Transferring pictures with DStar

I’ve successfully experimented with sending pictures using the data portion of D-Star.

I did it in multiple ways, starting with the simplest and ending with the longest path (though not most complex).

Equipment is an Android phone, a Kenwood TH-D74, and an ICom IC-9700.

Simplex

First I did it the simplest way, using simplex between the radios.

You install the ICom RS-MS1A app (sigh, yes that’s the kind of useful naming scheme they have). You’d think this app is needed for the ICom radio, but no. The IC-9700 has Picture mode built in. I used this app for the Kenwood D74.

You start the app, select “Others (Bluetooth)”, and select the D74.

On the D74 you need to:

  1. Press 1 to go into VFO mode
  2. Select the right frequency
  3. Set the mode to digital (DV/DR)
  4. If it’s DR, switch it to DV in the digital menu.
  5. In the digital menu, switch it to DATA

Annoyingly, unlike the native picture mode in the IC9700, setting DATA mode on the D74 will not allow any voice transmission at all.

On the IC9700, just set the right frequency, switch to DV mode, and select Picture from the menu.

I won’t go into detail Continue reading

Commit to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Every Day

Commit to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Every Day

The world is waking up
Protesting in the name of Black Lives Matter.
Reading the book “White Fragility”.
Watching the documentary “13th”.

The world is waking up to the fight against racism and I couldn’t be happier!

But let’s be clear: learning about anti-racism and being anti-racist are not the same things. Learning is a good first step and a necessary one. But if you don’t apply the knowledge you acquire, then you are not helping to move the needle.

Commit to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Every Day

Since the murder of George Floyd at the hands/knees of the Minneapolis police, people all over the world have been focused on Black Lives Matter and anti-racism. At Cloudflare, we’ve seen an increase in cyberattacks, we’ve heard from the leadership of Afroflare, our Employee Resource Group for employees of African descent, and we held our first ever Day On, held on June 18, Cloudflare’s employee day of learning about bias, the history and psychological effects of racism,, and how racism can get baked into algorithms.

By way of this blog post, I want to share my thoughts about where I think we go from here and how I believe we can truly embody Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Continue reading

The Dollars And Sense Of Nvidia Paying A Fortune For Arm

Back in April, when we were talking with Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang about the datacenter being the new unit of compute, we explained that we were always disappointed with the fact that Nvidia did not bring its “Denver” hybrid Arm CPU and Nvidia GPU, previewed way back in January 2011, to market, and said further we really wanted Nvidia to redefine what a CPU is by breaking its memory and I/O truly free from its compute. …

The Dollars And Sense Of Nvidia Paying A Fortune For Arm was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Tribal Priority Window extended to September 2 – but it’s still not enough time to connect Indigenous communities to a critical lifeline

Four men with tools building a community network in Hawaii

While Indigenous communities across the US battle some of the most brutal COVID-19 mortality rates in the country, they’ve simultaneously raced against the clock to take advantage of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to access and manage their own broadband.

The Tribal Priority Window is an unprecedented opportunity for eligible US Tribes to apply for 2.5GHz spectrum leases ahead of the federal auction. Targeted at the most digitally underserved communities in the US— where only half of housing units have access to broadband— the Window is intended to enable rural Tribes access to Internet service and the development of services to narrow the digital divide. The application process posed significant challenges to Tribes who already struggle with poor connectivity. The digital format, coupled with COVID-19 realities, has hampered their ability to file applications within the deadline.

Due to the insurmountable obstacles posed by the pandemic, Tribes and nearly 100 organizations have called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress to extend the Tribal Priority Window by 180 days.

In response, the FCC has granted them just 30 additional days to file their applications. In its order, the FCC says that this extension is due to the unusual Continue reading

Using sFlow to monitor dropped packets

Visibility into dropped packets describes instrumentation, recently added to the Linux kernel, that provides visibility into packets dropped by the kernel data path on a host, or dropped by a switch ASIC when packets are forwarded in hardware. This article describes integration of drop monitoring in the open source Host sFlow agent and inclusion of drop reporting as part of industry standard sFlow telemetry.

