What Happens When The Whole World Goes Remote? Not To Worry, We Were Built For This

What Happens When The Whole World Goes Remote? Not To Worry, We Were Built For This
What Happens When The Whole World Goes Remote? Not To Worry, We Were Built For This

In March, governments all over the world issued stay-at-home orders, causing a mass migration to teleworking. Alongside many of our partners, Cloudflare launched free products and services supported by onboarding sessions to help our clients secure and accelerate their remote work environments. Over the past few months, a dedicated team of specialists met with hundreds of organizations - from tiny startups, to massive corporations - to help them extend better security and performance to a suddenly-remote workforce.

Most companies we heard from had a VPN in place, but it wasn’t set up to accommodate a full-on remote work environment. When employees began working from home, they found that the VPN was getting overloaded with requests, causing performance lags.

While many organizations had bought more VPN licenses to allow employees to connect to their tools, they found that just having licenses wasn’t enough: they needed to reduce the amount of traffic flowing through their VPN by taking select applications off of the private network.

We Were Built For This

My name is Dina and I am a Customer Success Manager (CSM) in our San Francisco office. I am responsible for ensuring the success of Cloudflare’s Enterprise customers and managing all of Continue reading

NFC vs. Bluetooth LE: When to use which

Among many options for low-power, relatively short-ranged connectivity, two technologies stand out – near-field communication and Bluetooth low energy. Both have relatively low deployment costs and are simple to use.NFC is best known for being the technology behind many modern smart cards. NFC chips need to be very close – within a few centimeters – to a reader for a connection to be made, but that’s an upside in its primary enterprise use case, which is security and access control.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Bluetooth LE is a low-power derivative of the main Bluetooth standard, offsetting lower potential throughput with substantially reduced energy consumption and the consequent ability to fit into a wider range of potential use cases.To read this article in full, please click here

4 essential edge-computing use cases

Edge computing means different things to different players. But one thing is constant: Location matters.Edge computing enables autonomous mining equipment to react to unexpected conditions a mile below the surface, even when disconnected from a network. When a hotel guest places a food order from a mobile phone and wants to have it delivered poolside, edge computing makes it possible to steer servers to the guest's lounge chair.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge computing: The next generation of innovation

Like other hot new areas of enterprise tech, edge computing is a broad architectural concept rather than a specific set of solutions. Primarily, edge computing is applied to low-latency situations where compute power must be close to the action, whether that activity is industrial IoT robots flinging widgets or sensors continuously taking the temperature of vaccines in production. The research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts that by 2022, 90 percent of industrial enterprises will employ edge computing.To read this article in full, please click here

Chip maker Nvidia takes a $40B chance on Arm Holdings

After months of teasing and rumor, GPU and AI vendor Nvidia announced it would purchase Arm Holdings from its parent company SoftBank for $40 billion. The purchase includes $21.5 billion in Nvidia stock and $12 billion in cash, including $2 billion payable at signing. That will break the piggy bank because Nvidia had $10.9 billion in cash on hand as of the most recent quarter.Softbank acquired Arm in 2016 for $31.4 billion in 2016. At the time, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said it was an investment in the Internet of Things. But SoftBank, known for its profligate spending on acquisitions and investments, made some bad investments in WeWork and Uber, among others, and was saddled with $25 billion in debt.To read this article in full, please click here

Chip maker Nvidia takes a $40B chance on Arm Holdings

After months of teasing and rumor, GPU and AI vendor Nvidia announced it would purchase Arm Holdings from its parent company SoftBank for $40 billion. The purchase includes $21.5 billion in Nvidia stock and $12 billion in cash, including $2 billion payable at signing. That will break the piggy bank because Nvidia had $10.9 billion in cash on hand as of the most recent quarter.Softbank acquired Arm in 2016 for $31.4 billion in 2016. At the time, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said it was an investment in the Internet of Things. But SoftBank, known for its profligate spending on acquisitions and investments, made some bad investments in WeWork and Uber, among others, and was saddled with $25 billion in debt.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: Microsoft Warns of Cyberattacks on U.S. Election

Hackers vs. the election: Microsoft has warned that hackers from Russia, China, and Iran are targeting U.S. election systems, The Hill reports. The tech giant is seeing increasing efforts to hack into the Donald Trump and Joe Biden presidential campaigns. A Russian hacking group called Strontium has targeted more than 200 organizations, political campaigns, and parties over the past year, the company said. 

