EU launches antitrust probe into e-commerce sector

Europe’s e-commerce market will be subject to a full-fledged antitrust probe, as part of the European Commission’s push to tear down walls between the European Union’s 28 national digital markets.The competition inquiry will look for barriers to online cross-border trade of electronics, digital content, clothing and shoes, the Commission said Wednesday. The probe was proposed by Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in March and is one of 16 initiatives announced Wednesday that the Commission hopes will make the EU a single market for digital goods and services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Check Point – Don’t Use the ‘Install On’ Column

I got caught out by Check Point’s “Install On” column recently. Most people don’t need this setting any more, but it’s still there for legacy reasons. Time to re-evaluate.

When you create a firewall policy using Check Point, you define the set of possible installation targets. That is, the firewalls that this policy may be installed on. When you compile & install policy, you can choose from this list of targets, and only this list.

In the 4.1 days, we didn’t have this option. At install time, you had to choose from the complete list of firewalls. The default had all firewalls selected. You can imagine the merriment that ensued when someone would install the wrong policy on a firewall.

Most organisations will only have one installation target per policy. But sometimes you want to have the same policy on multiple firewalls. This is pretty easy to do, and might make sense if you have many common rules.

 

But then you say “What if I had 30 common rules, 50 that only applied to firewall A, and another 50 that only applied to firewall B?” That’s where people start using the “Install On” column. This lets you define at a Continue reading

Video: End-to-End High Availability in Dual Stack Networks

One of the topics I discussed in the IPv6 High Availability webinar is the problem of dual-stack deployments – what do you do when the end-to-end path for one of the protocol stacks breaks down. Happy eyeballs is one of the solutions, as is IPv6-only data center (Facebook is moving in that direction really fast). For more details, watch the short End-to-End High Availability in Dual Stack Networks demo video.

Watch the video

Electronic lock maker clashes with security firm over software flaws

The maker of a widely used electronic lock has taken issue with a security company’s criticism of one of its flagship products.IOActive, a Seattle-based security consultancy, published an advisory alleging several security flaws in electronic locks made by CyberLock, of Corvallis, Oregon.CyberLock, which received advance notice of the problems from IOActive, contends it wasn’t given enough time or information prior to IOActive’s warning. Mike Davis, the IOActive researcher who found the problems, published two letters said to have been sent by CyberLock’s lawyers to IOActive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Two “Network As Code” Domains

You’ve probably heard the term “network programmability” at this point. You probably also heard it equated to anything to do with code, automation, and networking. This was not always the case. Network programmability really first hit the big time back in 2011 in the early days of the public OpenFlow discussion. That phrase was almost universally understood to be a data plane concept - because it was describing the revolutionary ideas brought up by abstracting away a forwarding pipeline.

The Two “Network As Code” Domains

You’ve probably heard the term “network programmability” at this point. You probably also heard it equated to anything to do with code, automation, and networking. This was not always the case. Network programmability really first hit the big time back in 2011 in the early days of the public OpenFlow discussion. That phrase was almost universally understood to be a data plane concept - because it was describing the revolutionary ideas brought up by abstracting away a forwarding pipeline.

SD-WAN with Viptela

Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is bubbling up to be one of the prime use cases of SDN. The vendors that fall into the SD-WAN bucket often include Glue Networks, Nuage, Viptela, CloudGenix, VeloCloud, etc. As you dive into each of the solutions from the vendors, you may realize that some are truly unique technologically and some may just be offering a better way to manage existing wide area networking equipment (which is still a huge value add).

In this post, I’m going to give some background on what is driving me to deploy an SD-WAN solution. Follow up posts will cover the deployment a bit more technically.

