Take a Network Break! Aruba targets the enterprise edge with Aruba ESP and AI, Intel grapples with new attacks against secure enclaves in its chips, and MIT walks away from negotiations with an academic publisher over open access to journals. Three tech companies rethink the sale of facial recognition technology to U.S. police forces, the Wi-Fi Alliance praises the FCC Chair, and more tech news and commentary.
No more tweets for you: Twitter has removed 170,000 accounts it says are tied to a coordinated pro-China campaign, BBC.com reports. A core network of nearly 24,000 accounts along with 150,000 “amplifier” accounts were among those removed, the company said. The accounts were pushing pro-communist messages while criticizing protestors in Hong Hong.
No more Zoom for you: Meanwhile, video conferencing giant Zoom has shut down the account of a pro-democracy activist on the request of the Chinese government, The Independent writes. The account was closed after Zhou Fengsuo and other activists held a digital event commemorating the 1989 Tienanmen Square Massacre. After criticism, Zoom reactivated the account.
Closing the gap: Sub-Saharan Africa is the Internet’s next frontier, writes Forbes contributor Miriam Tuerk. “Expanding network connectivity across sub-Saharan Africa will open up digital services that many of us now take for granted,” she says. “Mobile Banking, WhatsApp chatting and video, e-health, e-education are key services only possible with reliable internet connectivity.”
Where’s the WiFi? The state of Michigan has launched a map of free WiFi hotspots in an effort to aid residents without Internet access during the COVID-19 pandemic, WKZO.com reports. “While public Wi-Fi hot spots are not a Continue reading
Why do we need another routing protocol in the datacenter? And why not use optimised BPG or ISIS? Tony Przygienda introduced and explains a new routing protocol written with current DC needs in mind; Routing in Fat Trees or in short RIFT.
In this blog post we’ll explore three tricks that can be used for data science that helped us solve real problems for our customer support group and our customers. Two for natural language processing in a customer support context and one for identifying attack Internet attack traffic.
Through these examples, we hope to demonstrate how invaluable data processing tricks, visualisations and tools can be before putting data into a machine learning algorithm. By refining data prior to processing, we are able to achieve dramatically improved results without needing to change the underlying machine learning strategies which are used.
Know the Limits (Language Classification)
When browsing a social media site, you may find the site prompts you to translate a post even though it is in your language.
We recently came across a similar problem at Cloudflare when we were looking into language classification for chat support messages. Using an off-the-shelf classification algorithm, users with short messages often had their chats classified incorrectly and our analysis found there’s a correlation between the length of a message and the accuracy of the classification (based on the browser Accept-Language header and the languages of the country where the request was submitted):
How are new technologies adopted in the Internet? What drives adoption? What impedes adoption? These were the questions posed at a panel session at the recent EuroDiG workshop in June.
For those that follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m an avid runner and post some of my experiences there. My current goal is to become a sub 20 minute 5km runner, which is turning out to be an aggressive goal. I’m probably at around 22 minutes right now. As I always do, I try to learn from different areas of life and cross apply that, to also what I do in IT. When you think about it, it’s not that different! Things I’ve learned from trying to become a better runner, that you can apply in your IT training.
Plan – The saying “failing to plan is planning to fail” is quite accurate. Many runners don’t have a plan and end up just running around the same pace every training session. That leads to mediocre results. The same is true when trying to become better at something in IT. You don’t always need a super detailed plan, but you need a plan. A certification is one of the tools to help you build that plan.
Discipline – A plan is no good if you don’t materialize it. Sometimes it’s tough, and you don’t feel like living Continue reading
There’s nothing wrong with promoting network automation, or infrastructure-as-code concepts, and Matt Oswalt and his team did an awesome job with NRE Labs (huge “Thank you!” to whoever is financing them), but is that really all NRE should be?
For many years I have been a keenly interested participant in the meetings organised by the DNS Operations and Research Community, or DNS OARC. This time around its most recent meeting headed into the online space. Here's my impressions of the material presented at the online DNS OARC 32a meeting.
The Open Switch 0.4.0 is the legacy Open Switch version with Cisco like CLI that I used to use in my tutorials. As it can be downloaded anymore, I share the VMDK image below. Please, use the image for learning or demonstration purpose only because this Open Switch version is discontinued. Instead, use the Open Switch […] Continue reading...
Last week I posted a tweet about a Kubernetes networking puzzle. In this post, we’ll go over the details of this puzzle and uncover the true cause and motive of the misbehaving ingress.
Puzzle recap
Imagine you have a Kubernetes cluster with three namespaces, each with its own namespace-scoped ingress controller. You’ve created an ingress in each namespace that exposes a simple web application. You’ve checked one of them, made sure it works and moved on to other things. However some time later, you get reports that the web app is unavailable. You go to check it again and indeed, the page is not responding, although nothing has changed in the cluster. In fact, you realise that the problem is intermittent - one minute you can access the page, and on the next refresh it’s gone. To make things worse, you realise that similar issues affect the other two ingresses.
If you feel like you’re capable of solving it on your own, feel free to follow the steps in the walkthrough, otherwise, continue on reading. In either case, make sure you’ve setup a local test environment so that it’s easier to follow along:
Over the past couple of decades, we've constructed two quite distinct online environments. There is the enterprise network which is commonly encountered at physical workplaces, and there is the consumer network which has been deployed across residential domains. The result is that many observed characteristics of the network have patterns that reflected the differences between these work and home environments. But what happened when the at-work workforce was sent home to work? What can the DNS tell us about the Lockdown?
