IDG Contributor Network: The UK is ‘running out of internet,’ pundit says

The United Kingdom, which is ranked on a GDP basis just behind France, Germany, and Japan – which in-turn are out-ranked only by the U.S. and China – is going to run out of internet soon, and might need to ration it, according to Andrew Ellis, a professor in optical communications at Aston University in Birmingham, England. The web will collapse because existing fiber optic cables can't accept any more data, and telcos can't afford to keep laying more fiber, Ellis has said recently. In any case, pumping data through cables is using up the country's power supply, Ellis says. At the current rate of growth, the web will consume the country's power supply within 20 years, he reckons.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Configuration management 101

Configuration management, without a doubt this is probably one of those things we all do, but to what end do we perform configuration management though? Usually configuration begins and sometimes ends with backing up and storing those configuration files but how much further can or should we go with configuration? Backing and storing configuration files […]

Google launches a service for storing big data

Google has introduced a service for storing large amounts of data online, potentially enabling organizations to execute big data analysis as a cloud service.The offering, called Google Cloud Bigtable, "is based on technology that Google has been running internally for many years, so it is not a brand new thing," said Tom Kershaw, who is Google's director of product management for the Google Cloud Platform.Bigtable powers many of Google's core services, including Google Search, Gmail, and Google Analytics.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Big data's biggest challenges The service could be used to store sensor data from an Internet-of-things monitoring system. Finance companies could house petabytes of trading data on the service to analyze for emerging trends. Telecommunications companies, digital advertising firms, energy, biomedical, and other data-intensive industries might benefit from the technology as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Economist: The Internet of Things will deliver surge of productivity

BOSTON - The view from Harvard's Michael Porter, an economist noted for his work on competition, is that the last 10 or 15 years have been "pretty dismal" for the economy. The IT- and Internet- driven innovations over the past four decades or so have played themselves out. The rate of investment and innovation "has been slowing down," he said.But that will change thanks to Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, which will deliver "tremendous" efficiency gains, he said. Harvard economist Michael Porter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Internet of Things to take a beating in DefCon hacking contest

Hackers will put Internet-connected embedded devices to the test at the DefCon 23 security conference in August. Judging by the results of previous Internet-of-Things security reviews, prepare for flaws galore.This year, DefCon, the largest hacker convention in the U.S., will host a so-called IoT Village, a special place to discuss, build and break Internet-of-Things devices.“Show us how secure (or insecure) IP enabled embedded systems are,” a description of the new village reads. “Routers, network storage systems, cameras, HVAC systems, refrigerators, medical devices, smart cars, smart home technology, and TVs—If it is IP enabled, we’re interested.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, May 6

Are Apple music-streaming deals under government scrutiny?With Apple’s new Beats music-streaming service readying a June launch, there’s a flurry of reports that its tough deal-making with record labels is drawing the attention of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Bloomberg reported that the regulator is investigating whether Apple is using its position as the largest seller of music downloads via iTunes to get better deals than rivals like Spotify. The Verge had earlier reported that both the Department of Justice and the FTC were digging around to find out if Apple was leaning on labels to stop letting streaming competitors offer free music options, so that users are pushed to paid services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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 →
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