Extending sFlow to provide visibility into dropped packets offers significant benefits for network troubleshooting, providing real-time network-wide visibility into the specific packets that were dropped as well the reason the packet was dropped. This visibility instantly reveals the root cause of drops and the impacted connections.

Packet discard monitoring complements sFlow's existing counter polling and packet sampling mechanisms and shares a common data model so that all three sources of data can be correlated.  For example, if packets are being discarded because of buffer exhaustion, the discard records don't necessarily tell the whole story. The discarded packets may represent mice flows that are victims of an elephant flow. Packet samples will reveal the traffic that isn't being dropped and provide a more complete picture. Counter data adds additional information such as CPU load, interface speed, Continue reading

Fast Friday – Mobility Field Day 5 Edition

I’ve been in the middle of Mobility Field Day 5 this week with a great group of friends and presenters. There’s a lot to unpack. I wanted to share some quick thoughts around wireless technologies and where we’re headed with it.

  • Wireless isn’t magic. We know that because it’s damned hard to build a deployment plan and figure out where to put APs. We’ve built tools that help us immensely. We’ve worked on a variety of great things that enable us to make it happen easier than it’s been before. But remember that the work still has to happen and we still have to understand it. As soon as someone says, “You don’t need to do the work, our tool just makes it happen” my defenses go up. How does the tool understand nuance? Who is double-checking it? What happens when you can’t feed it all the info it needs? Don’t assume that taking a human out of the loop is always good thing. Accrued knowledge is more important than you realize.
  • Analytics give you a good picture of what you want, but they don’t turn wrenches. All the data in the world won’t replace a keyboard. You need to Continue reading

Network Complexity Series

A while back Nick Russo developed a video series on network complexity for the Network Collective membership community. Today we’re releasing this content free for all to consume. This is fantastic content that helps quantify how complexity impacts network performance and network design. Thanks to Nick Russo for continually providing such fantastic content to the networking community.

You can find the documents referenced in the case study videos at the publications page on Nick Russo’s website.

Nick Russo
Contributor

The post Network Complexity Series appeared first on Network Collective.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 31st, 2020

Hey, it's HighScalability time!


 

Serverless is really complex. Or is it? @paulbiggar sparked a thoughtful Twitter thread.

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Without your support on Patreon this kind of Stuff won't happen. 

Usually I pitch my book Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 here, but if you're an author with books on Amazon I'd like to ask you to give Best Sellers Rank a try. I started it to send data to me about my own books, but in the best bootstrapping tradition I extended it to work for the entire planet.

Number Stuff:

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

The HashiCorp Consul Service Comes to Microsoft Azure

The release of HashiCorp’s push to widen the scope of its managed services offerings on the cloud. The GA release of HCS on Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, said the Azure HCS release is part of HashiCorp’s shift to a more managed-services business model. “We are transitioning from being a desktop software vendor to becoming more of a cloud software vendor,” said Dadgar. Dadgar said HashiCorp opted for Azure since there is a lot of overlap between the kinds of customer organizations HashiCorp and Microsoft tend to focus on. The launch Continue reading

Automating Security with CyberArk and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Proper privilege management is crucial with automation. Automation has the power to perform multiple functions across many different systems. When automation is deployed enterprise-wide, across sometimes siloed teams and functions, enterprise credential management can simplify adoption of automation — even complex authentication processes can be integrated into the setup seamlessly, while adding additional security in managing and handling those credentials.

Depending on how users have defined them, users can craft Ansible Playbooks that require access to credentials and secrets that have wide access to organizational systems. These are necessary to systems and IT resources to accomplish their automation tasks, but they’re also a very attractive target for bad actors. In particular, they are tempting targets for advanced persistent threat (APT) intruders. Gaining access to these credentials could give the attacker the keys to the entire organization.

Most breaches involve stolen credentials, and APT intruders prefer to leverage privileged accounts like administrators, service accounts with domain privileges, and even local admin or privileged user accounts.

