MLD Considered Harmful

Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) protocol is well hidden deep in the bowels of IPv6 protocol stack and most of us tend to gloss over it when we discuss IPv6 neighbor discovery process… until MLD raises its ugly head to bite an unsuspecting network administrator.

The problems with MLD are not new (and I wrote exhaustively about them a while ago), but it’s always nice to see other people raise awareness of broken IPv6 features like Enno Rey and his security team did during the IPv6 Security Summit (part of Troopers 15 conference).

About 25 US states oppose sale of RadioShack’s customer data

Several state consumer protection agencies in the U.S. have joined the state of Texas in objecting in bankruptcy court to the proposed sale by RadioShack of personal information of its customers.In a filing Wednesday, the state of Texas said it had received support from 21 governmental consumer protection entities to its objection last week to the planned sale of personally identifiable information (PII) of 117 million RadioShack customers.The state of Texas had earlier objected to the sale citing both the in-store and online privacy policies of the consumer electronics retailer. “All versions of the privacy policy contain an unequivocal provision that consumer PII will not be sold,” state officials said in a filing to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

About 25 US states oppose sale of RadioShack’s customer data

Several state consumer protection agencies in the U.S. have joined the state of Texas in objecting in bankruptcy court to the proposed sale by RadioShack of personal information of its customers.In a filing Wednesday, the state of Texas said it had received support from 21 governmental consumer protection entities to its objection last week to the planned sale of personally identifiable information (PII) of 117 million RadioShack customers.The state of Texas had earlier objected to the sale citing both the in-store and online privacy policies of the consumer electronics retailer. “All versions of the privacy policy contain an unequivocal provision that consumer PII will not be sold,” state officials said in a filing to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Foxconn to enter information security realm with joint venture

Foxconn Technology Group isn’t satisfied with just making iPhones, and plans to break into the information security market through an upcoming joint venture.On Thursday, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant announced it would set up in May a joint venture with Korea’s SK C&C, an IT services provider, to develop information security systems for the Chinese market.The venture will be based at one of Foxconn’s factories in China, where it has hired over a million workers to assemble electronics for vendors that include Apple, Microsoft and Sony.Electronics manufacturing has long been the core business of the company. Business from Apple is estimated to contribute 40 to 50 percent of Foxconn’s revenue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook’s Like button can still easily be gamed

Facebook’s Like button is a pervasive feature of the Web, a way to gauge the popularity of a website or piece of content. But researchers have found it’s easy to inflate the numbers, undermining its value as an accurate measure of popularity.The problem of bogus Likes has been around for some time, and Facebook has released updates to its software over the last couple of years to cut down on fraudulent ones generated by spammers.But researchers with McGill University’s School of Computer Science in Montreal say the social networking company still hasn’t fixed several major problems with the feature. This week, they released a research paper outlining the problems, which they first told Facebook about in early 2013.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FTC says it did not go easy on Google in search probe

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said its decision not to prosecute Google over its search practices was in line with the recommendations of its staff.The statement issued Wednesday by FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez and Commissioners Julie Brill and Maureen Ohlhausen was in response to the leak of an internal document, which suggested that the agency’s staff had concluded that Google’s business tactics had caused “real harm to consumers and to innovation,” and had recommended a lawsuit against the company.The FTC’s decision on the search allegations was in accord with the recommendations of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Economics, and Office of General Counsel, the three commissioners wrote, claiming that the document, which was inadvertently provided to The Wall Street Journal as part of a public records request, was only “a fraction” of the voluminous record and extensive internal analysis that was reviewed at the time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WhatsApp not as open as Messenger to outside developers

