text stringlengths 234 589k | id stringlengths 47 47 | dump stringclasses 62 values | url stringlengths 16 734 | date stringlengths 20 20 ⌀ | file_path stringlengths 109 155 | language stringclasses 1 value | language_score float64 0.65 1 | token_count int64 57 124k | score float64 2.52 4.91 | int_score int64 3 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sytek Inc developed NetBIOS in 1983 as an API (a specification proposed for using it as an interface to communicate by software parts) for software contact over IBM PC LAN networking technology. The Network Basic Input/Output System (NetBIOS) was at first introduced by IBM (a company, which is running IT consultation and computer technology business to access LAN resources. Since its creation, NetBIOS has developed as a starting point for a lot of other networking applications including International Business Machines, for example: Sytek (API). This Basic Input/Output system serves as an interface specifications to access the networking services.
NetBIOS, as a specific software layer is developed to connect a network’s operating system with a specific hardware.LAN. NetBIOS improved form is allowed certain programs written with the NetBIOS crossing point to work on the token ring structural design, offered by IBM. NetBIOS provides to the network relevance “hooks” set to perform inter-application messaging and data transferring. In basic sense, NetBIOS can let applications to talk to networks. NetBIOS regulate the crossing point between network applications and LANs operating capabilities for the purpose to detach an application program from hardware reliance.
Computers within a NetBIOS LAN are known by a name because every computer that is active inside network has its own permanent name involuntary. These names are utilized in identifying the network resources. Application programs utilize them for starting and as well closing sessions Computer systems in such LAN environment made communication by starting a session but this task is also done with the use of NetBIOS datagram and even using broadcast methods. Sessions let a large message in data form to be sent over the network. These are also performed the duty of error detection and after that correcting them. Such communication is performed on one-to-one basis. But methods as datagram and broadcast let one system to message in a limited message size to many other computers over the NetBIOS network, simultaneously, and without starting any session. Another limitation of datagram and broadcast methods is that no error detection or correction is possible if going to use them.
Commonly used NetBIOS is supported Ethernet, TokenRing, in addition to IBM Networks. It also support: connection oriented communication as TCP and as well connectionless communication like UDP. It can uphold broadcasts and multicasting methods. Three services as: Naming, Datagram, and Session are supported by NetBIOS as well.
The NetBIOS suffix (NetBIOS End Character or endchar) can be NetBIOS name’s 16th character and the purpose of such character use is to specify the record or service type for the registered name record. The number of record types is limited to 255. However, in actual use the number of commonly used NetBIOS Suffixes can be substantially smaller. The most common NetBIOS Suffixes (in hexadecimal format) are mentioned below and these are at this time used by Microsoft WindowsNT.
- <computername>00UWorkstation Service
- <computername>06URAS Server Service
- <computername>22UExchange Interchange
ASCII value of NetBIOS names 16th character can be described as:
- 00: Workstation Service
- 20: File Service/Host Record) | <urn:uuid:8695c43a-5561-453d-b1f7-0cd2a593a3dc> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://howdoesinternetwork.com/2012/netbios | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280888.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00367-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91928 | 684 | 3.375 | 3 |
In this article, learn about these concepts:
- Character codes and code pages
- How character sets work with Windows clients
- Conversion code libraries
- Configuring Samba for internationalization
This article helps you prepare for Objective 312.6 in Topic 312 of the Linux Professional Institute's (LPI) Mixed Environment specialty exam (302). The objective has a weight of 1.
To get the most from the articles in this series, you should have an advanced knowledge of Linux and a working Linux system on which you can practice the commands covered in this article. In particular, this article assumes that you have a working knowledge of Linux command-line functions and at least a general understanding of the purpose of Samba as covered in Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments): Concepts. To perform the actions described in this article, you must have the Samba software installed. In addition, you should have the GNU Compiler Collection libraries installed along with network and Internet access. A Windows client in the network will be helpful for testing non-English naming.
If you're in a mixed environment, chances are your users prefer to work with files and directories in their own locale. A locale is simply a set of parameters that define a user's language, country, and any other preferences the user may use and view in the computing environment. When software is able to perform in a user's locale, it's commonly referred to as internationalization, or i18n.
Say you're browsing directories on your computer using Nautilus in Linux or Windows Explorer in Windows and come across a directory named 01100001 01110000 01110000 01101100 01101001 01100011 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011. Or perhaps the computer displays the directory as 97 112 112 108 105 99 97 116 105 111 110 115 or 61 70 70 6C 69 63 61 74 69 6F 6E 73. Unless you are into reading binary, decimal, or hexadecimal or have a translator on hand, you would never know that that directory is a shared directory by the name of applications. Your computer does understand numbers, however. In fact, numbers are all your computer understands.
Thankfully, you don't have to learn binary, hexadecimal, decimal, or any other numbering system just to use the computer, because translators display readable language characters. At the basis of this translation is the character code. A character code is the representation in numeric form of a particular character mapping from numeric to a particular character. Table 1 shows the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character codes for a given directory.
Table 1. ASCII character codes for a directory named "applications"
This example is helpful if your locale works with ASCII. However, with the globalization of computer networking, more users want to work in their locale.
Take a step back in time for a moment to the early days of computer networking. Most software was developed with English in mind. As such, computers used an English character representation from standard ASCII with no problem. Standard ASCII assigns a single-byte character in the English language to a numeric value, such as 0 to 127 in decimal format. As the need expanded to include more characters and symbols, such as those found in French, Spanish, and mathematical equations, an extension to ASCII was included. This extension gives an additional bit to include 128 more characters, with values in the range of 128 to 255 in decimal format. Some of these common extensions to standard ASCII include ISO Latin I, Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC, which IBM uses), and Extended ASCII (used by Microsoft and the DOS operating system).
But what if a particular user environment prefers Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Slovak, or another language for which ASCII characters are insufficient? Working with these type of non-English locales is where the various code pages can help.
A code page is a mapping of numbers to specific characters as defined by a set of characters (repertoire) intended for use in a particular locale or locales. A code page has traditionally been known as codepage, encoding, charset, character set, and coded character set. Although technically the various names could have slightly different meanings, this article uses the terms code page, character set, encoding, and charset interchangeably.
Languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Slovak, and many others have code pages. Table 2 presents some of the commonly used code pages.
Table 2. Common code pages
|850||MS-DOS Latin 1 (Western European)|
|932||MS-DOS Japanese Shift-JIS|
|852||Central European languages that use Latin script|
|1252||Windows Western European Language|
|950||MS-DOS Traditional Chinese|
Working with name spaces in a non-English environment
Because Samba version 2.x had no support for Unicode, all language character set support in file names use a particular locale code page. Older Windows clients use single-byte code pages (as opposed to multi-bytes). However, there is no support in the Server Message Block (SMB)/Linux Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol for code conversion. Thus, you should use the same charset when Samba communicates with an older Windows client.
If your environment dictates the use of a specific code page, you need to know the basic meaning of a few Samba-specific terms:
- UNIX charset. The character set that Linux uses internally
- DOS charset. The character set Samba uses when communicating with older Windows clients
- Display charset. The character set used for screen display
iconv is installed on your Linux computer (which it most likely is),
you can determine the available code pages by using the
command, as shown in Listing 1.
Listing 1. Partial listing of available code pages
[tbost@samba ~]# iconv -l The following list contain all the coded character sets known. This does not necessarily mean that all combinations of these names can be used for the FROM and TO command line parameters. One coded character set can be listed with several different names (aliases). 437, 500, 500V1, 850, 851, 852, 855, 856, 857, 860, 861, 862, 863, 864, 865, 866, 866NAV, 869, 874, 904, 1026, 1046, 1047, 8859_1, 8859_2, 8859_3, 8859_4, 8859_5, 8859_6, 8859_7, 8859_8, 8859_9, 10646-1:1993, 10646-1:1993/UCS4, ANSI_X3.4-1968, ANSI_X3.4-1986, ANSI_X3.4, ANSI_X3.110-1983, ANSI_X3.110, ARABIC, ARABIC7, ARMSCII-8, ASCII, ASMO-708, ASMO_449, BALTIC, BIG-5, BIG-FIVE, BIG5-HKSCS, BIG5, BIG5HKSCS, BIGFIVE, BRF, BS_4730, CA, CN-BIG5, CN-GB, CN, CP-AR, CP-GR, CP-HU, CP037, CP038, CP273, CP274, CP275, CP278, CP280, CP281, CP282, CP284, CP285, CP290, CP297, CP367, CP420, CP423, CP424, CP437, CP500, CP737, CP775, CP803, CP813, CP819, CP850, CP851, CP852, CP855, CP856, CP857, CP860, CP861, CP862, CP863, CP864, CP865, CP866, CP866NAV, CP868, CP869, CP870, CP871, CP874, CP875, CP880, CP891, CP901, CP902, CP903, CP904, CP905, CP912, CP915, CP916, CP918, CP920, CP921, CP922, CP930, CP932,
You can use the
locale command to display the current
locale of the computer. If you need to change your locale, check with your
distribution's documentation for the location of the locale file. If you do change your
locale, a reboot is required after the change. Listing 2 shows
an example default locale for a computer running Linux.
Listing 2. Default locale (Unicode UTF-8) of a Linux computer
[tbost@samba ~]# locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL=
In Listing 2, notice that locales are represented as names that are easy to understand (as opposed to many of the code page naming conventions).
Working with character sets
The older DOS code page methods that Windows version 9x and Samba 2.x use can support extended character sets but not in multiple combinations. For example, Spanish, English, and French cannot be used together. Keep this restriction in mind if you are faced with the challenge of supporting multiple locales within these environments.
If you upgrade from Samba 2.x to Samba 3.x or change Samba's default locale after previously using a non-English locale, you may find many files that have special characters in the file name are now unrecognizable. Typically, these names will manifest as a garbled sequence of characters. This usually happens with umlauts and accents, because these characters were particular to the code page that was previously in use.
If you intend to name your Samba server using non-English characters, make sure the locale Samba that is using is the same as the locale on the Linux computer. This is where the UNIX charset directive performs an important role in the proper setting for the Samba configuration.
Using code conversion libraries
libiconv) is a GNU-licensed
program that converts from one encoding to another. Samba relies on
iconv being installed on the Linux computer and having
the necessary character set conversion routines. Although these conversions are not
always flawless, the tool performs its job fairly well.
If there is a mismatch in the character set, it will most likely result in a display of
random sequences of unreadable characters. However, a specific character that
is not supported among the same code pages for a Linux or Windows computer will
likely output a question mark (
?) for the unsupported
character code. In these scenarios, errors are usually logged in the Samba log file,
which could provide additional insight to the root of the issue. In such instances,
you need to delve a bit deeper into how character codes are converted using specific
code pages on the Samba server.
It may also be necessary to build the
libiconv library to
support a specific code page or apply a patch when complex multi-byte characters
are used, such as those in Japanese. If your locale is for the Japanese language,
you may have additional work building the
and then applying an available patch. CP932 (also known as
Windows-31J) is the Microsoft code page used for
libiconv library contains a CP932 converter
that converts Windows code page 932 to Unicode. However, a patch is needed to
make correct conversions. Listing 3 shows the code for using
such a library.
Listing 3. Patching, compiling, and installing the libiconv library for CP932
[tbost@samba ~]# wget http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.13.tar.gz [tbost@samba ~]# wget http://www2d.biglobe.ne.jp/~msyk/software/libiconv/libiconv-1.13-cp932.patch.gz [tbost@samba ~]# tar -xvzf libiconv-1.13.tar.gz [tbost@samba ~]# cd libiconv-1.13 [tbost@samba ~]# gzip -dc ../libiconv-1.13-cp932.patch.gz | patch -p1 [tbost@samba libiconv-1.13]# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/lib/libiconv [tbost@samba libiconv-1.13]# make [tbost@samba libiconv-1.13]# sudo make install [tbost@samba libiconv-1.13]# /usr/local/lib/libiconv/bin/iconv -l | egrep -i '(-31j|-ms)' EUC-JP-MS EUCJP-MS EUCJP-WIN EUCJPMS
The sequence of steps in Listing 3 is as follows:
- Download the
- Download the patch for CP932.
- Decompress and untar the
- Change the directory to the newly created libiconv-1.13 directory.
- Configure the directory using the /usr/local/lib/libiconv directory as the location in which to install the files.
- Compile the source code, and then install the tool using sudo permissions.
- Verify the patch has been applied.
Converting existing files and directories
To maintain consistency with naming, you may want to convert the names from one
character set to another if directories and files have already been named using
a previous character set. The
convmv tool, written
in Perl, does a nice job of converting from one character set to another.
The code in Listing 4 downloads the compressed tarball, and
then extracts its contents. Because
convmv is a
Perl script, no compilation is necessary. The final command instructs
convmv to recursively convert all files in iso-8859-8
(Latin/Hebrew) to Unicode UTF-8.
Listing 4. Converting file names with convmv
[tbost@samba /]# wget http://www.j3e.de/linux/convmv/convmv-1.14.tar.gz [tbost@samba /]# tar -xzvf convmv-1.14.tar.gz [tbost@samba /]# cd convmv-1.14 [tbost@samba convmv-1.14]# sudo ./convmv -f iso-8859-8 -t utf8 -r --notest --replace /applications
Configuring Samba for internationalization
Starting with Samba version 3, Unicode is the default encoding, which enables internationalization support with no configuration changes—provided that all clients can successfully negotiate Unicode. However, if you use Samba 2.x or when Samba has older Windows clients on the network, you must adjust the Samba configuration file, instructing it to use your locale.
When the appropriate character-conversion libraries are installed, configuring Samba for internationalization is straightforward. Keep in mind that the CIFS protocol supports non-English character sets across the wire and should not require changes.
Enabling character sets
Suppose you want to configure Samba 3 for Spanish Windows client support. If you want to configure a different language locale, use the appropriate DOS and UNIX charset parameter options. Otherwise, the configuration should be the same.
To enable character sets, complete these steps:
- As a best practice, create a backup of the smb.conf file.
- Open smb.conf in your favorite text editor.
- In the global settings, add the following directives:
#======================= Global Settings ======================= [global] dos charset = CP850 unix charset = ISO8859-1
The configuration settings above provide an example for using code page 850 on the Windows clients, while the Samba server's locale is set to IS08859-1. Your configuration will most likely use a different code page and locale.
- Test the new configuration for any syntax or unsupported character set
[tbost@samba /]# testparm -v Load smb config files from /etc/samba/smb.conf rlimit_max: rlimit_max (1024) below minimum Windows limit (16384) Processing section "[homes]" Processing section "[printers]" Loaded services file OK. Server role: ROLE_STANDALONE Press enter to see a dump of your service definitions
Loaded services file OKmessage should be returned. If any warnings or errors appear that relate to character set conversion, make sure
libiconvsupports the desired character set.
- Restart Samba or reload the configuration file.
Now, try to connect to a Windows client, and browse for directories containing an accent or other non-English character:
[tbost@samba /]# smbclient -U tbost //windowsclientname/applications Enter tbost's password:
windowslcientname is the NetBIOS name of the
Windows client in your network, while
is the shared directory on the Windows client. Once you are connected to the
share, navigate to a directory listing containing non-English characters, and
verify that they are displayed correctly.
- Review a listing of IBM code page identifiers, and learn more about how IBM categorizes code pages for various languages.
- Review a listing of Microsoft code page identifiers, and learn more about the available Windows code pages for various languages.
30 of the Samba manual discusses Unicode with Samba 3.x and patching
iconvfor Japanese language support.
- Learn about enabling SWAT for internationalization support in the Samba manual, and use SWAT to manage non-English environments.
Learn about GNU
libiconv, and understand a bit more how it converts character sets.
- At the LPIC Program site, find detailed objectives, task lists, and sample questions for the three levels of the LPI's Linux systems administration certification. In particular, look at the LPI-302 detailed objectives and the tasks and sample questions.
- Review the entire LPI exam prep series on developerWorks to learn Linux fundamentals and prepare for systems administrator certification based on LPI exam objectives prior to April 2009.
- Exam Preparation Resources for Revised LPIC Exams provides a list of other certification training resources maintained by LPI.
- In the developerWorks Linux zone, find hundreds of how-to articles and tutorials as well as downloads, discussion forums, and a wealth of other resources for Linux developers and administrators.
- Follow developerWorks on Twitter, or subscribe to a feed of Linux tweets on developerWorks.
- Stay current with developerWorks technical events and webcasts focused on a variety of IBM products and IT industry topics.
- Attend a free developerWorks Live! briefing to get up to speed quickly on IBM products and tools as well as IT industry trends.
- Watch developerWorks on-demand demos ranging from product installation and setup demos for beginners to advanced functionality for experienced developers.
- Get involved in the My developerWorks community. Connect with other developerWorks users while exploring the developer-driven blogs, forums, groups, and wikis. | <urn:uuid:54d64bfc-1cb2-4493-bde7-d2d6fa2e70c2> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-lpic3-312-6/index.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284411.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00091-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.821999 | 4,327 | 3.171875 | 3 |
BXLE has three parameters.
ex. BXLE 3,4,LOOP
Basics:The first two are registers while the last one is a memory location.
The second operand is an even-odd register pair.
Defn: The instruction stands for Branch on Less than or equal to.
In the given example register 3 should have the contents of an address location and similarly register 5 (hidden in the even-odd register pair) will have contents of an address location. Register 4 will have a value that serves as a count for incrementing.
The contents of register 3 is incremented by the value in register 4 and the result is compared with the contents of register 5. If the result is less than or equal to the contents of register 5 a branch takes place to the location pointed by the third operand (LOOP).
A practical example is where you store the starting address of an array in register 3 and the ending address of the same array in register 5. Considering that each element of the array is of the same lenght, store the length of element in register 4.
Hope this explains. | <urn:uuid:7a3b1e83-29c9-4750-a6c0-47cfcc5e5b0a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://ibmmainframes.com/about2852.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280308.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00395-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.893829 | 234 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Three California cities are becoming green heroes in the state's struggle to preserve dwindling water supplies and stop the destructive effects of water mismanagement. Healdsburg, Newport Beach and Petaluma have implemented the WeatherTRAK smart water management solution to conserve water at parks and other landscaped sites.
City leaders are paying particular attention to landscapes because they consume the majority of non-agricultural water and are typically over-watered by 30-300 percent.
Last year, the City of Healdsburg reduced water use and costs by 28 percent over the previous year after replacing ordinary irrigation controllers installed at parks and a high school with WeatherTRAK smart controllers. Park Superintendent Matthew Thompson explained, "We're proud of how much water we've saved. It's one thing for a city to talk about going green and another to report real results."
The city is now rolling out smart water management to nine additional sites to increase water savings.
Like Healdsburg, the city of Petaluma launched its smart water management initiative at nine city-maintained sites. After seeing water use reduced by 24 percent, the city council moved quickly to install WeatherTRAK smart water management systems at 27 additional locations including the grounds of a police station and museum.
Petaluma also installed the systems at 73 residences. Water use at these homes dropped 35 percent compared to the historical five-year average, saving 3.2 million gallons. Mayor Pamela Torliatt said, "We're very excited about the water savings we're achieving with the WeatherTRAK controllers. The WeatherTRAK team has partnered with us at every step to keep our program smooth-running while we meet sustainability objectives."
Water waste contributes to energy waste and in turn to global warming. For every one million gallons of water four million watt hours of power are expended and 5,360 pounds of C02 are emitted into the atmosphere.
Overwatering has other harmful effects. Each day millions of gallons of landscape water runoff laden with fertilizers, pesticides and other pollutants threaten oceans, wildlife breeding grounds and public health. This urban runoff also causes property damage, resulting in liability and repair costs for local governments and private property owners.
In late 2006, the City of Newport Beach initiated an innovative smart water management program to help protect marine life at Crystal Cove State Beach from urban runoff. More than 600 WeatherTRAK smart controllers installed in watershed areas of the city are reducing runoff by nearly 20,000 gallons per month. A citywide water conservation education campaign is helping to raise public awareness of the direct link between watering landscapes appropriately and protecting local ecosystems.
The WeatherTRAK solution is proven to save four times more water than any other technology. The system eliminates waste by dynamically adjusting water output based on plant needs and changing local weather. Automation also boosts the productivity of landscape maintenance teams since workers no longer need to adjust irrigation systems manually when the weather changes. Cities can redirect maintenance efforts and costs to more critical infrastructure projects.
