FTC complains retail tracking firm didn’t notify customers

A company that tracked retail store customers through their smartphones without notifying them and without giving them a chance to turn off the tracking has settled a U.S. Federal Trade Commission complaint that it didn’t live up to its privacy promises.Retail tracking firm Nomi Technologies stated in its privacy policy from late 2012 that it would provide a customer opt-out mechanism at stores using its tracking services, thus implying that it would notify customers of the tracking efforts, the FTC said. But the company did not give customers an opt-out option and did not notify customers they were being tracked, the agency said Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Winds of change blowing in the WAN

In the past few years, enterprise computing has experienced major upheavals brought about by cloud apps, Wi-Fi, mobility, and BYOD. The enterprise WAN, meanwhile, has not evolved much since it was transformed into an MPLS Layer 3 VPN infrastructure more than a decade ago. Things are about change. Based on my experience with customer deployments, more than 50% of enterprise traffic from branches is currently Internet-bound. This is due to outsourcing of utility applications, including email, search, voice, video and collaboration, not to mention cloud application use. Despite this trend, enterprises have resisted using the public Internet to provide remote offices with direct access to cloud applications. This is primarily due to compliance issues, especially in the financial and healthcare industries. Doing so would require extensive security policies at each location and would introduce a management nightmare. The alternative, backhauling traffic to the corporate DMZ, is not feasible. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Winds of change blowing in the WAN

In the past few years, enterprise computing has experienced major upheavals brought about by cloud apps, Wi-Fi, mobility, and BYOD. The enterprise WAN, meanwhile, has not evolved much since it was transformed into an MPLS Layer 3 VPN infrastructure more than a decade ago. Things are about change. Based on my experience with customer deployments, more than 50% of enterprise traffic from branches is currently Internet-bound. This is due to outsourcing of utility applications, including email, search, voice, video and collaboration, not to mention cloud application use. Despite this trend, enterprises have resisted using the public Internet to provide remote offices with direct access to cloud applications. This is primarily due to compliance issues, especially in the financial and healthcare industries. Doing so would require extensive security policies at each location and would introduce a management nightmare. The alternative, backhauling traffic to the corporate DMZ, is not feasible. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

House passes second cyberthreat information-sharing bill

For the second time in two days, the U.S. House of Representatives has voted to pass a bill that would give legal protections to companies that share cyberattack information.The House on Thursday voted 355 to 63 to pass the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement Act (NCPA), which would protect companies from customer lawsuits after they voluntarily share cyberthreat information with each other and with government agencies.The NCPA is similar in several ways to the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (PCNA), which passed the chamber on Wednesday, despite concerns from some lawmakers that it would allow some customer information to wind up in the hands of surveillance agency the U.S. National Security Agency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce for HR puts the focus on mobile and social capabilities

If there are any overriding trends at work in the enterprise-software market today, consumerization and mobile would have to be among the biggest. Vendors large and small have been racing to add such features to their products, and Thursday brought a fresh example: Salesforce for HR, a new tool that aims to give employees a personalized experience via mobile and social capabilities.Built on a foundation of cloud, social, mobile and data-science technologies, Salesforce for HR taps Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform and is designed to complement existing HR-focused systems with a number of tools designed to help companies and employees connect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Pretty much all of the Apple Watches are coming to work

Almost all current or perspective users of smartwatches and other wearable technologies want to use them for work, according to a Harris Poll survey commissioned by MDM vendor MobileIron.The survey, which covered 3,500 workers who use mobile devices for work in the U.S., western Europe and Japan, found that 94% of those who either owned or were planning to own a wearable would want to use them for work tasks.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Review: Docker Swarm soars, and the sky's the limit  | Insider threats force balance between security and access +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell takes on Cisco and Juniper with 100G data center switch

Dell this week extended its arsenal of data center Ethernet switches, highlighted by a 100G device with ports dividable into 25G and 50G channels.Twenty-five gigabit and 50G Ethernet are becoming popular options for data centers looking to fill the bandwidth gap between 10G and 40G for server-to-top-of-rack switch connectivity. Products supporting 25/50G are intended to scale network bandwidth to cloud server and storage endpoints, where workloads are expected to surpass the capacity of 10/40G Ethernet links deployed today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell takes on Cisco and Juniper with 100G data center switch

Dell this week extended its arsenal of data center Ethernet switches, highlighted by a 100G device with ports dividable into 25G and 50G channels.Twenty-five gigabit and 50G Ethernet are becoming popular options for data centers looking to fill the bandwidth gap between 10G and 40G for server-to-top-of-rack switch connectivity. Products supporting 25/50G are intended to scale network bandwidth to cloud server and storage endpoints, where workloads are expected to surpass the capacity of 10/40G Ethernet links deployed today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ubuntu, cloud-init, and OpenStack Heat

In this post I’d like to share a couple of things I recently learned about the interaction between cloud-init and OpenStack Orchestration (aka “Heat”). This may be stuff that you already know, but in the interest of helping others who may not know I’m posting it here.

One issue that I’d been repeatedly running into was an apparent “failure” on the part of Heat to properly apply cloud-init configurations to deployed Ubuntu instances. So, using a Heat template with an OS::Nova::Server resource defined like this would result in an instance that apparently wasn’t reachable via SSH (I’d get back Permission denied (publickey)):

resources:
  instance0:
    type: OS::Nova::Server
    properties:
      name: cloud-init-test-01
      image: { get_param: image_id }
      flavor: m1.xsmall
      networks:
        - port: { get_resource: instance0_port0 }
      key_name: lab

Deploying an instance manually from the same image worked perfectly. So what was the deal?