Fighting disinformation: The government of India is calling for greater international cooperation among countries and tech companies to combat disinformation and doctored videos related to the COVID-19 pandemic, India Times reports. “The pandemic has demonstrated the existential dilemma of an information society,” Counsellor Paulomi Tripathi said at the United Nations. “We have been exposed to misinformation and disinformation campaigns which have put lives and livelihoods of millions at risk, divided communities with fake news and doctored videos and undermined the trust in public authorities to tackle the disease.”

Cutting red tape: Nigeria is looking to waive fees for laying fiber optic cables on federal highways as a way to expand Internet access in the country, Quartz Africa reports. Officials hope the waiver will help the country meet targets in its national broadband plan, which aims for Continue reading

Is Cisco ACI Too Different?

A friend of mine involved in multiple Cisco ACI installations sent me this comment on their tenant connectivity model:

I’m a bit allergic to ACI. The abstraction is mis-aligned with familiar configurations, in particular contracts being independent of and over-riding routing, tenants, etc. You can really make a mess with that, and I’ve seen some! One needs to impose some structure, naming conventions…, and most people don’t seem to get that done.

As I noticed in the NSX-or-ACI webinar, it’s interesting how NSX decided to stay with the familiar VLAN/routing/filtering paradigm (more details), whereas the designers of Cisco ACI decided to go down a totally different path.

Read more …

Aligning superhuman AI with human behaviour: chess as a model system

Aligning superhuman AI with human behavior: chess as a model system, McIlroy-Young et al., KDD’20

It’s been a while, but it’s time to start reading CS papers again! We’ll ease back into it with one or two papers a week for a few weeks, building back up to something like 3 papers a week at steady state.

How human-like is superhuman AI?

AI models can learn to perform some tasks to human or even super-human levels, but do they then perform those tasks in a human-like way? And does that even matter so long as the outcomes are good? If we’re going to hand everything over to AI and get out of the way, then maybe not. But where humans are still involved in task performance, supervision, or evaluation, then McIlroy-Young et al. make the case that this difference in approaches really does matter. Human-machine collaboration offers a lot of potential to enhance and augment human performance, but this requires the human and the machine to be ‘on the same page’ to be truly effective (see e.g. ‘Ten challenges for making automation a ‘team player’ in joint human-agent activity‘).

The central challenge in realizing these Continue reading

Duty Calls: CPU Is Not Designed for Packet Forwarding

Junhui Liu added this comment to my Where Do We Need Smart NICs? blog post:

CPU is not designed for the purpose of packet forwarding. One example is packet order retaining. It is impossible for a multicore CPU to retain the packet order as is received after parallel processing by multiple cores. Another example is scheduling. Yes CPU can do scheduling, but at a very high tax of CPU cycles.

Duty calls.

Read more …

Cliché: Security through obscurity (yet again)

Infosec is a largely non-technical field. People learn a topic only as far as they need to regurgitate the right answer on a certification test. Over time, they start to believe misconceptions about that topic that they never learned. Eventually, these misconceptions displace the original concept in the community.

A good demonstration is this discussion of the "security through obscurity fallacy". The top rated comment makes the claim this fallacy means "if your only security is obscurity, it's bad". Wikipedia substantiates this, claiming experts advise that "obscurity should never be the only security mechanism".

Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. It's the very opposite of what you suppose to understand. Obscurity has problems, always, even if it's just an additional layer in your "defense in depth". The entire point of the fallacy is to counteract people's instinct to suppress information. The effort has failed. Instead, people have persevered in believing that obscurity is good, and that this entire conversation is only about specific types of obscurity being bad.


Hypothetical: non-standard SSH

The above discussion mentions running SSH on a non-standard port, such as 7837 instead of 22, as a hypothetical example.