Chris Spain, president and CEO of HydroPoint Data Systems, said, "Healdsburg, Newport Beach and Petaluma are taking decisive action to address our water crisis and global warming. Their savings are impressive -- millions of gallons of water and watt hours of power as well as significant decreases in carbon footprint and runoff." Spain added, "Other cities looking for a way to lighten the financial and environmental burdens of water mismanagement should follow their lead." | <urn:uuid:04cc7894-f29e-4858-8c22-8c8712fe03a9> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.govtech.com/products/Three-California-Cities-Launch-Smart-Water-Management.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280308.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00395-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925993 | 701 | 2.703125 | 3 |
A Practical View of NIST's Cloud Definition
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created a cloud definition that has been well-accepted across the IT industry. NIST was mandated to assist government agencies to adopt cloud computing for their IT operations. As part of their mandate, NIST created multiple working groups to define cloud computing, its architecture, and requirements. In this paper we explore the center core of NIST's cloud definition.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has created a robust, comprehensive cloud definition that has been well-accepted across the IT industry. It covers five essential cloud characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models. Spanning two pages of text, it initially seems overwhelming. Yet this cloud definition is very effective in establishing clear boundaries and scope for cloud computing. It can be used to filter the overly hyped cloud marketing literature to better understand the business value of true cloud services. This white paper examines NIST's cloud definition in detail with real world case study examples to illustrate how it is applicable to today's cloud market landscape.
At the request of the federal CIO Vivek Kundra, NIST was mandated to assist government agencies to adopt cloud computing for their IT operations. As part of their mandate, NIST created multiple working groups to define cloud computing, its architecture, and requirements. In this paper we explore the center core of NIST's cloud definition (document Special Publication 800-145), which has been well accepted throughout the IT industry across vendors, service suppliers, IT organizations, and customers.
Overview of Cloud Definition
The NIST cloud definition is a comprehensive description of the essential defining quality of cloud computing. They define it as:
"Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models."
This paper will elaborate and further illustrate how this is applicable in the current environment of the cloud computing industry. In the next several sections, we will state the NIST definition, elaborate on the key principles, and provide some case study examples.
There are five key attributes of a true cloud service. While there may be some variations in certain cases or environments, a cloud service should adhere to these traits.
NIST's five essential characteristics are:
1. On-demand self-service
NIST defines this as:
"A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider."
This is a key attribute of a true cloud service. A customer must be able to request the usage of a cloud service through an automated interface (such as a web portal, kiosk, mobile app, etc.) without the need to speak with a middleman or sales person. The consumer can request this at any time. This feature should also enable the consumer to cancel the usage of a cloud service at any time. From the consumer's perspective, engaging a cloud service and releasing a cloud service should be as convenient and hassle free as possible. For example, there should be no need to speak with a call center representative or request/release a cloud service only during working hours.
2. Broad network access:
NIST defines this as:
"Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations)."
A true cloud service must be accessible and usable through a broadly available communication network. Generally speaking, it means that as long as a consumer has Wi-Fi, broadband, or landline network connectivity, then he/she can utilize the cloud service. There should be no location dependency for the cloud service. Furthermore, a cloud service should be accessible with minimal dependency on the device used for accessing the cloud service. | <urn:uuid:18ed045c-1a5d-4e9d-bd83-7c08ef9dde6a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.globalknowledge.com/ca-en/resources/resource-library/white-paper/a-practical-view-of-nists-cloud-definition/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279923.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00331-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916334 | 842 | 2.625 | 3 |
Wikipedia Considers Coloring Untested TextRegistered Wikipedia users may soon have access to software that colors text deemed untrustworthy.
In an effort to enhance the reliability of Wikipedia content, the WikiMedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, is weighing whether to offer an opt-in tool for registered users that colors untrustworthy text.
The software, WikiTrust, is available as an extension to the MediaWiki platform, upon which Wikipedia runs. It's a project developed by UC Santa Cruz professor Luca de Alfaro, and computer science grad students B. Thomas Adler and Ian Pye.
Reached in Buenos Aires, where Wikimania 2009 has just wrapped up, de Alfaro says that the timing of an experimental trial remains under discussion. The purpose of the trial, he says, will be to gather community feedback about the utility of the tool.
Despite its name, WikiTrust can't directly measure whether text is trustworthy. "It can only measure user agreement," said de Alfaro. "That's what it does."
Wikipedia remains a target for vandals, pranksters, and anyone with a motive to manipulate entries. The online encyclopedia's community of editors is constantly on the lookout for accidental and deliberate changes that introduce bias to articles.
In an e-mail, Jay Walsh, head of communications for the WikiMedia Foundation, says that the WikiTrust code is being reviewed by the organization's technology team and that the timing of a trial, if it happens, has not been determined.
"The Foundation is looking at a number of quality/rating tools for Wikipedia content, and for our other projects," he explained in an e-mail. "Many are as simple as 'rate this article' features, and some, like WikiTrust are experimental and more unique in their ability to examine other data to render some context on the article. In all cases we will deeply consult with our community of developers and editors before implementing any technology."
While users may make trust decisions based WikiTrust, de Alfaro said that the software should also be useful as an anti-vandalism tool.
Vetting Wikipedia content for reliability could enhance scholarly acceptance of the online encyclopedia. De Alfaro says that he expects WikiTrust will be used to help identify reliable content for distribution to schools.
"It's always frowned upon to use Wikipedia as something you cite because the content is variable," he said.
Register for Interop New York and gain a complete understanding of the most important innovations in Interop's comprehensive conference and expo, where you'll see the full range of IT solutions to position your organization for growth. At the Jacob Javits Center, Nov. 16-20, 2009. Find out more and register. | <urn:uuid:6a095ff8-9fe4-4f66-af6a-4ca0aacae595> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.darkreading.com/risk-management/wikipedia-considers-coloring-untested-text/d/d-id/1082714 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280319.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00239-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921248 | 552 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Understanding what makes an SSD different than an HDD is vital for any VAR hoping to sell SSDs to their clients. So here is a short breakdown of what makes SSDs different – and better.
How they work: A SSD is basically a package of memory chips; typically the same ones as are used in common flash memory cards. This means that SSDs have no moving parts, and they do not require any power to retain data on the chips once it has been recorded there.
One benefit of SSDs: Data fragmentation is not an issue. It doesn’t matter if data from a single file are stored side-by-side or in different locations.
The reason: Unlike an HDD, an SSD doesn’t have lots of moving parts that have to get from one area of its storage to another to retrieve data. It’s all done electronically. There is some ‘seek time’ expended, but it is some minimal as to be unnoticeable.
An HDD is a complex machine that contains multiple magnetically coated disks (platters), which spin for data access and recording. Data is either recorded to or read from the spinning platters using ‘drive heads’, which are mounted on moving arms.
The need to spin the platters and move the arms to access data is what accounts for HDD’s slow speed compared to SSDs. It is also why HDDs generate heat and need for cooling, and make noise due to all these parts being in motion.
The need for spinning and moving parts really becomes a problem when a file is fragmented on the HDD; that is, parts of it are stored in different locations on the platters. The drive has to physically search for and then read these sections, which takes time when all these moving parts are involved.
These fundamental differences explain why you can replace an older computer’s HDD with an SSD, and see remarkably improved performance. This improvement is a direct result of the SSD not spending the same amount of time as an HDD when it comes to accessing and recording data.
This is also why computers equipped with SSDs multitask better than those with HDDs. They take less time to do the same jobs.
There are other reasons why SSDs look better than HDDs when you compare them.
First is robustness: Imagine dropping a solid state digital display watch on the floor. Then imagine taking one of those expensive windup clocks in a clear glass dome, and dropping it. Smash!
In this comparison, the SDD is the solid state watch. The HDD is the glass-domed windup clock. The first doesn’t have the parts to misalign and break; the second does. (Even without the glass done.)
Second is reliability: Lacking moving parts, SSDs have a lot less to fail than HDDs do. This doesn’t mean SSDs don’t wear out. They do, because the number of read/write cycles are not infinite. Nevertheless, having no moving parts makes an SSD less vulnerable to failure, because there is less that can fail.
Third is power consumption: SSDs use up to ten times less power than HDDs. This can be a big plus when SSDs are installed in battery-powered devices such as laptop computers. Reduced power consumption can make a real difference when an employee is off-site, and not able to plug in their laptop to keep it running; especially if the laptop is older and has batteries that are not longer taking a 100% charge.
Put everything together, and SSDs are just plain better than HDDs -- hands down. This doesn’t just mean in terms of performance, but long-term value. This is because the time savings offered by SSDs add up for businesses in improved productivity and better employee morale.
What else would you include in a SSD comparison to HDD? | <urn:uuid:ce402875-a04c-4288-a275-f5c796eefc2f> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.ingrammicroadvisor.com/components/a-simple-ssd-comparison-to-hdd | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281421.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00541-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956378 | 799 | 3.15625 | 3 |
Aligning big data use cases with business objectives is the key to big data success. Every big data project revolves around a well-defined use case that organizes the data and defines the criteria. Most organizations are drowning in data and the only way to organize that data is to take a step back, assess the value of various pieces of information, and then apply those useful bits in a way that drives business. So the only effective way to apply big data is by starting with a big data use case.
The size of the digital universe is expanding at a rate of 40 percent annually, including the number of new mobile and Web users and the Internet of Things. The amount of available data is doubling every two years and by 2020 it will reach 44 zettabytes or 44 trillion gigabytes of data. And all that data can be tapped for better business decision-making, if you can design the right big data use cases.
Defining Big Data Use Cases
A big data use case provides a framework to test hypotheses and model data to deliver insights. To make data-driven decisions, you first need to apply big data use cases to organize the data.
Use cases are a means to create a context for data in order to organize it. You start with the raw data, and then aggregate it to deliver intelligence or reveal patterns from which you gain insight. Once you have the results of the analysis you apply the insight to make better business decisions in a way that has a positive operational impact. The result is value creation and better financial outcomes.
However, the whole process has to start with the right big data use case. Here are five common use cases where big data is having a significant impact:
1. Risk management and fraud detection
More big data use cases are being created to address risk and fraud. Big data breaks down data siloes within the organization to provide a comprehensive picture of real-time activity. Analytics can aggregate and parse data from multiple sources, such as credit cards, payments, deposits, and fiscal transactions, or tracking online activity, such as user logins and file access.
All activity records are aggregated in a single, big data repository for analysis, making it easy to identify fraudulent activity. Big data also is capable of automating responses, such as isolating ports or servers or redirecting suspicious traffic. And, big data can be applied to monitor data security and handle eDiscovery for regulatory compliance.
2. Brand and sentiment analysis
With online marketing, web chatter has a greater impact than ever on brand sentiment and sales. Big data makes it possible to aggregate asynchronous data (online conversations, social media, blog content) with synchronous data (sales figures, product stocking data, pricing information) to identify consumer sentiment.
Hadoop can handle real-time analytics, and break down data insights by geography, age group, gender or any other demographic criteria. Analytics can also measure changes in sentiment over time with new marketing campaigns.
3. Customer insight
Big data use cases also are ideal for determining customer behavior and preferences. Hadoop lets you build behavioral models that combine sales and social data to predict shopping behavior. Big data use cases also are valuable for assessing comparison shopping, managing the customer lifecycle, and assessing online engagement.
4. Target marketing and personalization
In addition to assessing customer behavior, big data uses cases can be used to segment target markets. Analytics can map user behavior, location, time of day, and other parameters to determine performance for a particular store or product. It also can be used to predict performance among specific customer groups or market areas.
Personalization is another big data use case application. Online marketers are continually refining their marketing programs based on online activity. Big data use cases allow them to personalize sales and marketing messages using a variety of matching identifiers, such as mapping online store behavior to in-store coupons or offers.
5. Business operations intelligence
Big data also can identify problems in business processes. Tapping machine data, for example, can generate substantial savings by identifying production problems and automating responses. For example, Intel was able to save $9 million by adding CPU tester modules and big data analytics to reduce component failures. Similarly, UPS was able to save $30 million by using big data to analyze daily truck travel routes and cut 85 million miles off delivery mileage.
These are just five types of big data use cases that can be applied to almost any operation. If you can assimilate different data types to get better answers to business problems, then you may have a perfect big data use case. What’s your biggest business challenge? Is it a big data candidate? | <urn:uuid:4567c41f-1e2d-41e8-af1b-ad1b791e9039> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.ingrammicroadvisor.com/data-center/five-big-data-use-cases-you-may-not-know-of | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281421.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00541-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.897129 | 946 | 2.625 | 3 |
Multitasking (dividing one’s time between multiple tasks during a day or week) wastes time even though a person may keep very busy. It’s driven by compromise between competing projects, but rather than please everyone, the result is increased costs and delayed completion of every project. Multitasking encourages efficiency (getting a lot done) as a priority over effectiveness (getting the right work done).
Efficiency versus Effectiveness
Efficiency and effectiveness aren’t the same thing. Keeping busy doesn’t mean that someone’s time is being used wisely – it doesn’t ensure that the right work gets done.
Switching between tasks may keep resources fully utilized, but that doesn’t mean that the most projects, or the most important projects, are completed – quite the opposite. Splitting up time between multiple masters has the strange and unexpected result of getting less done – a lot less done.
Sharing scarce resources between competing projects is a compromise that serves no one’s best interests.
The alternative to multitasking is for resources to know which project (task) is the most important and finish working on it before moving on to the second most important project or task. The alternative to bad multitasking is to have resources complete tasks before moving on to the next task. (?)
The obvious problem is deciding which tasks to complete first. Which department will be given priority? Whose projects are at the top of the list? That is where portfolio management comes in. | <urn:uuid:46cdd008-3e62-43dc-91cc-38f0d7f966fe> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://blog.globalknowledge.com/2010/12/30/implications-of-multitasking/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280128.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00020-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949089 | 311 | 2.65625 | 3 |
It's true. Most IT leaders and organizations today are trying to hack themselves secure by relying on penetration testing as the sole method to determine whether their applications are secure enough to go into production. But penetration tests can't be a primary source of assurance because they simply aren't designed to verify all of the controls in an application. (See 5 Application Security Tips)
Penetration tests are simulations of real attacks performed by expert humans armed with hacking tools. The idea is that if an application is strong enough to withstand a simulated attack by highly skilled testers, then it is strong enough for the real world. However, penetration testing is not a positive verification of all of the required security controls, which means that many important security controls will go completely untested. For example, some organizations only test external-facing applications, since they believe those are the most likely to be attacked. Others only test applications with the most critical information, that process credit cards or healthcare data.
Until you've put some serious effort into securing your applications, pen testing will offer no value.
In addition, gone are the days when web applications used simple HTTP messages that were easy to intercept and modify with tools like OWASP's Zap. Today's applications use Ajax to send asynchronous messages at a rate that is too fast for humans to tamper with. Serialized data structures using JSON and XML are difficult to reverse engineer and require special tools to modify on the fly. The custom authentication and protocols used in both mobile and HTML5 WebSocket applications create all kinds of difficulties for pen testers.
These technologies are already in use in most organizations. Individually, each of them make manual penetration testing very difficult - but combined, they make it virtually impossible. We are many years away from having security tools that can even start to allow penetration testing to work on the technologies that we use right now. This puts severe resource constraints on an industry that already has too few skilled practitioners.
Are You Trapped?
Try this simple experiment on your own organization: Take some pen-test reports and calculate the average number of vulnerabilities you find per month (vIn). Next, search your risk register or bugtracking system and calculate the average number of vulnerabilities that are closed each month (vOut). Now, you can calculate your organization's vulnerability flow (vFlow). If the vFlow is positive, you are getting farther and farther behind every month.
vFlow = vIn - vOut
Pen-testing approaches to application security create a very expensive way to gain assurance across your portfolio. On average, each vulnerability costs roughly $1,000 to discover using penetration testing and $4,000 to code, test and redeploy a fix. That means that a typical application with 20 vulnerabilities represents about $100,000 of accrued security debt. And that's *before* you consider the costs of any breaches. If your portfolio has 1,000 applications, the reactive approach is simply infeasible.
It's easy for leaders to become addicted to the metrics they get from their pen-test program, which can grow to dominate an organization's entire application security program.
Escaping the Pen-Test Trap
I've helped a number of companies break out of this reactive pen test trap and establish highly favorable vFlow rates. Rather than attempting to pen test every application, we identify the most important vulnerabilities and put specific programs in place to stamp them out across the entire application portfolio.
Here are a few key steps for IT security leaders to undertake:
- Focus: Focus on eliminating the most important risks to the business. Targeted surveys and analysis can identify the prevalence and severity of many common flaws, as well as the root causes of these problems. Focusing on these problems is the most effective way to reduce application security risk.
- Standardize: Set standards for how the organization will deal with these risks. Create architectural patterns, programming guidelines and other strategic controls. Support developers by giving them simple and strong security controls to meet these standards. Providing them these controls saves significant time and money and reduces risk.
- Simplify: Making security as simple as possible for developers is an effective way to reduce mistakes. Training developers on exactly how to build secure code and providing tool support is more effective than courses teaching hacking techniques. Development teams trained in this manner produce 70 percent less vulnerabilities than untrained teams.
- Verify: Create automated means to verify that the standards are being followed. Verifying that an application has followed a positive practice is far easier than attempting to prove that there are no mistakes. Simple tools can verify these designs and coding patterns.
Once you've done everything you can to secure an application, there is clearly value in having an independent pen testing, which can become your early-warning system for new classes of vulnerability to eliminate from your portfolio. However, until you've put some serious effort into securing your applications, pen testing will offer no value.
Jeff Williams is the co-founder of both OWASP and Aspect Security, a consulting company focused on providing application security. | <urn:uuid:b292e6ef-90b9-4d6d-a9ab-bf553c12483a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/blogs/beyond-penetration-tests-p-1174/op-1 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280801.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00414-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946185 | 1,021 | 2.625 | 3 |
Beginning in October, the city of Austin, Texas, moved to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, produced at wind farms in west Texas and purchased from a publicly owned utility company.
The city now is subscribing to approximately 400 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy, according to an announcement by the city, and officials believe Austin has become the largest U.S. city that’s consuming 100 percent renewables.
Austin Energy is acquiring the renewable energy for the city under the utility company’s voluntary green-pricing program. The renewable energy is approximately 5.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, and 2.5 cents more than the standard charge for residential customers. Austin will be locked into the green rate for 10 years, the city said.
“These subscriptions provide stability in electric costs for city of Austin operations and also take a leadership step forward in climate responsibility,” said Mayor Lee Leffingwell, who co-sponsored the 2007 Climate Protection Plan. “We are setting an important standard for U.S. cities. We hope other American communities will join us soon.”
But the program will come at a price: Projections estimate it will cost Austin city government about $6.9 million more annually, The Austin Chronicle reported late last month. The Austin American-Statesman newspaper put the cost even higher, at $8.5 million in added charges during the first year for the 12,000-person municipal government.
By transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy, the city will comply with one goal of the Austin Climate Protection Program, adopted four years ago by the City Council to reduce pollution. Prior to October, the city government was consuming a mix that included 20 percent renewables, according to The Austin Chronicle.
The city’s public utility, Austin Energy, services nearly 1 million people in Austin, Travis County and part of Williamson County. | <urn:uuid:0d7ccd41-d7d3-46a9-8523-7ddba50928b9> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.govtech.com/technology/Austin-Texas-Switches-to-All-Renewable-Energy.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280834.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00258-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947914 | 387 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Before continuing on to cover which of the various technologies – those that are part of the Next-generation Enterprise WAN (NEW) architecture as well as others – addresses packet loss and how, I think it will be worthwhile to go a bit deeper into why packet loss has such a huge impact on application performance over the WAN in the first place.
While this will not be a deeply technical explanation that would satisfy scientists, engineers and network developers, it will get into a bit more technical detail than the typical column in the series.
We spent two columns on the factors that most impact application performance over the WAN, noting that packet loss was one of the scourges of application performance over the WAN. In fact, packet loss has the greatest impact on the performance of most applications over the WAN, by design.
Why is packet loss such a killer? There are many reasons, most having to do with the nature of how TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) works, and especially how TCP does congestion control/congestion avoidance. The key issue revolves around dealing with contention for limited bandwidth.
TCP is designed to use all available bandwidth, and to use it "fairly" across flows on average. To do this, given that each end station and TCP flow doesn't know how much bandwidth is available – neither if the single flow was the only one using bandwidth end-to-end at the moment, nor in the more typical case when given multiple flows, the amount available changes moment to moment. So the sender of the TCP data needs a way to know when "enough is enough." Packet loss is the basic signal of this.
While it may be counterintuitive, TCP and routers together are designed to cause loss, and react to it in specific ways to avoid overutilization of the network and the potential of congestion collapse. Because if data offered into the network wasn't reduced when the network was highly utilized and to the point of being overutilized, then useful work, a.k.a. "goodput," would cease. Think the traffic jams you see on highways, most frequently at on-ramps and off-ramps, but occasionally across the highway itself. The goals of TCP's design are to minimize the amount of time that the highway grinds to a halt (congestion avoidance), and to react appropriately to reduce traffic at those times that it does (congestion control).
