Is Apple building a car?

Early last week, a somewhat bizarre Apple rumor emerged from out of nowhere. Specifically, rumor has it that Apple is seriously investigating the prospect of developing its own branded automobile. The wave of rumors began a few days ago when Business Insider posted a report claiming that Apple was working on an exciting project that was luring back former employees from Tesla.... We got an unsolicited email from an employee at Apple about "vehicle development" at the company. This person said Tesla employees were "jumping ship" to work at Apple. "Apple's latest project is too exciting to pass up," the person said. "I think it will change the landscape and give Tesla a run for its money." Initially, it was easy to scoff at the report. Not only does the notion of Apple getting into the car business seem absurd on its face, but it's not as if Apple employees are exactly known for sending unsolicited emails about top secret research initiatives to tech publications. At most, the prevailing attitude was that Apple was simply keen on deepening their exploration into automotive-based software such as CarPlay. The very next day, Bryan Chaffin of Mac Observer chimed in with a Continue reading

Xiaomi leads China’s smartphone market, despite Apple’s iPhone 6

Apple’s iPhone 6 has been a hit in China, but according to one account, rival Xiaomi still reigns as the country’s largest smartphone vendor.In last year’s fourth quarter, Android handset maker Xiaomi had a 13.7 percent share, while second place Apple only had a 12.3 percent share, research firm IDC said Monday.The rankings are, however, different from those of another research firm Canalys, which put Apple as the top vendor, and Xiaomi second.Apple achieved in the fourth quarter its highest quarterly market share in China over the past two years, and it came from strong demand for its newest iPhone, said Xiaohan Tay, an IDC analyst.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Infosys to acquire startup Panaya to automate customer tasks

Indian outsourcer Infosys is to acquire Panaya, a U.S. vendor of automation technology for testing enterprise software deployments and upgrades.The cash deal values Panaya at an enterprise value of US$200 million, and is in line with the company’s strategy under new CEO Vishal Sikka to automate processes, including by using artificial intelligence, to cut down on repetitive tasks and accelerate services delivery.“This acquisition aims to use automation to boost the revenue of the company without a corresponding increase in staff,” said Sudin Apte, CEO and research director at analyst firm Offshore Insights. He pointed out that Infosys’ rivals like Tata Consultancy Services already use some degree of automation developed in-house.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybercriminal gang plunders up to $1 billion from banks over two years

A still-active cybercriminal gang has stolen up to a $1 billion from banks in at least 25 countries over the last two years, infiltrating networks with malware and spying on employees’ computers to facilitate large wire transfers, Kaspersky Lab said Sunday.The computer security vendor, which said it will release a report Monday on its findings, said the gang penetrated deeply into the banks’ networks, taking time to learn about internal procedures to make their fraudulent activity less suspicious.In some cases, the gang learned about wire transfer systems by watching administrators’ computers over video.“In this way the cybercriminals got to know every last detail of the bank clerks’ work and were able to mimic staff activity in order to transfer money and cash out,” Kaspersky said in a news release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Generating Web Docs for Ansible Modules

Spanning Tree Portfast – The Definitive Guide

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
The spanning tree portfast command is a very simple feature but often mis-understood. In this short post I will explore how this feature behaves, how it works and how to configure it on a cisco switch. Portfast is a Cisco Propietary feature that was originally developed to overcome an issue when a PC was trying... [Read More]

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post Spanning Tree Portfast – The Definitive Guide

Must bookmark: NSX Link-o-Rama

Generating Web Docs for Ansible Modules

If you have ever worked with Ansible, it’s almost a guarantee that you have used their online docs to figure out what parameters a given module supports, how they should be used, or what their defaults are. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a few custom modules and was trying to find a way to generate web docs for them, and have them locally accessible or easily posted to GitHub.

Ansible offers a way to “make webdocs,” but it generates the complete module inventory and truth be told, I didn’t get this work for my custom modules, so I figured I would explore a “simplified” way — a way that should be able to generate docs as needed for one or more modules on an as needed basis.

The outcome was the creation of an Ansible module and Jinja2 template that automatically generates a markdown file (that can then be viewed or posted anywhere).

How does it work?

The modules you’ve built or are local to your machine (even Ansible core modules) that you want to generate a web doc for must be documented according to Ansible standards. That’s the only major requirement.

