BlackBerry cutting staff in smartphone unit

BlackBerry plans to lay off an unspecified number of staff in its devices unit, as it attempts to make that business profitable, while expanding in other areas.The smartphone company in Waterloo, Ontario, said in a statement over the weekend that it had decided to consolidate its device software, hardware and applications business, “impacting a number of employees around the world.”The company said that as it moves into the next stage of its turnaround, it aims to reallocate resources in ways that will “best enable us to capitalize on growth opportunities while driving toward sustainable profitability across all facets of our business.”The company had 6,225 full-time employees as of Feb. 28 this year, the end of its last fiscal year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Full Adult Friend Finder database offered for $17,000

An unredacted version of a database said to be stolen from Adult Friend Finder is being offered for sale for 70 bitcoins, or around US$17,000.ROR[RG], the nickname of the person who claims to have breached the large online hookup site, wrote on Saturday in an underground forum that “I have had so many people ask me to buy the db today.”Seeking to capitalize on the momentum, ROR[RG]—who claims to live in Thailand—also offered to break into any company or website for 750 bitcoins, worth about $170,000.Fifteen files of data purported to come from Adult Friend Finder were posted to an underground forum in March. The files contained 3.9 million email addresses and in some cases the partner preference, gender, birth date, state, post code, language preference and IP address of users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 rumor rollup: iGPS and an Android Galaxy concept

How could Apple resist buying a company with technology dubbed iGPS? It fits right in along with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, no? While Apple doesn’t feel compelled to announce small acquisitions that the SEC doesn’t force it to disclose, news outlets this past week revealed that Apple has indeed snapped up a Bay-area GPS-focused company called Coherent Navigation that launched in 2008. Ironically, that company has fallen off the map, ditching its web presence, and revealing on its LinkedIn page that it has ceased operations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller – Part 3/3: “Node Cutter” SDN application in perl with web interface

For best article visual quality, open Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller – Part 3/3: “Node Cutter” SDN application in perl with web interface directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

In this tutorial series, I will show you by example, how to build your first external REST API based SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller, with web interface for the user control. Target will be to learn how to use REST API, curl and perl scripting to generate some basic and useful code to view and also manipulate network traffic.

This article is part of “Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller” series consisting these articles:

In this Part 3/3, I will show you my first example SDN application that I have written just to demonstrate the combination of REST API interface with perl and the ability to have a web based interface for the user to this interface. Please note that this application is purely demonstrative on the REST API interface and Continue reading

Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller – Part 2/3: Influencing Flows via cURL commands

For best article visual quality, open Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller – Part 2/3: Influencing Flows via cURL commands directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

In this tutorial series, I will show you by example, how to build your first external REST API based SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller, with web interface for the user control. Target will be to learn how to use REST API, curl and perl scripting to generate some basic and useful code to view and also manipulate network traffic.

This article is part of “Tutorial for creating first external SDN application for HP SDN VAN controller” series consisting these articles:

In this Part 2/3, we will discuss how to create a few cURL commands in linux environment, authenticate to the controller REST API interface and generate flows to modify the forwarding path overriding the controller decisions.

Step 1) cURL command line tool to authenticate to the REST API and receive a token

Lets start with the basics, in linux console exists Continue reading

Double Parentheses in Python

Python is one of the easiest programming languages to learn, because of it’s inherent flexibility. (This can be a good thing as well as a bad thing.)

One example of Python’s flexibility is the double parentheses. Take the following snippet for example:

print funcwrapper(3)(2)

Even an inexperienced programmer should be able to make sense of most of this. Reading from left to right, it looks like we want to print the output of a function, and we’re passing an integer - 3 - to that function. However, the second pair of parentheses doesn’t quite make sense.

This notation is different from what we would do if we wanted to pass two arguments to a function; in that case, we’d put them all inside a single pair of parentheses and separate them via commas:

print funcwrapper(3, 2)

So what does the first example using two pairs of parentheses accomplish?

The use of a double parentheses is actually an indicator of one of Python’s coolest features - and that is that functions are themselves, objects! What does this mean?

Let’s work our way up to the snippet above by first defining a very simple function - something that takes an integer Continue reading

US Senate blocks NSA surveillance reform bill

The U.S. Senate voted early Saturday to block the USA Freedom Act, a legislation that aimed to put an end to the bulk collection of telephone records by the National Security Agency.It also voted down a bill that would extend to July 31 certain provisions of the Patriot Act, including Section 215, which provides the legal framework for the current NSA phone surveillance program.The Senate, which adjourned Saturday for the Memorial Day weekend, will reconvene on May 31, when it will try to hammer out a deal ahead of the June 1 deadline when the Patriot Act provisions expire, unless reauthorized in the same or modified form by legislation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citizens of Tech 004 – Retro Virtual Reality Kittehs

A cat sets a world record. A surgical robot gets hacked. Capsela was a sweet toy. Oculus Rift is going to be available soon. Larsen B is falling into the Antarctic Ocean. Spotify takes on video. All this & more on this week's Citizens of Tech with Eric Sutphen & Ethan Banks.

