Apple Watch: An overpriced, out-of-date status symbol

Yesterday I was subjected to all 95 minutes, 14 seconds of the Apple Watch announcement "keynote" video stream, and I am left with one clear notion:The Apple Watch is the stupidest piece of gadgetry I have seen in a long, long time.(I should note that I am not entirely unbiased here. I am a Linux user and an Open Source advocate. And, perhaps most importantly, I like freedom. Apple and I don't tend to see eye-to-eye on that front. But that doesn't make the Apple Watch any less pointless.)Let's start with the elephant in the room – the price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tool allows account hijacking on sites that use Facebook Login

A new tool allows hackers to generate URLs that can hijack accounts on sites that use Facebook Login, potentially enabling powerful phishing attacks.The tool, dubbed Reconnect, was released last week by Egor Homakov, a researcher with security firm Sakurity. It takes advantage of a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) issue in Facebook Login, the service that allows users to log in on third-party sites using their Facebook accounts.Homakov disclosed the issue publicly on his personal blog in January 2014, after Facebook declined to fix it because doing so would have broken compatibility with a large number of sites that used the service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AnsibleFest New York City SUPER Early Bird Tickets Now Available

We are excited to announce that the next AnsibleFest will be held in New York City!

We are still working out the details, but we wanted to make some tickets available at a huge discount. AnsibleFest NYC is currently being planned for early June and will be at a great venue in New York City. If you are flexible and can plan ahead as well as make changes to your schedule, these tickets are for you!

The SUPER Early Bird price is just $179 (over 30% off the standard price) and is only available until March 23, 2015.

Purchase Super Early Bird AnsibleFest tickets here

We'll be announcing the exact date and location soon!

Announcing Virtual DNS: DDoS Mitigation and Global Distribution for DNS Traffic

It’s 9am and CloudFlare has already mitigated three billion malicious requests for our customers today. Six out of every one hundred requests we see is malicious, and increasingly, more of that is targeting DNS nameservers.

DNS is the phone book of the Internet and fundamental to the usability of the web, but is also a serious weak link in Internet security. One of the ways CloudFlare is trying to make DNS more secure is by implementing DNSSEC, cryptographic authentication for DNS responses. Another way is Virtual DNS, the authoritative DNS proxy service we are introducing today.

Virtual DNS provides CloudFlare’s DDoS mitigation and global distribution to DNS nameservers. DNS operators need performant, resilient infrastructure, and we are offering ours, the fastest of any providers, to any organization’s DNS servers.

Many organizations have legacy DNS infrastructure that is difficult to change. The hosting industry is a key example of this. A host may have given thousands of clients a set of nameservers but now realize that they don't have the performance or defensibility that their clients need.

Virtual DNS means that the host can get the benefits of a global, modern DNS infrastructure without having to contact every customer Continue reading

HP embraces open hardware designs with Cloudline servers

Hewlett-Packard is following in the footsteps of Facebook and Microsoft in embracing open hardware designs with its new low-cost Cloudline servers.Cloudline servers are no-frills cloud servers that break away from proprietary technology HP uses in its popular Proliant servers. The servers are HP’s first based on industry standard specifications defined by the Open Compute Project, which was founded by Facebook in 2012, and Open Networking Foundation, which was formed in 2011.The use of low-cost, bare-bones servers is growing among Internet service providers like Google and Facebook, which are looking for a cheap and efficient ways to upgrade hardware in data centers. Cloudline gives HP a chance to pursue that customer base, said John Gromala, senior director of hyperscale product management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, March 10

Facebook’s Open Compute Project struts its stuffThe Open Compute Project kicks off its annual Silicon Valley summit on Tuesday, where vendors and customers will show their latest designs for low cost data center hardware. Facebook started the project about three years ago to wrestle some control away from the big vendors and collaborate on open designs that white-box manufacturers can compete to implement. Microsoft, Intel, Canonical and Goldman Sachs will all give updates on what they’ve been building this past year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, March 10

