Graphene is hot, hot, hot

Super substanceThe question is becoming what can't graphene do? The material, which is a form of carbon (what’s known as an allotrope of carbon), was recently described by the National Physical Laboratory as having many extraordinary properties including superior mechanical stiffness, strength and elasticity, electrical and thermal conductivity while being optically active, chemically inert and impermeable to gases. The possession of all of these properties in a single material makes graphene a potentially disruptive technology in sectors like optoelectronics, flexible electronics, bioelectric devices, energy storage and ultrafiltration, the lab stated. Indeed, take a look at just some of the recent applications being ascribed to the material.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi 2 laptop coming with Pi-Top assembly kit

Do you want a Raspberry Pi 2 laptop? A new hardware kit coming from Pi-Top will help you build one at home in a matter of minutes.The popular US$35 Raspberry Pi 2 is an uncased computer that is already being used in drones, robots, gadgets, tablets and even desktops. The otherwise stationary computer can be transformed into a laptop even by beginners with no hardware assembly experience.The full Pi-Top kit includes a 13.3-inch screen, battery, trackpad, mousepad, laptop casings and Raspberry Pi 2, which would serve as the main motherboard. Users will be able to run a full Linux-based operating system and surf the Web, check email and run productivity software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook ‘riffs’ on Snapchat with new group video app

Facebook has released a new app for making videos that it thinks can win over the competition by allowing collaboration among friends.The company on Wednesday released Riff, a mobile app that lets people create short videos and then share them with friends. A video creation and sharing app alone is not unique—other services like YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter provide some other apps for this—but Facebook is hoping to distinguish its app by adding a strong collaborative element to it.After someone creates a video in Riff, that person’s Facebook friends can add to the video with a video of their own. From there, friends of the friend can add to it, and so on. This has the potential to give the video a communal effect, reminiscent of the Our Stories function in Snapchat that lets people watch videos taken by others during an event or over a period of time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco to buy SDN startup Embrane

Cisco plans to beef up its SDN [software-defined networking] technology by acquiring Embrane, a startup with an architecture for virtualized network appliances.Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cisco is already an investor in Embrane, which is based in Santa Clara, California, near Cisco headquarters. The acquisition is expected to close within three months.M&A: 2015 enterprise network & IT mergers and acquisition trackerEmbrane’s Heleos platform can deploy software-based appliances such as firewalls across a pool of commodity servers, using more or less computing power as demands rise and fall. It lets cloud service providers quickly deploy new, differentiated services, the company says. With open APIs, users can integrate Embrane’s technology with third-party billing and orchestration tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

War on Hackers: a Clear and Present Danger

President Obama has upped his war on hackers by declaring a "state of emergency". This triggers several laws that grant him expanded powers, such as seizing the assets of those suspected of hacking, or taking control of the Internet.

One one hand, this seems reasonable. Hackers from China and Russia are indeed a threat, causing billions in economic damage every year, by stealing money and intellectual property. This declaration specifically targets these issues. Presumably, in the next few weeks, we'll see announcements from the Treasure Department seizing assets from Chinese companies known to have stolen intellectual property via hacking.

But on the other hand, it's problematic. Declarations of emergency tend to be permanent. We already operate under 30 declarations of emergencies dating back to the Korean war. Once government grabs new powers, it tends not to give them back. Also, this really isn't an "emergency", the hacking it addresses goes back a decade. It's obvious corruption of the "emergency" provisions in the law for the President to bypass congress and rule by decree.

Moreover, while tailored specifically to the threats of foreign hackers, it ultimately affects everyone everywhere. It allows the government to bypass due process and seize Continue reading

White Box Acronym Soup

The LightReading blog, Open Networking Acronym Soup, covers all the interest groups, communities and standards bodies that are driving this idea of Open Networking, which in itself is a grab bag of topics around SDN, NFV and of course white box/bare metal switches. A recent blog post struck a chord with me at first because the author, Marc Cohn, is a good guy and a friend.

But secondly, and more importantly to everyone else, is to point out his astute observation that “we” (people, users and vendors) try to simplify stuff by using acronyms. I agree. In my past job at Infoblox, people always wanted to know what DDI meant, I would reply in my standard excited way “DNS, DHCP and IPAM’’ and most would agree that DDI was easier to say. So let’s take a look at the acronym soup and examine several key factors that you should know about white boxes. And I will lay them out here and try to keep it simple and break the list into two sections, what you should know now, and what you need to keep an eye on…for now.

OCP – Open Compute Project – This is an organization driven Continue reading

Where SDN falls down

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.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises faster network deployment times and increased agility. Unfortunately, early SDN architectures focused only on solving connectivity challenges at layers 2 through 4 of the OSI model and largely ignored application-centric challenges at layer 4 to layer 7. Yet, layers 4 – 7 are where many of the services reside that ensure applications are fast, highly available and secure.

