Technology Short Take 160

Welcome to Technology Short Take #160! This time around, my list of links and articles is a tad skewed toward cloud computing/cloud management, but I’ve still managed to pull together some links on other topics that readers will hopefully find useful. For example, did you know about the secret macOS network quality tool? You didn’t? Lucky for you there’s a link to an article about it below. Read on to get all the details!

Networking

  • Ivan Pepelnjak tackles the “infrastructure-as-code is scary” mindset. (Related: see the first bullet in the “Career/Soft Skills” section below.)
  • Larry Peterson reflects on the evolution of TCP.
  • Vikas Choudhary discusses Istio’s Secure Naming; that is, the name given to services and the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) put on the X.509 certificates used in mTLS.

Servers/Hardware

Security

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

GA Week 2022: what you may have missed

GA Week 2022: what you may have missed

Back in 2019, we worked on a chart for Cloudflare’s IPO S-1 document that showed major releases since Cloudflare was launched in 2010. Here’s that chart:

GA Week 2022: what you may have missed

Of course, that chart doesn’t show everything we’ve shipped, but the curve demonstrates a truth about a growing company: we keep shipping more and more products and services. Some of those things start with a beta, sometimes open and sometimes private. But all of them become generally available after the beta period.

Back in, say, 2014, we only had a few major releases per year. But as the years have progressed and the company has grown we have constant updates, releases and changes. This year a confluence of products becoming generally available in September meant it made sense to wrap them all up into GA Week.

GA Week has now finished, and the team is working to put the finishing touches on Birthday Week (coming this Sunday!), but here’s a recap of everything that we launched this week.

What launched Summary Available for?
Monday (September 19)
Cloudforce Continue reading

Weekend Reads 092322


Arm says Nvidia’s Grace processor will be among the first chips to use its upcoming Neoverse V2 CPU cores.


The early deceased Heinz Rutishauser (1918–1970) of ETH Zurich is considered the most important Swiss pioneer from the early era of computer science.


According to Dell’Oro, datacenter switching set a new record for revenues for any second quarter in history and also for any first six months of any year since it has been keeping records.


A key requirement for a bad actor wanting to launch a brand attack is the registration of a carefully chosen domain name.


Here, we introduce the concept of the data bill of materials or personal data bill of materials, a comprehensive inventory of personal data used in software systems.


VirusTotal recently identified 7-Zip, TeamViewer, CCleaner, Microsoft Edge, Steam, Zoom, and WhatsApp as the most-mimicked software brands in malware attacks.


No business can own the generic word for the product it sells. We would find it preposterous if a single airline claimed exclusive use of the word “air,” or a broadband service tried to stop its rivals from using the word “broadband.”


Cisco has revealed new hardware it is willing to sell to Continue reading

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs
How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

You go to a website or service, but before access is granted, there’s a visual challenge that forces you to select bikes, buses or traffic lights in a set of images. That can be an exasperating experience. Now, if you have iOS 16 on your iPhone, those days could be over and are just a one-time toggle enabled away.

CAPTCHA = "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"

In 2021 and 2022, we took direct steps to end the madness that wastes humanity about 500 years per day called CAPTCHAs, that have been making sure you’re human and not a bot. In August 2022, we announced Private Access Tokens. With that, we’re able to eliminate CAPTCHAs on iPhones, iPads and Macs (and more to come) with open privacy-preserving standards.

On September 12, iOS 16 became generally available (iPadOS 16 and macOS 13 should arrive in October) and on the settings of your device there’s a toggle that can enable the Private Access Token (PAT) technology that will eliminate the need for those CAPTCHAs, and automatically validate that you are a real human visiting a site. If you already have iOS 16, here’s what you should Continue reading

Hedge 148: The SRE with Niall Murphy (part 2)

It seems like only yesterday we started talking about the Site Reliability Engineer, and their place in the IT ecosystem. Over the last several years, the role of the SRE has changed—and it’s bound to continue changing. On this episode of the Hedge, Niall Murphy joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the changing role of the SRE, and what the SRE could be.

download

If you want to read more on this topic, check out Niall’s article over a USENIX.

