Technology Short Take 141

Welcome to Technology Short Take #141! This is the first Technology Short Take compiled, written, and published entirely on my M1-based MacBook Pro (see my review here). The collection of links shared below covers a fairly wide range of topics, from old Sun hardware to working with serverless frameworks in the public cloud. I hope that you find something useful here. Enjoy!

Networking

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting
Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

Last week, Cloudflare TV celebrated its first anniversary the only way it knows how: with a broadcast brimming with live programming spanning everything from the keynotes of Cloudflare Connect, to a day-long virtual career fair, to our flagship game show Silicon Valley Squares.

When our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince introduced Cloudflare TV to the world last year, he described it as a platform for experimentation. By empowering Cloudflare employees to try whatever they could think up on air — bound only by restraints of common sense — we hoped to unlock aspects of our team’s talent and creativity that otherwise might go untapped in the midst of the pandemic.

The results, as they say, have been extraordinary.

Since launching in June 2020, Cloudflare TV has featured over 1,000 original live episodes covering an incredible array of topics: technical deep dives and tutorials like Hardware at Cloudflare, Leveling up Web Performance with HTTP/3, and Hacker Time. Security expertise from top CISOs and compliance experts. In-depth policy discussions. And of course, updates on Cloudflare’s products with weekly episodes of Latest from Product and Engineering, Estas Semanas en Cloudflare en Español, and launch-day introductions to Magic WAN Continue reading

Member News: Somalia Chapter Focuses on Internet Education

Paying by phone: The Somalia chapter of the Internet Society is focusing on educating Internet users, particularly young people, about mobile payments. The chapter is working with technology stakeholders to improve digital literacy. The chapter notes that 70 percent of adults in Somalia use mobile money services regularly, and more than two thirds of payments […]

The post Member News: Somalia Chapter Focuses on Internet Education appeared first on Internet Society.

Review: Logitech Ergo K860 Ergonomic Keyboard

As part of an ongoing effort to refine my work environment, several months ago I switched to a Logitech Ergo K860 ergonomic keyboard. While I’m not a “keyboard snob,” I am somewhat particular about the feel of my keyboard, so I wasn’t sure how I would like the K860. In this post, I’ll provide my feedback, and provide some information on how well the keyboard works with both Linux and macOS.

Setup

Setting up the K860 is remarkably easy. The first system I tried to pair it with was an older Mac Pro workstation, and apparently the Bluetooth hardware on that particular workstation wasn’t new enough to support the K860 (Logitech indicates that Bluetooth 5.0 is needed; more on that in a moment). Instead, I popped in the USB-A wireless receiver, and was up and running with the K860 less than a minute later. This was using macOS, but the Mac Pro also dual-booted Linux, so I rebooted into Linux and found that the K860 with the Logitech-supplied USB receiver continued to work without any issues.

Linux, macOS, and Dual Boot Support

The key takeaway regarding Linux is this: if you’re interested in getting the K860 for use with Continue reading

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.The name "sar" stands for "system activity report," and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system's /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It's part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.To check if sar is available on your system, run a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.The name "sar" stands for "system activity report," and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system's /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It's part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.To check if sar is available on your system, run a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Sparking the next cycle of IT spending

Who, in the entire IT space, wouldn’t like to see an uptick in tech spending?  Enterprises would see new purchases easier to make, vendors would make more money, and technologists in general would have a new sense of excitement and mission.  It seems like we’ve been stuck in a do-more-for-less rut, but the past offers us some evidence of how we could get out of it.If you were to plot of the growth in enterprise IT spending versus GDP growth for the US over the entire life of information technology, you’d see not a hockey stick but a series of peaks and valleys.  You would see that there are three clear periods or cycles where IT spending has significantly outstripped GDP growth, and that we’ve been in a trough ever since the last one ended in about 2000.  We’ve never had two decades pass without another cycle, so what’s wrong?  Answer: Nothing’s driving one now.To read this article in full, please click here

Zambia Needs the Internet More than Ever

My country, Zambia, has more than 18 million people. Our new Internet Society chapter wants all of them to be online. Why? Because we need the Internet now more than ever. Globally, UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimate that 1.3 billion children between the ages of 3 and 17 – or two thirds […]

The post Zambia Needs the Internet More than Ever appeared first on Internet Society.

Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode

Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode
Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode

Last October we released WARP for Desktop, bringing a safer and faster way to use the Internet to billions of devices for free. At the same time, we gave our enterprise customers the ability to use WARP with Cloudflare for Teams. By routing all an enterprise's traffic from devices anywhere on the planet through WARP, we’ve been able to seamlessly power advanced capabilities such as Secure Web Gateway and Browser Isolation and, in the future, our Data Loss Prevention platforms.

Today, we are excited to announce Cloudflare WARP for Linux and, across all desktop platforms, the ability to use WARP with single applications instead of your entire device.

What is WARP?

WARP was built on the philosophy that even people who don’t know what “VPN” stands for should be able to still easily get the protection a VPN offers. It was also built for those of us who are unfortunately all too familiar with traditional corporate VPNs, and need an innovative, seamless solution to meet the challenges of an always-connected world.

Enter our own WireGuard implementation called BoringTun.

The WARP application uses BoringTun to encrypt traffic from your device and send it directly to Cloudflare’s edge, ensuring that no Continue reading

Getting started with Ansible security automation: Incident Response

Technological advancements are intended to bring more control, agility and velocity to organizations. However, adopting these new technologies and techniques, such as cloud computing and microservices, increases an organization’s security footprint, bringing greater risk of security breaches. 

Cyberattacks potentially expose organizations to financial loss, reputational damage, legal liability, and business continuity risk. As a result, security teams are under increased pressure to help proactively protect organizations against cyberattacks and maintain a more consistent, rapid incident response framework to respond to security breaches. 

In our previous blogs in this series, we explored how Ansible security automation enables security teams to automate and simplify investigation enrichment and threat hunting practices. We also discussed and provided our answer to the lack of integration across the IT security industry.

In this blog post, we’ll have a closer look at incident response and how Ansible security automation empowers security teams to respond effectively to security breaches.

 

What is an incident response, and why is it so difficult?

Incident response is the approach and techniques that security departments implement to neutralize and mitigate cyberattacks, and is a core responsibility of the security team. Recent news headlines are rife with high-profile security breaches and Continue reading

Questions about BGP in the Data Center (with a Whiff of SRv6)

Henk Smit left numerous questions in a comment referring to the Rethinking BGP in the Data Center presentation by Russ White:

In Russ White’s presentation, he listed a few requirements to compare BGP, IS-IS and OSPF. Prefix distribution, filtering, TE, tagging, vendor-support, autoconfig and topology visibility. The one thing I was missing was: scalability.

I noticed the same thing. We kept hearing how BGP scales better than link-state protocols (no doubt about that) and how you couldn’t possibly build a large data center fabric with a link-state protocol… and yet this aspect wasn’t even mentioned.

Read more …

Questions about BGP in the Data Center (with a Whiff of SRv6)

Henk Smit left numerous questions in a comment referring to the Rethinking BGP in the Data Center presentation by Russ White:

In Russ White’s presentation, he listed a few requirements to compare BGP, IS-IS and OSPF. Prefix distribution, filtering, TE, tagging, vendor-support, autoconfig and topology visibility. The one thing I was missing was: scalability.

I noticed the same thing. We kept hearing how BGP scales better than link-state protocols (no doubt about that) and how you couldn’t possibly build a large data center fabric with a link-state protocol… and yet this aspect wasn’t even mentioned.

Read more …

DNSSEC with EdDSA

The world of cryptographic algorithms is one that constantly evolves and increasing key sizes in the venerable RSA crypto algorithm is a source of concern for DNSSEC. The response to this escalation in key sizes is to look at alternative forms of public-key algorithms which have a higher cryptographic “density”, using elliptic curve cryptography. Here we will look at the level of Internet support provided for a recent crypto offering, the Edwards curve algorithm Ed25519.

The Hedge 88: Todd Palino and Getting Things Done

I often feel like I’m “behind” on what I need to get done. Being a bit metacognitive, however, I often find this feeling is more related to not organizing things well, which means I often feel like I have so much to do “right now” that I just don’t know what to do next—hence “processor thrashing on process scheduler.” Todd Palino joins this episode of the Hedge to talk about the “Getting Things Done” technique (or system) of, well … getting things done.

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