Review: The best password managers for PCs, Macs, and mobile devices

Thanks to a continuous barrage of high-profile computer security scares and reports of cloud-scale government snooping, more of us Internet users are wising up about the security of our information. One of the smarter moves we can make to protect ourselves is to use a password manager. It's one of the easiest too.A password manager won't shield you against Heartbleed or the NSA, but it's an excellent first step in securing your identity, helping you increase the strength of the passwords that protect your online accounts because it will remember those passwords for you. A password manager will even randomly generate strong passwords, without requiring you to memorize or write down these random strings of characters. These strong passwords help shield against traditional password attacks such as dictionary, rainbow tables, or brute-force attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Building Microservices

bulding microservicesBuilding Microservices
Sam Newman
ISBN: 978-1-491-95035-7

Scale out where you can, scale up where you must.

Someone, somewhere, should probably start a collection of “where you can, where must” sayings, as these rules of thumb (thumbs were used by carpenters instead of a ruler to measure an inch, apparently) are important to remember, even if they’re imprecise. Route where you can, switch where you must — really refers to using layer 3 versus layer 2 networking as much as possible — for instance. Scaling out, from the perspective of network engineering, is all about repeatable modules, spine and leaf fabrics, and distribution of the control plane (didn’t think of that last one, did you?).

But what does scaling out mean in the application development world? It means splitting services into modular pieces which interact over the network. The ultimate goal of splitting services is to get to the microservice.

But what is a microservice?

To answer this question, you need to turn to the first chapter of Scaling Microservices, which says, “Microservices are small, autonomous services that work together.” Sam Newman, in the rest of the first chapter, explains the concept well, from a number of different angles, Continue reading

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, June 17

Say it ain’t so: FBI probes alleged Cardinals-Astros hackEven America’s pastime isn’t safe from cybercrime: the FBI is investigating allegations that the St. Louis Cardinals hacked into computer systems belonging to rival baseball team the Houston Astros. The investigation centers on the baseball operations database, which is said to contain statistics, video and other vital information about players.Airbus joins the Internet satellite crowdCount European consortium Airbus in on the business of delivering Internet service via satellites, the Verge reports. It’s going to design and build 900 orbiters for Richard Branson’s OneWeb, which aims to provide LTE, 3G, and Wi-Fi to rural communities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, June 17

Say it ain’t so: FBI probes alleged Cardinals-Astros hackEven America’s pastime isn’t safe from cybercrime: the FBI is investigating allegations that the St. Louis Cardinals hacked into computer systems belonging to rival baseball team the Houston Astros. The investigation centers on the baseball operations database, which is said to contain statistics, video and other vital information about players.Airbus joins the Internet satellite crowdCount European consortium Airbus in on the business of delivering Internet service via satellites, the Verge reports. It’s going to design and build 900 orbiters for Richard Branson’s OneWeb, which aims to provide LTE, 3G, and Wi-Fi to rural communities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google-infused storage startup Cohesity reveals itself

Mohit Aron has a tough act to follow: His previous startup, Nutanix, may be on the cusp of filing for an IPO that values the hyperconverged infrastructure company at $2.5 billion. But Aron is off to a good start with his new venture, Cohesity, which this week emerges from stealth mode with $70 million in venture funding, reference-able customers such as Tribune Media, and a focus on a potentially big market in converging the secondary storage that houses so much DevOps, data protection, analytics and other unstructured data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN/OpenFlow/NFV Workshop: Frequent Questions

One of the potential attendees of my SDN workshop sent me a long list of questions. Almost every networking engineer, team leader or CIO asks the first one:

What will happen, if we don´t follow the SDN hype (in the short term, in the medium term and in the long term)?

Answering this question is the whole idea of the workshop.

The up-to-date list of scheduled SDN workshops is available on my web site.

Read more ...