Requirements

Since I now have equipment in a colo, moved into a new office, and of course, have the home office, I figured it may be a good idea to look at some of these SD-WAN technologies. In reality, my requirements have a mobile 4th site too that will be used when doing consulting and training onsite at customers to give dynamic site to site access just back to the colo.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have strict requirements – they are probably equivalent to those of a small IT Continue reading

Apple security program, MacKeeper, celebrates difficult birthday

MacKeeper, a utility and security program for Apple computers, celebrated its fifth birthday in April. But its gift to U.S. consumers who bought the application may be a slice of a $2 million class-action settlement.Released in 2010, MacKeeper has been dogged by accusations that it exaggerates security threats in order to convince customers to buy. Its aggressive marketing has splashed MacKeeper pop-up ads all over the web.The program was originally created by a company called ZeoBIT in Kiev, Ukraine. The country—full of young, smart programmers—has long been a hub for lower-cost software development and outsourcing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple trying to destroy Spotify’s free tier and streaming music on YouTube

With Apple gearing up to launch a revamped Beats music service at WWDC, The Verge is reporting that Apple is already aggressively trying to defeat some longstanding competition.Specifically, Apple is supposedly trying to convince music labels to stop supporting Spotify's free tier of streaming music. As a quick refresher, Spotify Premium members can pay $9.99 for unlimited on-demand music streaming while the free tier offers users a more limited offering with ads.What's more, Apple has reportedly gone so far as try and persuade music labels to drop their support for YouTube's music licensing program. To sweeten the deal, Apple has allegedly offered "to pay YouTube's music licensing fee to Universal Music Group of the label stopped allowing its songs on YouTube."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia’s shift away from mobile devices cuts modem unit

Nvidia’s 3G and LTE modem business is up for sale as the company moves away from mobile devices.The company on Tuesday said it plans to wind down its Icera modem operations by the second quarter of fiscal 2016 and sell its assets. Nvidia will start licensing modems from third-party companies to pair LTE connectivity with its Tegra chips.Nvidia gained a modem unit when it acquired Icera in 2011 for US$367 million. At the time, Nvidia was growing fast in smartphone and tablets with its popular Tegra chips, and Icera provided the central 3G and LTE connectivity for mobile devices. The Tegra 4i chip, announced in 2013, packaged a Tegra processor with an integrated Icera LTE modem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Speedy servers with Intel’s 18-core chips, DDR4 memory hit the market

Hardware makers are providing the building blocks for databases, ERP and analytics applications to run faster in data centers with new systems based on Intel’s latest Xeon E7 v3 chips.Seventeen hardware makers have announced 45 systems running on Intel’s new chips, which have up to 18 CPU cores. Servers from big names like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo have more memory capacity, internal bandwidth and storage capacity to speed up applications.The new Intel Xeon chips, announced on Tuesday, provide more throughput and power-saving features than the Xeon E7 v2 chips that shipped last year. As a result, a task could be executed on fewer servers while consuming less power, which could help cut electric bills. Alternatively, system administrators could extract more performance from the same number of servers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Structs in C

Back in March 2014 I wrote an app in Python that would log in and check various OSPF properties. When putting the data into a structure, I was limited both by knowledge and Python at the time. I ended up using a dictionary which worked rather well, but I was never 100% happy with it. … Continue reading Structs in C →

Product Update :: CCIE Collaboration 8-Hour Mock Lab Workbook (Vol. 2)

We’re excited to announce the full-scale launch of our CCIE Collaboration 8-Hour Mock Lab Workbook (Vol. 2)!  Written and tested by the world’s best Collaboration Instructor – Andy Vassar CCIE #22042 (Collaboration, Voice, and R&S), it’s a must have solution for any student that’s preparing for their Cisco Collaboration Certification.

Here’s what you get:

Five Complete 8-hour Mock Lab Scenarios

  • Scenarios you’ll encounter during your actual lab!

Detailed Solution Guide (DSG):

  • What to configure.
  • Why you need to configure.
  • What to look for when configuring your labs.

Web-based access to our workbooks

  • Study on the go.
  • Download PDF’s.

Pathway to success:

  1. Purchase your Volume 2 Workbook here today
  2. Purchase your rack rental vouchers
  3. Start preparing for your Lab Exam!
  4. Reserve a spot in a Collaboration 5-Day Bootcamp and get direct training from our world-class instructor Andy Vassar!

After you’ve purchased your CCIE Collaboration 8-Hour Mock Lab Workbook (Vol.2), don’t forget to reserve rack time with our CCIE Collaboration Rack Rental Vouchers – time slots book fast.  Purchase your vouchers today!

