Server Spending Holds Up Despite Every Damned Thing

Our increasingly networked and compute-intensive lives is driving the server business, and despite the cornucopia of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that spans the globe, the appetite for compute as expressed in shiny racks of servers or metal pizza boxes or an occasional tower sitting in a closet or under a desk continues despite the kind of consumption we have not seen since the dot-com boom. …

Server Spending Holds Up Despite Every Damned Thing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

FCC’s 5G-frequency auction prompts $2 billion in bids on the first day

Licenses for premium wireless bandwidth sought by service providers to build out high-performance 5G networks is being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission, potentially grossing up to $50 billion and enabling features that enterprises desire most. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises The spectrum on the block is a piece of what’s known as the C-band, specifically the 280MHz-wide swath of it from 3.7GHz to 3.98GHz. It provides wider channels that support faster connections and lower latency than other ranges available to carriers, analysts say.To read this article in full, please click here

5G-frequency auction prompts $2 billion in bids on the first day

Licenses for premium wireless bandwidth sought by service providers to build out high-performance 5G networks is being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission, potentially grossing up to $50 billion and enabling features that enterprises desire most. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises The spectrum on the block is a piece of what’s known as the C-band, specifically the 280MHz-wide swath of it from 3.7GHz to 3.98GHz. It provides wider channels that support faster connections and lower latency than other ranges available to carriers, analysts say.To read this article in full, please click here

Supporting Open Source Projects at Docker

At Docker, we are committed to building a platform that enables collaboration and innovation within the development community. Last month, we announced the launch of a special program to expand our support for Open Source projects that use Docker. The eligible projects that meet the program’s requirements (ie. they must be open source and non-commercial) can request to have their respective OSS namespaces whitelisted and see their data-storage and data-egress restrictions lifted.

The projects we’re supporting, and the organizations behind them, are as diverse as they are numerous, ranging from independent researchers developing frameworks for machine learning, to academic consortia collecting environmental data to human rights NGOs building encryption tools. To date, we’re thrilled to see that more than 80 non-profit organizations, large and small, from the four corners of the world have joined the program. 

Here are but a few diverse projects we’re supporting: 

The Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium aims to deliver more sustainable, efficient, and transparent approach to generating disease burden and vaccine impact estimates. 

farmOS is a web-based application for farm management, planning, and record keeping. It is developed by a community of farmers, developers, researchers, and organizations with the aim of providing a standard Continue reading

How Social Networking Has Changed in the Past Year Due to COVID-19

From the beginning of this year, people started working from home to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The routines of practically everyone changed one afternoon. More and more people’s work and daily lives have changed to working online and working from home.

How Social Networking Changed Since COVID-19 Began

In the beginning, resources helped social managers and teams navigate their responses to handle COVID-19. After posts were uploaded at the beginning of the year, using different social media platforms, we were able to get more information about the spread of the virus. For people and users of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, optimal send times were used.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn had a lot more users because of the pandemic. Lots of them made use of these platforms to handle their jobs and to send them to appropriate individuals all around the world.

COVID-19 Changed the Prime Posting Times for Social Media Sites

The data that got pulled for the yearly review showed the best times to upload necessary data. From the middle of April 2020, the most important times to upload different things on social media and to go online first changed. In different Continue reading

The deal with DMCA 1201 reform

There are two fights in Congress now against the DMCA, the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". One is over Section 512 covering "takedowns" on the web. The other is over Section 1201 covering "reverse engineering", which weakens cybersecurity.

Even before digital computers, since the 1880s, an important principle of cybersecurity has been openness and transparency ("Kerckhoff's Principle"). Only through making details public can security flaws be found, discussed, and fixed. This includes reverse-engineering to search for flaws.

Cybersecurity experts have long struggled against the ignorant who hold the naive belief we should instead coverup information, so that evildoers cannot find and exploit flaws. Surely, they believe, given just anybody access to critical details of our security weakens it. The ignorant have little faith in technology, that it can be made secure. They have more faith in government's ability to control information.

