Uber starts experimenting with cash payments in India

Uber, known for its no-hassle, no-cash payment system for rides, will start testing cash payments in India in the coming week.The experiment will take place in the city of Hyderabad and marks a change from the credit card payment strategy that it has favored so far. It is the first time Uber will accept cash payments, the company said on Tuesday.Hyderabad was chosen because Uber has many drivers and riders in the city, whose population was estimated at about 8.6 million people by the U.S. government in 2014. People can select the cash option up front in the Uber app and pay the amount shown at the end of the ride, it said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Anonymous-tied DDoS botnet shows insecure routers are legion

Tens of thousands of home routers have been infected with malware, and are being used by hackers to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, including by the hacktivist group Anonymous.The router-based botnet was discovered by Web security firm Incapsula while investigating a series of DDoS attacks against dozens of its customers that have been going on since late December.Incapsula’s researchers traced the malicious traffic back to routers made by Ubiquiti Networks and distributed by ISPs around the world to their customers.The devices had DDoS malware programs installed on them—usually more than one—including some that reported back to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network and channel called AnonOps, the researchers said in a report published Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Light On The Fiber Mountain

MountainRoad

Fabric switching systems have been a popular solution for many companies in the past few years. Juniper has QFabric and Brocade has VCS. For those not invested in fabrics, the trend has been to collapse the traditional three tier network model down into a spine-leaf architecture to optimize east-west traffic flows. One must wonder how much more optimized that solution can be. As it turns out, there is a bit more that can be coaxed out of it.

Shine A Light On Me

During Interop, I had a chance to speak with the folks over at Fiber Mountain (@FiberMountain) about what they’ve been up to in their solution space. I had heard about their revolutionary SDN offering for fiber. At first, I was a bit doubtful. SDN gets thrown around a lot on new technology as a way to sell it to people that buy buzzwords. I wondered how a fiber networking solution could even take advantage of software.

My chat with M. H. Raza started out with a prop. He showed me one of the new Multifiber Push On (MPO) connectors that represent the new wave of high-density fiber. Each cable, which is roughly the size and Continue reading

Big Switch SDN update aids VMware integration, bare metal monitoring

Big Switch Networks rolled out new versions of its SDN-based cloud fabric and monitoring applications which feature tighter integration with VMware, among other enhancements.Big Cloud Fabric is a leaf/spine Clos fabric providing physical and virtual workload connectivity in data centers. Version 2.6 provides fabric automation and analytics for VMware vSphere environments.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:SDN start-up Big Switch bullish on new course +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Switch SDN update aids VMware integration, bare metal monitoring

Big Switch Networks rolled out new versions of its SDN-based cloud fabric and monitoring applications which feature tighter integration with VMware, among other enhancements.Big Cloud Fabric is a leaf/spine Clos fabric providing physical and virtual workload connectivity in data centers. Version 2.6 provides fabric automation and analytics for VMware vSphere environments.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:SDN start-up Big Switch bullish on new course +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA details bleeding edge communications ideas

Some of the “revolutionary concepts” NASA detailed this week in its 2015 Technology Roadmaps sound like they are straight out of James Bond’s Q Branch – the research division that creates all of the super-agent’s really cool technology.Amongst the myriad concepts outlined in the Roadmaps – which lay out the new technologies and directions NASA hopes will steer its aeronautics, science and human exploration missions for the next 20 years -- were six high-risk high-reward technologies the space agency says are so “far out” that exactly how they would be developed is a not clear yet, NASA said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MediaTek unveils 10-core chip that promises better battery life

Not satisfied with offering eight-core chips, Taiwan’s MediaTek has unveiled a mobile processor with 10 cores.On Tuesday, the vendor announced its Helios X20, a “deca-core” chip that it claims can offer better power efficiency and improved performance over competing processors.The cores of the Helios X20 are in three clusters, essentially packing together a dual-core chip with a pair of quad-cores. The dual-core cluster, which uses two ARM Cortex-A72 2.5 GHz processors, is meant to handle the most intensive tasks. The pair of quad-core clusters are designed for medium and lower-scale computing.MediaTek claims this configuration can help save 30 percent on battery life over traditional chips, while keeping the phone’s software running smoothly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MediaTek unveils 10-core chip that promises better battery life

Not satisfied with offering eight-core chips, Taiwan’s MediaTek has unveiled a mobile processor with 10 cores.On Tuesday, the vendor announced its Helios X20, a “deca-core” chip that it claims can offer better power efficiency and improved performance over competing processors.The cores of the Helios X20 are in three clusters, essentially packing together a dual-core chip with a pair of quad-cores. The dual-core cluster, which uses two ARM Cortex-A72 2.5 GHz processors, is meant to handle the most intensive tasks. The pair of quad-core clusters are designed for medium and lower-scale computing.MediaTek claims this configuration can help save 30 percent on battery life over traditional chips, while keeping the phone’s software running smoothly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon bids $4.4 billion for AOL

Verizon Communications has agreed to buy AOL for about $4.4 billion, as it looks to build more extensive digital and video platforms to drive future growth.Network operators have to find new ways to make money as their traditional revenue streams are under pressure from a new generation of companies such as Skype, Facebook and WhatsApp.Verizon’s acquisition plan further drives its LTE wireless video and OTT (over-the-top) video strategy, the operator said, adding that its plan is to deliver services to customers over a global multiscreen network platform;AOL’s key assets include its subscription business: Media brands such as The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, Makers and AOL.com, as well as original video content, according to Verizon. The company is also after AOL’s programmatic advertising platforms, and looks to combine that with its own assets to build a mobile-first advertising platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon buying AOL for $4.4B

