No, 1,000 engineers were not needed for SolarWinds
Microsoft estimates it would take 1,000 to carry out the famous SolarWinds hacker attacks. This means in reality that it was probably fewer than 100 skilled engineers. I base this claim on the following Tweet:
When asked why they think it was 1,000 devs, Brad Smith says they saw an elaborate and persistent set of work. Made an estimate of how much work went into each of these attacks, and asked their own engineers. 1,000 was their estimate.
— Joseph Cox (@josephfcox) February 23, 2021
Yes, it would take Microsoft 1,000 engineers to replicate the attacks. But it takes a large company like Microsoft 10-times the effort to replicate anything. This is partly because Microsoft is a big, stodgy corporation. But this is mostly because this is a fundamental property of software engineering, where replicating something takes 10-times the effort of creating the original thing.
It's like painting. The effort to produce a work is often less than the effort to reproduce it. I can throw some random paint strokes on canvas with almost no effort. It would take you an immense amount of work to replicate those same strokes -- even to figure out the exact color of Continue reading
JNCIE-DC remote lab exam resources
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the exam centers of Juniper are at time of this writing closed for external visitors. Fortunately the Juniper Education team did a great job and made JNCIE lab exams available from your own home! Now this does impact how you make the test and also what resources you have available […]
The post JNCIE-DC remote lab exam resources first appeared on Rick Mur.The Datacenter Is Just A Big Game For Nvidia
We have a saying around here at The Next Platform, and it is this: Money is not the point of the game. …
The Datacenter Is Just A Big Game For Nvidia was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Creating serendipity with Python
We've been experimenting with breaking up employees into random groups (of size 4) and setting up video hangouts between them. We're doing this to replace the serendipitous meetings that sometimes occur around coffee machines, in lunch lines or while waiting for the printer. And also, we just want people to get to know each other.
Which lead to me writing some code. The core of which is divide n elements into groups of at least size g minimizing the size of each group. So, suppose an office has 15 employees in it then it would be divided into three groups of sizes 5, 5, 5; if an office had 16 employees it would be 4, 4, 4, 4; if it had 17 employees it would be 4, 4, 4, 5 and so on.
I initially wrote the following code (in Python):
groups = [g] * (n//g)
for e in range(0, n % g):
groups[e % len(groups)] += 1
The first line creates n//g (// is integer division) entries of size g (for example, if g == 4 and n == 17 then groups == [4, 4, 4, 4]). The for loop deals with the 'left over' parts that Continue reading
Changes Go Far Beyond Just AI, Machine Learning
SambaNova Systems is a technology startup founded in 2017 by a group of far-sighted engineers and data scientists who saw that the current approaches to AI and machine learning were beginning to run out of steam, and that an entire new architecture would be necessary in order to make AI accessible for everyone as well as deliver the scale, performance, accuracy and ease of use needed for future applications. …
Changes Go Far Beyond Just AI, Machine Learning was written by Daniel Robinson at The Next Platform.
The Role of Machine Learning and AIOps in Network Performance Management
Nascent AIOps holds the key to a more automated, streamlined, and optimized approach to IT management that can help quickly and effectively identify and resolve network issues.Response: Firefox 86 Introduces Total Cookie Protection – Mozilla Security Blog
Browsers keep users safe from excessive user tracking
Captains Take 5 – Nick Janetakis
Docker Captains are select members of the community that are both experts in their field and are passionate about sharing their Docker knowledge with others. “Docker Captains Take 5” is a regular blog series where we get a closer look at our Captains and ask them the same broad set of questions ranging from what their best Docker tip is to whether they prefer cats or dogs (personally, we like whales and turtles over here). Today, we’re interviewing Nick Janetakis who has been a Docker Captain since 2016. He is a freelance full stack developer / teacher and is based in New York, United States.
How/when did you first discover Docker?
I was doing freelance web development work and kept running into situations where it was painful to set up my development environment for web apps created with Ruby on Rails. Different apps had different Ruby version requirements as well as needing different PostgreSQL and Redis versions too.
I remember running a manually provisioned Linux VM on my Windows dev box and did most of my development there. I even started to use LXC directly within that Linux VM.
That wasn’t too bad after investing a lot of time to Continue reading
Does Unequal-Cost Multipathing Make Sense?
Every now and then I’m getting questions along the lines “why doesn’t X support unequal-cost multipathing (UCMP)?” for X in [ OSPF, BGP, IS-IS ].
To set the record straight: BGP does support some rudimentary form of unequal-cost multipathing with the DMZ Bandwidth community, but it only works across multiple egress points from a single autonomous system. Follow-up nerd knobs described how to use the same community over EBGP sessions; not sure whether anyone implemented that part (comments welcome).
Does Unequal-Cost Multipathing Make Sense?
Every now and then I’m getting questions along the lines “why doesn’t X support unequal-cost multipathing (UCMP)?” for X in [ OSPF, BGP, IS-IS ].
To set the record straight: BGP does support some rudimentary form of unequal-cost multipathing with the DMZ Bandwidth community, but it only works across multiple egress points from a single autonomous system. Follow-up nerd knobs described how to use the same community over EBGP sessions; not sure whether anyone implemented that part (comments welcome).
Intel Knows It’s All In The Packaging
The package is the most compact platform to do heterogenous integration for IP that can’t be naturally integrated in silicon but steady incremental improvements versus game-changing approaches are the only foreseeable path forward. …
Intel Knows It’s All In The Packaging was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
DeepLearning – Intro Fun
I am enjoying insights into deep learning and computer vision and how machine learning is applied on images. While Deep Learning and Nueral networks are subjects for experts in field, I wanted simply to be an end user to do some experiments on my dog and nothing more. I have to mention that I had internal resources to get training on image augmentation techniques, DLL Nueral network frameworks pretrained to be used readily but am still trying to find some way into what this technology is all about and how to implement in my AWS Deeplens.
https://pytorch.org/assets/deep-learning/Deep-Learning-with-PyTorch.pdf
This is a good book to get introduced into pytorch and deep learning terminology. There is a very interesting examples of doing image manipulation of a horse to zebra, and how you can transfer that learning to anything.
Below is how I used on my Dog and results, I had fun starting this and hope you will have fun too, you dont need any great programming or math to just access some of the Neural networks and do some analysis
Normal Image
I wrote this post to let anyone interested to know that I dint had to write any complicated coding Continue reading
Tech Bytes: Monitoring Remote Access VPN Performance With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)
On today's Tech Bytes podcast, we talk with sponsor ThousandEyes about monitoring remote access VPNs to get a clearer picture of connectivity and performance issues and to speed troubleshooting. Our guest is Alex Cruz Farmer, Principal Product Manager at ThousandEyes.Tech Bytes: Monitoring Remote Access VPN Performance With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)
On today's Tech Bytes podcast, we talk with sponsor ThousandEyes about monitoring remote access VPNs to get a clearer picture of connectivity and performance issues and to speed troubleshooting. Our guest is Alex Cruz Farmer, Principal Product Manager at ThousandEyes.
The post Tech Bytes: Monitoring Remote Access VPN Performance With ThousandEyes (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
The Hedge #72: Lisa Caywood and Marketectures
The open source world is not much different than the commercial world in terms of building marketectures rather than useable software—largely because open source projects still rely on sources of funding and material support to build and maintain a product. Many times, however, the focus on these marketectures get in the way of real work. Join Tom Ammon, Russ White, and Lisa Caywood as we discuss the problem of marketectures and the broader world of open source software.