The first thing I learned was that, in some circumstances (more on this in a moment) defaults to injecting SSH keys (like the key named lab specified in the template) to a user account named “ec2-user”. Ah! I’d been using the default “ubuntu” account specified in Continue reading

Cisco VIRL NXOSv NXAPI Update

How your smartphone use could affect your credit

For prospective borrowers who have no credit history, a common problem for immigrants whose credit starts anew when they move to the U.S., economists and startups are using metadata from smartphones to see how reliable a borrower is in other areas of their lives to help determine their likelihood of paying back a loan.A recent article in the New Scientist cites research conducted by Brown University economist Daniel Björkegren and the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab which involved combing through cellphone data of 3,000 borrowers from a Haitian bank to identify such trends as how often they pay their cellphone bills, how quickly they return important phone calls, and travel behavior based on location data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PCE Topology Notifications with OpenDaylight Helium

Helium SR3

OpenDaylight released its third maintenance release for Helium last month. Helium SR3 included a lot of bug fixes across OpenDaylight projects. In this blog, I would like to share my experience with PCE topology notifications available in SR3. 

Notifications 

The OpenDaylight controller sal-remote YANG model defines the RPC notification subscription service and data change notification constructs. Change-event notification subscription makes it possible to obtain notifications about data manipulations (inserting, changing, deleting) that are done on any specified part of any specified data store with specific scope. 

PCE Topology Notifications 

PCE topology notification is available in Helium SR3. This feature allows the user to subscribe to a notification stream and listen for asynchronous remote notifications through WebSocket. The changes that get notified are:

• Addition, update, deletion of Path Computation Clients (PCC)
• Addition, update, deletion of Label Switched Paths (LSP) 

Test Setup 

The setup has four routers running the IOS XRv 5.3 image, a CentOS 7 VM hosting OpenDaylight Helium SR3, and Packet Design’s SDN Service Assurance Platform acting Continue reading

iPhone 7, Apple Watch mashup: Brangelina of tech gadgets

An elegant new iPhone 7 design concept blends an advanced Apple smartphone with a key component of the new Apple Watch, resulting in something of a Brangelina of tech gadgets.Italy's Antonio De Rosa contributed his iPhone 7 design concept to the Behance portfolio site, where he takes on the challenge "to improve something that is already perfect" in the iPhone. + MORE: Why the gold Apple Watch costs $10K +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP & SDxCentral Present the NFV Report Webinar: Making NFV Real — a Novel Approach to MANO and OSS 

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To compete with Silicon Valley, European startups need to grow fast

Europe is still lacking real tech giants like Google, Facebook or Amazon, but it looks like things are slowly changing. However, if European companies want to start competing with Silicon Valley, they have to start thinking internationally from the beginning, says BlaBlaCar COO Nicolas Brusson.BlaBlaCar is a French ride-sharing startup. It has about 20 million users and is active in 18 countries, where its users can offer empty seats in their cars on a trip for a fee, allowing them to save costs while others can arrange a relatively cheap trip.Brusson, who spent years in Silicon Valley and worked as a venture capitalist before co-founding BlaBlaCar, is responsible for the international growth of the company. At The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam on Thursday he gave fellow European entrepreneurs some tips on how to become a big company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN Terminology from RFCs?

80% of your job in networking is getting you and your co-worker to agree to what the terms mean.

That paraphrase comes from one of my three networking profs in college, from literally 30 years ago. But that statement is still true today. Getting to a shared understanding of what we mean helps in any conversation about networking, and failing to truly understand the terminology can cause problems.

SDN promises many things, but it certainly has a big impact on networking terminology. SDN introduces many new terms, but it also redefines some terms and reemphasizes the underlying concepts behind other long-used terms.

And then there are no terminology police to run around and make us all use terms the same way. It’s enough to drive you crazy!

Today’s post (and possibly a few more) explores some attempts to answer some of the questions about what SDN terms to use and what they mean. In this post, I’ll look at a relatively new Internet RFC: the SDN Layers and Architecture Terminology RFC.

Overview: Terminology is a Challenge

What’s a network? Is it a class A, B, or C network, as defined by IPv4? Any subset of an IPv4 class A, Continue reading

IT/IT: Merge Lane

You’re probably living in a bubble (or sleeping on a mat in the data center — remind me to tell you about the sleeping bag I carried in the back of my truck for a while…) if you’ve not heard about the Nokia/Alcatel merger. What’s interesting, from a network engineering perspective, is what this means. To get a better idea, it’s important to consider another story posted this last week.

The white box switching market could see some monumental change within even one year, according to Dell’Oro Group analyst Alan Weckel. That’s mainly because of the rise of hyperscale cloud players — specifically Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Their buying power has grown substantially in the past few years — and white boxes have progressed rapidly during that time, too.

So what does white box have to do with the Nokia/ALU merger? Just about everything, most likely. To better understand, we need to first posit that the world is going software. Not that we won’t have hardware any longer, but rather that the hardware is going to become much less interesting over the next five to ten years as the software used to run the hardware is separated out and Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Survey: Employees will only embrace smartwatches if they improve work environment

As Apple ships its first pre-order smartwatches to customers this week, a new people-analytics survey indicates that more than half of workers would consider wearing an enterprise-supplied smartwatch if it provided a better work environment.PricewaterhouseCoopers, also known as PwC, surveyed over 2,000 adults in the UK and found that 40% would wear technology supplied by their employer.However, the number rose to over half, at 56%, if the information gathered was used to make the work environment better.Big Brother As one might imagine, trust was a big sticking point for the idea of an enterprise-supplied smartwatch. There was resistance to sharing data, in part because employees think the data will be used against them "in some way." A significant 41% of respondents said they were worried about this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here