Facebook’s Open Compute Project struts its stuffThe Open Compute Project kicks off its annual Silicon Valley summit on Tuesday, where vendors and customers will show their latest designs for low cost data center hardware. Facebook started the project about three years ago to wrestle some control away from the big vendors and collaborate on open designs that white-box manufacturers can compete to implement. Microsoft, Intel, Canonical and Goldman Sachs will all give updates on what they’ve been building this past year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wikimedia sues NSA to stop it from spying on its users

In an effort to stop the U.S. government from spying on Wikipedia’s readers and editors, the Wikimedia Foundation will sue the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).The lawsuit, due to be filed with a coalition of eight civili liberties organizations later Tuesday, challenges what Wikimedia calls the NSA’s unfounded, large-scale search and seizure of internet communications. Using surveillance techniques the NSA intercepts virtually all internet communications flowing across the network of high-capacity cables, switches, and routers that make up the internet’s backbone, which is used by Wikimedia to connect Wikipedia readers and contributors, the organization said in a blog post signed by its senior legal counsel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The website that was built for Google to destroy

When Matthew Rothenberg created a new website in early February, he let about two dozen people know about it through an unlikely medium: postcards.The unorthodox method was fitting for an unorthodox website called Unindexed. It was the latest project from Rothenberg, a 35-year-old based in Brooklyn, who has created a portfolio of interactive web installations and performance art projects around technology.Unindexed is no more. The website was coded to erase itself once Google added it to its search index. It lasted a little over three weeks, disappearing forever on Feb. 24.Rothenberg has done stints as head of product for Flickr and Bitly but for the last couple of years has focused on consulting and his art-technology side projects. His goal for Unindexed was to create a site where people could post comments safe in the knowledge that no record of those posts would ever exist again. It was also coded to prevent Google from caching it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The website that was built for Google to destroy

When Matthew Rothenberg created a new website in early February, he let about two dozen people know about it through an unlikely medium: postcards.The unorthodox method was fitting for an unorthodox website called Unindexed. It was the latest project from Rothenberg, a 35-year-old based in Brooklyn, who has created a portfolio of interactive web installations and performance art projects around technology.Unindexed is no more. The website was coded to erase itself once Google added it to its search index. It lasted a little over three weeks, disappearing forever on Feb. 24.Rothenberg has done stints as head of product for Flickr and Bitly but for the last couple of years has focused on consulting and his art-technology side projects. His goal for Unindexed was to create a site where people could post comments safe in the knowledge that no record of those posts would ever exist again. It was also coded to prevent Google from caching it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple to raise drivers’ wages, after demands to share its wealth

Apple has decided to increase hourly wages by about 25 percent and offer other perks for its contract drivers in the Bay Area, in response to demands from workers in the area for better terms.The move comes ahead of the company’s shareholder meeting on Tuesday, which civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson is attending, according to his Rainbow Push Coalition.Jackson, who has backed the demands of contract workers, is also likely to press Apple to outline its plans to employ more women, blacks and Latinos in its tech and general staff. This has been a long standing demand of the leader who has previously attended shareholder meetings of other tech companies including Hewlett-Packard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adobe extends its Marketing Cloud to IoT and beyond

Adobe’s Marketing Cloud has offered enterprises a tool for integrated online marketing and Web analytics for several years already, but on Tuesday the company announced numerous new extensions to the technology.Among the products unveiled at the Adobe Summit going on in Salt Lake City this week are new marketing tools designed with the Internet of Things in mind.A feature called Adobe Experience Manager Screens, for example, aims to help brands extend interactive content including images, 3D interactive models, video and more to physical locations such as retail stores, hotels and even devices like vending machines.A new IoT software development kit, meanwhile, lets brands measure and analyze consumer engagement across connected devices, while new Intelligent Location capabilities allow companies to tap GPS and iBeacon data to optimize their physical brand presence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCIE R&S – By the Numbers

When I started studying in earnest for my CCIE, I started a log of how I was spending my time studying, which books and papers I’d read, videos I’d watched, and so on. I thought it would be a neat exercise to look back afterwards at what it took to achieve this goal. I’m also somewhat self-deprecating and tend to minimize my accomplishments, so having this data is a way for me to remember that this wasn’t a small accomplishment at all.