TCP packets received by the receiving station are acknowledged back to the sending station. TCP is a window-based protocol, meaning that it can have a certain amount of traffic "in flight" between sending station and receiving station. It is designed to back off and substantially reduce the amount of bandwidth offered (by half) when packet loss is observed. Further, until the lost packet is received, and acknowledged by the receiver, only limited amounts of additional packets will be offered. Even for those applications that use multiple TCP flows, the similar principle applies that only so many new flows opened/packets sent until a lost packet is received at the other end and its receipt acknowledged.
Packet loss is detected in one of two ways. For a longer transfer where just a packet or two is lost, the sender notices and reacts to the loss when subsequent packets are acknowledged by the receiver, but not the missing one. Alternatively – and more typically for new or short TCP flows – packet loss is detected by the occurrence of a "timeout": the absence of receipt of an acknowledgement of the packet. The amount of time until a "timeout" is deemed to have occurred varies typically between a couple hundred milliseconds and three seconds.
TCP is an elegant protocol designed over 40 years ago when CPU and memory for keeping state was extremely expensive, and where the design goal for the router middleboxes was for them to be stateless. This worked – and continues to work – fantastically well on high-bandwidth, low-latency LANs and on low-bandwidth, high-latency WANs. But TCP wasn't designed to work optimally in the medium-to-high bandwidth, high-latency environment that characterizes most WAN use today. TCP also wasn't designed optimally for running interactive applications (web browsing, remote desktop) across very long-distance WANs.
TCP particularly was designed so that each end station could make its decisions completely independently of every end station. This conservative approach contributes to network stability and minimization of congestion.
Because the amount of data offered into the network is reduced by half – and only increased slowly thereafter as packets received successfully are acknowledged – when a single packet loss is detected by the sending station, WAN packet loss can have a huge impact on large transfer performance.
For short flows, where one of the first few packets is lost, a single lost packet can result in significant application delay because of the need to wait for the timeout to occur.
Now, if the network is so congested that many packets are being lost, this is probably the right behavior to ensure that network conditions don't get worse still. But it frequently is too harsh a penalty for the "unlucky" WAN flow subject to that single loss.
The conservative approach taken by TCP is still pretty much the best way to address network bandwidth contention on a LAN. All these years later, however, intelligent WAN devices and technology in the middle, which have many orders of magnitude more CPU processing power and memory available than they did when TCP was first introduced, and much more CPU and memory capability relative to WAN bandwidth than even 10 or 15 years ago, can make better decisions to deliver more network stability, more efficiency, better network utilization and better application performance.
Next time we'll start to look at the ways that various WAN technologies and techniques address the impact of packet loss on application performance.
A twenty-five year data networking veteran, Andy founded Talari Networks, a pioneer in WAN Virtualization technology, and served as its first CEO, and is now leading product management at Aryaka Networks. Andy is the author of an upcoming book on Next-generation Enterprise WANs. | <urn:uuid:c00ce973-797e-4abb-9792-1c92cf332dad> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2223494/cisco-subnet/why-does-packet-loss-destroy-application-performance-over-the-wan-.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279468.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00222-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968651 | 1,249 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Consumer Electronics: Closing In on Open Source
Jan 17, 2007 4:00 AM PT
Chances are that one or more of your consumer products uses the Linux operating system. In order to find out, you'll have to look at the fine print. Manufacturers do not openly advertise with labels announcing "Linux Inside."
Linux has steadily become the operating system of choice by manufacturers of toys, video and telephone equipment, along with many things that involve hand-held devices and remote controls. The trend for using Linux began around 2002 and is gathering momentum, according to several companies that develop Linux adaptations for product uses.
"Today, we see Linux in products from watches to supercomputers," Oren Teich, product manager for open source platform developer Monta Vista Technology, told LinuxInsider. "Linux is a great operating system feature-wise. It has a better technical implementation than other operating systems. That's why manufacturers are going to Linux more than any other OS solution."
Linux used to mean the entire set of software and add-ons needed to get a computer up and running, according to Teich. That is what most people still think when they hear that a product is Linux powered.
However, the Linux OS can be used in a scaled-down version in order to run a user interface designed to better accommodate consumer products, he said. The user navigates by pressing buttons on a control panel. Monta Vista offers its own Embedded Linux version for commercial deployment in consumer products.
"Linux is a very amorphous OS. It can be a different OS on a different product," Teich claimed. "We spend a lot of time modifying the code for scalability."
Linux has a remarkable ability to be adapted and scaled to specific purposes, he said. Some vendors have their own software developers to do this. Other vendors use Linux specialty companies to develop whatever is needed.
"The ability to do this is extremely unique to Linux," noted Teich. "We can use all custom trappings available in Linux to do anything we want in one product since there is no need for compatibility with other hardware."
Vendors now start with the Linux kernel and, depending on the intended use in the particular product, they modify the kernel to run what they need, he added.
Product developers are quick to point out that Linux is often the best choice available, but not the only choice. Microsoft touts its Windows Mobile and WinCE versions as viable portable operating systems for consumer products. The Wind River appliance platform is also available.
Of course, cost factors heavily into consumer product development. Unlike other options, the Linux OS is free. The inherent costs in using it involve fees for user support of a particular distribution or the costs of scaling the Linux kernel to a particular consumer product.
"You can tailor the Linux kernel to do anything that is needed with no royalties payments," said Philip Pokorny, director of field engineering at open source software and hardware firm Penguin Computing.
Most times consumers cannot tell a product is running Linux.
"Other vendors are attracted to the open source software. It levels the playing field," offered Dr. James Bottomley, CTO for SteelEye Technology, a company that develops clustering, data replication and disaster recovery software.
Wind River is both a good example of operating system alternatives for consumer products as well as a good example of Linux's flexibility, according to Bottomley. Wind River specializes in device software optimization (DSO) by enabling companies to develop, run and manage device software. The software developer markets its own Wind River platform and also develops services around Linux.
Bottomley cited TiVo and Cisco Systems as other examples of the trend toward Emedded Linux operating systems.
"TiVo built its own software system around Linux. Cisco built onto Linux as well," he said.
Embedded Linux Movement
Embedded Linux is an adapted Linux OS using the Linux kernel that requires as little as 2MB of memory to run in a consumer product. Within the computing industry, the Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) is working to foster the use of Embedded Linux. Consortium membership includes IBM, Intel, LynuxWorks, Motorola, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Siemens and Sony.
To demonstrate the scalability of the Embedded Linux OS, Bottomley compared the Linux movement in consumer products to the different ways of measuring a piece of string. Each consumer electronics product has its own set of kernel patches, he emphasized.
"What is starting to accelerate is the amount of people working in the embedded market. This trend will continue," said Bottomley.
Monta Vista, like other Linux product makers, contributes to the development of Linux ad-ons that become standard in the industry, noted Teich.
"We try to get everybody in a particular product industry to use the same set of changes. Then these modifications become standard," he explained.
When Pokorny recently moved into his new home, he discovered that controls for the house's centralized appliance system ran on Linux. He found that reference in the fine print of the instructional manual to the control panel that the system runs on an ARM processor with the Linux kernel.
Most wireless gateways have Linux kernels in them as well, he said, adding that they are an easy and low-cost solution.
Pokorny noted that Linux meets the usability standards regardless of the application. For instance, when using Linux in business, it is better to run a standard version like Red Hat so everything is working. All of the hardware support is already provided.
In the embedded space, manufacturers need an operating system to control everything in the box. Embedded Linux does just that. In consumer devices, products need a replacement for a real-time operating system. Linux adapts well to real-time environments.
"We find Linux to be very customizable," concluded Pokorny.
According to Teich, WiFi access points all use Linux. For instance, Linksys has a Linux model -- WRT54GL. You can usually spot the Linux product because the model number will have an L as part of its designation, he said.
Other examples of Linux inside consumer products, Teich said, are in every Sony, Hitachi and Panasonic HD television and their remote controls. Samsung Electronics uses Linux and a DivX-accelerated MIPS-based SoC (system-on-chip) in its portable digital TVs.
"Linux use in these types of products is widely deployed," stressed Teich.
Linux is also used by video projector companies, especially in those products that have the WiFi computer features. Similarly, desktop speaker phones use Linux, he noted. | <urn:uuid:7d6cc8fa-84c6-4d2a-a4a4-cc684e26d595> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/mobile/55196.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282110.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00340-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942014 | 1,362 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Glossary of Dedicated Server Hosting
- a: a
- Apache: A freely available Web server that is distributed under an “open source” license.
- ASP (Active Server Pages): A simple programming language used exculsively with Windows
- ASP.NET: Originally called ASP+. The next generation of Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP).
- Bandwidth: The amount data you can transfer from one point to another in a given time period.
- Blog: Short for weblog. A personal journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.
- Browser: The software you use to access the Internet. Examples include Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.
- C++: An object-oriented programming (OOP) language that is used to create large-scale applications.
- CGI (Common Gateway Interface): A protocol that interfaces application software with a web server (or other type of server).
- Cloud: On-demand access over Internet infrastructure to shared or virtualized resources such as applications and storage. The hosted IT services can scale dynamically to increase resources due to business fluctuations.
- Colocation (or co-location) hosting: Hosting where you own the hardware, but you rent space in a data center (or colocation facility) for Internet connectivity and networking.
- Control Panel: The software that lets you access and manage your hosting account. This is where you create mailboxes, set up your message forwarding, upload and edit files, etc.
- Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs): The unique TLD (or domain suffix/extension) for individual countries, which is usually a two-letter abbreviation for the country. Find your country code.
- Cybersquatter: The illegal act of buying or registering domain names with intent to profit from another company’s existing trademark or image.
- Daemon: An application or utility that runs in the background on the server.
- Dedicated Hosting: The exclusive use of a dedicated appliance/server by just one person or business (as opposed to shared hosting).
- Domain Name: An Internet address as recognized by a web browser. When combined with a web hosting service to create a website, the domain name is integrated into a URL to become that website’s name (as opposed to its IP address, which serves more as a location). See URL for more info.
- Domain Name System (DNS): A hierarchical naming system that maintains a relationship between IP addresses and domain names by “translating” IP addresses into the more readable domain names that users enter into their browsers.
- Domain Parking: A convenient way to hold or “park” domain name(s) that aren’t being actively used. Parking that uses a placeholder featuring ads is called “monetized” domain parking.
- eCommerce (or e-commerce): A term meaning electronic shopping or commerce via the internet.
- Email or (e-mail): Electronic mail. A means of communication that transfers electronic messages from an outbox on one computer to the inbox of another.
- Expired Domain: A domain on which the paid-for period has ended without the owner submitting payment for the next term (although there is a grace period allowing the owner to renew for a short time before the name expires). Upon expiration, the name is once more placed into the pool of available names.
Questions? CHAT NOW | <urn:uuid:6c584bb8-9d26-43e3-8dae-0a110e25ff7b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.codero.com/resources/glossary | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279657.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00488-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.875496 | 716 | 3.0625 | 3 |
SMTP:- SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL
It is a protocol for sending e-mail messages between servers. Most e-mail systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; the messages can then be retrieved with an e-mail client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server. This is why you need to specify both the POP or IMAP server and the SMTP server when you configure your e-mail application. | <urn:uuid:581e2141-d794-4165-ac08-3072a333184c> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://ibmmainframes.com/about3902.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282926.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00028-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.804317 | 116 | 3.46875 | 3 |
In September 2012, a Brazilian computer engineer, Reginaldo Silva, discovered a bug that would eventually lead him to rewards from Google and Facebook. The flaw, a XML External Entity Expansion (XXE) bug, was easily targeted on domains that offer OpenID authentication.
OpenID is still popular, and it's used in many places on the Web, including Facebook. In 2012, Silva's discovery led to a $500 USD reward from Google, but his bug affects libraries implemented in Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Perl, so he continued to work on the problem. At present, Silva says that many implementations of OpenID are still vulnerable to the XXE bug.
So how did his progression lead to such success with Facebook? He explained the details in a recent blog post.
"Long story short, when you forget your password, one of the ways you can prove to Facebook that you own an @gmail.com account is to log into your Gmail and authorize Facebook to get your basic information (such as email and name). The way this works is you're actually logging into Facebook using your Gmail account, and this login happens over OpenID..."
In the case of Facebook, Silva needed to work out a way to control the Yadis discovery process (where Facebook is authorized to gather information) and make Facebook think it was talking to a legitimate OpenID provider, such as Google.
Since controlling Google was out of the question, he studied the OpenID spec, and discovered how to make Facebook issue a Yadis discovery request to a URL under his control. His attempts were successful, and the XXE bug worked. However, nothing prepared him for the level of success. Facebook's server offered read access to most everything, including the /etc/passwd file.
In Silva's words:
"By then I knew I had found the keys to the kingdom. After all, having the ability to read (almost) any file and open arbitrary network connections through the point of view of the Facebook server, and which doesn't go through any kind of proxy was surely something Facebook wanted to avoid at any cost."
Silva contacted Facebook immediately and reported the issue. He expected to turn the bug into a remote code execution flaw after he returned from lunch. However, Facebook took the report seriously, and said it triggered "notifications to our on-call employees."
A fix was deployed across Facebook's entire network by the time Silva returned from his break. It seemed his quest to do further research and develop the remote code execution flaw was over before it started. However, after investigating the matter further, Facebook determined that the issue could have been escalated to a remote code execution issue, and rewarded Silva accordingly, offering him $33,500 USD in compensation. To date, the sum represents the social networking giant's largest bug bounty payout.
In a statement Facebook said:
"At this point, we wrote back to Reginaldo to applaud him for his file read vulnerability. We discussed the matter further, and due to a valid scenario he theorized involving an administrative feature we are scheduled to deprecate soon, we decided to re-classify the issue as a potential RCE bug. We knew we wanted to pay out a lot because of the severity of the issue, so we decided to average the payout recommendations across a group of our program administrators. As always, we design our payouts to reward the hard work of researchers who are already inclined to do the right thing and report bugs to the affected vendors." | <urn:uuid:f5c7d25a-4638-4b4a-9156-d5a7d5d0f7e3> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.csoonline.com/article/2136996/network-security/researcher-rewarded--33k-for-snatching-password-file-from-facebook-s-server.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279923.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00332-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973677 | 719 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have reported the first observation of spin precession of spin currents flowing in a silicon nanowire (NW) transport channel, and determined spin lifetimes and corresponding spin diffusion lengths in these nanoscale spintronic devices. The spin currents were electrically injected and detected using ferromagnetic metal contacts with a tunnel barrier consisting of single layer graphene between the metal and silicon NW. False color atomic force microscopy image of a silicon nanowire with the four contacts used in the spin measurements. The ferromagnetic metal / graphene tunnel barrier contacts used to inject and detect spin appear as blue, the gold ohmic reference contacts appear as yellow, and the green line is the silicon nanowire transport channel. The bright dot on the end of the nanowire is the gold nanoparticle used to seed the nanowire growth. (Photo: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory) False color atomic force microscopy image of a silicon nanowire with the four contacts used in the spin measurements. The ferromagnetic metal / graphene tunnel barrier contacts used to inject and detect spin appear as blue, the gold ohmic reference contacts appear as yellow, and the green line is the silicon nanowire transport channel. The bright dot on the end of the nanowire is the gold nanoparticle used to seed the nanowire growth. The NRL research team observed spin precession (the Hanle effect) for both the spin-polarized charge near the contact interface and for pure spin currents flowing in the NW channel. The latter unambiguously shows that spins have been injected and transported in the Si NW. The use of graphene as the tunnel barrier provides a low-resistance area product contact and clean magnetic switching characteristics, because it smoothly bridges the NW and minimizes complicated magnetic domains that otherwise compromise the magnetic behavior. The team's discovery is an essential step toward the realization of highly scaled semiconductor spintronic devices. The research results are reported in the 19 June 2015 issue of Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/ncomms8541). Semiconductor nanowires provide an avenue to further reduce the ever-shrinking dimensions of transistors. Including electron spin as an additional state variable offers new prospects for information processing, enabling future non-volatile, reprogrammable devices beyond the current semiconductor technology roadmap. Silicon is an ideal host for such a spin-based technology because its intrinsic properties promote spin transport, explains principal investigator Dr. Olaf van't Erve. Realization of spin-based Si NW devices requires efficient electrical spin injection and detection, which depend critically on the interface resistance between a ferromagnetic metal contact and the NW. This is especially problematic with semiconducting NWs because of the exceedingly small contact area, which can be of order 100 nm2. Researchers have shown standard oxide tunnel barriers to provide good spin injection into planar Si structures, but such contacts grown on NWs are often too resistive to yield reliable and consistent results. The NRL team developed and used a graphene tunnel barrier contact that produces excellent spin injection and also satisfies several key technical criteria: it provides a low resistance-area product, a highly uniform tunnel layer with well-controlled thickness, clean magnetic switching characteristics for the magnetic contacts, and compatibility with both the ferromagnetic metal and silicon NW. Using intrinsic 2D layers such as graphene or hexagonal boron nitride as tunnel contacts on nanowires offers many advantages over conventional materials deposited by vapor deposition (such as Al O or MgO), enabling a path to highly scaled electronic and spintronic devices. The use of multilayer rather than single layer graphene in such structures may provide much higher values of the tunnel spin polarization because of band structure derived spin filtering effects predicted for selected ferromagnetic metal / multi-layer graphene structures. This increase would further improve the performance of nanowire spintronic devices by providing higher signal to noise ratios and corresponding operating speeds, advancing the techological applications of nanowire devices. The NRL research team includes Dr. Olaf van't Erve, Dr. Adam Friedman, Dr. Connie Li, and Dr. Berend Jonker from the Materials Science and Technology Division, and Dr. Jeremy Robinson from the Electronics Science and Technology Division. About the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory provides the advanced scientific capabilities required to bolster our country's position of global naval leadership. The Laboratory, with a total complement of approximately 2,500 personnel, is located in southwest Washington, D.C., with other major sites at the Stennis Space Center, Miss., and Monterey, Calif. NRL has served the Navy and the nation for over 90 years and continues to advance research further than you can imagine. For more information, visit the NRL website or join the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Blood-contacting implantable medical devices, such as stents, heart valves, ventricular assist devices, and extracorporeal support systems, as well as vascular grafts and access catheters, are used worldwide to improve patients' lives. However, these devices are prone to failure due to the body's responses at the blood-material interface; clots can form and inflammatory reactions can prevent the device from performing as indicated. Currently, when this occurs, the only solution is to replace the device. In a paper published in the April 13 issue of Nature Communications, investigators from Harvard report on a novel biochemical method that enables the rapid and repeated regeneration of selected molecular constituents in situ after device implantation, which has the potential to substantially extend the lifetime of bioactive films without the need for device removal. Their approach could also be used to load and release a number of material-bound constituents for controlled drug loading and delivery. Newer implantable devices have thin films with bioactive molecules and/or drugs that help prevent clots and inflammation while also enhancing device integration and local tissue repair, as well as inhibiting microbe colonization. For example, the blood-thinner heparin has been coated on the surfaces of cardiovascular devices to prevent clot formation on or within the devices. However, the newer devices have limitations. "Not only do they have a finite reservoir of bioactive agents, but the surface components of the thin films also degrade or lose their effectiveness when exposed to the physiological environment over time. Presently the only solution is to replace the entire device," said lead author Elliot Chaikof, MD, PhD, Chair of Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Dr. Chaikof is also Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, an associate faculty member of Harvard's Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering, and a faculty member of the Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Sciences and Technology. A number of approaches have been attempted to improve the stability and activity of thin-film constituents of implantable devices. But despite some progress, a surface coating that reliably retains its biological activity over extended, clinically relevant time periods has not been developed. The new approach relies on an enzyme, Staphylococcus aureus Sortase A, which catalyzes the linking of two peptide sequences. By inducing a series of mutations, David Liu, PhD, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, developed a laboratory-evolved enzyme, Staphylococcus aureus Sortase A (eSrtA), which has an enhanced catalytic activity of approximately 120-fold over the non-mutated, wild-type enzyme. eSrtA catalyzes not only linking of peptides but also breaking them apart, which it can do repeatedly. "We found that through a two-step process of removing and replacing bioactive coatings, eSrtA enables rapid, repeated thin-film regeneration in the presence of whole blood in vitro and in vivo," said Liu. "We also developed a series of new enzymes that recognize a variety of distinct peptide sequences that could be put to work in a similar manner." "But, we know that there are many questions that only further research can answer," said Chaikof. "For instance, eSrtA is a bacterial enzyme, and while there is a precedent for the clinical use of such enzymes - for example, streptokinase, uricase, and asparaginase - studies must be done to determine how immunogenic this enzyme might be." Additionally, it is unknown how often a bioactive coating would need to be regenerated, how long it would last, or whether the bioactive constituents could become inaccessible over time due to biologic processes. "Many thousands of people depend on implantable devices with bioactive constituents for their health and well-being, so finding a strategy that will ensure the long-term efficacy of these devices is of paramount importance," said Chaikof. "While this research is relatively early stage, it opens the door to a new way of approaching and addressing this clinical challenge." Explore further: Team builds implantable piezoelectric nanoribbon devices strong enough to power pacemaker (w/ Video)
Scott and Fyfe has appointed RSM Lining Supplies Global Ltd, a supplier of CIPP products, as its distributor for the range of Alphashield products in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The Alphashield range of seamless glass textiles liners has been designed for rehabilitation of small diameter pipes with multiple bends of up to 90°. ‘We are delighted to have formed a partnership with RSM Lining Supplies Global Ltd,’ said Michelle Quadrelli, business director of the Pipe Fabric Technology Division at Scott & Fyfe Ltd ‘RSM has built a strong reputation for supplying quality products into the CIPP market and we feel that they have the necessary expertise and channels to effectively bring our Alphashield range of products to the UK, Irish, Australian and New Zealand markets.’ This story uses material from Scott and Fyfe, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.