From there, Continue reading

NAT, Security, and Repeating Myself

In a former post I pointed out that we need to think of obscurity as a tool in network security — that we shouldn’t try to apply rules that are perfectly logical in terms of algorithms to networks as a system. While I’m not normally one to repeat myself, this topic needs a little more […]

Author information

Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, and his author page on Amazon.

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The post NAT, Security, and Repeating Myself appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

Securing BFD now possible!

Confession Time.

I am guilty of committing several sins. One that egregiously stands out is writing two IETF specs for BFD security (here and here) without considering the impact on the routers and switches implementing those specs. Bear in mind that Bi-directional Forwarding Detection (BFD) is a hard protocol to implement well. Its hard to get into a conversation with engineers working on BFD without a few of them shedding copious quantities of tears on what it took them to avoid those dreaded BFD flaps in scaled setups. They will tell you how they resorted to clever tricks (hacks, if you will) to process BFD packets as fast as they could (plucking them out of order from a shared queue, dedicated tasks picking up BFD packets in the ISR contexts, etc) . In a candid conversation, an ex-employee of a reputed vendor revealed how they stage managed their BFD during a demo to a major customer since they didnt want their BFD to flap while the show (completely scripted) was on. So, long story short — BFD is hard when you start scaling. It just becomes a LOT worse, when you add security on top of it.

The reason BFD is hard is because of Continue reading

Securing BFD now possible!

Confession Time.

I am guilty of committing several sins. One that egregiously stands out is writing two IETF specs for BFD security (here and here) without considering the impact on the routers and switches implementing those specs. Bear in mind that Bi-directional Forwarding Detection (BFD) is a hard protocol to implement well. Its hard to get into a conversation with engineers working on BFD without a few of them shedding copious quantities of tears on what it took them to avoid those dreaded BFD flaps in scaled setups. They will tell you how they resorted to clever tricks (hacks, if you will) to process BFD packets as fast as they could (plucking them out of order from a shared queue, dedicated tasks picking up BFD packets in the ISR contexts, etc) . In a candid conversation, an ex-employee of a reputed vendor revealed how they stage managed their BFD during a demo to a major customer since they didnt want their BFD to flap while the show (completely scripted) was on. So, long story short — BFD is hard when you start scaling. It just becomes a LOT worse, when you add security on top of it.

The reason BFD is hard is because of Continue reading

News Analysis: CloudGenix, LightCyber, VMware, Meru

Exporting NetFlow from Linux to a collector over IPv6

There is another project out there in the ether that I have a hand in providing input for. One of the features that I felt was necessary for it is exporting NetFlow information from traffic the Linux machine handled, to a collector. This is dual-stack traffic, but I have the collector listening on IPv6.

Firstly, I needed something that would gather and export the data, so I found softflowd. My ubuntu server had it in the repo, so a quick apt install got it onto the machine easily enough. You need to edit /etc/default/softflowd and set what interface(s) you want it capturing & generating flow data from, and what options to feed to the daemon, like what server:port to export that data to:

INTERFACE="eth#"
OPTIONS="-v 9 -n [x:x:x:x::x]:9995"

Fill in the correct interface name you want to gather data from. The -v 9 option tells it to use Netflow v9, which has IPv6 support The -n option is used for specifying the collector machine’s IP and port, and fill in for the correct IPv6 address of that collector. Above is the format for specifying an IPv6 host running a collector, like nfcapd. Then you can fire up the softflowd daemon, Continue reading

CLUS Keynote Speaker – It’s a Dirty Job but Somebody’s Gotta Do It

Did you guess by the title who will be the celebrity keynote speaker for CLUS San Diego? It’s none other than Mike Rowe, also known as the dirtiest man on TV.

Mike is the man behind “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery Channel. Little did he know when pitching the idea to Discovery that they would order 39 episodes of it. Mike traveled through 50 states and completed 300 different jobs going through swamps, sewers, oil derricks, lumberjack camps and what not.

Mike is also a narrator and can be heard in “American Chopper”, “American Hot Rod”, “Deadliest Catch”, “How the Universe Works” and other TV shows.

He is also a public speaker and often hired by Fortune 500 companies to tell their employees frightening stories of maggot farmers and sheep castrators.