Want to buy SAP software? There’s an app (store) for that

It’s simple for consumers to get apps whenever the mood strikes them, but in enterprises it’s typically a different story. Borrowing a page from successful consumer app stores, SAP has launched SAP Store, hoping to make software purchases just as easy on the business side.Unveiled Tuesday at Sapphire Now in Orlando, the SAP Store is a key part of the digital-business push SAP has made at the conference. Its goal is to allow enterprise users to buy software from SAP without the need for a purchase order, invoice or lengthy request-for-proposal process.Built on SAP’s own Hybris Commerce Suite and available across devices, the store offers a one-click online agreement and transparent pricing. Individuals can configure their new applications—usually in a few hours or less, SAP says—without needing help from their IT department or outside consultants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Could IPv6 Drown My Wireless Network?

IPv6WiFi

By now, the transition to adopt IPv6 networks is in full swing. Registrars are running out of prefixes and new users overseas are getting v6-only allocations for new circuits. Mobile providers are going v6-only and transition mechanisms are in place to ease the migration. You can hear about some of these topics in this recent roundtable recorded at Interop last week:

One of the converstaions that I had with Ed Horley (@EHorley) during Interop opened my eyes to another problem that we will soon be facing with IPv6 and legacy technology. Only this time, it’s not because of a numbering scheme. It’s because of old hardware.

Rate Limited

Technology always marches on. Things that seemed magical to us just five years ago are now antiquated and slow. That’s the problem with the original 802.11 specification. It supported wireless data rates at a paltry 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps. When 802.11b was released, it raised the rates to 5.5 Mbps and 11 Mbps. Those faster data rates, combined with a larger coverage area, helped 802.11b become commercially successful.

Now, we have 802.11n with data rates in the hundreds of Mbps. We also have 802. Continue reading

Anticipating IoT traffic growth? Why a colo, not the cloud, might be in your future

The Internet of Things is coming, and drastic traffic growth is going to blow your network sky-high. Should you scale up your on-premises data center? No. Should you move to the cloud? No. The best strategy, according to a speaker at the Interop 2015 conference, is to move your servers, applications, and data into your own servers in a top-tier colocation facility.That’s not the advice you’d expect to hear in 2015, when the industry message is relentlessly cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud – and when the Interop expert speaker, Jason Mendenhall, carries the business card title of Executive Vice President, Cloud. However, when you realize that Mr. Mendenhall works for Switch’s massive 1.6 million square foot colocation center in Las Vegas, his bias toward colos becomes clear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft said to be considering a bid for Salesforce

Less than a week after rumors surfaced that Salesforce.com is fielding buyout offers, Microsoft is reportedly considering throwing its hat in the ring.Although Microsoft isn’t in talks with Salesforce and a deal isn’t imminent, Microsoft is evaluating making a bid for the cloud CRM provider after it was approached by another potential buyer, Bloomberg reported Tuesday afternoon.Salesforce is working with two investment banks to decide how to respond to acquisition offers, and its options range from rejecting all bids to working out a deal, according to Bloomberg, whose information comes from anonymous sources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lessons from Tax Day 2015: How the tax sites fared

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Every April millions upon millions of taxpayers rush to file state and federal taxes before the 15th, and as with every other aspect of day-to-day life, filing taxes has become digital. The IRS website alone receives three to four times as much traffic in early spring as it does in the off-season, and this gigantic spike is indicative of what most tax-related websites experience at this time of year.

+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Yikes: 10,000 IRS impersonation scam calls are placed every week  +

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lawmakers want to protect the online freedom to Yelp

If the waiter was rude, your hotel room dirty or the plumber sloppy, you should be able to say so online without fear of getting slapped with a lawsuit.So said a group of lawmakers who want to make it illegal for U.S. businesses to use contracts to preemptively muzzle customers so they can’t post negative reviews.Four members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation last week that would render non-disparagement clauses in consumer contracts unenforceable. The bill, the Consumer Review Freedom Act, comes after consumer uproar when geek toy company KlearGear.com tried to charge a Utah couple a US$3,500 fee for a negative review they wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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