FTC says it did not go easy on Google in search probe

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said its decision not to prosecute Google over its search practices was in line with the recommendations of its staff.The statement issued Wednesday by FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez and Commissioners Julie Brill and Maureen Ohlhausen was in response to the leak of an internal document, which suggested that the agency’s staff had concluded that Google’s business tactics had caused “real harm to consumers and to innovation,” and had recommended a lawsuit against the company.The FTC’s decision on the search allegations was in accord with the recommendations of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Economics, and Office of General Counsel, the three commissioners wrote, claiming that the document, which was inadvertently provided to The Wall Street Journal as part of a public records request, was only “a fraction” of the voluminous record and extensive internal analysis that was reviewed at the time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WhatsApp not as open as Messenger to outside developers

Facebook-owned WhatsApp, the popular mobile messaging and calling service, has no immediate plans to offer tools to outside developers to let them build services on top of it.Doing so could potentially introduce unwanted content into the app, slow it down, and disrupt the flow of one-to-one messages and interactions between its users, WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton said Wednesday during a panel talk at Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco.Acton delivered his remarks after two developers from the audience asked when, if at all, WhatsApp would offer application programming interfaces or APIs to them.Acton was adamant. For the year, the company is focused on its voice calling service—which is available for Android now and coming to iOS soon—as well as its recently launched Web software, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Egyptian company says rogue Google SSL certificates were a mistake

An Egyptian company that created unauthorized digital certificates for several Google domains said Wednesday it made a mistake and acted quickly when the error became known.The SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layers/Transport Layer Security) certificates would have allowed MCS Holdings of Cairo to decrypt traffic sent by users on its network to Google, a major privacy concern. Google said it doesn’t believe the certificates were misused.But MCS shouldn’t have been able to create digital certificates for Google properties in the first place. It appears MCS and a Certificate Authority (CA) in China both made mistakes, which highlight ongoing problems in the way digital certificates are issued.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to Upgrade IOS on Cisco 4500X Switch

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
The post describes the process of how to upgrade the IOS / Software on a Cisco 4500X switch. I will not be covering how to do a hitless upgrade using ISSU with 2 switches in a VSS pair. This process is performed on two switches which are not in production. So to perform the upgrade... [Read More]

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post How to Upgrade IOS on Cisco 4500X Switch

How Messenger chats factor into what you see in Facebook news feed

Havent seen many posts from some friends lately on Facebook? Perhaps you need to reach out directly to them.How often you chat with someone using Facebooks Messenger app is a signal the company uses to determine how to place posts in your feed. If you havent chatted with someone in a while on Messenger, and then you start chatting again, posts from that person might appear higher in your news feed.That was one piece of information shared by Facebook engineers during a session Wednesday during the companys F8 conference in San Francisco.The algorithm Facebook uses to rank posts in peoples news feeds is a complicated one, and it’s always in flux, but the session, titled “How News Feed Works,” shed light on it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding 802.11 Medium Contention

In this post, I dive deep into 802.11 medium contention to understand how it works as a precursor to the final blog post in this series where I’ll detail the two main sources of medium contention, identify Wi-Fi's breaking point (that'll be fun, stay tuned) and how this affects proper WLAN design in order to optimize wireless networks to prevent medium contention from killing your WLAN performance.

Read the full blog post over on the Aruba Networks Tech Blog...

This is the third blog post in a series about WLAN capacity planning. Be sure to read the first and second posts.