Mike also believes in skilled trades and in working smart AND hard. He has written extensively on the country’s relationship with work and the skill gap.

I’m sure Mike’s speach will be very interesting…and maybe a bit gross…

The following two links take you to Cisco Live main page and the registration packages:

Cisco Live
Cisco Live registration packages

Install the CORE Network Emulator on Amazon AWS

Having set up an Ubuntu Linux server running on a free micro-instance in Amazon’s Web Services EC2 service, I’d like to see how some of the open-source network simulation tools I’ve been using work in the cloud.

First, I will install the CORE Network Emulator on my Amazon AWS EC2 virtual private server. Please read the rest of this post to see how it works.

I expect that the CORE Network Emulator will install and run on an Amazon EC2 instance because it uses Linux Containers (LXC) as its virtualization technology. I have already observed that LXC containers work when run inside a virtual machine on my Laptop computer. It should work the same when running in a virtual machine in Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service.

Install CORE

I’ve already described how to install the CORE network emulator in previous posts so I will list the installation steps below without any explanation. For details, please see my post on how to install the CORE Network Emulator from source code.

Install prerequisite software

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install bash bridge-utils ebtables 
  iproute libev-dev python tcl8.5 tk8.5 libtk-img 
  autoconf automake gcc libev-dev make python-dev 
   Continue reading

Networking Field Day 9: Brief Recap

I’m sitting in the San Francisco airport with nothing better to do than writing blog posts, so let’s see what we’ve seen and learned during the Networking Field Day 9.

Most videos recorded during the week are already online. You’ll find links to them in the Presentation Calendar section.

Yelp sues positive review provider Revleap

Yelp has filed a lawsuit against Revleap, a company that says it can help businesses improve their ratings, though Yelp says it actually spams them and cons them out of money.Revleap, based in Los Angeles, operates a paid service that it says can “create a large constant flow of positive reviews that stay on top of your profile, and remove fake reviews,” according to its website.These sorts of messages are knowingly false, Yelp contends in a lawsuit filed Friday, because Revleap has no way of removing bad reviews or getting good ones to appear more prominently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yelp sues positive review provider Revleap

Yelp has filed a lawsuit against Revleap, a company that says it can help businesses improve their ratings, though Yelp says it actually spams them and cons them out of money.Revleap, based in Los Angeles, operates a paid service that it says can “create a large constant flow of positive reviews that stay on top of your profile, and remove fake reviews,” according to its website.These sorts of messages are knowingly false, Yelp contends in a lawsuit filed Friday, because Revleap has no way of removing bad reviews or getting good ones to appear more prominently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Live 2015 – Mike Rowe Announced as Keynote Speaker

Cisco just announced to the Cisco Champion community that the guest speaker for the keynote is going to be none other than …… Mike Rowe!! In case you don’t know, Mike Rowe is an American TV host, narrator, actor, and former opera singer. He is best-known for his extensive work on the Discovery Channel. He has starred on the shows Dirty Jobs, and narrated many shows including Deadliest Catch, American Hot Rod, and Ghost Hunters. He also did a quick stint on the QVC Shopping Network where he was hired after talking about a pencil for nearly eight minutes. According to his bio,  he worked the graveyard shift for just three years, until he was ultimately fired for making fun of products and belittling viewers. I’ve included one of my favorite videos from his time at QVC down below, be sure to check out some of the other ones if you haven’t seen them.

Mike also founded the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which promotes hard work. Mike has long been a supporter of the skilled trades and his foundation works hard at awarding scholarships to men and women who demonstrate an aptitude for doing the work that America needs. He is also Continue reading

Vint Cerf worries about a ‘digital dark age,’ and your data could be at risk

In this era of the all-pervasive cloud, it’s easy to assume that the data we store will somehow be preserved forever. The only thing to fret about from a posterity perspective, we might think, is the analog information from days gone by—all the stuff on papers, tapes and other pre-digital formats that haven’t been explicitly converted.Vinton Cerf, often called “the father of the Internet,” has other ideas.Now chief Internet evangelist at Google, Cerf spoke this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he painted a very different picture.Rather than a world where longevity is a given, Cerf fears a “digital dark age” in which the rapid evolution of technology quickly makes storage formats obsolete thanks to a phenomenon he calls “bit rot.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here