Secure browsers offer alternatives to Chrome, IE and Firefox

The Web browser has been a major infection vector for years, allowing malware to be transported to millions of computers through phishing, man-in-the-middle, SQL injection and countless other attacks. But what if there were a way to stop this madness and secure the browsing channel itself? The Web browser has been a major infection vector for years, allowing malware to be transported to millions of computers through phishing, man-in-the-middle, SQL injection and countless other attacks. But what if there was a way to stop this madness and secure the browsing channel itself? There are several key things to look for. First is in understanding your existing browser. When you use Chrome, for example, you agree to let Google track your browsing behavior and offer up search suggestions, send them error reports, track your URLs, and lots more. They claim it is to help improve the user experience, but it also leaves you vulnerable to attacks and records your movements through cyberspace. So a replacement browser should offer some additional privacy components. (There are products that can be used to anonymize your browsing history and protect your identity when you surf online, such as TOR or ZipZap.)To read this Continue reading

Response: Speeds and Feeds › Of Money, Responsibility, and Pride

Steve Marquess who manages the business side of the OpenSSL Foundation talks about the shabby state of corporate support for open source development. I want to call out this paragraph first (although many other are more interesting), about the courage and discipline it takes to publish your work in the face of fear of public […]

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VXLAN – Virtual Extensible LAN

How does the internet work - We know what is networking

As the time goes by and the network with more and more virtualised servers and other devices are making that network more complicated, overlay technologies are rising to save the day for network administrators. Virtual Extensible LAN – VXLAN is a new encapsulation technology used to run an overlay network on current Layer 3 communication […]

VXLAN – Virtual Extensible LAN

Introduction to Ansible and SAN Configuration Automation

My previous post on automatically generating a SAN configuration explored what is possible when using a templating language like Jinja2, and a little Python work. I’d like to take this a step further. There are two areas I did not address in that post. The typical SAN or UCS administrator likely knows little if any Python. I’d like to produce a tool that is easy enough to consume, and requires no programming knowledge to use.

Introduction to Ansible and SAN Configuration Automation

My previous post on automatically generating a SAN configuration explored what is possible when using a templating language like Jinja2, and a little Python work. I’d like to take this a step further. There are two areas I did not address in that post. The typical SAN or UCS administrator likely knows little if any Python. I’d like to produce a tool that is easy enough to consume, and requires no programming knowledge to use.

HTIRW: Overview

Okay, so we all know some little slice or another of the Internet. But how do all these slices really fit together? How does each player in the system make money by getting your device to connect to someone else’s server to grab content (whether or not you just asked for it)? Let’s put it […]

Author information

Russ White

Russ White
Principle Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about, or don't really care about. You want numbers and letters? Okay: CCIE 2635, CCDE 2007:001, CCAr, BSIT, MSIT (Network Design & Architecture, Capella University), MACM (Biblical Literature, Shepherds Theological Seminary). Russ is a Principal Engineer in the IPOS Team at Ericsson, where he works on lots of different stuff, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, and is a cochair of the Internet Society Advisory Council. Russ will be speaking in November at the Ericsson Technology Day. he recently published The Art of Network Architecture, is currently working on a new book in the area Continue reading

Twitter War !

Through a court-mandated decision, access to Twitter has officially been blocked across all of Turkey. Weather or not this was the right decision; it is evident that people are not happy about it at all. As you already may know, I am originally from Turkey but have been living elsewhere for many years now while […]

Author information

Orhan Ergun

Orhan Ergun, CCIE, CCDE, is a network architect mostly focused on service providers, data centers, virtualization and security.

He has more than 10 years in IT, and has worked on many network design and deployment projects.

In addition, Orhan is a:

Blogger at Network Computing.
Blogger and podcaster at Packet Pushers.
Manager of Google CCDE Group.
On Twitter @OrhanErgunCCDE

The post Twitter War ! appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

The Economic Value of Unlicensed Spectrum $228 Billion Annually in the U.S.

According to a new report completed by Telecom Advisory Services, LLC (Raul Katz, Columbia Business School) commissioned by WiFiForward, the economic value of unlicensed spectrum is over $228 Billion per-year in the U.S. alone!
WiFiForward Value of
Unlicensed Spectrum
Infographic

FINAL REPORT - ASSESSMENT OF THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF UNLICENSED SPECTRUM IN THE UNITED STATES

The Report Overview (1 page) highlights the use-cases and value of each. WiFiForward has also produced an infographic (shown at right) to highlight the various ways in which unlicensed spectrum provides economic value in the U.S.

