All About That YANG at the 92nd IETF Meeting

I was at the 92nd IETF meeting in Dallas a few weeks ago. I attended 16 sessions, mostly in the routing area, and every single one had a discussion about the YANG data model (indeed most had several such discussions). 

YANG is the data modeling language for the NETCONF protocol. NETCONF/YANG was picked by the Interface to Routing System (I2RS) Working Group for an SDN controller to interact with IP/MPLS routers. It makes an IP/MPLS network programmable. There are other IETF protocols in play as well, such as Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP). To make SDN management and orchestration (MANO) service aware, we need to bind these paths to the services they are intended for. This is where NETCONF/YANG data models come to the rescue. I was very pleased to see the attention NETCONF/YANG data models got at the IETF.  

One thing that can hinder quick adoption and implementation for some data models is competing proposals. Indeed, some camps have formed around competing proposals. This is not unusual in the IETF. Different Internet-drafts (documents intended to be adopted by Continue reading

Complaint alleges YouTube Kids pushes advertising content

The six-week-old YouTube Kids service is a “hyper-commercialized” environment that intermixes advertising and other programming in a way that deceives its target audience, a coalition of privacy and children’s advocacy groups said in a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.Joining in giving YouTube Kids the big thumbs-down are the Center for Digital Democracy, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. They say the video app, targeted toward preschool children, blurs the lines between advertising and other programming using methods that are prohibited by federal regulations on commercial television.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco VIRL Exclude From Launch

Linux Australia breached, personal details leaked

The open-source and free software user group Linux Australia said personal information for attendees of two conferences it hosts may have been leaked after malware was found on one of its servers.The information may have included first and last names, postal and email addresses, phone numbers and hashed passwords, wrote Joshua Hesketh, Linux Australia’s president, on a message board. Financial data was not affected, he wrote.The breach affects those who registered for the group’s Linux conference over the last three years and for python programming conference Pycon Australia in 2013 and 2014, he wrote. Attendee data for those conferences was held on the compromised server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung expects big drop in first-quarter profits

Samsung Electronics expects first quarter profits to drop by more than 30 percent, marking the sixth straight quarterly decline at the company, which is struggling to compete with Apple at the top of the smartphone market.Operating profit for the quarter, which included the key year-end sales period, will be around 5.9 trillion won (US$5.4 billion), a drop of just over 30 percent versus the last three months of 2013, while revenue is expected to be 47 trillion won, down 12 percent, the company said in its earnings guidance. It will report its full quarterly results at the end of the month.The profits outlook isn’t as bad as analysts had feared.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung expects big drop in first-quarter profits

Samsung Electronics expects first quarter profits to drop by more than 30 percent, marking the sixth straight quarterly decline at the company, which is struggling to compete with Apple at the top of the smartphone market.Operating profit for the quarter, which included the key year-end sales period, will be around 5.9 trillion won (US$5.4 billion), a drop of just over 30 percent versus the last three months of 2013, while revenue is expected to be 47 trillion won, down 12 percent, the company said in its earnings guidance. It will report its full quarterly results at the end of the month.The profits outlook isn’t as bad as analysts had feared.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung expects big drop in first-quarter profits

Samsung Electronics expects first quarter profits to drop by more than 30 percent, marking the sixth straight quarterly decline at the company, which is struggling to compete with Apple at the top of the smartphone market.Operating profit for the quarter will be around 5.9 trillion won (US$5.4  billion), a drop of just over 30 percent versus the first three months of 2014,  while revenue is expected to be 47 trillion won, down 12 percent, the company  said in its earnings guidance. It will report its full quarterly results at the  end of the month.The profits outlook isn’t as bad as analysts had feared.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung expects big drop in first-quarter profits

Samsung Electronics expects first quarter profits to drop by more than 30 percent, marking the sixth straight quarterly decline at the company, which is struggling to compete with Apple at the top of the smartphone market.Operating profit for the quarter will be around 5.9 trillion won (US$5.4  billion), a drop of just over 30 percent versus the first three months of 2014,  while revenue is expected to be 47 trillion won, down 12 percent, the company  said in its earnings guidance. It will report its full quarterly results at the  end of the month.The profits outlook isn’t as bad as analysts had feared.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Pentagon’s groundbreaking IPv6 project hasn’t broken much ground

The U.S. Department of Defense hasn’t followed through on its commitment to convert to IPv6, the new Internet standard designed to make room for an explosion of new connected devices.The DoD demonstrated IPv6 in 2008 but then disabled the technology because it didn’t have enough people trained to use it and was worried about potential security risks, according to a report by the Inspector General of the department. The Inspector General issued the report internally in December and on Monday released a redacted version to the public.The current Internet Protocol, IPv4, doesn’t meet battlefield needs, according to the report. Among other things, IPv6 would let troops quickly set up mobile, ad-hoc networks in the field. In addition, the slow transition to IPv6 has left the military without the expertise to identify malicious activity that uses the new protocol, the report said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Pentagon’s groundbreaking IPv6 project hasn’t broken much ground