1,041,248 bytes of digital notes taken

13,916 km traveled (8,711 mi)

1,432 total study hours

652 hours in the lab

321 hours of just reading

223 videos watched

161 hours spent watching those videos

128 PDF documents read

23 books read

5 figures worth of expenses and costs

1 completely trashed USB mouse

Beyond these numbers there’s the intangibles that went into this goal too. No vacations. Giving up free time on evenings and weekends. Not seeing friends as much. Not spending as much time with family. Maintaining focus constantly on the end goal. Constantly staying up late and getting up early.

Looking back at all of this, I realize that becoming CCIE certified isn’t just about Continue reading

Cisco Live Europe 2015 – and the year ahead

Cisco Live Europe 2015

Commonly known as the biggest networking/’networking’ event in the industry for Europe, Cisco Live has something for everyone. Some great breakout technical sessions, meet the engineer, the World of Solutions and of course this year, the DevNet hall that also had a weekend hackathon which this blogger would have loved to have taken part in.

It was pretty obvious (you would have to be blind and deaf not to notice) that whilst walking around the Milano Congressi venue that houses the event, that Cisco have cottoned on to the idea that a copy and replace of product names to ‘software defined <$PRODUCT>’ is a bit of a unique to them tide turner. There are only so many ways problems like ‘resistance to change’ and the ‘adoption of technology to a risk averse’ industry can be addressed. If everything is based on the same naming schema, then the problem becomes less of a thing. Even if people use the same product they used before with a different name, guess what, it’s now software defined and the maturity cycle is already under way. Clever move. Not that I appreciate new startups calling everything software or hardware defined. Yikes. Continue reading

Some notes on DRAM (#rowhammer)

My twitter feed is full of comments about the "rowhammer" exploit. I thought I'd write some quick notes about DRAM. The TL;DR version is this: you probably don't need to worry about this, but we (the designers of security and of computer hardware/software) do.

There are several technologies for computer memory. The densest, and hence cheapest-per-bit, is "DRAM". It consists of a small capacitor for each bit of memory. The thing about capacitors is that they lose their charge over time and must be refreshed. In the case of DRAM, every bit of memory must be read them re-written every 64-milliseconds or it becomes corrupt.

These tiny capacitors are prone to corruption from other sources. One common source of corruption is cosmic rays. Another source is small amounts of radioactive elements in the materials used to construct memory chips. So, chips must be built with radioactive-free materials. The banana you eat has more radioactive material inside it than your DRAM chips.


The upshot is that capacitors are unreliable (albeit extremely cheap) technology for memory which readily get corrupted for a lot of reasons. This "rowhammer" exploit works by corrupting the capacitors by overwriting adjacent rows hundreds of thousands Continue reading

US Census online by 2020? Not so fast

The US Census Bureau has designs on bringing the 2020 census online but while that might sound like a good idea, there are many challenges that need to be addressed.That’s according to the Government Accountability Office which in a report out today said that to successfully offer the Internet as public response option the Census Bureau needs to, among other things, design and develop an Internet response application, develop and acquire the IT infrastructure to support the large volume of data processing and storage.The idea is a good one. The GAO stated that the Census Bureau has determined an Internet response option offers several benefits for the 2020 census, including the added convenience for households in an increasingly Internet-enabled population to respond to the survey; better quality data, which could reduce the amount of follow-up that is needed for surveys with incomplete or inconsistent data; and less printing, postage, and processing of paper questionnaires.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple’s most important announcements at its Apple Watch event

More than just a smartwatch...Image by REUTERS/Robert GalbraithApple used today's high-profile event to launch its much-anticipated Apple Watch, but also to make announcements about several other products and new partnerships. Here are the most important announcements from Apple's big day.Brand new 12-inch MacBookImage by REUTERS/Robert GalbraithTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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