News Article | December 18, 2013
LSI has been a 33-year survivor in the hot-and-cold storage networking semiconductor industry. Storage networking chip maker LSI Corp., which has been busy acquiring other companies the past few years to gain market share, itself has been acquired. Avago Technologies, a Singapore-based company that also makes processors that power both wireless and wired communications equipment, said Dec. 17 that it will acquire San Jose, Calif.-based LSI for $6.6 billion in cash. LSI has been a survivor in the hot-and-cold semiconductor industry. It was founded in 1980 by former executives of now-defunct Fairchild Semiconductor, which also had other executives who went on to start Intel in the 1970s. LSI is the No. 1 storage networking processor maker in the world by sales. Its main competitors have been China's Marvell Technology Group, NXP Semiconductor and ST Microelectronics. To a lesser extent, LSI competes against companies such as Nvidia and Intel.To bolster itself against all those worthy market opponents, LSI over the past few years has bought small but forward-thinking companies such as solid-state storage makers SandForce, ONStor, SiliconStor and StoreAge; semiconductor maker Aquantia; and Ethernet networker Chelsio Communications.Avago, which became public in 2009, is the former Hewlett-Packard semiconductor division that was part of the spinoff business that became Agilent Technologies in 1999. Agilent and Avago subsequently separated six years later , with Avago moving its headquarters to Singapore. In 2005, it employed about 6,800 and was responsible for about a quarter of Agilent's revenue; nonetheless, it was not considered central to Agilent's plans going forward. Avago now has a market cap of about $11 billion. LSI shareholders will receive $11.15 per share from the transaction, which equates to a premium of about 40 percent from the Dec. 13 closing share price of $7.94. Shares of Avago were up more than 16 percent, to $52.75, following news of the deal.
Abstract: Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have devised a clever combination of materials -- when used during the thin-film growth process -- to reveal that particle atomic layer deposition, or p-ALD, deposits a uniform nanometer-thick shell on core particles regardless of core size, a discovery having significant impacts for many applications since most large scale powder production techniques form powder batches that are made up of a range of particles sizes. "Particle atomic layer deposition is highlighted as a technology that can create new and exciting designer core/shell particles to be used as building blocks for the next generation of complex multifunctional nanocomposites," said Dr. Boris Feygelson, research engineer, NRL Electronics Science and Technology Division. "Our work is important because shell-thickness is most often a crucial parameter in applications where core-shell materials can be used to enhance performance of future materials." Atomic layer deposition is a layer-by-layer chemical vapor deposition-based thin-film growth technique used extensively in the electronics industry to deposit nanometer-thick films of dielectric materials on devices. Combined with other deposition and shadowing masking techniques, ALD is an integral part of electronic chip and device manufacturing. The same gas-phase process can be applied in a rotary or fluidizing powder bed reactor to grow nanometer-thick films that are highly conformal and uniformly thick on individual particles. Previous research on p-ALD, patented by ALD NanoSolutions, Inc., has shown that growth of each layer during the deposition process varies with particle size, with the underlying assumption that larger particles will always have less growth. To observe this growth phenomenon, the NRL team grew alumina on nano- and micron-sized particles of tungsten and measured the shell thickness in a transmission electron microscope. Because of the huge mass/density difference of the two materials, this pairing provides maximum contrast in the electron microscope and delineation was easily distinguishable between the particle core and shell. In their research, the scientists created core and shell powders consisting of a tungsten particle core and thin alumina shell that were then synthesized using atomic layer deposition in a rotary reactor. Standard atomic layer deposition of trimethylaluminum and water was performed on varying batches of powder with different average particle sizes. "Amazingly, we found that the growth per cycle of the alumina film on an individual particle in a batch was shown to be independent of the size of an individual particle, and therefore, a powder batch -- which consists of particles sizes spanning orders of magnitude -- has constant shell thicknesses on all particles. This result upsets the current understanding of ALD on particles," said Dr. Kedar Manandhar, ASEE postdoc, NRL Electronics Science and Technology Division and leading author of the research paper. The work, published recently in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A, suggests that water, a reactant in the ALD process, is reason for the same rate of growth on different particles. This uniformity of thickness on different particle sizes in a particular batch is determined to be due to the difficulty of removing residual water molecules from the powder during the purging cycle of the atomic layer deposition (ALD) process. "Water is very sticky and it is very difficult to remove the last mono-layer from surfaces," Feygelson says. "And when you have a tumbling bed of powders, the water sticks around between the particles and results in consistent shell growth in the tumbling powder. Applications for this research demonstrate implications for use in materials like abrasion resistant paints, high surface area catalyst, electron tunneling barriers, ultra-violet adsorption or capture in sunscreens or solar cells and even beyond when core-shell nanoparticles are used as buildings blocks for making new artificial nanostructured solids with unprecedented properties. ### This research is a cross-disciplinary effort at NRL between the Materials Science and Technology Division and Electronics Science and Technology Division. The authors of the paper gratefully acknowledge Drs. Dev Palmer (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), Baruch Levush (NRL), and Fritz Kub (NRL). For more information, please click If you have a comment, please us. Issuers of news releases, not 7th Wave, Inc. or Nanotechnology Now, are solely responsible for the accuracy of the content. | <urn:uuid:09748f9c-23e2-42cc-9270-db7a95f0f683> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.linknovate.com/affiliation/division-5-technology-162614/all/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279248.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00535-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931873 | 3,420 | 2.75 | 3 |
Microsoft researchers have developed technology that allows software to use the sound of the user's own voice to speech synthesize other languages.
During an open day of demonstrations run by Microsoft Research dubbed TechFest, Microsoft researcher Frank Soong demonstrated the results of software reading out other languages including Spanish, Italian and Chinese Mandarin in the voice of Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid.
While the results could hardly be called natural sounding, they do indeed sound rather like the source voice recorded in English. Microsoft said one application is for speech recognition and translation for travellers in foreign countries.
Microsoft also suggested the software could be used to help students learn a second language by providing phrases that would be easier for the student to imitate. The prototype software needs around an hour to train in order to be able function.
Another demonstration showed how the technology could also be used to supplement English speech synthesis so that foreign language remained consistent rather than switching to another voice for place names, for example.
A report on MIT's Technology Review has a number of sound samples which demonstrate the technology while Microsoft's TechFest keynote is also available in video here, assuming you have a Windows Media plug-in. | <urn:uuid:172cd772-12bb-4540-8c13-ed7ca910f2c7> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/microsoft-research-uses-your-voice-to-speak-other-languages/028077 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280587.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00195-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93458 | 233 | 2.90625 | 3 |
What weight is considered obese or overweight?
The words obesity and overweight are generally used interchangeably. However, according to the Institute of Medicine report, their technical meanings are not identical. Overweight refers to an excess of body weight that includes all tissues, such as fat, bone and muscle. Obesity refers specifically to an excess of body fat.
It is possible to be overweight without being obese, as in the case of a body builder who has a substantial amount of muscle mass. It is possible to be obese without being overweight, as in the case of a very sedentary person who is within the desirable weight range but who nevertheless has an excess of body fat. However, most overweight people are also obese and vice versa. Men with more than 25 percent and women with more than 30 percent body fat are considered obese. The USFDA has released a chart detailing recommended weights relative to height; women should be in the lower end of their appropriate weight range, according to the chart.
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We're glad you have chosen to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy, and all links are nofollow. Do not use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation.comments powered by Disqus | <urn:uuid:958d7b0c-9200-414e-90fd-dde8a5ec3516> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.knowledgepublisher.com/article-252.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280899.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00213-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971002 | 291 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Applies to Kaspersky Small office Security 2 for Personal Computer
All network connections on your computer are monitored by Firewall. Firewall assigns a specific status to each connection and applies various rules for filtering of network activity depending on that status, thus, it allows or blocks a network activity. Firewall works based on rules of two types: packet rules and rules for applications.
Packet rules have a higher priority compared to the application rules. If both packet rules and application rules are applied to the same type of network activity, this network activity will be processed using the batch rules. Packet rules are used in order to restrict packets transfering regardless applications.
How to create a packet rule
In order to create a packet rule, perform the following actions:
- open the main application window
- on the upper right hand cormer of the window, click on the Settings link
- on the upper part of the Settings window, go to the Protection tab
- on the left hand part of the Settings window, select Firewall
- on the right hand part of the window, click on the Settings button
- on the Firewall window, go to the Filtering rules tab
- double-click the folder Packet rules
- click on the Add link to create a new packet rule
- specify the required parameters and click on the OK button to save the rule.
To the contents ↑
Network rule parameters
Action to be performed by the product
While creating a packet rule you can specify an action performed by Firewall if it detects the network activity:
- Process according to application rules. The packet rule is not used, but the rule for the application is used.
The Allow or Block rules can be logged. In order to do this, check the Log events box.
If you want to create a packet rule you need to set network service. Network service contains types of network activities, which are restricted according to a network rule. You can select the type of network activity or create a new by clicking the Add link.
Network service includes the following parameters:
Protocol. Firewall restricts connections via TCP, UDP, ICMP, ICMPv6, IGMP and GRE protocols. If you selected ICMP or ICMPv6 protocol, then you can specify a type and a code of ICMP packet.
Direction. Firewall controls connections with the following directions:
Inbound. The rule is for data packets received by your computer
Inbound (stream). The rule is for network connections created from another computer.
Inbound / Outbound. The rule is for inbound and outbound data packets and data streams regardless the direction.
Outbound. The rule is for data packets sent from your computer.
Outbound (stream). The rule is only for network connections created by your computer.
Remote and Local ports. You can specify ports which are used by your and remote computers for TCP and UDP protocols. These ports will be controlled by Firewall.
You can also specify network addresses. You can use an IP address as the network address or specify the network status. In the latter case the addresses will be copied from all networks that are connected and have the specified status at the moment.
You can find detailed instructions on how to set a range of IP addresses in KB6480.
You can select one of the following addresses types:
Addresses from group. The rule will be created for IP addresses from the specified range of IP addresses. Select one of the address groups. If there are no address groups you want to add, you can create a new group. In order to do this, click the Add link in the lower part of the section and in the Network addresses window that will open specify the addresses.
To the contents ↑ | <urn:uuid:1b677831-59f1-4029-9156-018bb3bb5bf7> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://support.kaspersky.com/5481 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282926.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00029-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.883945 | 775 | 3.03125 | 3 |
There is a long history of cable industry vertical integration, tracing back to the 1972 creation of HBO by Cablevision
In the 1940s, the U.S. Department of Justice put a wallop on Hollywood that would have made James Cagney, a popular movie tough guy of the era, tip his fedora hat.
The provocation came from a series of business practices prevalent among the five major movie studios of the day. At the top of the list was “block-booking,” which required that movie theaters accept and run a package of short films and features as a quid pro quo for getting rights to a single attractive release. A cousin, “blind-booking,” meant theaters had to sign up for a broad slate of releases for a forthcoming season based only on thin descriptions studios provided. Taken together, the take-it-or-leave-it practices made the nation’s 18,000 or so movie theaters little more than passive delivery vessels for grand plans drawn up in Hollywood.
How did the studios pull off these feats of business bullying?
Easy. They owned the theaters.
Or at least they owned the theaters that mattered – grand palaces like Paramount Pictures’ El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. These opulent theaters exhibited first-run movies that drew big audiences and had enormous influence on the popularity of films. At the time, Paramount controlled about 8 percent of the first-run theaters in major population centers, while Fox and Warner Bros. each accounted for about 3 percent of the total. All together, the five major studios controlled only 17 percent of the nation’s theaters, but those theaters accounted for nearly half of the industry’s film rental revenue. And by maintaining a grip on the theaters that mattered most, the studios were able to dictate terms to all that followed.
One of the intentions of the Justice Department, which began litigation against the studios in 1938, was to crack apart this system of vertical integration – common ownership both of film production and exhibition. On that count, the government was successful. After a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of the government, the studios were forced to divest their exhibition holdings, effectively ending the studio oligopoly and opening up new opportunities for non-aligned filmmakers.
But the forced divestiture didn’t spell the end of vertical integration in the film industry, or the media sector at large. To the contrary, the idea of aligning content and distribution under common ownership and control remains a widely shared ambition. In cable television, particularly, it’s a prevalent theme. The proposed combination of Comcast Corp. and NBC Universal, dramatic though it may be, is only the latest rendition.
There is a long history of cable industry vertical integration, tracing back to the 1972 creation of Home Box Office by a predecessor of the cable company, Cablevision, and including the 1995 acquisition of a controlling interest in Turner Broadcasting System by Time Warner Inc., which itself owned cable systems. When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. controlled both DirecTV and Fox Cable Networks, it was practicing the art of vertical integration. The same is true for some of the same movie studios that drew the aim of the Justice Department throughout the 1940s. Movielink, an Internet movie platform, was a joint venture originally involving MGM Studios, Paramount and Universal Studios. They not only supplied content to the venture, they controlled the delivery infrastructure that made it work.
Ironically, the Justice Department’s attack on Hollywood ended up producing a back-handed endorsement of vertical integration. Although the DOJ argued that vertical integration of film production, distribution and exhibition was illegal per se, “the majority of the court does not take that view,” according to the Supreme Court in its ruling. Instead, the court noted that the legality of vertical integration turned on a range of considerations, including whether its impact was to restrain competition rather than merely support legitimate business ambitions.
Although it broke up the Hollywood oligopoly, the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc. has contributed to the legal case for the legitimacy of media industry integration.
Not only has it given rise to modernday, technology-infused derivations such as Hulu, an online video platform owned by three television networks, it has also inspired some old-school variations. Today, for instance, if you see a movie at the El Capitan on Hollywood Boulevard, you’re taking part in a throwback to Hollywood’s golden era. Not just because the theater has been beautifully refurbished, but because its new owner, The Walt Disney Co., happens to be one of the world’s most prominent film producers. In Hollywood, that’s what they call a sequel. | <urn:uuid:9abd16e5-ecb6-401c-b01d-8a3e495137e8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.cedmagazine.com/article/2009/12/memory-lane-vertical-reality | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280410.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00086-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94869 | 976 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Every business and government is dependent upon cryptographic keys and certificates to provide trust for critical communications. These trust technologies underpin the modern world of business, establishing secure transactions and protecting access to confidential corporate data.
Unlike before, when trust could be measured in terms of locks, safes and video cameras, trust today is established in such security technologies within the enterprise network that can’t be seen, only managed. As organizations adopt cloud computing and employee-owned devices have increased access to the corporate networks and sensitive information, the challenge of securing company data everywhere increases exponentially. Cryptographic keys and digital certificates establish trust in the enterprise, ensuring that corporate data remains secure whether accessed by the employee in the cube on the second floor or by an executive in a hotel room in Singapore.
The attack vehicle
When it comes to Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), bad actors will take advantage of the trust gap – using any and every exploit that they can leverage to steal your organization’s data. They will look for the weakest link in your security systems and find the path of least resistance. Over the past several years, criminal organizations and individual bad actors have found that by taking advantage of poor key and certificate management practices that they can breach trust to infect systems with information-siphoning malware and in some cases even implant weaponized code that can inflict physical damage on facilities.
All you have to do is look back at the past few years to realize the impact trust-based attacks have had on organizations. Organized groups have been using encryption keys and digital certificates to steal information for years, as they serve as perfect vehicles for sliding past defensive systems. Case in point: Stuxnet and Flame. These two well-known examples of malware took advantage of stolen and weak certificates. Why did the actors choose this method? Compromised certificates authenticated the malware on the network making it appear as if it was legitimate code. As a result, the infected operating systems allowed the installation of the malware without any warning.
The certificate-based attack problem is ongoing and growing. In April, the Common Computing Security Standards (CCSS) forum has logged sixteen legitimate digital certificates associated with malware. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t sound too bad, but when you take into account that an average of 200,000 new malicious programs are found every day, the use of legitimate certificates becomes a very real problem that organizations aren’t ready to face. Cybercriminals have gone as far as setting up fake companies to deceive a public Certificate Authority (CA) into issuing legitimate certificates that could be used to distribute malware, as was the case with the Brazilian banking malware signed with a valid DigiCert certificate.
Does this mean that trust-based technology is broken? Not quite.
The root of the problem
While each of the above exploits demonstrates the misuse of a digital certificate, it is not the technology that is the root of the failure but the proper controls over the technology. The cybercriminals behind these exploits understand that each unmanaged and unaccounted for cryptographic key and certificate deployed in an organization is a valuable asset ripe for exploitation.
The problem is systemic, and the exposure is significant. Over half of all enterprises don’t know how many keys and certificates are in use, for instance. More than 60 percent of the organizations surveyed by Venafi at RSA 2013 would take a day or more to correct a CA trust compromise if they were attacked by digitally signed malware; it would take at least that long to respond to a compromised SSH key. Combine the inability to understand how trust is established with the incapacity to quickly respond when it breaks down, and you have the perfect environment for APTs and for sophisticated attackers to launch their exploits. The financial impact of these exploits can hardly be exaggerated.
The average global 2000 organization must manage in excess of 17,000 encryption keys – and most of the time the keys are managed manually. The first step in self-defense is to know thyself. Your organization is fully exposed to trust exploits and the consequences of targeted and persistent attacks on intellectual property if it does not have a clear understanding of its key and certificate inventory. Cybercriminals can easily collect unencrypted data within the network, so internal data should be protected in the same manner as external data—by encryption.
The lifecycle of all cryptographic keys should be securely managed with an enterprise key and certificate management solution. It’s no surprise that every organization surveyed by the Ponemon Institute for the 2013 Annual Cost of Failed Trust Report has had to respond to at least one attack on keys and certificates over the last two years.
Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents at RSA 2013 stated that they were concerned about the issuance of certificates to mobile devices outside of IT control. The same percentage of respondents were also perturbed that system administrators, who are not necessarily security experts, were responsible for encryption keys and certificates. This situation can result in security breaches, unplanned outages, or audit and compliance failures. By enforcing longer key lengths, strong algorithms, frequent rotation of keys and short validity periods for certificates, you can increase your ability to reduce the threat surface.
Only through automated management can you respond fast enough to a compromise and limit significant reputational and financial damage. With APTs leveraging trust technology weaknesses, it’s critical to have visibility into and control of enterprise key and certificate inventories. Cybercriminals understand that the easy targets are those organizations that have little visibility into their threat surface and cannot respond quickly. As an industry, we need to gain control over trust and plug the gap related to key and certificate-based exploits. | <urn:uuid:fe9a524e-b0dd-4582-a3a5-df95ae95f180> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2013/05/27/plugging-the-trust-gap/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280410.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00086-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950549 | 1,142 | 2.625 | 3 |
A telephony protocol that features prominently in the CCIE Voice and CCVP exam blueprints (as well as the real world!) is the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP). MGCP is a master-slave protocol that involves a Media Gateway Controller (MGC, the master) and Media Gateways (MGs, the slaves).
MGCP is often used in Cisco Unified Communications Manager / CallManager (UCM/CCM) networks, with UCM/CCMs functioning as the MGCs that control voice gateways (MGs).
In an MGCP network, call control intelligence, dial plan, and much of the configuration resides on the MGC, while the MGs are ‘dumb' entities that are controlled by the MGC, and provide functions such as translation between packets and signals sent and received over VoIP and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) networks. MGCs are sometimes also referred to as call agents.
MGs can be classified as either trunking gateways or residential gateways depending on the precise connectivity that they provide. MGs that terminate trunks that connect to the telephone network are referred to as trunking gateways, and MGs that provide analog connections to phones are referred to as residential gateways.
In order to really understand MGCP, you have to understand the MGCP connection model, which involves connections and endpoints.
MGCP endpoints can be found in media gateways, and they are sources or destinations for data. These endpoints can be either physical or virtual, with physical endpoints being interfaces that terminate, for example, PSTN trunks or Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) connections to phones, and virtual endpoints being, for example, audio sources in audio content servers.
