The Week in Internet News: Judge Blocks U.S. TikTok Ban

No deal: A U.S. judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s order to ban Chinese app TikTok from the Apple and Android app stores, CNBC reports. Trump has argued that the app is a security risk. Oracle and Walmart are in talks to buy a piece of TikTok’s U.S. operations as a way to appease Trump, though it appears that there’s disagreement with Chinese owner ByteDance over the outlines of a deal.

Breaking up is hard to do: The Hill has commentary about Trump’s attempt to ban TikTok and WeChat, another Chinese app, saying these are “only the most recent signs that the once open, global internet is slowly being replaced by 200, nationally-controlled, separate internets.” Trump’s efforts follow a long-term Chinese government drive to create a walled off Internet inside its own borders.

It’s nice to share: The European Union is preparing new regulations that would require large tech companies to share their customer data files with smaller competitors, Euronews says. An early draft of the Digital Services Act says companies like Amazon and Google “shall not use data collected on the platform … for [their] own commercial activities … unless they [make it] accessible to business users active Continue reading

Using Ansible with Arista EOS and CloudVision

In mid-September, Carl Buchmann, Fred Hsu, and Thomas Grimonet had an excellent presentation describing Arista’s Ansible roles and collections. They focused on two collections: CloudVision integration, and Arista Validated Designs. All the videos from that presentation are available with free ipSpace.net subscription.

Want to know even more about Ansible and network automation? Join our 2-day automation event featuring network automation experts from around the globe talking about their production-grade automation solutions or tools they created, and get immediate access to automation course materials and reviewed hands-on exercises.

Using Ansible with Arista EOS and CloudVision

In mid-September, Carl Buchmann, Fred Hsu, and Thomas Grimonet had an excellent presentation describing Arista’s Ansible roles and collections. They focused on two collections: CloudVision integration, and Arista Validated Designs. All the videos from that presentation are available with free ipSpace.net subscription.

Want to know even more about Ansible and network automation? Join our 2-day automation event featuring network automation experts from around the globe talking about their production-grade automation solutions or tools they created, and get immediate access to automation course materials and reviewed hands-on exercises.

Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption

Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption, Xu et al., SIGCOMM’20

We are standing on the eve of the 5G era… 5G, as a monumental shift in cellular communication technology, holds tremendous potential for spurring innovations across many vertical industries, with its promised multi-Gbps speed, sub-10 ms low latency, and massive connectivity.

There are high hopes for 5G, for example unlocking new applications in UHD streaming and VR, and machine-to-machine communication in IoT. The first 5G networks are now deployed and operational. In today’s paper choice, the authors investigate whether 5G as deployed in practice can live up to the hype. The short answer is no. It’s a great analysis that taught me a lot about the realities of 5G, and the challenges ahead if we are to eventually get there.

The study is based on one of the world’s first commercial 5G network deployments (launched in April 2019), a 0.5 x 0.92 km university campus. As is expected to be common during the roll-out and transition phase of 5G, this network adopts the NSA (Non-Standalone Access) deployment model whereby the 5G radio is used for the data Continue reading

Birthday week: Cloudflare turns 10

Birthday week: Cloudflare turns 10
Birthday week: Cloudflare turns 10

2020 marks a major milestone for Cloudflare: it’s our 10th birthday.

We’ve always used birthdays as an opportunity to give back to the Internet. But this year — a year in which the Internet has been so central to giving us all some degree of connectedness and normalcy — it feels like giving back to the Internet has been more important than ever.

And while we couldn’t celebrate in person, we were humbled by some of the incredible minds that joined us online to talk about how the Internet has changed over the last ten years — and what we might see over the next ten.

With that, let’s recap the key announcements from Birthday Week 2020.

Day 1, Monday: Workers

During Birthday Week in 2017, Cloudflare announced Workers — a serverless platform that represented a completely new way to build applications: by writing your code directly onto our network edge. On Monday of this year’s Birthday Week, we announced Durable Objects and Cron Triggers — both of which continue to expand the use cases that Workers can address.

Many folks associate the serverless paradigm with functions as a service — which, at its core, is stateless. Workers KV started Continue reading

Weekend Reads 100220

Equinix is not just about colocation anymore. The company is reinforcing that reality with new branding that positions Equinix as “the world’s digital infrastructure company.”

An FPGA is a chip that is programmed by a circuit. It is said to “emulate” that circuit. This emulation runs slower than the actual circuit would run if it were implemented in an ASIC—it has a slower clock frequency and uses more power, but it can be reprogrammed every few hundred milliseconds.

If I could change one thing in the minds of all programming language designers, it would be to impress upon them—forcefully—the idea that anything that is significant to the syntactic or structural meaning of a program must be easily visible to the human reader, as well as easily understood by the systems used by developers.

The same attributes that give deep learning its ability to tell images apart are helping attackers break into the cryptoprocessors built into integrated circuits that were meant improve their security. The same technology may provide the tools that will let chip designers find effective countermeasures, but it faces an uphill struggle.

If your broadband keeps going haywire, maybe someone nearby is using an ancient television set.

Continue reading

Must Watch: Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement

While I keep telling you that Google-sized solutions aren’t necessarily the best fit for your environment, some of the hyperscaler presentations contain nuggets that apply to any environment no matter how small it is.

