IDG Contributor Network: Coming soon: The app store for virtualization

The constant push to increase productivity and profit has historically led commercial enterprises to drive some of our world's most significant technology advances. It was the enterprise push for further development of desktop computer processing that changed the personal computer from a hobbyist activity to a mission-critical tool. Commercial organizations deployed fiber for dedicated computer networks while the rest of us were just getting used to DSL. And the cellphone? It began its life as tool to keep business sales teams and execs more productive.But something happened during the smartphone revolution. What made the smartphone the critical invention of the 21st century was the ease of application use. Applications became "apps," and with them came their own marketplace, or "app store."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Coming soon: The app store for virtualization

The constant push to increase productivity and profit has historically led commercial enterprises to drive some of our world's most significant technology advances. It was the enterprise push for further development of desktop computer processing that changed the personal computer from a hobbyist activity to a mission-critical tool. Commercial organizations deployed fiber for dedicated computer networks while the rest of us were just getting used to DSL. And the cellphone? It began its life as tool to keep business sales teams and execs more productive.But something happened during the smartphone revolution. What made the smartphone the critical invention of the 21st century was the ease of application use. Applications became "apps," and with them came their own marketplace, or "app store."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Betting On The Right Horse

The annoucement of the merger of Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia was a pretty big discussion last week. One of the quotes that kept being brought up in several articles was from John Chambers of Cisco. Chambers has said the IT industry is in for a big round of “brutal consolidation” spurred by “missed market transitions”, which is a favorite term for Chambers. While I agree that consolidation is coming in the industry, I don’t think market transitions are the driver. Instead, it helps to think of it more like a day at the races.

Tricky Ponies

Startups in the networking industry have to find a hook to get traction with investors and customers. Since you can’t boil the ocean, you have to stand out. You need to find an application that gives you the capability to sell into a market. That is much easier to do with SDN than hardware-based innovation. The time-to-market for software is much lower than the barriers to ramp up production of actual devices.

Being a one-trick pony isn’t a bad thing when it comes to SDN startups. If you pour all your talent into one project, you get the best you can build. If Continue reading

Bahrain

7 troubling similarities between the Apple Watch and Google Glass

Call it heresy, but now that I've had the chance to actually get my hands on the Apple Watch, I keep being struck by the parallels with the much-maligned Google Glass. That doesn't necessarily mean the Apple Watch will fail spectacularly the way Glass did, just that it will face many of the same challenges. Let's take a look at a few of them.(Note that I tried the Apple Watch only at the Apple Store. Actual deliveries don't begin until Friday, April 24. I have spent much more time with Google Glass… just not in public).They're both too expensiveThe Apple Watch starts at $350, but the "nice" ones start at twice that price and soar well into five freaking figures! Even more annoying, if you just want to upgrade the aluminum sport model with a slightly less-cheesy leather band, it'll cost you another $250. Really? $250 for a leather watchband?! In comparison, the $1,500 price tag on Google Glass no longer seems so outrageous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTTPS snooping flaw in third-party library affected 1,000 iOS apps with millions of users

Apps used by millions of iPhone and iPad owners became vulnerable to snooping when a flaw was introduced into third-party code they used to establish HTTPS connections.The flaw was located in an open-source library called AFNetworking that’s used by hundreds of thousands of iOS and Mac OS X applications for communicating with Web services. The bug disabled the validation of digital certificates presented by servers when establishing secure HTTPS (HTTP over SSL/TLS) connections.This means that attackers in a position to intercept encrypted traffic between affected applications and HTTPS servers could decrypt and modify the data by presenting the app with a fake certificate. This is known as a man-in-the-middle attack and can be launched over insecure wireless networks, by hacking into routers and through other methods.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HOL Head-of-line blocking

How does Internet work - We know what is networking

Head-of-line blocking (HOL blocking) in networking is a performance issue that occurs when a bunch of packets is blocked by the first packet in line. It can happen specially in input buffered network switches where out-of-order delivery of packets can occur. A switch can be composed of input buffered ports, output buffered ports and switch fabric. When first-in first-out input buffers are used, only the first received packet is prepared to be forwarded. All packets received afterwards are not forwarded if the first one cannot be forwarded. That is basically what HOL blocking really is.If there’s no HOL blocking happening,