The report details the value of unlicensed spectrum in the U.S. based on two different economic impacts:
  1. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - direct sales of technologies, services and applications that run on unlicensed spectrum. This results in $6.7 Billion per-year in value ($4.559 Billion of which is attributed to Wi-Fi).
  2. Economic Surplus - use of technologies that rely on unlicensed spectrum that add value to the economy. This results in $222 Billion per-year in economic value ($91.474 Billion of which is attributed to Wi-Fi).
Missing Data?
I am a bit confused since the value from enterprise Wi-Fi sales and resulting efficiencies appears Continue reading

Understanding FabricPath

Fabric Path


- L2 routing protocol (MAC in MAC Routing).

- Alternative to running STP, built-in loop prevention and mitigation.
  - Even with vPC, you still have STP.
  - vPC is a physical triangle and logical P2P link.
  - can have only 2 vPC peers.
  - thus distribution blocks can be only 2 upstream switches.

- FP builds arbitrary topologies.
  - full mesh
  - partial mesh
  - triangle
  - square

- Single CP for unknown ucast, ucast, bcast and mcast traffic.

- Enhances mobility and virtualization in FP network.
 - MAC mobility : physically move L2 node, but retain the same MAC address and VLAN association for the VM.

- FP retains config across an ISSU.

- FP is not TRILL.

Requirements:

- FP is not Ethernet (hence HW support is limited), it is not Ethernet in Ethernet, is Ethernet in FP tunneling.
 - F line card.
 - Enhanced L2 license (on every system that enables FP).
 - NX7K and NX55K.
 - Beginning NX-OS 6.1, FEX with vPC+ on F2 cards is supported.

FP terminology

CE : Classical Ethernet
- regular ethernet with regular flooding, STP

Windows ISATAP Client, Part 1

Last month I had the opportunity to work with a company to perform an IPv6 pilot.  There are a lot of elements to light up for an organization to use IPv6, most of them (but not all) being technical in nature.  One of the mechanism I used was ISATAP. In the past I have not […]

Author information

Dan Massameno

Dan Massameno is the president and Chief Engineer at Leaf Point, a network engineering firm in Connecticut.

The post Windows ISATAP Client, Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Dan Massameno.

The Difference Between Arista and Competitors (Factories not Babies)

I was asked to describe how Arista has been able to penetrate the networking switch market relatively quickly. Arista was founded in 2004 and ten years later has achieved a competitive position against all the major vendors in networking and specifically against Cisco who has a dominant market position. Most vendors develop product like an […]

The post The Difference Between Arista and Competitors (Factories not Babies) appeared first on EtherealMind.

Response: Rate-limiting State and Internet Frailty – ACM

This article from the Association of Computing Machinery and written by no less than Paul Vixie. It is a detailed review of the basic facts of the Internet being smart at the edge and dumb in the middle. By design, the Internet core is stupid, and the edge is smart. This design decision has enabled […]

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Comparing and Contrasting SDN Across the Pond

Comparing and Contrasting SDN Across the Pond


by Steve Harriman, VP of Marketing - April 8, 2014

How do the U.S. and Europe compare on SDN? To find out, we just replicated a survey we conducted in the U.S. last year. At the MPLS SDN World Congress in Paris a few weeks ago, we polled more than 100 service providers and equipment providers (mostly based in the EU) about their SDN plans, business drivers and concerns. Added to the U.S.-based survey of 100, the results show many similarities as well as some interesting differences. 

Production SDN Deployment Lower in Europe 

More than 90 percent of the 200+ respondents to the two surveys said their organizations are exploring SDN in some way. However, while 74 percent of the EU-based respondents said their organizations are either researching or prototyping SDN, only about eight percent said they currently have some production deployment. This compares to 20 percent of the U.S. survey respondents who indicated some production deployment (with 62 percent either researching or prototyping SDN). 

The percentage planning to deploy production SDN in either this year or in 2015 was similar for both sets, with eight Continue reading

The Learning Curve: Implementations vs Fundamentals

I’ve spent a lot of time lately considering skillsets, and how people go about learning new things. Many aspects of the IT industry are starting to overlap with each other (the idea of DevOps being just one manifestation) and it’s incredibly interesting to see how individual professionals are incorporating new knowledge into their repertoire. I did a little contemplation on this over the weekend and I’d like to share some observations I’ve made.

The Learning Curve: Implementations vs Fundamentals

I’ve spent a lot of time lately considering skillsets, and how people go about learning new things. Many aspects of the IT industry are starting to overlap with each other (the idea of DevOps being just one manifestation) and it’s incredibly interesting to see how individual professionals are incorporating new knowledge into their repertoire. I did a little contemplation on this over the weekend and I’d like to share some observations I’ve made.