IoT technology is hitting an inflection point for businesses

A new survey released by UK-based research firm Omdia bears out some of the industry’s rosier predictions for IoT uptake among businesses, finding that almost four out of five companies expect to be actively deploying IoT within the next two years.The survey, which was commissioned by IoT connectivity vendor MachineQ and collected responses from more than 200 enterprises in the manufacturing, retail, real estate and construction, healthcare and life sciences industries, also found that 70% of respondents said that they planned to have more than 50,000 IoT devices deployed within the next 24 months.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia strikes AI consulting deals with Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be all the rage, but it's still slow to be deployed. The learning curve is steep, there are few people with adequate AI experience, and the rules of governance are unclear.That explains Gartner's 2020 statistic that only 53% of AI pilot programs actually make it to deployment. The tools and experience needed are just not there for the average IT shop, especially a smaller enterprise.Nvidia is looking to change that with a pair of AI-related alliances with consulting giants Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton. Both deals are designed to help companies plot AI strategies and gain access to Nvidia technology and expertise.To read this article in full, please click here

Building Software Bridges To Ensure Workload Portability

In these modern IT days – where the rapidly-evolving environment stretches from the datacenter to the cloud and edge, with a range of hyperscale cloud providers and myriad clusters to choose from – what is increasingly important when creating and running workloads is portability. …

Building Software Bridges To Ensure Workload Portability was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IPv6 Buzz 110: The Peculiar Power Of DHCPv6 Option 108

On today's IPv6 Buzz podcast we explore DHCPv6 Option 108. Option 108 basically allows a DHCP server to use IPv4 to contact a host and tell that host to disable its IPv4 stack and switch to IPv6-only. In other words, you're using IPv4 to turn off IPv4. We examine the use cases for this peculiar capability.

The post IPv6 Buzz 110: The Peculiar Power Of DHCPv6 Option 108 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Logpush: now lower cost and with more visibility

Logpush: now lower cost and with more visibility
Logpush: now lower cost and with more visibility

Logs are a critical part of every successful application. Cloudflare products and services around the world generate massive amounts of logs upon which customers of all sizes depend. Structured logging from our products are used by customers for purposes including analytics, debugging performance issues, monitoring application health, maintaining security standards for compliance reasons, and much more.

Logpush is Cloudflare’s product for pushing these critical logs to customer systems for consumption and analysis. Whenever our products generate logs as a result of traffic or data passing through our systems from anywhere in the world, we buffer these logs and push them directly to customer-defined destinations like Cloudflare R2, Splunk, AWS S3, and many more.

Today we are announcing three new key features related to Cloudflare’s Logpush product. First, the ability to have only logs matching certain criteria be sent. Second, the ability to get alerted when logs are failing to be pushed due to customer destinations having issues or network issues occurring between Cloudflare and the customer destination. In addition, customers will also be able to query for analytics around the health of Logpush jobs like how many bytes and records were pushed, number of successful pushes, and number of Continue reading

Cloudflare Zaraz supports Managed Components and DLP to make third-party tools private

Cloudflare Zaraz supports Managed Components and DLP to make third-party tools private
Cloudflare Zaraz supports Managed Components and DLP to make third-party tools private

When it comes to privacy, much is in your control as a website owner. You decide what information to collect, how to transmit it, how to process it, and where to store it. If you care for the privacy of your users, you’re probably taking action to ensure that these steps are handled sensitively and carefully. If your website includes no third party tools at all - no analytics, no conversion pixels, no widgets, nothing at all - then it’s probably enough! But… If your website is one of the other 94% of the Internet, you have some third-party code running in it. Unfortunately, you probably can’t tell what exactly this code is doing.

Third-party tools are great. Your product team, marketing team, BI team - they’re all right when they say that these tools make a better website. Third-party tools can help you understand your users better, embed information such as maps, chat widgets, or measure and attribute conversions more accurately. The problem doesn’t lay with the tools themselves, but with the way they are implemented - third party scripts.

Third-party scripts are pieces of JavaScript that your website is loading, often from a remote web server. Those Continue reading

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