How IXPs Can Help Achieve Digital Transformation across the Middle East

In September the Internet Society, in cooperation with Middle East Network Operators Group, held an online workshop on Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). This was part of a workshop series launched by the Internet Society to foster open dialogue and coordinate with governments and other stakeholders to achieve digital transformation across Arab countries. Last year, workshops included the participation of several governments, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and Jordan.

These discussions provided a framework for two policy documents: Middle East & North Africa Internet Infrastructure Report and Internet Infrastructure Security Guidelines for the Arab States. The reports show that supporting and developing the few existing regional IXPs, plus creating new ones, is an essential requirement for developing the Internet in the region.

The September workshop was divided into two parts: In the first part, a number of experts from Africa, Europe, and Asia shared their experiences in establishing and operating IXPs. The second part was an open discussion with participants.

The workshop aimed to explain the role of each stakeholder in establishing and operating IXPs – in addition to reviewing the best practices applied around the world, drawing on experiences from Italy to Pakistan.

IXPs create a direct path Continue reading

Tech Bytes: First Bank’s Automation With Gluware. The Real Story.

In this Tech Byte, we talk with Gluware customer, First Bank. First Bank is a family-owned, privately held bank operating in the Midwest and California, with roughly 100 locations in 5 different states. Our guests are Julie Wehling, Solutions Architect at Gluware; and Mike Pazarena, Network Engineer at First Bank. Mike talks about starting his […]

The post Tech Bytes: First Bank’s Automation With Gluware. The Real Story. appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Amazon Web Services launches Nvidia Ampere-powered instances

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of a new GPU-powered instance called Amazon P4d that is based on Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture, and the two firms are making big performance claims.AWS has offered GPU-powered instances for a decade now, the most current generation called P3. AWS and Nvidia are both claiming that P4d instances offer three times faster performance, up to 60% lower cost, and 2.5 times more GPU memory for machine learning training and high-performance computing workloads when compared to P3 instances.To read this article in full, please click here

Amazon Web Services launches Nvidia Ampere-powered instances

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of a new GPU-powered instance called Amazon P4d that is based on Nvidia’s new Ampere architecture, and the two firms are making big performance claims.AWS has offered GPU-powered instances for a decade now, the most current generation called P3. AWS and Nvidia are both claiming that P4d instances offer three times faster performance, up to 60% lower cost, and 2.5 times more GPU memory for machine learning training and high-performance computing workloads when compared to P3 instances.To read this article in full, please click here

Trick or Threat: Ryuk ransomware targets the health care industry

Introduction

A recent report [1] from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) has alerted the public about possible forthcoming ransomware attacks that target the health industry.
This report has raised concerns [2] especially because of the current pandemic, which has strained the resources of hospitals and care centers. As a consequence, a ransomware attack, in addition to crippling a healthcare provider’s infrastructure, might actually put at risk the lives of patients.

The advisory describes in detail the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) followed by the malicious actors who, at the moment, seem to be associated with Russian crime groups.
The attack uses a number of malware components, such as TrickBot, BazarLoader, Ryuk, and Cobalt Strike, in order to compromise networks, create bridgeheads, and then move laterally so that, eventually, a ransomware attack can be successfully carried out.

In the rest of this report, we present the characteristics of the various components of the attacks. We look at both the actual malware components (i.e., the code that performs the malicious actions), as well as the network evidence associated with their actions. Even though a number of these components (as well as similar ones) have been covered previously Continue reading

Looking Ahead: Five Opportunities on The Horizon According to Tech Leaders

Looking Ahead: Five Opportunities on The Horizon According to Tech Leaders

Dozens of top leaders and thinkers from the tech industry and beyond recently joined us for a series of fireside chats commemorating Cloudflare’s 10th birthday. Over the course of 24 hours of conversation, these leaders shared their thoughts on everything from entrepreneurship to mental health — and how the Internet will continue to play a vital role.

Here are some of the highlights.

On the global opportunity for entrepreneurs

Anu Hariharan
Partner, Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund

Looking Ahead: Five Opportunities on The Horizon According to Tech Leaders

Fast forwarding ten years from now, I think entrepreneurship is global, and you're already seeing signs of that. 27% of YC startups are headquartered outside the US. And I'm willing to bet that in a decade, at least 50% of YC startups will be headquartered outside the US. And so I think the sheer nature of the Internet democratizing information, more companies being global, like Facebook, Google, Uber — talent is everywhere. I think you will see multi-billion dollar companies coming out of other regions.