Facebook-owned WhatsApp, the popular mobile messaging and calling service, has no immediate plans to offer tools to outside developers to let them build services on top of it.Doing so could potentially introduce unwanted content into the app, slow it down, and disrupt the flow of one-to-one messages and interactions between its users, WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton said Wednesday during a panel talk at Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco.Acton delivered his remarks after two developers from the audience asked when, if at all, WhatsApp would offer application programming interfaces or APIs to them.Acton was adamant. For the year, the company is focused on its voice calling service—which is available for Android now and coming to iOS soon—as well as its recently launched Web software, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Egyptian company says rogue Google SSL certificates were a mistake

An Egyptian company that created unauthorized digital certificates for several Google domains said Wednesday it made a mistake and acted quickly when the error became known.The SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layers/Transport Layer Security) certificates would have allowed MCS Holdings of Cairo to decrypt traffic sent by users on its network to Google, a major privacy concern. Google said it doesn’t believe the certificates were misused.But MCS shouldn’t have been able to create digital certificates for Google properties in the first place. It appears MCS and a Certificate Authority (CA) in China both made mistakes, which highlight ongoing problems in the way digital certificates are issued.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to Upgrade IOS on Cisco 4500X Switch

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
The post describes the process of how to upgrade the IOS / Software on a Cisco 4500X switch. I will not be covering how to do a hitless upgrade using ISSU with 2 switches in a VSS pair. This process is performed on two switches which are not in production. So to perform the upgrade... [Read More]

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post How to Upgrade IOS on Cisco 4500X Switch

How Messenger chats factor into what you see in Facebook news feed

Havent seen many posts from some friends lately on Facebook? Perhaps you need to reach out directly to them.How often you chat with someone using Facebooks Messenger app is a signal the company uses to determine how to place posts in your feed. If you havent chatted with someone in a while on Messenger, and then you start chatting again, posts from that person might appear higher in your news feed.That was one piece of information shared by Facebook engineers during a session Wednesday during the companys F8 conference in San Francisco.The algorithm Facebook uses to rank posts in peoples news feeds is a complicated one, and it’s always in flux, but the session, titled “How News Feed Works,” shed light on it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding 802.11 Medium Contention

In this post, I dive deep into 802.11 medium contention to understand how it works as a precursor to the final blog post in this series where I’ll detail the two main sources of medium contention, identify Wi-Fi's breaking point (that'll be fun, stay tuned) and how this affects proper WLAN design in order to optimize wireless networks to prevent medium contention from killing your WLAN performance.

Read the full blog post over on the Aruba Networks Tech Blog...

This is the third blog post in a series about WLAN capacity planning. Be sure to read the first and second posts.

Cheers,
Andrew

Akamai: Most Internet attacks in Q4 originated in China

A majority of the Internet attack traffic in 2014’s fourth quarter originated in China, followed by the U.S., according to cloud service provider Akamai.China and the U.S. were the only countries where more than 10 percent of attack traffic originated, Akamai said in its quarterly state of the Internet report. The other top 10 nations each had less than 5 percent of the world’s attack traffic. Taiwan, for instance, came in third with 4.4 percent of the traffic.Still, the attack traffic coming from China was down compared to the third quarter, falling to 49 percent from 41 percent. Attack traffic coming from the U.S. also fell, decreasing to 13 percent from 17 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

USB 3.1 set to reach desktops

The emerging USB 3.1 standard is set to reach desktops as hardware companies release motherboards with ports that can transfer data two times faster than the previous USB technology.MSI on Wednesday announced a 970A SLI Krait motherboard that will support the AMD processors and the USB 3.1 protocol. Motherboards with USB 3.1 ports have also been released by Gigabyte, ASRock and Asus, but those boards support Intel chips.USB 3.1 can shuffle data between a host device and peripheral at 10Gbps (bits per second), which is two times faster than USB 3.0. USB 3.1 is also generating excitement for the reversible Type-C cable, which is the same on both ends so users don’t have to worry about plug orientation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco programs the cloud