MGCP connections are simply associations between endpoints for the purpose of transmitting data, and can be either point-to-point or multipoint in nature.
As previously mentioned, the MGC controls the MGs. The MGC uses a number of commands, sent on UDP port 2427, to accomplish this:
CreateConnection (CRCX): this is used to create a connection between two endpoints. A number of parameters can be specified, such as codec, bandwidth, echo cancellation, and so on.
ModifyConnection (MDCX): this command can be used to modify the parameters associated with a connection.
DeleteConnection (DLCX): this is used to terminate a connection.
EndpointConfiguration (EPCF): an MGC can send this message to a gateway in order to specify the signal encoding to be received by an endpoint. Encoding for audio calls could be mu-law or a-law.
NotificationRequest (RQNT): an MGC sends this message to instruct a gateway to inform it when certain specified events, such as off-hook and on-hook, take place.
Notification (NTFY): used by a gateway to inform the MGC when events that the MGC specified in the NotificationRequest have taken place.
RestartInProgress (RSIP): the gateway uses this message to inform the MG that it is taking an endpoint or group of endpoints out-of-service or returning an endpoint or group of endpoints to service.
AuditEndpoint (AUEP): the MG sends this message to a gateway to find out information regarding endpoints.
AuditConnection (AUCX): this is used by the MGC to find information about connections.
If you are wondering how these commands are used in the real world, then take a look at these examples of a Cisco voice gateway being brought in service with a UCM/CCM call agent, and a sample call flow involving a voice gateway which is controlled by a UCM/CCM (call agent).
Before finishing this description of MGCP, it is important to mention MGCP PRI/BRI backhaul. MGCP PRI/BRI backhaul is a configuration in which ISDN Q.921 signaling is terminated on a gateway, but Q.931 signaling is transported using UDP port 2428 to the MGC for processing. Here's an illustration of MGCP PRI backhaul to a UCM/CCM call agent. | <urn:uuid:3ed55894-00fe-4800-9b37-18548d5572fd> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2344172/cisco-subnet/ccie-voice-ccvp-objectives--3--media-gateway-control-protocol--mgcp-.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281426.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00388-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908006 | 876 | 2.875 | 3 |
News Article | April 28, 2016
SpaceX may soon land on the surface of Mars and it is expected to happen in the next two years, Elon Musk announced. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, plans to land an unmanned spacecraft on Mars as soon as 2018 with the assistance of NASA – a ground breaking partnership between both public and private sectors. The announcement on Twitter revealed an ambitious timeline for a daunting mission to land the spacecraft on the Red Planet. Dubbed Red Dragon, the Dragon 2 spacecraft will be launched by the Falcon Heavy rocket. The privately handled space company will send one of its Dragon spacecraft on a test flight to Mars, where it could gather valuable data and information on landing large payloads on the planet's surface without parachutes or aerodynamic decelerators. "SpaceX is planning to send Dragons to Mars as early as 2018. Red Dragon missions will help inform the overall Mars architecture that will be unveiled later this year," the company said on its Facebook page. "These missions will help demonstrate the technologies needed to land large payloads propulsively on Mars." The Red Dragon spacecraft measures about 20 feet tall and 12 feet wide. It will not carry astronauts during its mission but will land on Mars to shed light on its ability to reach remote destinations in the solar system. In a separate Tweet, Musk also said the spacecraft is designed to land anywhere in the solar system and its mission on the Red Planet will serve as its first test flight. Musk added that the new Dragon won't be suitable for longer missions as its internal volume is only about the size of an SUV. SpaceX tested Dragon 2's SuperDraco propulsive landing system at its McGregor, Texas facility which plays a pivotal role in the spacecraft's Mars landing in the future. Musk is expected to reveal the detailed plans for the Mars Colonial Transporter (MCT) at the International Astronautical Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico this summer. © 2016 Tech Times, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Menezes P.T.L.,State University of Rio de Janeiro |
La Terra E.F.,MCT
Near Surface Geophysics | Year: 2011
In the present work, high-resolution ground magnetic data are used to unveil the structure of the Regis kimberlite pipe, which is located in a well-known diamondiferous province in the central portion of Brazil. The main tectonic feature of the area is a NW-SE major crustal fracture zone, extending for more than 3000 km within Brazil, along which Regis and several other kimberlite pipes have intruded. The area is located at low magnetic latitude (inclination approximately 27° south) and the ground magnetic anomaly associated with the Regis pipe appears as an isolated asymmetric dipole-like source caused by magnetization primarily in the direction of the Earth's magnetic field. We inverted this high-resolution magnetic data set in order to recover the 3D effective susceptibility model of the studied pipe. We obtained an asymmetric conical-shaped strongly magnetized body (35 × 10 -3 SI units) extending from 50-720 m depth. Prior to the inversion, the data were upward continued to 30 m above the surface to attenuate high-frequency noise and mitigate inversion artefacts. Our results were used to better define the subsequent drilling positions to thoroughly evaluate the economic potential of the Regis pipe. One available borehole drilled approximately in the centre of the structure corroborates our interpretation. © 2011 European Association of Geoscientists & Engineers. Source
Sotomane C.,DSV |
Asker L.,DSV |
2011 IST-Africa Conference Proceedings, IST 2011 | Year: 2011
Accurate short term load forecasting is crucial for efficient operations planning of electrical power systems. We present a model for automatic forecasting of the short term (24 hours) electrical power consumption in Maputo, Mozambique. The proposed model is based on analysis of historical records of power consumption combined with information about additional factors that influence the consumption. The data is clustered into segments with the objective of identifying similar consumption patterns. These consumption patterns are then correlated with weather conditions and used to construct an automated prediction model for load forecasting. Today these forecasts are made manually by experts at Electricidade de Moçambique (the local power company) using conventional methods. The automated prediction model that was developed in this project presents an accurate and consistent complement to manual prediction and is currently being evaluated for the possibility of augmenting the manual forecasts with additional information. © 2011 IIMC LTD. Source
Agency: National Science Foundation | Branch: | Program: SBIR | Phase: Phase I | Award Amount: 99.95K | Year: 2006
This Small Business Innovative Research Phase I project aims to develop and demonstrate a compact and portable chlor alkali generator for emergency response operations. A portable system that uses an electrochemical reactor to generate chlorine and caustic soda efficiently in a compact manner will be developed. These products may be combined to produce hypochlorite giving the emergency responder a range of chemical reactants produced on-site that can be used for disinfecting water or decontaminating surfaces. During the Phase I program, we will develop and demonstrate the compact reactor culminating in a prototype design that will be developed in a Phase II follow-on effort. Emergency response personnel need improved methods to disinfect or decontaminate such exposed areas quickly. Of particular importance is providing improved water quality for consumption in disaster areas along with quicker decontamination of buildings, personnel, and equipment. Extensions of our compact electrochemical reactor technology may also be applied toward smaller units for disinfecting water for recreational and military soldiers.
News Article | November 9, 2015
Marine Current Turbines (MCT), the tidal energy company owned by German engineering giant Siemens has announced that it has suspended development of a planned 10 MW tidal array in Wales. | <urn:uuid:176e836f-c87d-4489-9264-8f1468c0a0a4> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.linknovate.com/affiliation/mct-938168/all/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281426.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00388-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930671 | 1,205 | 3.34375 | 3 |
With at least one candidate for president making the case for a “rigged” presidential election – rigged against him, that is – a major theme of his campaign, you can bet that there will be a great deal of oversight of the voting process by both sides.
While the discussion has so far focused on voter fraud (like votes cast by “dead people”), a much more likely scenario entails an overall failure of the voting system due to old age. Not of the voters – but of voting machines that are at great risk of failure.
What “hanging chads” were to the 2000 Presidential elections, “computer glitch” could very well be to this year’s elections, according to a recent study by the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
“Technology has changed dramatically in the last decade, but America’s voting machines are rapidly aging out,” according to the comprehensive ten-month study. “Old voting equipment increases the risk of failures and crashes — which can lead to long lines and lost votes on Election Day — and problems only get worse the longer we wait.”
While recent hacks of state voter databases and the Democratic National Committee have grabbed the headlines, the antiquated state of voting machines and voting systems across the United States could pose a much greater threat.
>See also: Inside the mind of a state-sponsored hacker
According to the 2015 Brennan Centre report (which was a follow-up to a 2014 Presidential Commission on Election Administration study), many states rely largely on electronic voting machines designed and engineered in the 1990s that have recommended lifespans of no more than 20 years – a target date that is coming due in many places.
43 states are using machines over 10 years old, and in 14 states the machines are 15 or more years old.
Older machines can also have serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today.
“Several election officials have mentioned ‘flipped votes’ on touch screen machines, where a voter touches the name of one candidate, but the machine registers it as a selection for another,” according to the report.
If (or, according to these experts, when) election results are compromised or delayed as a result of this issue, many people will undoubtedly express shock.
But in 2016, the problem of aging-out equipment that can’t keep pace with modern demands should come as no surprise; indeed, it happens all the time, at banks, government offices, airline reservation systems, etc.
One recent example – a 2014 outage at ATM machines of the Lloyd’s Banking Group three days before Christmas – was attributed directly by industry experts to aging servers that shut down because they just couldn’t cope with demand.
Even worse: A year earlier, RBS customers were shut out of their accounts, some for weeks, because of equipment failure – leading company chief executive Ross McEwan to issue a mea culpa in which he bemoaned the fact that “for decades, RBS failed to invest properly in its systems. We need to put our customers’ needs at the centre of all we do. It will take time, but we are investing heavily in building IT systems our customers can rely on. We know we have to do better.”
But the potential for failure at the election booth is much more serious.
A cash withdrawal that can’t be made or credit card purchase that can’t be processed will, of course, cost the parties involved (banks, retailers, payment processors) some money, and require time and money to fix.
But unless actual hacking is the issue, customers’ money and credit lines should remain safe. In others words, it’s a temporary problem that, hopefully, will be resolved when the system is eventually back in operation.
An election day glitch is also, arguably, a “temporary” affair – but unlike at the bank, there is no “next time.”
A large-scale election infrastructure crisis due to failed equipment could really set off a major crisis – social, constitutional, and legal – and badly shake the confidence of Americans in their electoral system, in an election year where there has been far too much strife and divisiveness already.
The real solution, of course, would be to update machines to current state-of-the-art electronic voting systems that are much more secure and accurate than the older ones – but in an era of massive spending cuts and overwhelming government debt, there is little enthusiasm among lawmakers or the public for funding a massive multi-billion dollar project like that.
Of course, if something goes terribly awry with the 2016 election, those attitudes are likely to change – but do we really want to take a chance that something will go wrong?
Until new machines are in place, voters will have to make do with the old ones – which means that authorities must do everything in their power to protect the integrity of the voting process, right now, with the little amount of time that remains before the election.
>See also: The week of the data leak
What can jurisdictions do? Well, one thing would be to interface with experts who can make solid recommendations on ways to preserve the integrity of the election.
Performing disaster recovery tests and running an analysis of the voting systems and the networks they are connected to for possible glitches should be done immediately; if any system has a potential to short out, for example, that should be discovered and remediated before the event, not after.
What happens to a vote after it is recorded? Is everything backed-up or replicated properly? Can jurisdictions be sure that all data can be fully recovered in case of a glitch or is there a chance that some of the data will be lost? Does software need to be updated and if so, how will updates affect the voting system – or will we only find out when a machine malfunctions?
Indeed, a recent study by the University of Chicago sought to list the top reasons for IT failure – and discovered that the most common reason for outages is “unknown”- meaning that IT staff had no idea why their systems broke down.
At a bank, that would be totally unacceptable; in an election, especially as fraught as this one, “unknown” factors that call into question the votes of thousands, or millions, could lead to civil disorder, or worse.
The United States can’t afford to take a chance – not this time. Any jurisdiction that has not gotten its IT house in order had better get busy, even at this late hour.
Sourced by Yaniv Valik, VP product management and customer success at Continuity Software | <urn:uuid:c34d25e6-6474-4c85-bb7e-dd6c17ca4ab9> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.information-age.com/it-outage-election-outdated-voting-system-123462989/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560283301.73/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095123-00140-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963578 | 1,389 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Late last month, we were advised that some malware used in a spear-phishing attack was signed using 512-bit RSA Web server certificates. In a recent blog post from FOX-IT, it was confirmed that the abused certificates were issued by more than one CA to more than one subscriber and it was concluded that the certificate keys had not been stolen, but had been derived from the public keys. That is, the public key was so small that a hacker could, via brute-force attack, guess the private key.
This is not how public key cryptography is supposed to work. The keys should be sufficiently large that the amount of resources and time required to derive the private key would be too large and too long to make the effort worth it. What happened?
Two things. First, some Web server administrators are still generating weak key pairs. Unfortunately, these admins are not aware of best practices with regards to key sizes for SSL certificates. In 2011, 1024-bit RSA is still allowed, but 2048-bit RSA is recommended; 512-bit RSA is definitely a no-no. The second issue is that some CAs were not checking and enforcing minimum key size requirements.
So how can a Web server certificate be used to sign malware? Don’t you need a code signing certificate to sign code? This is another problem. The way the certificate purpose is assigned is through an extension in the certificate called Extended Key Usage (EKU). There are EKUs for SSL, code signing, and S/MIME, amongst others. The certificates used in the spear-phishing attack had no EKU extension. No EKU doesn’t mean “no purpose.” It means “ALL PURPOSES.” So these so-called Web server certificates could be used to sign code. This is not caused due to a Web server admin’s error; this is caused by the CAs not restricting the usage of their certificates with an EKU.
Entrust got involved because we cross-signed a CA in Malaysia that was issuing SSL certificates with 512-it keys and no EKUs. The result was that Entrust revoked the cross-certificate and the cross-certificate was blacklisted by the browsers 1 2 3.
So, if there were other CAs that issued SSL certificates with weak 512-bit keys and no EKUs, why was the Malaysian CA singled out and blacklisted by the browsers? The fact is, Digicert Malaysia committed a trifecta of certificate issuance faux pas — weak keys, no EKU, and no revocation information. All of the other CAs were able to revoke their certificates, so the certificates would no longer be trusted.
Digicert Malaysia failed to put information in their certificates that would allow the end-user to determine whether or not their certificates were still trustworthy. This left revocation and blacklisting of their CA certificate as the only reasonable recourse.
So what can we take away from this situation?
- The SSL industry needs a common standard for all CAs to follow when issuing certificates. This standard needs to include recommendations for key size and certificate profiles. More to follow on a future post.
- Web server administrators need make sure that they are creating keys that are at least 1024-bit RSA and preferably 2048-bit RSA.
- Public CAs will correct their issuing practices, but enterprise CA operators should ensure that their CAs are configured properly as well.
- Browsers should consider building in safeguards, so that non-complaint certificates are not given the same user interface treatment as compliant certificates.
A final thought. Mistakes happen, which are expected when issuing SSL certificates. That is why the system is designed to be resilient and mitigate various security incidents. In this case, the browsers and the effected CAs worked together to resolve the issue and restore a secure state in a swift manner. | <urn:uuid:a254da31-8ea6-4445-9995-feae5a57bd2d> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.entrust.com/512-bit-certificates-abused-in-the-wild/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279248.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00536-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965828 | 802 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Definition: (1) The situation or input that forces an algorithm or data structure to take the most time or resources. (2) Having to do with this situation or input.
See also best case, average case, worst-case cost, worst-case execution time, amortized cost, complexity, randomized algorithm, worst-case minimum access, adversary.
Note: See the notes on worst-case behavior at Huffman coding and balanced quicksort and the link at BB(α) tree.
If you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please get in touch with Paul Black.
Entry modified 12 August 2014.
HTML page formatted Mon Feb 2 13:10:40 2015.
Cite this as:
Paul E. Black, "worst case", in Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [online], Vreda Pieterse and Paul E. Black, eds. 12 August 2014. (accessed TODAY) Available from: http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/worstcase.html | <urn:uuid:151bc0b3-6c4d-4fbc-b97b-da0814cdafab> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/dads/HTML/worstcase.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280718.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00040-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.825402 | 218 | 2.765625 | 3 |
Definition: A theoretical measure of the execution of an algorithm, usually the time or memory needed, given the problem size n, which is usually the number of items. Informally, saying some equation f(n) = o(g(n)) means f(n) becomes insignificant relative to g(n) as n approaches infinity. The notation is read, "f of n is little oh of g of n".
Formal Definition: f(n) = o(g(n)) means for all c > 0 there exists some k > 0 such that 0 ≤ f(n) < cg(n) for all n ≥ k. The value of k must not depend on n, but may depend on c.
Generalization (I am a kind of ...)
See also ω(n).
Note: As an example, 3n + 4 is o(n²) since for any c we can choose k > (3+ √(9+16c))/2c. 3n + 4 is not o(n). o(f(n)) is an upper bound, but is not an asymptotically tight bound.
Strictly, the character is the lower-case Greek letter omicron.
Little o is a Landau Symbol.
If you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please get in touch with Paul Black.
Entry modified 17 December 2004.
HTML page formatted Mon Feb 2 13:10:39 2015.
Cite this as:
Paul E. Black, "little-o notation", in Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [online], Vreda Pieterse and Paul E. Black, eds. 17 December 2004. (accessed TODAY) Available from: http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/littleOnotation.html | <urn:uuid:896e3a3a-cbcd-49ba-9bb3-e5c0cc26f294> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/dads/HTML/littleOnotation.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280723.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00462-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.87889 | 386 | 3.671875 | 4 |
O men, when you start to write about BGP it is probably the time then you seriously start questioning yourself where did I go with myself. That is probably the moment in which you realize that there is a network geek sitting somewhere inside you. At least that is what happened to me when I finished to write this huge post. Don’t be scared, it’s fun to know about this thing below.
Every local network is managed by his own network administrator. If the network become big enough and there are more than few sub-segments inside that network there will probably be some kind of routing protocol running inside. That routing protocol will be IGP or interior gateway protocol more probably OSPF as it’s vendor independent.
When we want to connect our network to other networks across the world, we are trying to connect it to the internet. The Internet is the network connecting most of the networks today and in that way it became the biggest inter-networking system in the world. To be able to get that huge network to function and get our LANs to act jointly there must be a routing protocol that enables it.
BGP – Border Gateway Protocol is that one.
Every individual network has his own policies that are enabling that network to behave as the administrator want. When connection networks to the internet network all those policies need to be tied together with BGP protocol in order to influence outside communication entering the local network and communications initiated from the local network going outside somewhere on the internet. This is done using more that few different BGP attributes. Those attributes are forwarded across specific prefixes. Sometimes those attributes are not only forwarded but also modified on the way, one of which is the community attribute.
As BGP communities are not decently illustrated across the Internet resources I will try to do it here hopefully whit some success.
Community attributes shortly called communities are mostly used in service provider part of the network but there are some good use cases inside our corporate network also. Those cases when they are used inside corporate network can be very creative and interesting to follow in order to get more knowledge about communities and BGP.
There are so many service providers on the world today and some of them are peered together, of course, to give the interconnection to all users. The number of providers is so big that controlling which way will some communication be directed towards the destination can be very difficult. Service providers need to have agreements so that they are able to get all the data across the Internet flowing without problems. When we summarize those agreements something like this can be said: Customers are paying to ISP to get all the prefixes so that they can access all the corners of the Internet space. Customers are also advertising their own prefix to the provider and PEERS are in agreement that they will exchange their customer prefixes to each other.
There are different kinds of methods to get to this result inside ISP BGP configuration to implement policies like that. AS path filters, Prefix filters, communities.
For the first two BGP methods of policing the prefixes (prefix and AS path filters) ISP is able to doo all of that. The thing that is causing the issue is scalability. For every net customer ISP must ensure that every new customers prefix and AS Number is added to the filters on all of the BGP edge routers. All of the BGP edge routers of that one ISP of course, but that is still probably to big number of routers.
There are TcL scripts and things like that that are ably to help and automate one portion of the configuration but that is not really a solution of this issue. The more routers there are the probability of an error, be that human or some other error increases.
Communities give us a sophisticated yet straightforward solution.
The BGP Community Attribute
Inside the Autonomous system all BGP routers are running iBGP. They are probably configured in a full mesh in order not to have routing loops. In that config all BGP-speaking routers are sending their prefixes to each of its iBGP neighbors. Okay, you can use route reflectors so that one is the chief who catches and sends the prefixes to others but the idea is the same all routers get all the info.
When we peek outside the AS – BGP Autonomous system. Routers that are connection our AS with some other AS are configured as eBGP peers.
