Hints and Principles: Applied to Networks

While software design is not the same as network design, there is enough overlap for network designers to learn from software designers. A recent paper published by Butler Lampson, updating a paper he wrote in 1983, is a perfect illustration of this principle. The paper is caleld Hints and Principles for Computer System Design. I’m not going to write a full review here–you should really go read the paper for yourself–but rather just point out some useful bits of the paper.

The first really useful point of this paper is Lampson breaks down the entire field of software design into three basic questions: What, How, and When (or who)? Each of these corresponds to the goals, techniques, and processes used to design and develop software. These same questions and answers apply to network design–if you are missing one of these three areas, then you are probably missing some important set of questions you have not answered yet. Each of these is also represented by an acronym: what? is STEADY, how? is AID, and when? is ART. Let’s look at a couple of these in a little more detail to see how Lampson’s system works.

STEADY stands for simple, timely, efficient, Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Seven Countries Repeat Calls for Encryption Backdoors

Here we go again: Seven countries, including the U.S., U.K., Japan, and India, are again pushing tech companies to provide encryption backdoors for law enforcement, The Verge reports. The new international statement says encryption poses “significant challenges to public safety.” The U.S. and allies have long pushed for backdoors, even as security advocates have warned that criminals will find ways to exploit holes in encryption.

ISPs protest: ISPs in Dhaka, Bangladesh, are threatening to shut down service for three hours a day over a dispute on overhead wire replacement, Dhaka Tribune reports. The city is planning to move the wires underground, but ISPs are concerned about potential problems during the switch. Threatening a blackout to protest potential blackouts seems counterproductive.

Decency police: The government of Pakistan has banned short video app TikTok over “immoral and indecent” content, Al Jazeera says. It’s unclear what TikTok content the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority found offensive. A kickboxer in the country, hoping to market his training services on TikTok, challenged the ban, however, Reuters reports. “If TikTok can be banned even though it has millions of videos because of a few offensive ones, why can’t the whole internet be shut Continue reading

Network Break 306: Cloudflare Launches Secure NaaS Offering; SonicWall Vulnerability Affects Nearly 800,000 Devices

Today's Network Break examines a new security service from Cloudflare, a SonicWall vulnerability that affects a massive number of its appliances, a fresh funding round for networking startup Alkira, and more nerdy networking news.

The post Network Break 306: Cloudflare Launches Secure NaaS Offering; SonicWall Vulnerability Affects Nearly 800,000 Devices appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How a Customer’s Trust in Cloudflare Led to a Big Win against Bots

How a Customer's Trust in Cloudflare Led to a Big Win against Bots

Key Points

  • Anyone with public-facing web properties is likely to have bot traffic on their website.
  • One type of bot that commonly targets eCommerce and online portals is a ‘scraper bot’.
  • Some scraper bots are good (such as those used by search engines to assess your website’s content to inform search results, or price comparison sites to help inform consumer decisions), however many are malicious, and will work to scrape not only images but also pricing data from your site for use by a competitor.
  • Many Bot Management providers will need to divert your traffic to a dedicated data centre to analyse your traffic and ‘scrub’ it clean from malicious bot traffic before sending it on to your site. While effective this will almost certainly add latency to the traffic’s ‘journey’ resulting in degraded user experience. Look for a technology partner with an expansive network who can scan your traffic in real time as it passes through any data centre on their network.
  • Good and bad scraper bots behave in largely the same way, making it difficult for bot protection systems to differentiate between the two. A common challenge with Bot Management solutions is that they can return a high Continue reading

New on ipSpace.net: Virtualizing Network Devices Q&A

A few weeks ago we published an interesting discussion on network operating system details based on an excellent set of questions by James Miles.

Unfortunately we got so far into the weeds at that time that we answered only half of James’ questions. In the second Q&A session Dinesh Dutt and myself addressed the rest of them including:

  • How hard is it to virtualize network devices?
  • What is the expected performance degradation?
  • Does it make sense to use containers to do that?
  • What are the operational implications of running virtual network devices?
  • What will be the impact on hardware vendors and networking engineers?

And of course we couldn’t avoid the famous last question: “Should network engineers program network devices?”

You’ll need Standard or Expert ipSpace.net subscription to watch the videos.

New on ipSpace.net: Virtualizing Network Devices Q&A

A few weeks ago we published an interesting discussion on network operating system details based on an excellent set of questions by James Miles.