People have this perception that everything is a zero sum game, or that we are already at peak Internet penetration. Absolutely not. The global market cap is ~$85 trillion. Less than 10% is e-commerce. Internet enabled businesses is $8 Continue reading

Weekly internet health check, US and worldwide

The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (a.k.a. unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS)) is an indication of how well served businesses are via the internet.ThousandEyes is monitoring how these providers are handling the performance challenges they face. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here. Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters To read this article in full, please click here

Talk of a national 5G network leaves a lot of questions unanswered

A Pentagon request for information that led to speculation about a nationwide 5G network created by a partnership between the mobile carriers and the government has provoked the wrath of Congressional leaders. 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 controversy started with an official request for information from the Pentagon, which asks for guidance about the Department of Defense owning and operating 5G networks for domestic operations. Per Forrester vice president and research director Glenn O’Donnell, the plan as discussed would amount to a public-private partnership funded through government stimulus money and overseen by the DoD, but it would be implemented and operated by one of the country’s major wireless carriers.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM, Red Hat, and AT&T team up for private edge deployments

IBM’s new Cloud Satellite offering will move the company’s open hybrid-cloud framework into new and different environments, thanks to partnerships with AT&T for 5G connectivity and IBM's Red Hat  unit for containerization. 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 Cloud Satellite, currently in beta, is a software product, sold through IBM, that provides a link to IBM and AT&T’s hardware. It offers a one-dashboard method of managing services across multiple computing environments, networks and locations. It leverages Red Hat’s OpenShift containerization platform—built on Kubernetes for the flexibility to deploy applications and services across multiple environments—IBM’s cloud framework for management, and AT&T’s public or private 5G for connectivity between customersites and the cloud. Thus, an application could be deployed at the edge, but managed from IBM’s cloud framework, with connectivity furnished by AT&T, and OpenShift making it simpler to keep workloads virtualized and flexible.To read this article in full, please click here

Expanded Support for Open Source Software Projects

Docker remains committed to providing a platform where the non-commercial open source developers can continue collaborating, innovating and pushing this industry into new directions.  

In August, we announced to our dedicated community and ecosystem that we are creating new policies for image retention and data pull rates. We made these changes to make Docker a sustainable business for the long term, so that we can continue supporting the developer community and ecosystem that depends on the Docker platform. We got great feedback from our extensive user base, and adjusted our policies to delay the policies on image retention until mid-2021. The plan for data pull rates is moving forward, and starting today limits will be gradually enforced, with the plan to be fully applied in the coming weeks. The final limits will be:

  • Unauthenticated users will be restricted to 100 pulls every 6 hours
  • Authenticated free users will be restricted to 200 pulls every 6 hours

To support the open source community, Docker has created a special program for Open Source projects to get continued free access and freedom from restrictions for their communities and their users. For the approved, non-commercial, open source projects, we are thrilled to announce Continue reading

My collection of vintage PC cards

Recently, I have been gathering some old hardware at my parents’ house, notably PC extension cards, as they don’t take much room and can be converted to a nice display item. Unfortunately, I was not very concerned about keeping stuff around. Compared to all the hardware I have acquired over the years, only a few pieces remain.

Tseng Labs ET4000AX (1989)​

This SVGA graphics card was installed into a PC powered by a 386SX CPU running at 16 MHz. This was a good card at the time as it was pretty fast. It didn’t feature 2D acceleration, unlike the later ET4000/W32. This version only features 512 KB of RAM. It can display 1024×768 images with 16 colors or 800×600 with 256 colors. It was also compatible with CGA, EGA, VGA, MDA, and Hercules modes. No contemporary games were using the SVGA modes but the higher resolutions were useful with Windows 3.

This card was manufactured directly by Tseng Labs.

Carte Tseng Labs ET4000AX ISA au-dessus de la boîte "Planète Aventure"
Tseng Labs ET4000 AX ISA card

AdLib clone (1992)​

My first sound card was an AdLib. My parents bought it in Canada during the summer holidays in 1992. It uses a Yamaha OPL2 chip to produce sound via FM synthesis. Continue reading

Strong Reactions and Complexity

In the realm of network design—especially in the realm of security—we often react so strongly against a perceived threat, or so quickly to solve a perceived problem, that we fail to look for the tradeoffs. If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough—or, as Dr. Little says, you have to ask what is gained and what is lost, rather than just what is gained. This failure to look at both sides often results in untold amounts of technical debt and complexity being dumped into network designs (and application implementations), causing outages and failures long after these decisions are made.

A 2018 paper on DDoS attacks, A First Joint Look at DoS Attacks and BGP Blackholing in the Wild provides a good example of causing more damage to an attack than the attack itself. Most networks are configured to allow the operator to quickly configure a remote triggered black hole (RTBH) using BGP. Most often, a community is attached to a BGP route that points the next-hop to a local discard route on each eBGP speaker. If used on the route advertising the destination of the attack—the service under attack—the result is the DDoS attack traffic no longer Continue reading

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