, just about everything.Still, those of us who work in technology may sometimes be too close to the situation to fully understand how much the industry continues to tilt away from legacy PC and server platforms—and even wannabe platforms like tablets—toward building everything around the ubiquitous smartphone. We still live and work with older categories—and in many cases still rely on them to run our businesses—and so may not always see how much the global center of gravity is shifting to the devices in the palms of our hands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here