Unfortunately we got so far into the weeds at that time that we answered only half of James' questions. In the second Q&A session Dinesh Dutt and myself addressed the rest of them including:

  • How hard is it to virtualize network devices?
  • What is the expected performance degradation?
  • Does it make sense to use containers to do that?
  • What are the operational implications of running virtual network devices?
  • What will be the impact on hardware vendors and networking engineers?

And of course we couldn’t avoid the famous last question: “Should network engineers program network devices?”

You’ll need Standard or Expert ipSpace.net subscription to watch the videos.

The case for a learned sorting algorithm

The case for a learned sorting algorithm, Kristo, Vaidya, et al., SIGMOD’20

We’ve watched machine learning thoroughly pervade the web giants, make serious headway in large consumer companies, and begin its push into the traditional enterprise. ML, then, is rapidly becoming an integral part of how we build applications of all shapes and sizes. But what about systems software? It’s earlier days there, but ‘The case for learned index structures’(Part 1 Part 2), SageDB and others are showing the way.

Today’s paper choice builds on the work done in SageDB, and focuses on a classic computer science problem: sorting. On a 1 billion item dataset, Learned Sort outperforms the next best competitor, RadixSort, by a factor of 1.49x. What really blew me away, is that this result includes the time taken to train the model used!

The big idea

Suppose you had a model that given a data item from a list, could predict its position in a sorted version of that list. 0.239806? That’s going to be at position 287! If the model had 100% accuracy, it would give us a completed sort just by running over the dataset and putting Continue reading

Weekend Reads 101620

As software engineers, our industry may be competitive, but we need to remove the stigma associated with failing. One way of doing that is to talk about our failures. The more we hear and talk about failures, the more acceptable it becomes. We need to think about failures as learning opportunities, not a time to shame and ridicule others (or ourselves).

As the data keep growing in volume, the data analytics pipelines have to be scalable to adapt the rate of change. And for this reason, choosing to set up the pipeline in the cloud makes perfect sense (since the cloud offers on-demand scalability and flexibility).

We tactfully crafted emails and had reassuring phone calls with them. We updated them often and gave them the right amount of transparency and technical insight. But here are the truths that we couldn’t tell them.

A majority of security tools that organizations use to defend against malware attacks are themselves vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers to escalate privileges on a compromised system, a new CyberArk study has found.

If the best platforms are more than matchmakers, then the best open source projects are more than utilities. It wouldn’t be incorrect or inconceivable Continue reading

One more (Zero Trust) thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System

One more (Zero Trust) thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System
One more (Zero Trust) thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System

Today, we’re very excited to announce our plans for Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System, a new product that monitors your network and alerts when an attack is suspected. With deep integration into Cloudflare One, Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System gives you a bird’s eye view of your entire global network and inspects all traffic for bad behavior, regardless of whether it came from outside or inside your network.

Analyze your network without doing the legwork

Enterprises build firewall rules to keep their networks safe from external and internal threats. When bad actors try to attack a network, those firewalls check if the attack matches a rule pattern. If it does, the firewall steps in and blocks the attack.

Teams used to configure those rules across physical firewall appliances, frequently of different makes and models, deployed to physical locations. Yesterday, we announced Magic Firewall, Cloudflare’s network-level firewall delivered in our data centers around the world. Your team can write a firewall rule once, deploy it to Cloudflare, and our global network will protect your offices and data centers without the need for on-premises hardware.

This is great if you know where attacks are coming from. If you don’t have that level Continue reading

No, that’s not how warrantee expiration works

The NYPost Hunter Biden story has triggered a lot of sleuths obsessing on technical details trying to prove it's a hoax. So far, these claims are wrong. The story is certainly bad journalism aiming to misinform readers, but it has not yet been shown to be a hoax.

In this post, we look at claim the timelines don't match up with the manufacturing dates of the drives. Sleuths claim to prove the drives were manufactured after the events in question, based on serial numbers.

What this post will show is that the theory is wrong. Manufacturers pad warrantee periods. Thus, you can't assume a date of manufacture based upon the end of a warrantee period.


The story starts with Hunter Biden (or associates) dropping off a laptop at a repair shop because of water damage. The repair shop made a copy of the laptop's hard drive, stored on an external drive. Later, the FBI swooped in and confiscated both the laptop and that external drive.

The serial numbers of both devices are listed in the subpoena published by the NYPost:


You can enter these serial numbers in the support pages at Apple (FVFXC2MMHV29) and Western Digital (WX21A19ATFF3) to discover precisely Continue reading
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