HOL Head-of-line blocking

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, April 21

New mainframe can’t keep IBM sales from slidingIBM reported a 12 percent drop in revenue for the last quarter despite a big boost from its new z13 mainframe. Profit was down 5 percent to $2.4 billion on revenue of $19.6 billion. IBM said Monday that its cloud, analytics and mobile business increased more than 20 percent from a year earlier, but wasn’t enough to offset declines elsewhere.Google’s Mobilegeddon hits TuesdayIt’s here: the day that webmasters have called Mobilegeddon for its potentially cataclysmic effect on those who did not heed the warnings has arrived. On Tuesday, websites that aren’t sufficiently mobile-friendly will find themselves tumbling far down in Google’s search rankings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, April 21

New mainframe can’t keep IBM sales from slidingIBM reported a 12 percent drop in revenue for the last quarter despite a big boost from its new z13 mainframe. Profit was down 5 percent to $2.4 billion on revenue of $19.6 billion. IBM said Monday that its cloud, analytics and mobile business increased more than 20 percent from a year earlier, but wasn’t enough to offset declines elsewhere.Google’s Mobilegeddon hits TuesdayIt’s here: the day that webmasters have called Mobilegeddon for its potentially cataclysmic effect on those who did not heed the warnings has arrived. On Tuesday, websites that aren’t sufficiently mobile-friendly will find themselves tumbling far down in Google’s search rankings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mobile worker guilt hits most young workers

Most younger mobile workers feel guilty about using smartphones and smartwatches to do personal tasks while at work and for performing work at home when they should be taking care of their families or other duties.A new survey of 3,500 professionals -- mostly under age 34 -- conducted in the U.S. and five other countries found at least 58% said they have feelings of guilt in this hyper-connected world.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How to lure tech talent with employee benefits, perks The survey, conducted by the Harris Poll for MobileIron, also found that 60% said they would leave their job if their boss didn't allow any remote work or restricted their ability to do personal tasks at work. The survey involved workers in the U.S. as well as France, Germany, Japan, Spain and the UK between December 2014 and January 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech’s ticking time bombs: The components you might (and might not) expect to wear out

Frequent failureImage by ENIAC used over 17,000 vacuum tubes. TexasDex/Wikipedia.The early computers of the vacuum-tube age were marvels of engineering for their time. Today, we can simultaneously appreciate the advances these computers represented, making previously unthinkable computational work possible, and chuckle at what to us seems like their ludicrous size and painfully slow processing speeds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rearchitecting L3-Only Networks

One of the responses I got on my “What is Layer-2” post was

Ivan, are you saying to use L3 switches everywhere with /31 on the switch ports and the servers/workstation?

While that solution would work (and I know a few people who are using it with reasonable success), it’s nothing more than creative use of existing routing paradigms; we need something better.

Update 2015-04-22 14:30Z - Added a link to Cumulus Linux Redistribute Neighbor feature.

Google makes mobile websites more app-like with Chrome push notifications

Google has taken a big step in its efforts to make mobile websites act more like native applications on Android smartphones, by adding notifications to its browser.One of the most convincing arguments for building an application instead of a website has been the ability to send notifications to users. Google is hoping to narrow that advantage by adding the feature to version 42 of its Chrome browser for Android.As a result, Android developers no longer have to decide between the engagement potential of a native app and the reach of a mobile website, Google said in a blog post on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pica8 Digs Up Labeled BGP for Network Virtualization

As if VXLAN needed another rival. But labeled BGP, ancient by SDN standards, has carrier appeal, Pica8 claims.