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

Where SDN falls down

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.Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises faster network deployment times and increased agility. Unfortunately, early SDN architectures focused only on solving connectivity challenges at layers 2 through 4 of the OSI model and largely ignored application-centric challenges at layer 4 to layer 7. Yet, layers 4 – 7 are where many of the services reside that ensure applications are fast, highly available and secure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARM fades from Windows PCs and tablets, but grows in Chromebooks

You win some, you lose some. Microsoft this week dropped support for ARM processors from its Surface tablets with the Surface 3, but adoption of the chip architecture in Chromebooks is growing.Chromebooks from little-known companies HiSense and Haier went on sale this week for US$149, and come with an ARM-based chip made by Rockchip. These are the least expensive Chromebooks, which usually cost $200 and up.Asus also announced a new ARM-based 10.1-inch Chromebook Flip hybrid, which can be a tablet and laptop and will ship in a few months starting at $249. Acer announced a Chromebase, a 21.5-inch all-in-one PC with Chrome OS and an ARM-based processor from Nvidia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Over 100,000 devices can be used to amplify DDoS attacks via multicast DNS

Over 100,000 devices have a misconfigured service called multicast DNS that accepts requests from the Internet and can potentially be abused to amplify distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.The multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) is a protocol that allows devices on a local network to discover each other and their services. It is used both by PCs and embedded devices like network attached storage (NAS) systems, printers and others.The mDNS protocol allows queries to be sent to a specific machine using its unicast address. However, the official specification recommends that when receiving such queries, the mDNS service should check before responding that the address that made the request is located in the same local subnet. If it’s not, the request should be ignored.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle bolsters Marketing Cloud to show CMOs the big picture

It’s a common theme that spans functional areas within the organization: data remains stuck in silos, making it all but impossible for decision-makers to get a glimpse at the big picture. Zeroing in on marketers’ experience of this problem, Oracle on Wednesday rolled out several enhancements to its Marketing Cloud designed to help companies develop a more holistic view of their customers.Among the new features unveiled at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience event this week in Las Vegas are Oracle ID Graph, Rapid Retargeter and AppCloud Connect.Oracle ID Graph is designed to help marketers connect the many identities a consumer may have across channels and devices and understand that they all belong to the same person.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Obama authorizes sanctions against hackers

U.S. President Barack Obama has signed an executive order authorizing the U.S. government to impose sanctions on people, organizations and governments that partake in “malicious cyber-enabled activities” that harm the country.“The same technologies that help keep our military strong are used by hackers in China and Russia to target our defense contractors and systems that support our troops,” Obama said in a statement.The sanctions would target activities that harm critical infrastructure, disrupt computer networks, expose personal information and trade secrets, and entities that profit from information stolen in cyberattacks. The administration will focus on threats from outside the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS targets interrupted sessions with virtual desktops upgrade

Amazon Web Services has made its WorkSpaces virtual desktops less annoying to use with a feature that resumes the previous session after it detects an interruption.Today, if users close a laptop lid or lose the network connection, their session will be interrupted and they may be disconnected and have to log back in. But thanks to the auto session resume feature, that’ll be a thing of the past.It might seem like a small upgrade. But if Amazon wants the use of its WorkSpaces to take off on a larger scale, it’s small things like that it has to get right. The default time for resuming a session is 20 minutes, but it can be extended to a maximum of four hours or disabled by the administrator.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare’s Buenos Aires data center now online

Che, ya estamos en Argentina! It is con placer that we announce our 32nd data center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our Buenos Aires data center is our 5th in Latin America following deployments in Santiago, São Paulo, Medellin, and Lima. As of this moment, CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away from nearly all of Latin America's 300 million Internet users.

Argentina may be better known as the land of bife and malbec, but it is also home to a thriving tech community, including several well known start-up accelerators such as Startup Buenos Aires, Wayra and NXTP Labs (a CloudFlare customer!). At CloudFlare, we know a thing or two about the challenges of building a technology company, and we're proud to support the fast delivery of Internet applications for users in Argentina, as well as those who create them.

Don't cry for me Argentina

Although not commonly known, the title of the famous song from the musical Evita originates from an epitaph on a plaque honoring Evita Peron, and roughly translates as: "Don't cry for me Argentina, I remain quite near to you." Unfortunately, when it comes to the Internet, there is plenty of Continue reading

Is it safe to use public Wi-Fi networks?

Wi-Fi has significantly changed the way we work and play, enabling us to interact with the digital world from anywhere in the physical world. Furthermore, free Wi-Fi access is on the rise, from local coffee shops to international restaurant chains. However, the convenience of free Wi-Fi comes with some real threats, from computer viruses to identity theft.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 7 reasons to deploy Wi-Fi security in Enterprise mode Wi-Fi is a type of wireless local area network (WLAN) technology that enables an electronic device such as a laptop or smartphone to exchange data or connect to the Internet using radio waves. The core technology behind Wi-Fi is a device called an access point, which acts like a bridge between the wired network and the Wi-Fi network. The access point, in turn, typically connects to the Internet via a network router.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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