Free SSL/TLS certificate project moves closer to launch

Let’s Encrypt, a project aimed at increasing the use of encryption across websites by issuing free digital certificates, is planning to issue the first ones next month.Digital certificates are used to encrypt data traffic between a computer and a server using SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) and for checking that a website isn’t a spoof.Let’s Encrypt is run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), a new California public-benefit corporation. Its backers include Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cisco and Akamai.The first certificates will not be valid unless administrators install the organization’s root certificate in their client software, wrote Josh Aas, ISRG’s executive director, in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTC move to test ads on BlinkFeed app angers users

As HTC faces shrinking revenue, the smartphone vendor is testing ads over its BlinkFeed media aggregation app, and some users aren’t happy.On Tuesday, HTC said it had begun rolling out an update to its BlinkFeed app that would include advertisements for users in the U.S., the U.K., China and a few other markets.The ads, for now, will be in a limited number, and promote sponsored apps, in addition to HTC accessories and devices, the company said in a blog post.“Because these are native ads, they will appear like a typical BlinkFeed post rather than as a pop-up or banner ad,” HTC added. However, users will be given an option to opt out from seeing the ads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How a bad keystroke can lead you to SpeedUpKit ‘scareware’

Dozens of misspelled domain names that spoof major brands are leading unsuspecting PC users to a questionable tune-up application called SpeedUpKit.Since people are unlikely to seek out the application, its promoters rely partly on people misspelling the domain name for prominent brands to lead them to it. If you try to access the obituary website legacy.com from a Windows PC in the U.S., for instance, but type “legady” by accident, you’re likely to end up on a page promoting SpeedUpKit.The practice, known as typosquatting, can sometimes violate consumer protection laws or constitute trademark infringement. Big brands police the web for such misspellings, and domain name registrars often try to stop the practice, but it still happens.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTIRW: That Big Number Database in the Sky

As we come close to ending this rather long running series on how the Internet really works (because I’m certain you’re about bored of this series, and ready for me to talk about something else!), I’d like to discuss three more topics I think are really important to the Internet’s operation on a day to […]

Author information

Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, LinkedIn, and his author page on Amazon.
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The post HTIRW: That Big Number Database in the Sky appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

AT&T looking at white boxes as CPE

SANTA CLARA -- AT&T is considering offering bare metal switches and servers to consumers as customer premises equipment for the carrier’s services. At the Open Network Summit conference here, Andre Fuetsch, AT&T senior vice president, Architecture & Design, said the economics of commodity bare metal switching, as well as the scale, performance and programmability, make it appealing for the carrier to sell into the customer premises. +MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: AT&T lays out 'radical' network changes with SDN+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can GitHub really be worth $2 billion?

If youre looking to hire a developer, which is more important: her LinkedIn profile or samples of her code on GitHub?Many would argue the latter, which helps to explain why the online code repository is reportedly closing in on a valuation of $2 billion.“GitHub is an interesting company,” said analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics. “It is partly a hosting service for developers and partly a social media site.”The San Francisco startup, which offers a popular code-sharing platform for software developers, is seeking a whopping $200 million in an upcoming private funding round that values the company as high as $2 billion, according to a report Monday from Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Because dossiers

Here's the thing about computers -- even your laptop can support "big-data" applications. There are only 300-million people in the united states. At  1-kilobyte per person, that's still only 300-gigabytes -- which fits on my laptop hard-drive.

Building dossiers is becoming a thing in the hacking underground. Every time they break into a retail chain, hospital, insurance company, or government agency, they correlate everything back to the same dossier, based on such things as social security numbers, credit card numbers, email addresses, and even IP addresses. Beyond hacked secrets, public sources of information are likewise scanned in order to add to the dossier. Tools such as Maltego make it surprisingly easy to combine your own private information with public sources in order to build such dossiers.

When even the small hacking groups are focused on this effort, you can bet the big guys like China and Russia are even more interested in this.

This is one explanation behind the OPM hack. The hackers may have had something specific in mind, such as getting the personal information from SF86 forms where those seeking clearance are forced to disclose their various addictions and perversions. It may be used to blackmail people -- Continue reading

Etsy dips toes into crowdfunding

Etsy is trying out a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding service that, if successful, could help the company grow its business by expanding the number and type of items available for sale on its site.Fund on Etsy, announced Tuesday, comes as Etsy faces pressure to deliver returns to shareholders as a publicly traded company. Etsy’s stock began trading on the NASDAQ exchange in April, but the company has yet to report a profit.The company grew its revenue by 56 percent last year to US$196 million, but it lost more than $15 million. In this year’s first quarter, it grew its revenue 44 percent year-on-year to more than $58 million, but it had a net loss of nearly $37 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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