To control your phone, just keep tapping it

If you’re tired of touching that touchscreen, try hitting your phone and making some noise.Researchers in South Korea have developed a sound-based method of controlling smartphones, and connected appliances, by tapping them.Graduate students from Seoul National University of Science and Technology are demonstrating an Android app called Sound Tap at the 2015 Computer-Human Interaction Conference (CHI) in Seoul this week.Sound Tap can be used to control a smartphone by tapping its rear surface with a finger once or twice, or by lightly striking the phone itself against various surfaces in the environment. Since the taps create unique frequencies, they can be used to trigger different functions on the phone, such as calling up browsers, photo galleries or music players.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HOL Head-of-line blocking

How does Internet work - We know what is networking

Head-of-line blocking (HOL blocking) in networking is a performance issue that occurs when a bunch of packets is blocked by the first packet in line. It can happen specially in input buffered network switches where out-of-order delivery of packets can occur. A switch can be composed of input buffered ports, output buffered ports and switch fabric. When first-in first-out input buffers are used, only the first received packet is prepared to be forwarded. All packets received afterwards are not forwarded if the first one cannot be forwarded. That is basically what HOL blocking really is. If there’s no HOL blocking

HOL Head-of-line blocking

Huawei plans to offer public cloud service in China

Telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies plans to launch a public cloud service in China in July, amid growing competition from local and foreign players.“We hope that once it launches, we can bring some surprises to all our enterprise customers,” said Eric Xu, Huawei’s acting CEO, on Tuesday at a company event for analysts.Xu provided few details, but said Huawei aimed to offer a unique service. In China, other large tech players have already entered the public cloud space, including Microsoft and Amazon.com.Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is currently the leading player, according to Forrester Research. And in March, it announced it would enter the U.S. cloud computing market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bedep’s DGA: Trading Foreign Exchange for Malware Domains

As initially researched by Trend Micro [1] [2], Zscaler [1] [2], Cyphort, and Malware don’t need Coffee, the Bedep malware family focuses on ad / click fraud and the downloading of additional malware. ASERT’s first sample dates from September 22, 2014, which is in line with when Trend Micro started seeing it in their telemetry. In early 2015, the family got some more attention when it was being observed as the malware payload for some instances of the Angler exploit kit, leveraging the Adobe Flash Player exploit (CVE-2015-0311) which at the time was a 0day. It was also observed that this newer version was using a domain generation algorithm (DGA) to generate its command and control (C2) domain names.

This post provides some additional notes on the DGA including a proof of concept Python implementation, a look at the two most recent sets of DGA generated domains, and concludes with some sinkhole data.

Samples

The following Bedep samples were used for this research:

• MD5 e5e72baff4fab6ea6a1fcac467dc4351
• MD5 1b84a502034f7422e40944b1a3d71f29

The former was originally sourced from KernelMode.

Algorithm

I’ve posted a proof of concept (read: works for me) Python implementation of the DGA to ASERT’s Github.

At the time of Continue reading

Qualcomm looking to fast-track Snapdragon 820 with help from Samsung

A plan by Qualcomm to get Samsung Electronics to make its Snapdragon 820 chip could lead to faster smartphones, offering longer battery life by early next year.The chip company will get its top-line device manufactured in factories belonging to Samsung, according to a news report by Re/code. The South Korean company will make the Snapdragon 820 chip using the 14-nanometer process, which will also be used to make Apple’s next A9 chip.The Snapdragon 820 chip was announced last month at Mobile World Congress and is expected to start shipping later this year. Qualcomm hasn’t shared information about where it will be manufactured, but Samsung’s 14-nm process will provide big performance and power advantages over current Snapdragon chips.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm looking to fast-track Snapdragon 820 with help from Samsung

A plan by Qualcomm to get Samsung Electronics to make its Snapdragon 820 chip could lead to faster smartphones, offering longer battery life by early next year.The chip company will get its top-line device manufactured in factories belonging to Samsung, according to a news report by Re/code. The South Korean company will make the Snapdragon 820 chip using the 14-nanometer process, which will also be used to make Apple’s next A9 chip.The Snapdragon 820 chip was announced last month at Mobile World Congress and is expected to start shipping later this year. Qualcomm hasn’t shared information about where it will be manufactured, but Samsung’s 14-nm process will provide big performance and power advantages over current Snapdragon chips.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here