The U.S. Department of Defense hasn’t followed through on its commitment to convert to IPv6, the new Internet standard designed to make room for an explosion of new connected devices.The DoD demonstrated IPv6 in 2008 but then disabled the technology because it didn’t have enough people trained to use it and was worried about potential security risks, according to a report by the Inspector General of the department. The Inspector General issued the report internally in December and on Monday released a redacted version to the public.The current Internet Protocol, IPv4, doesn’t meet battlefield needs, according to the report. Among other things, IPv6 would let troops quickly set up mobile, ad-hoc networks in the field. In addition, the slow transition to IPv6 has left the military without the expertise to identify malicious activity that uses the new protocol, the report said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Edward Snowden: Don’t censor your d**k pics

People shouldn’t hold back on sending racy photos of themselves online for fear the images might be scooped up by government spies, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has said.Snowden appeared for a sit-down interview Sunday night on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” The host traveled to Russia to do the interview in person.To make the issue hit home for his TV audience, Oliver asked Snowden which government programs might allow spies to access people’s “d**k pics.”Many of the programs would, Snowden said, but that shouldn’t cause people to hold back.“You shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing,” he said. “If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EIGRP “FD is Infinity”

Let's take a look at EIGRP and the state a route can get into where EIGRP tells you “FD is Infinity”.

Apple employees to receive 50% discount on Apple Watch purchases

With the Apple Launch now just about two weeks away -- and pre-orders slated to begin this Friday at 12:01 AM Pacific Time -- Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out an email thanking Apple employees for the hard work involved in bringing the Apple Watch to market and for the work retail employees will do once the product launches.In addition to the typical boilerplate that sometimes accompanies corporate emails, Cook relayed that Apple employees looking to purchase an Apple Watch will be able to do so at a 50% discount. The discount is applicable to the Sport and Watch models, which is to say that Apple is most definitely not offering any discounts on the Edition Apple Watches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Plain Text Productivity Experiment

I’m a big fan of plain text-based formats and tools, for a variety of reasons. As a result, I’ve moved almost all of my writing into plain text formats, primarily Markdown (MultiMarkdown, to be specific), and I recently spent a couple of months experimenting to see if a plain text-based productivity system would work for me as well. Here’s what I found.

<aside>I won’t go into a great amount of detail on why I wanted to see if a plain text-based productivity system would work, as I’ve discussed the merits of using plain text-based formats before (platform portability, application portability, longevity, etc.).</aside>

I first looked at Gina Trapani’s todo.txt system, which is plain text-based and has a thriving community built around its format. The todo.txt format is very straightforward and very simple—almost too simple. After trying it for a short while I found that it just wasn’t flexible enough to meet my needs.

A few weeks later, I stumbled on the TaskPaper format (named after the Mac app of the same name). Also plain text-based, the TaskPaper format also had a thriving community of applications and tools built around the format, and while also Continue reading

Apple Pay rival CurrentC coming in mid-2015

The mobile payments space is about to get more crowded: CurrentC, a platform backed by some of the country’s biggest retailers, will launch in the next few months and give Apple, Google and Samsung added competition.Few details are known about the service, but it is expected to merge payments and loyalty benefits and will give retailers additional insight into the spending habits of customers who are members. Less is known about the benefits it may offer consumers.A small -scale trial began last year and CurrentC is currently being tested in several undisclosed markets around the U.S. However, its use is restricted to employees of member retailers, which include Walmart, 7-Eleven, Dunkin Donuts, Sears, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil and Gap.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple Pay rival CurrentC coming in mid-2015

The mobile payments space is about to get more crowded: CurrentC, a platform backed by some of the country’s biggest retailers, will launch in the next few months and give Apple, Google and Samsung added competition.Few details are known about the service, but it is expected to merge payments and loyalty benefits and will give retailers additional insight into the spending habits of customers who are members. Less is known about the benefits it may offer consumers.A small -scale trial began last year and CurrentC is currently being tested in several undisclosed markets around the U.S. However, its use is restricted to employees of member retailers, which include Walmart, 7-Eleven, Dunkin Donuts, Sears, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil and Gap.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Tap Monitoring Fabric Architecture Blog Series – Part 1: Open Networking (bare-metal) Switches

Network Automation Training

Chromebooks coming with Intel’s new Braswell chips

A new generation of low-cost Chromebooks are on the way, running the Intel Braswell chips that are expected to debut later this week.The new Braswell chips include new Celeron and Pentium processors, which will support both Chrome OS and Windows, said sources familiar with Intel’s product plans. More details on Braswell will be shared at the Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen this week.New Chromebooks running Braswell are expected in the coming months from top PC makers, as well as from low-cost manufacturers China who might bring the price point down to less than US$200. Braswell will also appear in low-cost Windows laptops, desktops and tablets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Turkey blocks Twitter, YouTube over hostage photo

A Turkish court blocked access to numerous sites including Twitter and YouTube on Monday, over their hosting of images of an Istanbul prosecutor held at gunpoint by militants last week.An Istanbul court issued the ruling blocking Twitter and YouTube, as well as 166 other sites that had distributed the photograph, a report in The New York Times said. It also blocked the pages of several newspapers in Turkey that had printed the photo.Turkey’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, called outlets that had circulated the image “tools of terrorist propaganda,” the Times reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here