Cheers,
Andrew

Akamai: Most Internet attacks in Q4 originated in China

A majority of the Internet attack traffic in 2014’s fourth quarter originated in China, followed by the U.S., according to cloud service provider Akamai.China and the U.S. were the only countries where more than 10 percent of attack traffic originated, Akamai said in its quarterly state of the Internet report. The other top 10 nations each had less than 5 percent of the world’s attack traffic. Taiwan, for instance, came in third with 4.4 percent of the traffic.Still, the attack traffic coming from China was down compared to the third quarter, falling to 49 percent from 41 percent. Attack traffic coming from the U.S. also fell, decreasing to 13 percent from 17 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

USB 3.1 set to reach desktops

The emerging USB 3.1 standard is set to reach desktops as hardware companies release motherboards with ports that can transfer data two times faster than the previous USB technology.MSI on Wednesday announced a 970A SLI Krait motherboard that will support the AMD processors and the USB 3.1 protocol. Motherboards with USB 3.1 ports have also been released by Gigabyte, ASRock and Asus, but those boards support Intel chips.USB 3.1 can shuffle data between a host device and peripheral at 10Gbps (bits per second), which is two times faster than USB 3.0. USB 3.1 is also generating excitement for the reversible Type-C cable, which is the same on both ends so users don’t have to worry about plug orientation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco programs the cloud

Cisco recently unveiled three enhancements to its core and edge platforms for service providers to increase programmability for cloud and IP traffic growth. The new offerings include Application Engineered Routing, the IOS XRv 9000 Virtual Router and 100G Ethernet line cards for the ASR 9000 series edge router.The new and enhanced products are intended to allow service providers to scale their networks and to uncover new revenue opportunities. Cisco says global IP traffic will increase three-fold from 2013 to 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 21%, due to more Internet users and devices, faster broadband speeds and more video viewing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook extends Parse to build IoT apps

Facebook is extending Parse, its suite of back-end software development tools, to create Internet of Things apps for items like smart home appliances and activity trackers.By opening Parse to IoT, Facebook hopes to strengthen its ties to a wider group of developers in a growing industry via three new software development kits aimed specifically at IoT, unveiled Wednesday at the company’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco.The tools are aimed at making it easier for outside developers to build apps that interface with Internet-connected devices. Garage door manufacturer Chamberlain, for example, has already used Parse for its app to let people open and lock their garage door from their smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenStack Neutron – The Dirty Network Detail

This post is just a quick response to a comment by Turing Machinæ on Show 227 – OpenStack Neutron Overview with Kyle Mestery, which was “I’ve learnt absolutely NOTHING about openstack from this podcast.” Whilst I don’t agree I have some empathy; time and time again I’ve found myself hitting a brick wall recently when […]

Author information

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 20 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, automation, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books, is a regular contributor at DevCentral and was an F5 DevCentral MVP for 2014.

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The post OpenStack Neutron – The Dirty Network Detail appeared first on Packet Pushers Continue reading

Centec GoldenGate Chip to Challenge Broadcom Trident II

Centec enters the 10G age with its newest switch chip.

School district gets an HP SDN makeover to address wireless growth, security problems

Faced with exponential growth in wireless devices and an increasingly digital curriculum, Jeff Dietsche, Systems and Infrastructure Manager for the South Washington County Schools in Minnesota, decided his only hope was to deal with a single vendor and use SDN to streamline operations. Dietsche tells the tale to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

A Go Gotcha: When Closures and Goroutines Collide

Here's a small Go gotcha that it's easy to fall into when using goroutines and closures. Here's a simple program that prints out the numbers 0 to 9:

(You can play with this in the Go Playground here)

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {  
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        fmt.Printf("%d ", i)
    }
}

It's output is easy to predict:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9  

If you decided that it would be nice to run those fmt.Printfs concurrently using goroutines you might be surprised by the result. Here's a version of the code that runs each fmt.Printf in its own goroutine and uses a sync.WaitGroup to wait for the goroutines to terminate.

package main

import (  
    "fmt"
    "runtime"
    "sync"
)

func main() {  
    runtime.GOMAXPROCS(runtime.NumCPU())

    var wg sync.WaitGroup
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        wg.Add(1)
        go func() {
            fmt.Printf("%d ", i)
            wg.Done()
        }()
    }

    wg.Wait()
}

(This code is in the Go Playground here). If you're thinking concurrently then you'll likely predict that the output will be the numbers 0 to 9 in some Continue reading

The Facts Behind the Myth

I hate getting into lengthy discussions regarding open networking (or bare-metal) pricing as there are benefits other than price. However, with so many people trying to understand the industry transition, I feel compelled to jump in when I see confusing information.