Technologists believe this information coverup hinders well-meaning people and protects the incompetent from embarrassment. When you hide information about how something works, you prevent people on your own side from discovering and fixing flaws. It also means that you can't hold those accountable for their security, since it's impossible to notice security flaws until after they've been exploited. At the Continue reading

Why We’re Helping to Measure the Internet

Here at the Internet Society, we’ve always known that the Internet can be an integral part of our existence. 2020 has shown us that we need stable, reliable, and available Internet for everyone, everywhere.

Much of our work – and the work of the organizations that facilitate the smooth functioning of the Internet – is focused on helping to increase the Internet’s reach, reliability, resilience, availability and security. One of the ways we can track whether these efforts are working is to collect and measure data on various facets of the Internet. This helps to build up a bigger picture of the Internet’s development over time and the resulting data can be used to inform and support policy, investment, and education.

Internet Insights

The Internet Society Insights platform was launched in December 2020 to provide a curated set of insights to help everyone gain deeper, data-driven insight into the Internet. We’re collating data from several trusted organizations – data partners – and will examine Internet trends, generate reports, and tell data-driven stories on how the Internet is evolving.

In this blog, we catch up with some of our data partners and prominent members of the Internet measurement community to find out more about why Continue reading

Freeze Your Credit Reports Before Identity Thieves Open Credit In Your Name

I found out today that I’m a victim of identify theft. Specifically, the bad guys have gotten a hold of my name, SSN, and probably other fun tidbits of my personal information. My best guess is that this is a result of the Equifax breach, not that it matters.

How Did I Notice The Identity Theft?

I am enrolled in a free credit monitoring service that notifies me when things happen on my credit report. (I’m not recommending a particular monitoring service. The one I’m using is tied to a bank where I’m a customer, and it’s good enough.) There were two “hard inquiries” listed within a few days of each other.

There are hard and soft inquiries. As I understand it, a hard inquiry means you’ve applied for credit, and the lending institution is trying to figure out whether or not they’ll extend you the money. If you see a hard inquiry and you’re not applying for credit, that’s a red flag. Soft inquiries are for things like pre-approved credit card offers that you didn’t ask for but receive in the mail anyway.

One of the hard inquiries was from the Small Business Association government agency. The thief Continue reading

New Report Explores COVID-19’s Impact on the Internet in Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many have shifted their day-to-day activities to online. To sustain the spike in Internet traffic, fast and affordable Internet service are now more critical than ever.

Yet, Ookla Insights shows that Internet speed in Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka has declined since the pandemic. A new Internet Society report, The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Performance in Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, examines the impact of this fall in the performance and quality of Internet services in these countries on online users.

Informed by an online survey, taken by two hundred Internet users – predominantly tech-savvy city dwellers with access to the Internet – the report reveals there is a decline in Internet performance in the three countries. It shows that though the performance decline frustrated online users, more are increasingly spending on high-speed Internet.

The research advocates for governments and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to take advantage of the situation and accelerate efforts to increase network capacity and reliability to address the performance gaps.

Here are some highlights from The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Performance in Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Fall in Internet Performance

Around 50-80% of Continue reading

Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone
Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

In September, we announced that we’re building a new, free Web Analytics product for the whole web. Today, I’m excited to announce that anyone can now sign up to use our new Web Analytics — even without changing your DNS settings. In other words, Cloudflare Web Analytics can now be deployed by adding an HTML snippet (in the same way many other popular web analytics tools are) making it easier than ever to use privacy-first tools to understand visitor behavior.

Why does the web need another analytics service?

Popular analytics vendors have business models driven by ad revenue. Using them implies a bargain: they track visitor behavior and create buyer profiles to retarget your visitors with ads; in exchange, you get free analytics.

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet, and part of that is to deliver essential web analytics to everyone with a website, without compromising user privacy. For free. We’ve never been interested in tracking users or selling advertising. We don’t want to know what you do on the Internet — it’s not our business.