In a move designed to bolster its content offerings – particularly in video delivered to mobile devices – Verizon is shelling out some $4.4 billion for AOL.From a Verizon statement released with the hour: Verizon’s acquisition further drives its LTE wireless video and OTT (over-the-top video) strategy. The agreement will also support and connect to Verizon’s IoT (Internet of Things) platforms, creating a growth platform from wireless to IoT for consumers and businesses.AOL is a leader in the digital content and advertising platforms space, and the combination of Verizon and AOL creates a scaled, mobile-first platform offering directly targeted at what eMarketer estimates is a nearly $600 billion global advertising industry. AOL’s key assets include its subscription business; its premium portfolio of global content brands, including The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, MAKERS and AOL.com, as well as its millennial-focused OTT, Emmy-nominated original video content; and its programmatic advertising platforms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, May 12

Verizon offers $4.4 billion for AOLVerizon said Tuesday that it plans to spend $4.4 billion to buy AOL, which was once a leader in Internet connectivity but has struggled to find its way as a content provider and online advertising platform. AOL still has a subscription business—anecdotally, aged users who don’t know they can get email for free from Yahoo and Google—and also owns The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget and other media brands.Public Wi-Fi set for speed boost as operators upgrade this yearWireless hotspots that can deliver hundreds of megabits per second in real-world bandwidth should soon be easier to find as operators upgrade to 802.11ac, the fastest Wi-Fi technology yet, according to a survey by IHS. By this time next year, a noticeable number of hotspots will use it, says the research firm, which expects operator spending on Wi-Fi networks to increase by 88 percent in 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zynga’s data center troubles prove cloud computing isn’t a game

Last week, embattled game maker Zynga announced $100 million in spending reductions. The hundreds of layoffs rightly garnered most of the headlines, but there was another important development as well – the company also said that it was abandoning the data centers on which it reportedly just spent $100 million to build. Zynga will return its infrastructure to the cloud.It seems that after being a big Amazon Web Services customer for several years (running a reported 80% of its computing load), in 2012 the company made a "dramatic shift" from the public cloud to its own network, called zCloud. At the time, Allan Leinwand, Zynga's CTO for infrastructure, told PC World that AWS was like a four-door sedan, and that, "we love four-door sedans, but it's a car that's used for a lot of things – doing the shopping, moving the kids. I like to think of zCloud as the sports car built for the Le Mans of social gaming. It's tuned for the track." (Of course, the company still ran some workloads on AWS using a hybrid cloud model.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Disrupt NY: Meet the next generation of tech companies

11 up-and-coming tech companiesLast week, TechCrunch held its annual Disrupt NY event, where hopeful tech companies gather to explain their ideas, show off their products and try to attract allies, funding and attention.I attended on Monday, May 4th, the first day of the three-day event, and talked to some of the companies exhibiting in Startup Alley, a large, packed room in which several rows of hopefuls showed off their ideas to a loud and lively crowd.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Presentation & Video: Quo Vadis, SDN?

From the automation perspective, the RIPE conference is a dream come true – 30 seconds after you upload your presentation, it appears on the RIPE web site, it’s automatically updated on the podium computer, and the video recording of your talk is published before you even manage to get off the podium – so you can already watch my “SDN - 4 years later (aka Quo Vadis, SDN?)” presentation if you missed it yesterday.

Watch the presentation

The best way to protect passwords may be creating fake ones

Password managers are a great way to supply random, unique passwords to a high number of websites. But most still have an Achilles’ heel: Usually, a single master password unlocks the entire vault.But a group of researchers has developed a type of password manager that creates decoy password vaults if a wrong master password is supplied.A paper on the experimental software, called NoCrack, will be presented on May 19 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Jose, California.NoCrack is intended to make it much more time-consuming and difficult for attackers to figure out if they’ve hit pay dirt.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The best way to protect passwords may be creating fake ones

Password managers are a great way to supply random, unique passwords to a high number of websites. But most still have an Achilles’ heel: Usually, a single master password unlocks the entire vault.But a group of researchers has developed a type of password manager that creates decoy password vaults if a wrong master password is supplied.A paper on the experimental software, called NoCrack, will be presented on May 19 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Jose, California.+ MORE: Beware ticking IoT security time bomb +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dial Peer Redundancy

The implementation of redundancy in any technology is of paramount importance, whether you’re studying to achieve a CCIE certification or designing a network for a client. So it goes without saying that this is a concept with which you should become intimately familiar.

In this blog, we’ll turn our focus specifically to redundancy in IOS dial-peers. Of course, dial-peers come in two different flavors: POTS and VoIP. POTS dial-peers deal exclusively with PSTN connectivity while VoIP dial-peers can be used for several purposes, as long as the communication takes place over IP.

Let’s take the example of a call routed inbound from the PSTN, destined toward the HQ CUCM cluster using the H.323 protocol. The configuration on the gateway appears as shown below.

Dial-Peer-Redundancy01

As you can see, we are accepting calls inbound from the PSTN using dial-peer voice 1 pots and translating the incoming called number to a 4-digit DN. From there, we have two separate dial-peers with the ability to send the call to the HQ CUCM cluster. As you know, the dial-peer with the lowest preference (default 0) is chosen as the first routing option. If for some reason, that option is unavailable, the next possible dial-peer Continue reading

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