Forrester analyst Andre Kindness recently published a report called The Myth of White-Box Network Switches which is causing a pretty interesting debate.  The discourse forms, as Andre puts it, “I think there is misunderstanding/reading my research. I’m not saying one solution is cheaper. It highlights the cost”; however, the title of the report necessarily creates bias. Luckily, we had a chance to speak with Andre to better understand his perspective and intentions as well as relay our observations.

For the hardcore, we’ve gone through some of the market basics in prior blog posts; most notably Democratizing Capacity and Death of the Multipler Effect.  Some of the absolute numbers in those analyses have changed; however, these hold true and directly relate to both the points that Andre was trying to make as well as the gaps in his analysis.

Bill of Materials Cost

The report makes two observations that we completely agree with. One is that, most of Continue reading

What’s the difference between MTP and MPO connectors for 100G?

Cabling up a 100G link for a customer test we discovered we needed to buy a couple of 100G cables.  The interfaces involved were multimode, and use parallel optical paths – i.e. 10 parallel fibres each carrying 10Gbps within a single cable.

It turns out the world of such cables is a bit confusing in its terminology.  Some people call these cables MTP, and others call them MPO.   After a bit of digging, it turns out that they’re basically the same, but MTP is a brand name for a connector that complies with the MPO standard.  The brand is owned by a company called USConec.    Confusion over…

There’s quite a nice photo close-up of this connector type available on Completeconnect’s website – here.   You can see the parallel fibres in the end of the interface.  The cable has 24 fibres in, but only 20 are used – 10 in each direction giving full duplex connectivity at 100Gbps.

The male-ness and female-ness of these types of connector is quite difficult to determine.  If you see a pair of pins protruding from the connector at either end of the two rows of fibres, Continue reading

Taking a moment to thank the Internet, Google and Howard Johnson’s

Oh, sure, we take this stuff for granted today (except for Howard Johnson’s). Yet every now and then I feel a need to thank the Internet and Google for doing what they do best: finding answers to questions that would otherwise nag me no end.This morning I read a story about the impending closure of the Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Lake Placid, N.Y. As the story noted, this iconic eatery, owned and operated by the same family for more than 50 years, is one of only three HoJo’s restaurants still in operation in the United States.Where are the other two?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Featured F5 Networks White Paper: NFV Implementation Tips to Take, Traps to Avoid

This white paper created for F5 Networks, will focus on useful tips and pitfalls to avoid during NFV implementation.

Facebook app leaks F8 news about Parse, Messenger, ‘teleportation station’

Facebook’s app for its F8 developer conference stole some of the show’s thunder by sending out, ahead of the event, a notification that revealed what products will most likely be discussed.“F8: Just revealed: Parse of IoT, Messenger as a Platform, and the Teleportation Station,” read the message, which several people posted to Twitter. The two-day conference starts Wednesday morning Pacific time.Parse is Facebook’s development platform for creating mobile apps. The message, if correct, implies that Facebook is entering the Internet of Things space, which aims to connect assorted devices to the Web.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook app leaks F8 news about Parse, Messenger, ‘teleportation station’

Facebook’s app for its F8 developer conference stole some of the show’s thunder by sending out, ahead of the event, a notification that revealed what products will most likely be discussed.“F8: Just revealed: Parse of IoT, Messenger as a Platform, and the Teleportation Station,” read the message, which several people posted to Twitter. The two-day conference starts Wednesday morning Pacific time.Parse is Facebook’s development platform for creating mobile apps. The message, if correct, implies that Facebook is entering the Internet of Things space, which aims to connect assorted devices to the Web.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here