Cisco recently unveiled three enhancements to its core and edge platforms for service providers to increase programmability for cloud and IP traffic growth. The new offerings include Application Engineered Routing, the IOS XRv 9000 Virtual Router and 100G Ethernet line cards for the ASR 9000 series edge router.The new and enhanced products are intended to allow service providers to scale their networks and to uncover new revenue opportunities. Cisco says global IP traffic will increase three-fold from 2013 to 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 21%, due to more Internet users and devices, faster broadband speeds and more video viewing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook extends Parse to build IoT apps

Facebook is extending Parse, its suite of back-end software development tools, to create Internet of Things apps for items like smart home appliances and activity trackers.By opening Parse to IoT, Facebook hopes to strengthen its ties to a wider group of developers in a growing industry via three new software development kits aimed specifically at IoT, unveiled Wednesday at the company’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco.The tools are aimed at making it easier for outside developers to build apps that interface with Internet-connected devices. Garage door manufacturer Chamberlain, for example, has already used Parse for its app to let people open and lock their garage door from their smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenStack Neutron – The Dirty Network Detail

This post is just a quick response to a comment by Turing Machinæ on Show 227 – OpenStack Neutron Overview with Kyle Mestery, which was “I’ve learnt absolutely NOTHING about openstack from this podcast.” Whilst I don’t agree I have some empathy; time and time again I’ve found myself hitting a brick wall recently when […]

Author information

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 20 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, automation, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books, is a regular contributor at DevCentral and was an F5 DevCentral MVP for 2014.

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The post OpenStack Neutron – The Dirty Network Detail appeared first on Packet Pushers Continue reading

Centec GoldenGate Chip to Challenge Broadcom Trident II

Centec enters the 10G age with its newest switch chip.

School district gets an HP SDN makeover to address wireless growth, security problems

Faced with exponential growth in wireless devices and an increasingly digital curriculum, Jeff Dietsche, Systems and Infrastructure Manager for the South Washington County Schools in Minnesota, decided his only hope was to deal with a single vendor and use SDN to streamline operations. Dietsche tells the tale to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

A Go Gotcha: When Closures and Goroutines Collide

Here's a small Go gotcha that it's easy to fall into when using goroutines and closures. Here's a simple program that prints out the numbers 0 to 9:

(You can play with this in the Go Playground here)

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {  
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        fmt.Printf("%d ", i)
    }
}

It's output is easy to predict:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9  

If you decided that it would be nice to run those fmt.Printfs concurrently using goroutines you might be surprised by the result. Here's a version of the code that runs each fmt.Printf in its own goroutine and uses a sync.WaitGroup to wait for the goroutines to terminate.

package main

import (  
    "fmt"
    "runtime"
    "sync"
)

func main() {  
    runtime.GOMAXPROCS(runtime.NumCPU())

    var wg sync.WaitGroup
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        wg.Add(1)
        go func() {
            fmt.Printf("%d ", i)
            wg.Done()
        }()
    }

    wg.Wait()
}

(This code is in the Go Playground here). If you're thinking concurrently then you'll likely predict that the output will be the numbers 0 to 9 in some Continue reading

The Facts Behind the Myth

I hate getting into lengthy discussions regarding open networking (or bare-metal) pricing as there are benefits other than price. However, with so many people trying to understand the industry transition, I feel compelled to jump in when I see confusing information.

Forrester analyst Andre Kindness recently published a report called The Myth of White-Box Network Switches which is causing a pretty interesting debate.  The discourse forms, as Andre puts it, “I think there is misunderstanding/reading my research. I’m not saying one solution is cheaper. It highlights the cost”; however, the title of the report necessarily creates bias. Luckily, we had a chance to speak with Andre to better understand his perspective and intentions as well as relay our observations.

For the hardcore, we’ve gone through some of the market basics in prior blog posts; most notably Democratizing Capacity and Death of the Multipler Effect.  Some of the absolute numbers in those analyses have changed; however, these hold true and directly relate to both the points that Andre was trying to make as well as the gaps in his analysis.

Bill of Materials Cost

The report makes two observations that we completely agree with. One is that, most of Continue reading