BGP routers exchange the info about their prefixes. It means that they are telling to their neighbors about network with subnet mask, and BGP attributes. With all that info best-path selection algorithm can be performed on every router to give him the means to decide about witch routes are best to use. When update with the prefix is sent to the neighbor AS, attribute AS-PATH is updated with the number of that sending ASN. The AS-PATH is in that way used to prevent routing loops. You see, if some AS eBGP router receives a prefix update with his own ASN inside AS-PATH attribute string it will see that this prefix is trying to go in the loop as it was once before advertised across this router.
We can add community BGP attribute to every advertised prefix. For community we can say that it is a BGP transitive optional attribute. It means that other BGP autonomous systems (eBGP) routers upon receipt of some prefix with community attribute inside may not be able to recognize what it means but they will however be able to decide whether to transport it through the AS or pass it to other AS.
Community attribute is simply a 32bit value that can be glued to any prefix.
32-bit value can be written as one instance or it can be divided into two halves. First 2 bytes for your ASN and the other 2 for something else. Values 0x00000000 through 0x0000FFFF and 0xFFFF0000 through 0xFFFFFFFF are reserved for something that does not matter here for us. Today’s routers use communities in this format ASN:SOMETHING. In this convention the communities 1:0 through 65534:65535 are free for use. It is a convention that you should use your ASN number as the leading 16 bits for your own communities and communities that you are sending to other AS.
There are some communities that are defined as standard. RFC 1997 does that and it is saying that in BGP implementations those are:
- NO-EXPORT 0xFFFFFF01
- NO-ADVERTISE 0xFFFFFF02
- NO-ADVERTISE-SUBCONFED 0xFFFFFF03
NO-EXPORT is used if you want to stop your eBGP routers to send some particular prefix out to others outside your AS. One reason can be if you are sending a subnet of a large address block in order to influence external AS best-path selection with longest match. If that is what you do there are simple many subnets that you create and only few need to get outside your AS. All other you can mark with NO-EXPORT and they will get nowhere.
NO-ADVERTISE will stop a BGP router in sending tagged prefix to any BGP router including iBGP neighbors inside his AS.
NO-ADVERTISE-SUBCONFED is used to stop a prefix within a confederation.
Ok, what is the confederation?
You can make confederations of few routers inside AS and they are then like in some sort of subAS. Like if you will group the routers to AS inside AS. Normally there will be at least two confederation inside one AS and they are boring and not even used so much in provider network so there is no need to get into it here if you are not CCIE candidate. If you are, thay are not so heavy to understand, don’t worry.
There is another transitive optional attribute type, the Extended Community. It is Type 16.
Extended Community is a structured 8 octet long value. The first octet specifies the type. With that value we are defining the structure given to the remaining octets. Type field uses the first bit to differentiate whether this community is registered in Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) or in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Second bit defines if the community is Transitive or Non-Transitive. It means that you can see from second bit if the community attribute will be passed between AS or not. There are other community types defined for the first octet prepared in advance for the use as standardized. One of them is the Route Target Community. This one is used in Multiprotocol Label Switching Virtual Private Networks – MPLS VPNs. You remember: ip vrf VPN_A rd 100:1 route-target import 100:1 route-target export 100:1
Route Target Community identifies which routers may receive some specific prefix. In the MPLS VPN world you need this to select which prefixes are part of which VPN if there is more than one customer using MPLS from service provider and usually it is.
There is also another one called Link Bandwidth Community. With this one ISP can influence the best path selection. When eBGP router on our AS learns from some other AS about a prefix with this attribute attached, this router will send to every other router inside our AS that the link bandwidth to that prefix is such and such. As it’s a Non-Transitive one it’s limited to our local AS.
Intra-Autonomous System Communities
We can make a lot of things using this kind of communities. We can take ISP three basic types of neighbors and see what to do. Normally customers of a service provider want to send their prefixes only and not their peers’ prefixes. It’s complicated a little, let’s make distinction between peer, customer and transit prefix.
We will advertise each prefix to a customer, peer, or transit provider by matching communities associated with the correct policy. Look at the picture above. To all prefixes received from customers we are putting an ingress tag 100:10. From peers we are putting the tag 100:20. Prefixes from transit provider are tagged with 100:30.
And now we can control what prefix goes where using this internal community attribute attached to every prefix that we received from somewhere.
Customers by definition want to go everywhere and they are expecting from their ISP to get all the prefixes. Each BGP session that goes to our customer will be configured to send all prefixes matching 100:10, 100:20, 100:30. They will receive everything that we learned. Peer is on the other side someone who wants to get only our customers prefixes, other thing he is learning from some other peering. We will send to the peer only prefixes tagged with 100:10.
We can do a lot more using this community coding, we can also use more communities each one for something else. To get more complex vendors enable us for pattern matching on routers for specific values, ranges or even logical operators OR and NOT. There is also the possibility to match community attribute with regular expressions.
Inter-Autonomous System Communities
Using Inter-Autonomous System Communities we can influence the traffic flows and make traffic engineering to a next level without much effort. We are able to prepend AS numbers inside our advertised prefixes and also use Multi-Exit Discriminators. Multi-Exit Discriminators are not supported by all ISP-s but if they are they are enabling us to configure from which ISP will our traffic be forwarded back to our AS if we have more ISPs (multihoming). We can then decide which pipe to use for incoming (download) traffic for specific session, app etc. We can furthermore decide to advertise some particular prefix or not announce prefixes at all, modify the origin type, or use other’s ISP’s communities designed for specific use.
There are more traffic engineering signaling possibilities. One of them is to simply force adjacent AS to prepend its ASN a specific number of times for some prefix sent to customers or peers. The other example includes a request for the neighbor to drop all traffic to a specific prefix.
Used for DoS mitigation
Last example shows communities in network security role. Denial of Service – DoS attacks may break customer access to resources across the internet by sending to much connection request to their servers so they became unable to serve ordinary requests. The attack may be focused on one or more hosts and not on the whole network (basically it can be focused to particular server that attacker wants to break.
This is fancy stuff, look at this:
Administrator on that network is able to tag individual server route. When administrator detects DoS attack to his server it can simply define a prefix of /32 that is basically representing single server IP address (192.168.1.100 255.255.255.255). Administrator can use that /32 prefix with Inter-Autonomous System Communities attribute set to signal to the provider to drop all traffic that is destined for that server/prefix.
ISP upon receipt of that /32 prefix with attribute as described above selects that single IP address and routes all traffic destined for it to the NULL interface on each BGP router. This can be the best ever technique to immediately stop DoS attack to your service but it must be used with caution as from this example is clear that if that is the only ISP you are using, the requests for that server service will be dropped even for valid requests. If there is multihoming involved then is better but keep in mind that you should try to drop only the traffic that is sourced from specific source that is detected as attacker IP or attacker subnet. In DDoS attacks this can be difficult as the sources are many but this technique will stop the attack immediately even then, hopefully the attackers will then decide to attack somewhere else where fancy BGP attributes are not used J
Sometimes the ISP is also sending some communities to the customers giving them the choice to use them for some purpose if they want to. If for example, a customer has the same provider for all offices on different continents those communities can be used to deduce where the prefix is coming from. So we can see where the prefix was originated. By using this community information customer can configure his BGP to prefer, for example, UK connection rather than Greece connection for traffic destined to USA. If you look at the backbone Internet map there is logic in that UK is directly connected under the sea with USA.
If you are an administrator with rather small network environment it does not mean that you cannot benefit from BGP communities. You just need to be careful and start with a clean and structured community design and you can get most of it. Here are some suggestions, some of them from myself, some cached on different resources across the network.
For the internal communities you need to choose whether to use them or not based on the network size and the whole setup of your network. For external communities is a little more useful maybe, ISPs are offering different sort and number of communities. Some will provide nothing, some enough to tag the primary and backup links to the Internet, and others will get you a big list with all sorts of influence possibilities.
You should document all communities that you are using and be aware of all the communities that you are transporting across your AS for others if you are a transit. | <urn:uuid:d10efe9c-5541-4f4c-9063-b68c7202be34> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://howdoesinternetwork.com/2014/bgp-communities | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280888.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00370-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943545 | 3,173 | 2.515625 | 3 |
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray had similar ideas for transmitting speech telegraphically. They even filed patents on the same day.
Today, Bell is credited with inventing the first telephone and is considered one of the most influential figures in human history. Gray is best known for losing out to Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone patent.
Why is that?
The same reason Mark Zuckerberg is one of the richest and most influential people in the world and the Winklevoss twins are best known for suing Zuckerberg, claiming he stole their idea.
Vision without execution is fantasy. It doesn’t matter how great an idea is if you don’t do something with it.
Steve Jobs famously said “Real artists ship.” It’s better to ship something good and iterate on it once you’ve brought it to life than to spend years trying to make it perfect and miss your window of opportunity.
So here’s my advice:
- Talk less and do more. Turn your idea from something abstract into something concrete. Ideas aren’t useful if they just stay ideas. Mark Zuckerberg built and shipped Facebook. All the Winklevoss twins had was an idea. Think about where they both are today. Who would you rather be?
- Don’t worry about what other people think. Do your friends, family, significant other or co-workers think your idea sucks? It doesn’t matter. All great ideas are initially resisted because they change things in a big way and people are fundamentally scared of change. Don’t be discouraged if other people don’t like your idea. All that matters is that you believe in it.
- Don’t be afraid to fail. I know failure can be intimidating, but it’s better to try and fail than to never try at all. Do you really want to be on your deathbed wondering what would have happened if you had made one serious attempt at your big idea when you were younger? Or do you want to get over your fear of failure and have a go at it while you still can?
Everyone has ideas. What separates the best from the rest is the ability to execute on them. So get out there and make something!
Charlie Tibshirani is a product manager at Axcient. He first shipped something at the age of 10 when he drew a cartoon of a duck that was published in his local newspaper. | <urn:uuid:50ca1f87-e3d5-4db5-b8d7-0c865ba9f9c8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://axcient.com/blog/vision-without-execution-is-fantasy/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280899.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00214-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967561 | 507 | 2.96875 | 3 |
The inaccuracy of voting systems made headlines in 2000 when events in Florida led many to dispute the election of President George W. Bush. While technological advancements have eliminated many of the problems of voting machines, MIT News reported, a study released on Oct. 18 found that early voting by mail is much less accurate than in-person voting.
“A lot of changes over the last decade have made voting in America better,” said Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at MIT, who co-authored the new report with five colleagues at four universities. “The possibility of a [situation like Florida’s 2000 election] is much lower now than it was 12 years ago. [However,] we have possibly gotten way ahead of ourselves in encouraging people to vote by mail. It’s pretty clear that the improvement we’ve gotten by having better voting machines in the precincts may be given back by having more and more people voting at home.”
Outdated machines, like those that use punch cards and levers, have largely been replaced with more reliable optical-scan or electronic voting machines. The residual vote rate, or number of uncounted ballots, has dropped from 2 percent in 2000 to 1 percent in 2006 and 2008, the report found. However, the reported stated, “absentee voting is more prone than in-person voting to residual vote rates.”
And the more error-prone voting method is becoming more popular. In 2000, 14 percent of voters voted by mail, and in 2008, 28 percent voted by mail. “The genie may be out of the bottle,” Stewart said. “We’ve settled for convenience at the cost of accuracy and making sure that every vote counts.”
The full report on the new study can be found at MIT News. | <urn:uuid:23905fe4-6710-43b8-9d7d-dba98ccc66bc> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.govtech.com/policy-management/Study-Voting-By-Mail-Inaccurate.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280065.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00179-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971437 | 379 | 3.09375 | 3 |
For American drivers, $4-a-gallon gasoline is painful: It bites deeply into household incomes at a time when millions of people are stretched to a breaking point. But for the U.S. military, the cost of fuel is a magnitude greater--and a matter of life or death. Fuel shipments account for the majority of the supplies trucked through Afghanistan, and militants attack the convoys almost daily. At least one member of the armed forces is killed for every 24 fuel convoys that snake their way along Afghanistan's dangerous roads; hundreds of troops and contractors have died protecting the trucks. All of that ramps up the cost of a gallon of military gasoline to stratospheric levels. Gen. James Conway, the former Marine Corps commandant, estimated in 2009 that gas sometimes cost his forces $400 a gallon once all of the expenses were taken into account.
Because of the military's vast energy needs, senior Defense officials say that reducing those costs is a national-security imperative. On its own, the U.S. military is the single largest industrial consumer of oil in the world. It requires approximately 125 million barrels annually--more oil than 85 percent of the world's nations consume. Every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of crude costs the Defense Department $1.3 billion. In 2008, the year that oil and gasoline prices last reached record highs, the Pentagon spent about $20 billion on fuel alone--a burden ultimately borne, of course, by U.S. taxpayers. Energy experts predict that prices will only rise in the coming years. Meanwhile, the nation's broader dependence on oil all but ensures that the military will remain handcuffed to the Middle East, North Africa, and other volatile-but-oil-rich parts of the world.
So the Pentagon has launched an aggressive program to change all that, with a slew of ambitious plans to convert the oil-hungry U.S. military to alternative-energy sources--and, at the same time, spur creation of a commercial industry capable of producing enough renewable energy at affordable prices for civilians. The hope is that demand from a massive consumer like the armed forces could affect supply--scaling up energy production, driving down cost, and leading to technological breakthroughs for biofuels, solar panels, hybrid vehicles, and similar products. That would reduce the need for oil throughout the U.S. economy and spare the armed forces from future missions in war-torn, oil-exporting states. It's not the military's job to fight climate change, but many senior Defense officials contend that there is a clear national-security reason to do so, because government studies show that the fossil-fuel emissions behind global warming will induce food shortages, drought, and rising sea levels--inviting a world of political volatility.
The Pentagon has spawned a range of modern technologies, from the Internet (created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1969 as an internal communications network), to the GPS capability now commonly found in cars and smartphones (developed decades ago to help troops maneuver through unfamiliar terrain), to the microwave oven (which grew out of World War II microwave radar detectors). The list goes on: microchips, semiconductors, jet engines, and many other inventions were conceived and born within the military-industrial complex before the commercial economy adopted them.
So can the military-industrial complex do for clean energy what it did for the Internet, jet engines, and the microwave?
Experts in the worlds of defense, energy, finance, and policy say yes--but the hurdles are high. The Republican-controlled House, skeptical of climate change and renewable energy, isn't a fan of the Pentagon's green push. Renewable fuels are far more expensive than conventional ones, and it's not clear when (or if) prices will fall enough to compete with petroleum. The success of the entire effort depends on the Pentagon's ability to spur creation of an industry capable of producing enormous quantities of renewable energy despite largely unproven technologies and business models. The Defense Department "is in the process of playing a catalytic role with renewable energy," said Arati Prabhakar, a former director of microelectronics for DARPA who now chairs the Energy Department's Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee. "They won't be the biggest, most important market over time. But for the newest technologies, those first few percentage points of market share are tremendously important."
The rewards of sparking an industry that would transform the entire U.S. energy economy could be tremendous. But the challenges along the way will be, too. Transforming how people drive their cars and power their homes and businesses is much harder than inventing a single technology, such as digital communications, that changes the game once it is introduced. And clean energy is different from the GPS or the Internet: The private sector, not the Pentagon, is developing the underlying science. That means the military is heavily dependent on the business acumen of alternative-energy entrepreneurs and the vagaries of Wall Street, which has to decide whether to finance a company's growth plans. Although a handful of firms are already producing high-octane biofuels that can replace conventional petroleum for tankers, fighter planes, and aircraft carriers, they have yet to do it on the large scale--and at the low price--necessary to power the entire military, let alone fill up the tanks of millions of U.S. drivers.
Although investment in renewables could substantially reduce what the military pays for fuel in the long run, the up-front cost for new, often untested technologies is high--and the Pentagon will have to accept the bet that at least some of them won't work. These efforts come, of course, just as Congress wants to slash spending--a belt-tightening to which even the Defense Department won't be immune.
The move also hinges on how well the military can navigate new relationships with the small constellation of clean-tech entrepreneurs that make up the nation's nascent renewable-energy industry. Those companies, many of which are still seeking venture capital, aren't always well positioned to deal with the Pentagon's onerous, often stovepiped, and frequently lengthy procurement process.
Leading the charge through all of this is Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who has made alternative energy a cornerstone of his tenure. "We can establish a market for alternative energy because of the size and the amount of energy we use," he told National Journal.
Overall, the Pentagon is aggressively working to meet a mandate, contained in a 2007 law, to generate 25 percent of its electricity using wind, solar, and other renewable sources by 2025. What's more, the Air Force says it will buy roughly 400 million gallons of alternative fuel by 2016, enough to power half of its domestic flights, and the Navy plans to shift half of its energy usage from fossil fuels to renewable sources by 2020. Pentagon officials say that these are extraordinarily ambitious goals; they've only just begun to think about how to realize them.
At Mabus's direction, the USS Makin Island an amphibious assault ship that launches jets, helicopters, and Marine watercraft, has been outfitted with a hybrid engine--a supersized version of what's under the hood of a Prius--and the Navy is considering hybrid engines for a small fleet of its next-generation DDG-1000 destroyers. The service has also successfully powered F-18 warplanes, helicopters, and so-called swift boats using biofuels made from algae and from camelina, a flowering member of the mustard family. A pair of Marine forward operating bases in southern Afghanistan's violent Helmand province are run entirely on solar power, while a company of about 100 Marines there recently spent a month recharging their radios and GPS devices using roll-up solar panels rather than bulky batteries. (They are "logistical centers at the edge of the battlefield," according to 1st Lt. Gregory Wolf, a Marine Corps spokesman.) Overall, the Pentagon has nearly 500 renewable-energy projects and installations--and top Defense officials say they're just getting started.
Yet despite the attention that renewables are attracting, fossil fuels (chiefly oil and coal) remain the lifeblood of the nation's economy. Wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable-power sources make up less than 5 percent of the nation's electricity mix--and cost about 11 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 3 to 9 cents for such conventional power sources as coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Hybrid and electric vehicles, which dramatically cut the amount of petroleum needed for transportation, account for less than 5 percent of all passenger vehicles sold and cost 20 to 50 percent more than their conventional counterparts. A few small companies make biofuels from renewable nonfood sources, including algae and switchgrass; that fuel, however, costs $140 to $150 per barrel, compared with about $100 for a barrel of oil (although biofuel prices, like oil prices, fluctuate depending on the cost of the commodities used to produce them).
President Obama has tried to spur a transition of the U.S. economy from fossil fuels to clean energy, but his efforts have largely stalled, chiefly because of pushback from Republicans in Congress and a powerful lobbying campaign by the coal and oil industries. Sweeping climate-change legislation that would have priced fossil-fuel emissions and mandated purchases of renewable electricity--creating both demand and a market for clean energy--died in Congress and is unlikely to be revived as long as the GOP controls the House.
Clean-tech companies and venture capitalists say that the military's latest efforts come just as those firms are in desperate need of a boost from the federal government, whether through a mandate, a price signal on fossil fuels, or just a giant new customer. Companies say they need a kick-start to get the technologies close to the point of "price parity"--almost equal to the cost of fossil fuels. When that happens, these firms say, they're confident more demand will emerge. But federal help for renewables is under attack today as never before. House Republican leaders, skeptical of climate-change science and eager to slash federal spending, shoot down anything that resembles new government regulation--and they have placed the paltry clean-energy subsidies that do exist at the center of their assault on government spending.
Mabus has led meetings at the Pentagon with clean-tech companies, senior Defense officials, and Wall Street investors--intended, he said, to deliver a simple message: "We've been working with venture capitalists, we've been working with investors, saying, 'Here's the market we can bring.' We're getting a big response." This month, for example, the Pentagon's Defense Venture Catalyst Initiative invited a handpicked group of clean-tech companies to give presentations on products they believe could help the armed forces. "DOD is being hugely helpful to the industry right now," said Rob Day, a partner in Black Coral Capital, a clean-technology venture-capital firm based in Boston. "DOD is a big enough consumer that they can end up catalyzing a lot of early volume for start-ups that help them bring costs down significantly. Not least of the benefits is that DOD is obviously very credit-worthy and probably willing to engage in long-term contracts, so that kind of customer can also help unlock a lot of financing for these companies."
The military's demand for renewable energy wouldn't have nearly the effect on the clean-energy market as those economywide policies. But energy experts say that sustained demand from such a massive, unique customer could provide the crucial push needed for some clean technologies to reach the price-parity tipping point. Overall, the military consumes 1 to 2 percent of all of the energy used in the United States. That may not sound like much, but a big shift in how that percentage of power is produced could be enough to change the dynamic. "It can help spur the entire industry," said Brad Carson, director of the National Energy Policy Institute at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. "One percent is actually a massive market. It's enough to make an impact. That's enough for small start-ups to build sufficient volume to make their business viable and get into the commercial market."