Let's continue this hypothetical. You do this. Then an 0day Continue reading

Python Pieces: Using PyEnv

If you’re like me – one of the most frustrating things about Python is version management. You get a new Mac, the system default is 2.x something, you need 3.x something, and you’re wondering what the best (right) way to get the version you want installed. You install Python 3 but the default Python version stays the same until you do some symlink hack thing that you know is just creating a mess. So for awhile you just call python3 explicitly but then you realize that all of the packages you installed using pip are no longer available and you need to install them again using pip3.

Sound familiar? Maybe I’m the only one that struggles with this – but I tend to muddle my way through just making things work while in the back of my head I know that Im creating a complete disaster of the local Python installation. I shall muddle no longer thanks to PyEnv. I was recently introduced to the tool and it’s a total game changer. It allows you to seemlessly manage your local Python install, easily install different versions, easily switch versions, and even has the capability of automgically switching versions Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Making of an RFC in today’s IETF

Years ago I was naive enough to participate in writing an IETF document. Three years later we finally managed to turn it into an RFC, and I decided that was enough for one lifetime.

But wait, it gets worse… as Geoff Huston argues in his article, the lengthy review process doesn’t necessarily result in better (or more precise) documents.

Seems like we managed to turn IETF into yet another standard body like IEEE, ISO or ITU/T.

Kubernetes Pod Networking on AWS: Getting There from Here

Thinking about running Kubernetes on AWS? To optimize your chances of success, you’ll need to have a solid understanding of Kubernetes pod networking. As applications grow to span multiple containers deployed across multiple clusters, operating them becomes more complex. Containers are grouped into pods, and those pods can be networked and scaled to meet your specific needs.

Kubernetes provides an open source API to manage this complexity, but one size doesn’t fit all. So you’ll want to get a handle on the different methods available to support your project. Then when you’re ready to move forward, you’ll have a much clearer idea of what will work best for you. If this sounds challenging, not to worry. Our short video explains Kubernetes pod networking on AWS and can answer many of the questions you may have. We’ve also included some great examples to help guide you.

Want to learn more about Calico Enterprise? Check out these resources.

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A Place for Things and Things in Their Place

This morning I was going to go for a run and I needed to find a rain jacket to keep from getting completely soaked. I knew I had one in my hiking backpack but couldn’t locate it. I searched for at least ten minutes in every spot I could think of and couldn’t find it. That is, until I looked under the brain of the pack and found it right next to the pack’s rain cover. Then I remembered that my past self had put the jacket there for safe keeping because I knew that if I ever needed to use the pack rain cover I would likely need to have my rain jacket as well. Present me wasn’t as happy to find out past me was so accommodating.

I realized after this little situation that I’ve grown accustomed to keeping my bags organized in a certain way both for ease of use and ease of inspection. Whether it’s a hiking backpack or an IT sling bag full of gadgets I’ve always tried to set things up in simple, sane manner to figure out how to find the tools I need quickly and also discover if any of them are Continue reading

How Peering and Infrastructure Development Improved Connectivity in Kenya, Speeding Economic Growth

The country can become a continental digital leader with strengthened Internet Exchange Points (IXPs).

In January this year, Internet users in Kenya reached 22.86 million, a 16% jump from 2019. A leap that was made with no major impact on network quality and speed, and no increase in connectivity costs. Between 2012 and now, the percentage of mobile broadband subscribers increased 100-fold to cover nearly 42% of the country’s population, while the price of data decreased by 50%. This would have been unimaginable a decade ago when around 70% of the country’s traffic went through Europe.

A recent Internet Society report shows IXPs played an important role in this success. The report shines a light on how the combination of peering and Internet infrastructure development improved connectivity in Kenya. It discusses how Kenya was able to localize Internet traffic – from 30% in 2012 to 70% in 2019 – by growing its IXP membership, through attracting local, regional, and international networks, including popular Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). This allowed the local networks to efficiently exchange regional and international traffic without incurring major additional costs.

The report reveals how informed stakeholders and the local technical community in Kenya Continue reading

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