Our customers have long relied on Cloudflare’s Analytics because we’re accurate, fast, and privacy-first. In September we released a Continue reading

Deprecating the __cfduid cookie

Deprecating the __cfduid cookie
Deprecating the __cfduid cookie

Cloudflare is deprecating the __cfduid cookie. Starting on 10 May 2021, we will stop adding a “Set-Cookie” header on all HTTP responses. The last __cfduid cookies will expire 30 days after that.

We never used the __cfduid cookie for any purpose other than providing critical performance and security services on behalf of our customers. Although, we must admit, calling it something with “uid” in it really made it sound like it was some sort of user ID. It wasn't. Cloudflare never tracks end users across sites or sells their personal data. However, we didn't want there to be any questions about our cookie use, and we don’t want any customer to think they need a cookie banner because of what we do.

So why did we use the __cfduid cookie before, and why can we remove it now?

The primary use of the cookie is for detecting bots on the web. Malicious bots may disrupt a service that has been explicitly requested by an end user (through DDoS attacks) or compromise the security of a user's account (e.g. through brute force password cracking or credential stuffing, among others). We use many signals to build machine learning models that can Continue reading

Hyperconvergence as a service offers hands-off data-center management

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has made substantial inroads in enterprise environments, and vendors have responded with new use cases and purchasing scenarios, including an emerging deployment option: HCI as a service.Conventional HCI combines servers, storage and network resources into a single box, providing adopters with a gateway to simplified, centralized data-center management. HCI as a service (HCIaaS) ups the ante by enabling data-center operators to adopt HCI in a manner that promises to reduce both operational and financial overhead.Several HCI vendors, including VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HPE, offer a managed service option, says Naveen Chhabra, a senior analyst at IT research firm Forrester. "It basically turns the capital expenditure and one-time investment into an [operating expense]," Chhabra says. "In most cases, the vendor will also manage the HCI's day-to-day operations."To read this article in full, please click here

Hyperconvergence as a service offers hands-off data-center management

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has made substantial inroads in enterprise environments, and vendors have responded with new use cases and purchasing scenarios, including an emerging deployment option: HCI as a service.Conventional HCI combines servers, storage and network resources into a single box, providing adopters with a gateway to simplified, centralized data-center management. HCI as a service (HCIaaS) ups the ante by enabling data-center operators to adopt HCI in a manner that promises to reduce both operational and financial overhead.Several HCI vendors, including VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HPE, offer a managed service option, says Naveen Chhabra, a senior analyst at IT research firm Forrester. "It basically turns the capital expenditure and one-time investment into an [operating expense]," Chhabra says. "In most cases, the vendor will also manage the HCI's day-to-day operations."To read this article in full, please click here

Implement Private VLAN Functionality with Linux Bridge and Libvirt

I wanted to test routing protocol behavior (IS-IS in particular) on partially meshed multi-access layer-2 networks like private VLANs or Carrier Ethernet E-Tree service. I recently spent plenty of time creating a Vagrant/libvirt lab environment on my Intel NUC running Ubuntu 20.04, and I wanted to use that environment in my tests.

Challenge-of-the-day: How do you implement private VLAN functionality with Vagrant using libvirt plugin?

There might be interesting KVM/libvirt options I’ve missed, but so far I figured two ways of connecting Vagrant-controlled virtual machines in libvirt environment:

Read more …

Implement Private VLAN Functionality with Linux Bridge and Libvirt

I wanted to test routing protocol behavior (IS-IS in particular) on partially meshed multi-access layer-2 networks like private VLANs or Carrier Ethernet E-Tree service. I recently spent plenty of time creating a Vagrant/libvirt lab environment on my Intel NUC running Ubuntu 20.04, and I wanted to use that environment in my tests.

Challenge-of-the-day: How do you implement private VLAN functionality with Vagrant using libvirt plugin?

There might be interesting KVM/libvirt options I’ve missed, but so far I figured two ways of connecting Vagrant-controlled virtual machines in libvirt environment:

Read more …
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