Among the reasons a consumer like the military can have such a big impact: its willingness to push cutting-edge technology and a refusal to compromise on security and reliability. That can give renewable-energy companies that sell to the Pentagon a priceless advantage in convincing commercial consumers that renewables and hybrids are just as sturdy and dependable as old-fashioned fossil-fueled cars. "Because of its interest in security, DOD can spur some truly experimental technologies," Carson said. "Many of these Navy bases are looking at generating electricity from ocean waves--something that's technically doable but has never been scaled up at any level."
Still, the Pentagon is stepping into a complicated game of chicken-or-egg. For the moment, clean-tech companies selling to the military can't get the financing they need to enable them to produce tens of millions of gallons of product annually unless they can show investors that there are customers chomping at the bit for that product. But the Pentagon can't afford to buy such large quantities of biofuel until the price drops substantially. A close look at the military's recent purchases shows how much more prices will have to fall for renewable energy to compete with conventional fuel. The Navy bought 150,000 gallons of biofuels from a San Francisco-based company called Solazyme, which grows an algae that can produce synthetic petroleum, a product chemically indistinguishable from old-fashioned Texas sweet crude. Solazyme declined to say how much the algae-based fuel, which will power giant tanker ships, costs. However, people familiar with the deal said that the price is at least an order of magnitude greater than what the military pays for conventional fuel to power its jets, ships, and combat vehicles--about $3 to $4 per gallon. Another firm, Sustainable Oils, sold the Air force 200,000 gallons of camelina-based aviation fuel at an average price of $50.15 per gallon; it was used to power combat helicopters and the Green Hornet, an F/A-18F Super Hornet strike fighter. "It went 1.7 Mach," Mabus said of the Green Hornet. "The engine didn't notice the difference."
But all of that won't help Solazyme, Sustainable Oils, and similar companies create an economy of scale that could power a fleet of tankers and jets on algae or camelina for anything like an affordable price. "One of our main criteria is that it has to be cost-competitive with traditional fuel," said Kevin Geiss, the Air Force's deputy assistant secretary for energy. "I fully appreciate the industry's perspective in wanting a firm purchase commitment so they can reduce their own risk in what is a high-risk business. But the realities are that price matters.... The Air Force has given the strongest market signal of anyone about our commitment to these types of fuels. We know this is the future," he said, stressing that prices have to fall before the military can increase its green-fuel buys.
The clean-tech industry's advocates are striving to bring those prices down. Retired Gen. Charles F. Wald is working with the Aviation Fuel Alliance, a group of the nation's biggest military and commercial consumers of jet fuel (including the Air Force, Navy, FedEx, and American, Delta, Southwest, and United airlines) to push for legislation to change the military's fuel-procurement requirements; specifically, they want to extend the five-year limit on contracts to 15 years. The idea is that the military and commercial users would commit to 15-year pacts if they could get the fuel at a lower price, and those contracts would create the economy of scale that could unleash private investment in algae technology.
The Pentagon, too, has been trying to get Congress to allow it to ink longer contracts, but the push has been stalled since the George W. Bush administration. "The current commodity buy is too low to get production to scale," Wald said. "If you could send a signal to industry that this group will buy guaranteed fuel at a certain rate, comparable to the cost of oil, for 15 years, you could send the signal the market needs." Not to mention paving the way for a future in which commercial flights are powered by algae-generated biofuels.
Meanwhile, the Defense Department is also confronting a new world of energy-security threats--and clean-energy opportunities--in the form of domestic military bases that rely on the fragile, aging U.S. electric grid for power. Over the past two years, a slew of studies have raised alarms about the vulnerability of the nation's commercial electric grid, which is more than a century old in some parts of the country. A 2008 study by a Defense Science Board task force on the Pentagon's energy strategy concluded that U.S. military bases rely almost exclusively on "outside the fence" commercial power, which is "remarkably fragile" and a highly attractive target for terrorist attacks. Yet increasingly, the military is conducting remote warfare abroad from bases at home, such as Nevada's Creech Air Force Base, which operates the Predator drones over Iraq and Afghanistan. Creech is "deeply vulnerable to blackouts and cyberattacks," according to Dorothy Robyn, the deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and the environment. According to the Defense Science Board, the Pentagon's reliance on the commercial grid puts missions at risk. "A power failure at a military base here at home could threaten our operations abroad," Robyn said.
So energy officers at military bases are working to turn their facilities into "island microgrids"--entities that can generate and store their own electricity, independent of the surrounding commercial grid. The base grid is plugged into the bigger grid, but in the event of a blackout, it could continue to function on electricity generated on-site--largely from renewable sources. These include utility-scale solar arrays, backed up with advance-battery solar-power storage units and diesel generators--along the lines of the two small, all-solar bases operating in Afghanistan's Helmand province. Energy experts say that the military's approach could also offer a new model for towns and cities, protecting them from regional-grid blackouts--and boosting local renewable-energy production.
The military's push for energy independence is opening up new opportunities for companies like NanoSolar, a San Jose, Calif.-based manufacturer that is building solar generators this fall at the National Guard's Camp Roberts in California and Camp Perry in Ohio. One of the largest solar arrays in the world is currently operating outside Las Vegas, where a 140-acre field of solar panels generates electricity for both Nellis Air Force Base and the surrounding towns. "There's tremendous opportunity for solar power at DOD installations throughout the Southwest," said Brian Stone, NanoSolar's vice president of sales.
For now, the cost of solar-generated electricity is still 10 to 50 percent more than power from fossil fuels, but Stone hopes that the new military demand will lower the price--if the Pentagon changes how it buys electricity. For now, military bases make two- to 10-year purchase agreements with electricity providers. But, as with biofuel producers, solar and other renewable-source companies say that those contracts won't be enough to help them get the investment they need to grow. Only longer, 20- to 25-year contracts could be enough to bend the cost curve.
Even some of the biggest defense contractors see both challenge and opportunity in helping the military reduce its oil use. Defense giant BAE has developed prototypes of 27-ton hybrid combat vehicles--rolling tanks that carry a two-person crew and alternate between electric-battery and conventional-fuel propulsion. The firm is also working on a line of full-sized, 75-ton hybrid tanks that Mark Signorelli, BAE's vice president of ground combat vehicles, said could save the military as much as 20 percent of the fuel it now uses in giant combat vehicles, which are one of the top three fuel guzzlers in the arsenal. But the sticker price of the vehicles' propulsion systems, which BAE estimates will be in the range of $1 million to $2 million, is about 5 percent to 10 percent higher than that of standard propulsion systems, which has caused military procurers to hesitate; to date, the Pentagon has not purchased any hybrid tanks.
Signorelli says that the process is comparable to the quandary that a consumer faces in buying a new car: balancing the higher up-front cost of, say, a $28,000 hybrid Ford Fusion against the prospect of recouping the money in fuel savings two or three years down the road--and enjoying additional economy thereafter. It's a case that the car dealer has to make to the customer, and that Signorelli has to make to the military. In both situations, he says, the seller also has to demonstrate that the hybrid will be as safe and sturdy as a standard vehicle. "They want you to show them first," said Signorelli, who added that given the Pentagon's latest drive to save petroleum, his company intends to make a new pitch to the military this fall.
In some ways, however, the timing of the military's clean-energy push couldn't be worse. Because the effort will cost more at the outset, an era of budget-cutting isn't the best time to sell the proposal to Congress. And for GOP deficit hawks, any outlays that smack of clean-energy subsidies are the first target. Republicans have already sought to slash all of the Energy Department's funding for clean-energy research this year, and some want to eliminate the department altogether. Meanwhile, Republican leaders of the House Appropriations Committee want to cut $8.9 billion from the Defense Department's $538 billon request for fiscal 2012. Although that's a pittance compared with the cuts awaiting other agencies, it means that something will come under the knife, and it may well be purchases of algae-generated jet fuel, solar-power contracts, or hybrid combat vehicles.
But expect this to be one priority for which the administration pushes back hard--aided by many powerful friends at the Pentagon and on Wall Street. With Obama unable to enact any of the climate-change legislation he once envisioned, the military is the next best platform to spur the growth of a clean-energy economy--and it may be his last. | <urn:uuid:dd791ede-865a-47fe-890b-2103243253e5> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2011/05/pentagon-wants-to-spur-a-revolution-in-clean-energy/49153/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279248.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00537-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957375 | 4,604 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Halo 3 Meets Second LifeBy Chris Gonsalves | Posted 2008-01-18 Email Print
The U.S. Army enlists new virtual world video game to teach soldiers interpersonal skills and cultural awareness for combat environments like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Video games and military training are a natural fit. Any exercise that can sharpen physical reflexes and shooting skills has obvious applications for soldiers preparing for war.
For researchers at Sandia National Labs and BBN Technologies, however, the video game platform is being used to prepare soldiers for much more genteel aspects of modern warfare. Sandia's specialists in computer simulation and human interaction have developed a new interpersonal skill-building and cross-cultural awareness video game to prepare troops for difficult communication situations in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and other global hotspots.
"We are talking about training for nonkinetic engagement—interpersonal communication, negotiation skills and interpersonal rapport," says Dr. Elaine Raybourn, lead scientist on the nine-month project. "The goal is to make soldiers better thinkers and communicators under stress."
Raybourn expects 20,000 soldiers a year will be trained with the simulation game, which was funded through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dubbed "DARWARS Ambush NK!" the multiplayer simulation game will first be given to the U.S. Army for testing before being distributed to the other military branches.
Up to 64 players can participate in the new game on networked computers. While the game technology is Internet capable, Sandia officials said the military prefers to run the games on small, closed LANs with participants from a single unit all working together. Players direct their avatars through the realistic war-zone landscape while communicating with each other via headset or, as many prefer, by military field radios. Participants serve as either role players or evaluators with tasks and experiences that vary according to their role.
Instructors can create or modify scenarios, monitor training, and jump in and change the direction of the game at any time, according to Raybourn.
"They have the perspective of a typical first-person shooter," says Raybourn. "But we don't just drop them into the game. There's a lot of preparation and after-action work built into this training." The interactions practiced in the game help soldiers deal with local customs, build trust with natives in foreign war zones and equip and train locals to aid U.S. military efforts. Those skills, long the purview of special operations forces, are now in demand for many combat troops including military police, Raybourn says.
In fact, it was a similar game that Raybourn created specifically for the U.S. Army Special Forces in 2005 that led DARPA to seek her help in building the new game. The previous game, still in use by special operations soldiers at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina is a precursor to the famed live-action Robin Sage exercise which hones the Green Berets' skills in adaptive thinking, negotiation, conflict resolution and leadership in cross-cultural settings, Raybourn says.
DARPA officials had already been developing a training game with BBN Technologies, but wanted to augment the game's focus on physical elements such as improvised explosive devices and ambushes. These "nonkinetic" modules include social and cultural intelligence for a geographical area linked to key events and the traditional roles of civilians.
"DARPA wanted a thinking piece for the soldiers, to learn how to negotiate with tribal leaders, for example," Raybourn says. "When things go wrong, troops have to learn to shift how they think in environments that are potentially dangerous."
"I found Raybourn's idea of using a set of soldiers as observers and assessors particularly innovative and hope the Army can adopt it with its digital training tools," Ralph Chatham, former DARPA program manager who selected Raybourn to work on the project, said in a statement. "The Army is the only big organization in the world that has institutionalized introspection in their after-action review [AAR] process. Sergeants can talk back to lieutenants in an AAR, and both are pleased with the process. That part of the [Adaptive Thinking and Leadership] simulation game Raybourn and the team produced fits the Army perfectly."
The game's content was developed by a number of military experts from the Army's Battle Command Training Center in Fort Lewis, Wash., along with several current and former Army and Marine Corps officers with real-world experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We hope this training will help soldiers better understand the cultural environments they are exposed to and better handle difficult situations," Raybourn says. | <urn:uuid:95386237-cd8d-44be-a518-1f95bc492197> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Security/Halo-3-Meets-Second-Life | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280239.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00289-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959776 | 966 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Designing IP Addresses for Large Networks
In numerous Cisco classes, students learn about IPv4 and IPv6 address subnetting, complex subnetting, variable length subnet masking (VLSM), summarization, prefix routing, and address aggregation. These are valuable skills. In order to apply these skills efficiently, a network designer should possess one additional skill. Planning the IP address space for a Class A or B IPv4 address is necessary to apply the complex skills listed above properly. Complex subnetting, VLSM, and IP address summarization can be implemented simply and efficiently with proper planning. | <urn:uuid:43c86e47-9402-4350-b154-b09ad15243e9> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.globalknowledge.com/ca-en/resources/resource-library/white-paper/designing-ip-addresses-for-large-networks/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280239.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00289-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.894525 | 124 | 3.15625 | 3 |
Mobile communications have come a long way. Citrix Systems including XenMobile and many features such as TCP Westwood and SPDY integrated into NetScaler have played a big role. Nevertheless there is one source of irritation that causes angst among mobile clients as they roam about their day.
Standard TCP connections are not maintained when mobile devices switch from one network to another. This causes loss of state information for applications using a TCP connection that fails. For example, if the user is streaming a video on a mobile phone over a 4G network, streaming will be interrupted when connecting to a Wi-Fi system. TCP connectivity is lost and must be reestablished, causing the user to start the video from the beginning.
To ensure reliable mobile sessions when the network changes, multiple client-to-server paths for the same TCP flow are required. In most deployments today hosts and clients typically have the option of multiple network paths between them, including 3G/4G and 802.11n access. This allows the use of the optimal path for data transfer and improves the end user experience for faster data transmissions. Mobile device communications, particularly running LTE and other 4G networks, are especially enhanced.
As one would expect, the technology supporting multiple client/server paths is called Multi-path TCP (MPTCP.) This connectivity method is an extension of the TCP/IP protocol and leverages multiple paths available between MPTCP-enabled hosts and clients to maintain the TCP sessions. It is a major modification to TCP that allows these paths to be used simultaneously by a single transport connection. With MPTCP enabled, transactions can continue even if one of the network paths is not available. MPTCP offers better robustness and availability than standard TCP, because the application session does not fail if one link goes down. MPTCP is an IETF charter en-route to standardization. MPTCP has been adopted by at least one major mobile manufacturer and is expected to be broadly adopted by end of this year.
The idea behind MPTCP is to make use of the additional paths that are otherwise ignored by the routing system. Doing so can provide more bandwidth, fault tolerance and higher network utilization for network operators. MPTCP involves modifying TCP to give it the capability to send a given packet over a given path. The TCP New Reno congestion control algorithms are run separately for each path, so each has its own transmission window that reflects that path’s available bandwidth. MPTCP can send: Many packets over paths with a large transmission window and/or a small round-trip-time (RTT); and fewer packets over paths that have a small window and/or a large RTT. This way, a Multipath TCP can automatically and quickly adjust to congestion in the network, moving traffic away from clogged paths and towards uncongested routes.
NetScaler is unique among Application Delivery Controllers in their full support for multiple TCP paths. Through an integrated MPTCP Gateway feature NetScaler holds a dual TCP stack in between the service and client to help with mobility and efficient access. Initially a mobile client is switched on, and connects to the carrier network. Then the Client-MPTCP detects this network, opens a connection and NetScaler starts transmitting data over the wireless carrier network. If available the client can then detect and connect to a new Wi-Fi network. The Client-MPTCP detects this link and opens a new TCP connection. If NetScaler detects congestion on the carrier link it then dynamically sends data over Wi-Fi. The result is a seamless load distribution and path failover with faster data transmission for a superior end user experience. | <urn:uuid:293bfc7a-68ff-43ce-a299-75c2742898f4> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2013/05/28/maximize-mobile-user-experience-with-netscaler-multipath-tcp/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280718.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00041-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924073 | 744 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Gnuplot is a tool used to generate trends and graphs. It is typically used for time-series-based data gathering, but is not restricted to this; static data can also be used. Gnuplot can be run in either batch or on the fly, with the results being presented by a graphics viewer or Web browser. This article demonstrates how to use gnuplot using a batch file to generate data collected from sar and other data sources. Gnuplot is very rich in command options using the set operator. However, to generate basic graphs using line or boxes, it requires some knowledge of the documentation.
For this demonstration, I will present the graphs using a Web server.
Gnuplot converts raw tabular data into a graphic file image. Popular formats are png, pdf, and jpeg, and they can then be presented either on the fly or directly to an X terminal, Web page, or a general graphic viewer utility. The image can also be imported into documents. A command interface is used to interact with gnuplot using the 'set' commands to specify how the image is to be formatted and presented. Typically this includes the sizing of the graph, colors to be used, the scale, x,y coordinates, and the output image name. The plot command is then used to actually generate the image using the gnuplot engine. There is also the splot command that will draw 3-D graph images. Though commands can be carried out interactively using the command interface, it is best done with a config file, as this is reusable by using variables in the file (if required) using the shell 'here' document method. The config file is then piped through gnuplot to generate the image file. If there are any errors in the config file, these will be displayed during this process, highlighting where the error is. With the newly generated graphics file, the image can then be displayed.
As with any data-gathering process that is to be used to generate graphs, some tinkering of the data gathered will have to be carried out prior to piping through gnuplot. This filtering may well include deleting headers or trailers from the data file; sed and awk are your friends for any text-filtering requirements.
Gnuplot version 4.2 can be downloaded as an rpm from the AIX® 5L Source Packages website at:http://www.perzl.org/aix/index.php.
As well as gnuplot, you will also require a running http server for this demonstration.
The required dependent libraries and http server can also be downloaded from here or from the AIX toolbox website.
Make sure you have the following rpm libraries installed prior to installing gnuplot, as these are prequisites:
fontconfig-2.7.2-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm expat-2.0.1-2.aix5.1.ppc.rpm freetype2-2.3.9-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm zlib-1.2.3-5.aix5.1.ppc.rpm libpng-1.2.40-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm gd-2.0.35-4.aix5.1.ppc.rpm libjpeg-7-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm libXpm-3.5.7-2.aix5.1.ppc.rpm gettext-0.17-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm glib2-2.20.5-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
To list the installed rpms use:
# rpm –qa
Finally, install the actual gnuplot package:
# rpm -ivh gnuplot-4.2.4-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
Run gnuplot to test. You will be presented with the gnuplot interface command (issue
quit to exit the interface):
$ gnuplot G N U P L O T Version 4.2 patchlevel 4 last modified Sep 2008 System: 5.3 Copyright (C) 1986 - 1993, 1998, 2004, 2007, 2008 Thomas Williams, Colin Kelley and many others Type `help` to access the on-line reference manual. The gnuplot FAQ is available from http://www.gnuplot.info/faq/ Send bug reports and suggestions to <http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnu plot> Terminal type set to 'unknown' gnuplot>
Creating a graph with sar
sar is probably the most common method of gathering performance data, so let's use that as just one example. Listing 1, sarx.txt, contains the filtered output from running sar at an hourly interval for five hours.
Listing 1. sarx.txt
14:10:50 33 27 4 36 4.00 15:10:50 29 14 3 28 4.00 16:10:50 35 21 1 31 4.00 17:10:49 38 29 2 39 4.00 18:10:40 42 29 3 35 4.00
Next, create a file to contain all the gnuplot commands required to generate the graph. Tthe file can be called anything you like; in this demonstration, I am calling it sarx.conf.
To be able to generate the image, you must inform gnuplot what format the graphics file should be and how it should be presented visually. Listing 2, sarx.conf, contains the configuration file to issue the set operations. Any line starting with a # character is considered a comment. Let's look more closely at Listing 2.
set terminal png truecolor
First the terminal type is set, which informs gnuplot what the resulting image will be formatted into. This article uses the png (Portable Network Graphics) format.
set output "sarimage.png"
Next, inform gnuplot the actual output image filename. In this case, call it sarimage.png.
When generating graphs, you need to specify an x and y axis range for your data. This example tells gnuplot to make that decision and lets gnuplot calculate the range values. However, this can be overridden, as demonstrated later.
set xdata time set timefmt "%H:%M:%S"
Because this example uses date values as a point of reference for the data, we inform gnuplot of this with the format of the values. In the example contained in Listing 1 sarx.txt it is in the format:
Based on the UNIX date notation, note the use of double quotes surrounding the date variable. Other common formats are:
%d - day of month 1 -31 %m - month of year 1 -12 %y - year 0-99 %b - three character of month name , ie: jan ,feb %B - name of month
If we had a date column in the format:
Then this would be represented by
: set timefmt ″%H-%M″
set style data lines
When the graph is presented the data plotted should be in a smooth data line. Other common drawing formats are: dots, boxes, errorbars, candlesticks.
plot "sarx1.txt" using 1:2 title "%user", '' using 1:3 title "%sys"
Next, the graph is actually plotted or generated using the plot command. First, the data input file name is given, then we inform gnuplot what columns to plot. In this example we are going to use column 1 as the x axis, then plot column 2 data with the title ″%user″, followed by column 3 with the title ″%sys″. The titles or labels will be displayed at the top right of the graph. Columns 2 and 3 will use column 1 as their x value reference when plotting. Each 'using' statement in the plot command is separated by a comma. The use of the two single quotes is discussed in the next section.