You’re probably familiar with the traditional attack flow: compromise an environment, escalate privilege, move laterally, continue to escalate, then own and exfiltrate. It works, but it also requires a lot of work and a lot of Continue reading

Weekend Reads 073120

More than 4.7 million sources in five countries — the US, China, South Korea, Russia, and India — were used to level distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against victims in the second quarter of 2020, with the portmap protocol most frequently used as an amplification vector to create massive data floods, security and services firm A10 Networks says in its threat report for the second quarter.

Thousands of people graduate from colleges and universities each year with cybersecurity or computer science degrees only to find employers are less than thrilled about their hands-on, foundational skills. Here’s a look at a recent survey that identified some of the bigger skills gaps, and some thoughts about how those seeking a career in these fields can better stand out from the crowd.

Three standards for email security that are supposed to verify the source of a message have critical implementation differences that could allow attackers to send emails from one domain and have them verified as sent from a different — more legitimate-seeming — domain, says a research team who will present their findings at the virtual Black Hat conference next month.

We’ve tried to use GUI to simplify the YAML file. But Continue reading

Member News: Teaching Computer Science in Rural Nigeria

Computing for the people: The San Francisco Chapter has an article by a software developer using open source software and open standards hardware to teach computer science skills to students in rural Nigeria. Chioma Ezedi Chukwu, founder of the STEMTeers mentorship program, writes that open source is more than free tools, software, or hardware. “It was a great opportunity to learn, learn by building and create with innovation.”

Coding for kids: Meanwhile, the Pacific Islands Chapter highlights a hackathon for kids event at a childcare center in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. The goal of the event, focused on design thinking, was to equip the students with lifelong skills in the digital age.

Supporting e-learning: In other education-related news, the Uganda Chapter is focused on helping teachers and students improve their digital skills as the country embraces e-learning following the COVID-19 pandemic. “Educators need to adjust their teaching methods to cope with the new changes,” an article says. “Educators should be able to cause change or affect the learner beyond the chalk and blackboard while learners need to be taken through an adaptability process as they transition to digital education.”

Tracking the virus: The Chapter in the Continue reading

Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless

Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless
Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless

This week we’ve talked about how Workers provides a step function improvement in the TTFB (time to first byte) of applications, by running lightweight isolates in over 200 cities around the world, free of cold starts. Today I’m going to talk about another metric, one that’s arguably even more important: TTFD, or time to first dopamine, and announce a huge improvement to the Workers development experience — wrangler dev, our edge-based development environment with all the perks of a local environment.

There’s nothing quite like the rush of getting your first few lines of code to work — no matter how many times you’ve done it before, there's something so magical about the computer understanding exactly what you wanted it to do and doing it!

Making magic: Reimagining Developer Experience for the World of Serverless

This is the kind of magic I expected of “serverless”, and while it’s true that most serverless offerings today get you to that feeling faster than setting up a virtual server ever would, I still can’t help but be disappointed with how lackluster developing with most serverless platforms is today.

Some of my disappointment can be attributed to the leaky nature of the abstraction: the journey to getting you to the point of writing Continue reading

Cisco urges patching flaws in data-center, SD-WAN gear

Cisco has issued a number of critical security advisories for its data center manager and SD-WAN offering customers should deal with now.On the data center side, the most critical – with a threat score of 9.8 out of 10 – involves a vulnerability in the REST API of Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) could let an unauthenticated, remote attacker bypass authentication and execute arbitrary actions with administrative privileges on an affected device.Cisco DCNM lets customers see and control network connectivity  through a single web-based management console for the company’s Nexus, Multilayer Director Switch, and Unified Computing System products.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco urges patching flaws in data-center, SD-WAN gear

Cisco has issued a number of critical security advisories for its data center manager and SD-WAN offering customers should deal with now.On the data center side, the most critical – with a threat score of 9.8 out of 10 – involves a vulnerability in the REST API of Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) could let an unauthenticated, remote attacker bypass authentication and execute arbitrary actions with administrative privileges on an affected device.Cisco DCNM lets customers see and control network connectivity  through a single web-based management console for the company’s Nexus, Multilayer Director Switch, and Unified Computing System products.To read this article in full, please click here

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