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
TwitterGoogle+LinkedIn

The post Citizens of Tech 004 – Retro Virtual Reality Kittehs appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Suhosin: How to harden your PHP web application

The number of Internet servers that run the PHP language is incredible: According to Netcraft, as of January, 2012, something around 244,000,000 web sites were running PHP and according to a May, 2015, survey by W3Techs “PHP is used by 81.9% of all websites whose server-side programming language we know.” Bottom line: PHP rules.The lure of PHP is that it's easy to learn, easy to develop with, and flexible (though not every one thinks PHP is a good idea). On the other hand, as with all programming languages, PHP has security issues so poor coding practices can make a server vulnerable to hackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Double Parentheses in Python

Python is one of the easiest programming languages to learn, because of it’s inherent flexibility. (This can be a good thing as well as a bad thing.) One example of Python’s flexibility is the double parentheses. Take the following snippet for example: print(funcwrapper(3)(2)) Even an inexperienced programmer should be able to make sense of most of this. Reading from left to right, it looks like we want to print the output of a function, and we’re passing an integer - 3 - to that function.

Double Parentheses in Python

Python is one of the easiest programming languages to learn, because of it’s inherent flexibility. (This can be a good thing as well as a bad thing.) One example of Python’s flexibility is the double parentheses. Take the following snippet for example: print funcwrapper(3)(2) Even an inexperienced programmer should be able to make sense of most of this. Reading from left to right, it looks like we want to print the output of a function, and we’re passing an integer - 3 - to that function.

Show 238 – A Deeper Look at SD-WAN with CloudGenix – Sponsored

Vijay Sagar and Aaron Edwards of CloudGenix discuss the software defined WAN with the Packet Pushers. We've heard from CloudGenix before on Priority Queue Show 49. If you missed that show, you might want to give it a listen first to get the most out of this podcast. On this show, we go a bit deeper into CloudGenix -- what it does, how it does it, and how you'd integrate it into your network.

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
TwitterGoogle+LinkedIn

The post Show 238 – A Deeper Look at SD-WAN with CloudGenix – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Technology Short Take #51

Welcome to Technology Short Take #51, another collection of posts and links about key data center technologies like networking, virtualization, cloud management, and applications/operating systems. Here’s hoping you find something useful in this collection!

Networking

  • I’m not sure if this falls here or into the “Cloud Computing/Cloud Computing” category, but Shannon McFarland—fellow co-conspirator with the Denver OpenStack Meetup group—has a nice article describing some design and deployment considerations for IPv6 in the OpenStack Kilo release.
  • I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned Open Virtual Network (OVN) here before, as I’m pretty jazzed about the work going on with this project. If you’re unfamiliar with OVN, Gal Sagie has a couple of articles that might help. I’d start with the later of the two articles, which provides an introduction to OVN, before moving on to Gal’s discussion of OVN and the distributed controller and his article on OVN and containers.
  • Speaking of OVN, Russell Bryant has a detailed description of using OVN with OpenStack Neutron (via DevStack).
  • Using Jinja2 templates for automating network device configuration is a topic that’s getting a fair amount of attention (there were at least two sessions discussing this technique while I was at Interop). Rick Sherman has Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—A Visit From Networking Legend Dr. Doug Comer

It has been an exciting week here at Plexxi! Dr. Doug Comer spent the day with us on Wednesday learning about our products and new network architecture. Dr. Comer is an internationally recognized networking guru, widely known for his series of groundbreaking textbooks on computer networks, the Internet, computer operating systems and computer architecture (including the popular ‘Internetworking with TCP/IP’). He designed and implemented X25NET and Cypress networks as well as the Xinu operating system. He is currently a professor of computer science at Purdue University where he teaches courses on operating systems and computer networks. It was a pleasure having him at the Plexxi headquarters—we hope he learned as much from us as we did from him! Take a look at a few photos from his visit.

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Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

InfoWorld: 3 ways the data lake is actually not helping with IT agility
By Yves de Montcheuil
Loosely speaking, a data lake is the big data version of an operational data store, plus a network storage appliance, plus data processing/query engines, all combined — typically in a Hadoop cluster Continue reading

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