One of those must-watch presentations is Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement together with a wonderful TL&DR summary by the one-and-only Todd Hoff of the High Scalability fame.

Must Watch: Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement

While I keep telling you that Google-sized solutions aren’t necessarily the best fit for your environment, some of the hyperscaler presentations contain nuggets that apply to any environment no matter how small it is.

One of those must-watch presentations is Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement together with a wonderful TL&DR summary by the one-and-only Todd Hoff of the High Scalability fame.

Introducing support for the AVIF image format

Introducing support for the AVIF image format
Introducing support for the AVIF image format

We've added support for the new AVIF image format in Image Resizing. It compresses images significantly better than older-generation formats such as WebP and JPEG. It's supported in Chrome desktop today, and support is coming to other Chromium-based browsers, as well as Firefox.

What’s the benefit?

More than a half of an average website's bandwidth is spent on images. Improved image compression can save bandwidth and improve overall performance of the web. The compression in AVIF is so good that images can reduce to half the size of JPEG and WebP

What is AVIF?

AVIF is a combination of the HEIF ISO standard, and a royalty-free AV1 codec by Mozilla, Xiph, Google, Cisco, and many others.

Currently JPEG is the most popular image format on the Web. It's doing remarkably well for its age, and it will likely remain popular for years to come thanks to its excellent compatibility. There have been many previous attempts at replacing JPEG, such as JPEG 2000, JPEG XR and WebP. However, these formats offered only modest compression improvements, and didn't always beat JPEG on image quality. Compression and image quality in AVIF is better than in all of them, and by a wide margin.

Introducing support for the AVIF image format Introducing support for the AVIF image format Introducing support for the AVIF image format
Continue reading

Technology Short Take 131

Welcome to Technology Short Take #131! I’m back with another collection of articles on various data center technologies. This time around the content is a tad heavy on the security side, but I’ve still managed to pull in articles on networking, cloud computing, applications, and some programming-related content. Here’s hoping you find something useful here!

Networking

  • This recent Ars Technica article points out that a feature in Chromium—the open source project leveraged by Chrome and Edge, among others—is having a significant impact on root DNS traffic. More technical details can be found in an associated APNIC blog post.
  • Here’s a few details around Open Service Mesh.
  • Quentin Machu outlines a series of problems his company experienced using Weave Net as the CNI for their Kubernetes clusters, as well as describes the migration process to a new CNI. His blog post is well worth a read, IMO.

Security

BiB097: VMware’s Future In The Cloud-Native Era

Kit Colbert is the VP & CTO, Cloud Platform BU at VMware. In this briefing, Drew Conry-Murray and Ethan Banks reflect on a Zoom conversation they had with Kit during VMworld 2020. The context of the conversation was simple enough. Harshly stated, we wanted to know what VMware's future is in the cloud-native era. Will companies need VMware? Kit's answer was not hand-wavy, cheerleader-ish nonsense. Instead, he responded with a thoughtful plan.

BiB097: VMware’s Future In The Cloud-Native Era

Kit Colbert is the VP & CTO, Cloud Platform BU at VMware. In this briefing, Drew Conry-Murray and Ethan Banks reflect on a Zoom conversation they had with Kit during VMworld 2020. The context of the conversation was simple enough. Harshly stated, we wanted to know what VMware's future is in the cloud-native era. Will companies need VMware? Kit's answer was not hand-wavy, cheerleader-ish nonsense. Instead, he responded with a thoughtful plan.

The post BiB097: VMware’s Future In The Cloud-Native Era appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Design an Edge System for the Cloud Native Edge Infrastructure

In the previous article, I discussed how Rancher’s Calico networking software, and the Intel NUCs. The infrastructure is based on K3s, Calico, and Portworx that provide the core building blocks of the Kubernetes cluster. Solution Architecture The sensors attached to the fans of the turbine provide the current rotational speed, vibration, temperature, and noise level. This telemetry data stream along with the deviceID from each fan acts as the input to the predictive maintenance solution. InfluxDB is connected to Mosquitto via Grafana dashboard to InfluxDB to build a beautiful visualization for our AIoT solution. In the next part of this tutorial, I will discuss the deployment architecture along with the storage and network considerations based on K3s, Calico, and Portworx. Stay tuned. Janakiram MSV’s Webinar series, “Machine Intelligence and Modern Infrastructure (MI2)” offers informative and insightful sessions covering cutting-edge technologies. Sign up for the upcoming MI2 webinar at

The Internet Is Built on ‘Intermediaries’ – They Should Be Protected

This opinion piece was originally published in The Hill.

Now is not the time to be careless with laws that could harm the Internet we rely on more than ever in our day to day lives.

Policymakers owe it to the billions of users around world that rely on the Internet for work, education, and daily activities to do their homework before attempting to change laws so pivotal to the Internet’s success.

And yet, the uptick of lawmakers making hasty changes to the law known as “Section 230” is proof of uninformed decision making that has the future of a law that helped shape the Internet looking increasingly grim.

In the last two years, there have been at least 18 attempts – via bills, executive orders and other initiatives – to try blow up the rule that has kept Internet intermediaries from being liable from the actions of their users since 1996. Within each of those efforts, the definition of what will be impacted has varied widely from “platforms” to “interactive computer services” and “Internet intermediaries.”

Depending on these definitions, and the larger policies they are attached to, the associated impacts of these proposals could be annoying, or they could Continue reading

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