To generate the image file, the format is:
cat < conf file> | gnuplot
For this demonstration, I would use:
$ cat sarx.conf | gnuplot
The sarimage.png file will now be produced. To view the image copy the file to your htdocs directory within your Web-server file system, for viewing.
Figure 1. sarimage, demonstrates the resulting output on a Web browser using the sample data provided.
Listing 2. sarx.conf
#sarx.conf set terminal png truecolor set output "sarimage.png" set autoscale set xdata time set timefmt "%H:%M:%S" set style data lines plot "sarx.txt" using 1:2 title "%user", '' using 1:3 title "%sys"
Figure 1. sarimage
Presentation of the plots
Shortcuts in the command line can be used in the plot command. For example, after the initial plot command, any further options to the plot command can be abbreviated, using the first letter of the option. However, for this demonstration, I will only be abbreviating the input file, which is done using two single quotes instead of giving the input file again (sarx1.txt). The following demonstrates this explanation. The first example is the notation I am using in this demonstration, the second example is the abbreviated notation, and the third example gives the full command statement without any abbreviations. All three examples produce the same output.
plot "sarx1.txt" using 1:2 title "%user", '' using 1:3 title "%sys" plot "sarx1.txt" using 1:2 title "%user", '' u 1:3 t "%sys" plot "sarx1.txt" using 1:2 title "%user",\ ″sarx1.txt'' using 1:3 title "%sys"
When displaying graphs to other users, it makes sense to sometimes include a worded label and a title for easy identification of the subject matter. To include an x and y label, use the xlabel and ylabel commands and enclose your text with quotes:
set ylabel " y line info here" set xlabel " x line info here"
To include a title header for the graph, use the title command:
set title "main title info here"
Gnuplot uses its own default colors when generating a graph. By default, the graph generated will be on a white background; this makes sense, as the graph would probably be printed. However, you can change any of the colors using color codes denoted in the Hex range, prefixed with the letter x. The format for the hex codes are:
A Google search of 'hex color codes' produces the full range of colors in Hex.
The order of the colors to override gnuplots default colors are:
background border X Y plotting lines
A light gray color in hex equates to:
To generate a graph with a light gray background I could then use:
set terminal png xC9C9C9
Notice that in the above command I had to replace the truecolour option to the terminal type png, which overrides the default colors gnuplot uses. As I have not specified any more colors to override the default settings, gnuplot will then use its own default colors for the rest of the graph.
A grid can also be very useful as a point of reference when viewing graphs. Using the grid option, the following will inform gnuplot to insert a grid on the graph:
You can implicitly set the x and y coordinates; however, be sure to not specify the range that is less than the spread of data or no graph will be drawn. Using the sample data contained in Listing 1 you can see the range for the time x coordinates are from 14:10:50 through to 18:10:40.
The y coordinates range (that's columns 2 and 3) from 14 to 50.
With that information, you can specify your own ranges. This example uses the x range from 14:00 through to 18:15, and the y range from 10 to 50.
set xrange ["14:00:00" : "18:15:00"] set yrange ["10:00" : "50:00" ]
Listing 3. sarx2.conf
#sarx2.conf set terminal png xC9C9C9 set output "sarimage.png" set autoscale set xdata time set timefmt "%H:%M:%S" set ylabel "Performance" set xlabel "Time" set title "Sar Output Example" set xrange ["14:00:00":"18:15:00"] set yrange ["10:00" : "50:00" ] set grid set style data lines plot "sarx1.txt" using 1:2 title "%user", '' using 1:3 title "%sys"
Figure 2. sarimage2
Gnuplot with histograms
Histograms or boxes can also be used to represent data and for some it is a more visual representation than using static data. Listing 4 represents data that contains the total number of user groups taken from an AIX applications box. Column one contains the actual AIX group names and column two contains the total members.
Listing 4. grpdata.txt
staff 54 apps 22 sybgrp 12 db2grp1 29 dasdm 8 dstage 21 dsgrp 8 batch 28 db2prd 1
To use histograms, simply inform gnuplot that the graph will be generated using a histogram:
set style data histograms
The default histogram generated will not have bold edges to their boxes and none of the boxes will be filled with color. However, if you specify a border, it may contain a double strike of bold lines at the bottom of the box, along the x axis line (Cosmetically, this wouldn't look right.).
Gnuplot draws the borders of the boxes in this order: top, bottom, left, and right, with their respective values: 1, 2, 4, 8. To erase one or more border lines, supply the sum of those values. In this example, the bottom border line is to be deleted, so that gets erased with the -1 option. Specifying the fill option fills the boxes with the default color:
set style fill solid 1.00 border -1
For the x coordinates, you are not using time spreads, but rather you are going to use the group names instead. Using the xtic option, this tells gnuplot to put the tic along the x axis along with the data labels (column one). In this case, it is the group names. However, there are occasions when supplying labels that contain many characters or indeed time formats for the xtics that will just not fit between the tics on the graph. You will discover overlaps in the labels. To avoid this, rotate the labels by 90 degrees (experiment to suit) so that they are vertical. You can achieve this using the following command:
set xtic rotate by 90
The data in column two is to use column one (x data) as reference:
( 2:xtic (1)
When generating the graph, give a title to the data "apps groups numbers":
plot "grpdata.txt" using 2:xtic(1) title "apps group numbers"
To generate the image grpimage.png, use:
$ cat grphist.conf | gnuplot
Listing 5 contains the gnuplot commands to generate the image, which is displayed in Figure 3, below.
Listing 5. grphist.conf
# grphist.conf set terminal png truecolor set output "grpimage.png" set grid set xtic rotate by 90 set style data histograms set style fill solid 1.00 border -1 plot "grpdata.txt" using 2:xtic(1) title "apps group numbers"
Figure 3. grpimage
Of course, you can have more than one set of data drawn in histograms, as was shown in the sar example. Now look at another source of data. Listing 6 contains data that reflects data growth and reduction contained on disk arrays over a three-month period. Column one is the disk array name, column two is one month's disk growth usage, column three is the next month's disk growth usage, and the following month's growth is contained in column four.
Listing 6. disk.txt
hdisk2 420 425 410 hdisk3 700 780 760 hdisk4 450 450 452 hdisk5 680 702 690 hdisk6 320 330 329 hdisk7 530 515 514
The conf file for generating the data is contained in Listing 7. Looking more closely at the plot command, you again use the xtic command as you want to override gnuplot for the x axis data. Columns two, three, and four use the x axis as reference when generating the histogram. Once you have referenced that, column two is to use the x axis:
Gnuplot assumes the rest of the columns to be plotted will reference that as well, so there is no need to specify the xtic again within the plot command:
plot "disk.txt" using 2:xtic(1) title "Oct-09 data growth(gb)", '' using 3 title "N ov-09 data growth(gb)", '' using 4 title "Dec-09 data growth(gb)"
To generate the image, use:
$ cat diskhist.conf | gnuplot
The resulting image is displayed in Figure 4.
Listing 7. diskhist.conf
# diskhist.conf set terminal png truecolor set output "diskimage.png" set grid set style data histograms set style fill solid 1.00 border -1 plot "disk.txt" using 2:xtic(1) title "Oct-09 data growth(gb)", '' using 3 title "N ov-09 data growth(gb)", '' using 4 title "Dec-09 data growth(gb)"
Figure 4. diskimage
Gnuplot is a tool that can be used to generate different graphs from different types of data. To automate the process of graph generation using shell scripts, I recommend using the 'here' document method, as this process can be used to generate graphs using gnuplot on the fly. To stop the Web server from caching your graphs, use the appropriate HTML META tags (for example, the 'no-cache' statement) in your scripts.
- Gnuplot Home Page provides downloads, FAQs, documentation, and much more.
- Download Gnuplot rpm
- >Download gnuplot prerequisite libraries
- Follow developerWorks on Twitter.
- Get involved in the My developerWorks community.
- Participate in the AIX and UNIX forums: | <urn:uuid:3ee1098b-a908-4220-9d78-705bd3d5b138> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-gnuplot/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280850.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00527-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.794327 | 4,047 | 3.28125 | 3 |
Why building smart cities in 2017 will begin with transportation infrastructure
The smart city concept is not a new one. The main attraction at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair was the General Motors Pavilion’s Futurama ride that ferried visitors past incredibly detailed models, accompanied by the narrator’s welcome “and now, we have arrived at this wonder world of 1960.” Of course, because GM was the sponsor, the focus was on transportation. But if the entries to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2016 Smart Cities Challenge are any indication, modernizing our cities’ transportation infrastructures will be the primary focus of urban planners in 2017.
GM’s Futurama ride showed a future with multiple lanes of asphalt connecting cities and rural areas, and city streets teeming with cars. Sounds quaint today, but in 1939, that would have seemed like something out of a science fiction novel.
"You have to understand that the audience had never even considered a future like this," Dan Howland editor of the Journal of Ride Theory, told Wired magazine back in 2007. "There wasn't an interstate freeway system in 1939. Not many people owned a car. They staggered out of the fair like a cargo cult and built an imperfect version of this incredible vision."
Today, that grand vision of vehicles moving freely and efficiently down wide open highways and city avenues has devolved into mile after mile of traffic congestion and pollution. Modernizing our mass transportation systems is one of the primary obstacles urban planners face, and the U.S. has fallen behind much of the world.
Juniper Research’s “Worldwide Smart Cities: Energy, Transport & Lighting 2016-2021” report ranks the world’s top smart cities. 60 percent are in Europe thanks to innovations in reducing congestion and energy consumption. Singapore earned the top ranking due to its application of smart mobility policies and technology, particularly its fixed and cellular broadband services, city apps and strong open data policy.
“Congestion and mobility are almost universal issues for cities to address,” notes the report’s author Steffen Sorrell. “Facilitating the movement of citizens within urban agglomerations via transport networks is fundamental to a city’s economic growth. When addressed effectively, the impacts are substantial: higher economic productivity, potential for new revenue streams and services as well as a measurable benefit in reduced healthcare costs.”
Fortunately, it does appear that U.S. city planners received that message loud and clear in 2016. 77 cities submitted entries to the Department of Transportation’s $50 million Smart City Challenge that detailed their plans to leverage new and developing technologies to solve their transportation problems.
Columbus, Ohio won the contest, and will not only receive $40 million from the federal government and another $10 million from Seattle-based Vulcan owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; it will also reap an additional $90 million in matching funds from local companies, governments and non-profits.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx says a significant factor that contributed to Columbus’ win was its plan to increase and improve poor people's access to multiple transportation options. For example, autonomous vehicles will link neighborhoods where unemployment levels are higher than the city average to nearby jobs centers, health care and other essential services.
Additionally, the city’s application proposes leveraging data collection and analysis technologies to transmit real-time information about traffic and parking conditions and transit options to minimize traffic issues associated with major events or incidents. It also plans to build “smart corridors,” starting with a bus rapid transit routes that use wireless technology among and between vehicles and infrastructure to improve safety, efficiency and usability.
These efforts to bring an aging and obsolete mass transportation system network into the 21st century is a critical component to any smart city project. Like Columbus, most cities’ networks were built decades ago, and are based on proprietary solutions. These aging networks are expensive to operate and difficult to manage as more people adopt smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other mobile devices. It creates a fragmented communications system, and the increases public safety risks.
Private companies and nonprofits have committed funding and their expertise to help not only Columbus, but also the cities that didn't win (or even enter) the DOT’s contest. These companies represent sectors such as cloud computing, telecommunications, electric vehicle charging infrastructure systems, and wireless transmitters for vehicles and infrastructure. The DoT reports 150 companies and nonprofit groups have pledged as much as $500 million worth of support.
All of these government agencies and private sector organizations came together in 2016 to begin building a new ecosystem for the design and construction of new transportation networks and capabilities, or the modernization of existing ones.
As a result, expect to see the visions like those several other cities presented in their DoT contest applications become reality in 2017, including:
Denver: Proposes building a new data management system to collect data from multiple sources to provide a real-time picture of travel in the city, including where people are moving and how they’re getting there. People will be able to access the information on their mobile devices, and make decisions on the best transportation options at any given time.
Pittsburgh: The Steel City’s plan includes a real-time adaptive traffic signal control system called Surtrac that will monitor traffic and control lights on the streets that feed into downtown. The lights will use sensors to identify transit and freight vehicles and allow them to move through the signals quicker, reducing pollution that would occur while the vehicles are idling at a stop light.
Portland: A cornerstone its plan is a mobile app that enables residents to compare transportation options, and pay for the option they choose within the app. The city also wants to build traffic sensors and signals that can receive and transmit data, and install technology in fleet vehicles to collect data on traffic conditions. New Wi-Fi-enabled kiosks will provide internet access and travel information at all transit stops.
For these amazing 2016 ideas to become reality in 2017 and beyond, there’s one critical component that all smart transportation networks must share: universal availability. That includes interacting with all contactless technologies (i.e., Bluetooth, NFC, Wi-Fi) to provide an easy access to the information from the city objects and get data about the traveller’s journey pattern. No proprietary software that favors one hardware vendor, application developer or communications provider over others.
City planners must partner with technology developers and integrators that offer connectivity across all mobile devices to ensure the networks they begin building in 2017 can scale to meet the needs of residents, visitors, businesses and government 20 years from now.
To borrow from GM’s Futurama ride, “now we have arrived at this wonder world of 2038.”
- » Does the IoT have the potential to break the internet?
- » Industrial IoT keeps moving: Three hardware predictions for 2017
- » Nokia, Vodafone and Telit team up to expand ecosystem using NB-IoT technology
- » The data management implications of the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy
- » Wearable tech and IoT consolidation: Hope for a less turbulent 2017 | <urn:uuid:3623fa71-478c-441e-a0c6-beeb479f7b46> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.iottechnews.com/news/2017/jan/10/why-building-smart-cities-2017-will-begin-transportation-infrastructure/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279650.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00069-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94166 | 1,483 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Intranets have quickly become popular in government, but primarily as distributors of documents. Corporate America is finding that intranets can do much more. Telecommunications giant MCI Worldcom has no ordinary intranet. With 550 intranet sites, workers can perform a wide range of activities online, but the most important use is online training. Unlike intranets that simply provide information about training opportunities, MCI workers can train themselves. For one business unit, intranet classes account for 40 percent of the unit's total training. Not surprisingly, training costs at the company have plummeted. Overall, MCI has saved more than $111 million in training, travel and printing costs since the intranet was launched in 1994.
MCI is not alone. Xerox's intranet has cut the cost of training for some computer classes from $105 per user to $2. Companies such as Boeing and Monsanto have reported increased productivity and reduced personnel costs as a result of their extensive intranets.
These and other companies are part of a new trend in intranet development that has expanded beyond the stage of publishing internal documents and calendars and sending e-mail to applications involving interactivity, collaboration and sharing of knowledge. It's a trend that hasn't gone unnoticed in state and local government. "Intranets are going to become the dominant method for internal information management," said Dennis Newman, MIS director of Winston-Salem, N.C.
Newman pointed out that intranet architecture hearkens back to the days of centralized information systems, but that the business model is decidedly modern, with decentralized, nonhierarchical sharing of information.
"For MIS, that means a lower cost of management and little overhead at the desktop," he added. For workers, it means more democratic access to information.
Intranets use the same computer languages, protocols, interfaces and software found on the Internet, but are only accessible to an organization's members, employees or others with authorization. Intranets look and act like any Web site, but have a software firewall blocking unauthorized access. The result is a highly flexible communications network much less expensive to build and manage than private networks based on proprietary protocols.
Grasping the Potential
State and local governments quickly grasped the communications potential and erected intranets in just about every area of government operations. Intranets have been used by police to provide neighboring enforcement agencies access to mug-shot databases. They have been used by a state finance agency to answer staff queries on corporate tax issues. Important environmental records stored as document images have been moved onto an intranet to allow more staff easy access to the information. A county's social service department has built an intranet so that caseworkers have access to up-to-date regulations on welfare and Medicare benefits. The list goes on.
In Tulare County, Calif., the Health and Human Services Agency is using the latest in Web-based tools for managing documents on an intranet. With 1,600 employees and 60,000 cases, managing documentation for manuals, policies and procedures is a logistical nightmare, according to Doug Littlejohn, the county's manager of user-support systems. The agency is installing Intra.doc!, a Web-based document-management system from Intranet Solutions Inc.
The software will allow the agency to manage its intranet documents on an enterprise scale, provide better security to its document repository and give users robust search capabilities. The agency will also be able to publish documents in various formats, and retrieve, archive and replicate documents to other sites.
On a smaller scale, Oklahoma City has deployed an intranet so that the city's Prequalification Board members have better access to the massive documentation needed to qualify a firm to bid on large-scale construction projects. Using Microsoft's off-the-shelf FrontPage Editor, Steve Gravlin, the Public Works Department's prequalification administrator, was able to build a simple intranet application for the board in one week.
"I've got 35 contractors to prequalify every month," Gravlin said. "With five board members, I was spending most of my time photocopying documents."
Gravlin considered using CD-ROM to distribute the documents, but opted for the cheaper, more flexible intranet. It has few bells and whistles, but is effective in linking the board's agenda with the items they need to consider at each monthly meeting.
"The board members are excited about this," Gravlin commented. "They can see a point in the future when their meetings will be paperless."
In Winston-Salem, the city's Department of Information Services is looking for ways to extend its intranet beyond the document-publishing stage and into the field of interactivity and collaboration. According to Walt Pitcher, information systems programmer in charge of the city's intranet, it's not that easy.
"The challenge is getting people to think in a different mode, to move away from paper and start doing things online," Pitcher said. "People are a little wary of pushing a button and wondering whether the transaction actually occurred."
To move toward a more online-driven environment, the city is centralizing its data in an Oracle database for better access. Small interactive applications have been written in Perl, a Web-based programming language, to keep track of city hardware and software that is Y2K compliant. Other applications include the use of interactive forms, also written in Perl, for purchase requisitions and travel.
The department also purchased Common Ground Web Publisher from Hummingbird Communications to improve the handling of documents on the city's intranet and Internet sites. Common Ground allows workers to submit documents directly to the intranet by simply dropping the document into a directory, which is automatically converted into a universal document format that maintains the graphic integrity of the original and then publishes to the Web server.
Common Ground automatically updates the HTML navigation pages that link to the documents so directory information is always current. The Web publishing process is completely automated, so webmasters like Pitcher don't have to worry about document conversion, posting on the Web or updating tables of contents.
Intranet development software such as Common Ground and Intra.doc! has come in response to customer demands for tools that simplify the task of publishing documents on internal Web sites. Workers are looking not so much for more information, but for ways to make the information more useful.
As a result, corporations are finding that intranets have spawned collaboration among teams of workers distant geographically and hierarchically. Xerox discovered that with intranets, workers are creating applications that break through the company's traditional hierarchy and save money and time. Intranets let workers make travel arrangements and order business cards.
At a higher level, intranets allow an organization to reuse its collective knowledge without the impediments of geography, organizational hierarchy and the requisite approval process, which can slow the sharing of knowledge. To help workers tap into a company's expertise, some firms are building their intranets into corporate portal Web sites, similar to the commercial ones popping up on the Internet. These portals can streamline access to information, making it easier to convert terabytes of internal information into knowledge.
Intranet portals use the same concept developed by America Online, Microsoft, Excite, Netscape and other Web sites, displaying categories of information aimed at specific departments of the organization. Companies such as Boeing and Monsanto, with long, extensive intranet experience, have built portals that not only allow employees to quickly find the information they are searching for, but to also add information on their own. The result is increased productivity and lower costs, according to experts.
But building a portal isn't cheap. Software licenses for the special software needed to build a portal can run as high as $100,000 per server, not including integration, programming and maintenance costs. One option around these high costs is to lease a portal. Netscape's Custom Netcenter lets companies create custom portals that mix internal information with news from commercial services, such as the Dow Jones news service.
Even for less expansive intranets, development and maintenance costs can prove formidable. Analysts also point to other issues that can impede use of intranets:
* Data glut. Proliferating intranets can swamp workers with too much information and leave them without an effective means of finding what they want. Agencies should be prepared to spend money on well-designed search engines and time on teaching employees how to conduct an effective search.
* Overburdened webmasters. Many organizations are finding that the demands of running a Web site can far exceed the ability of the webmaster to run it.
* Security. Stories abound of companies (and government agencies) that have had their firewalls penetrated by crackers. Stringent security policies and procedures must be in place if an agency wants to avoid cleaning up a security breach in their intranet.
* Information ownership. Many corporations and governments have found that workers who control information are often reluctant to give it up for the common good of an intranet. There are no simple answers to persuading workers and managers to loosen their grip on information.
So how do you convince a city/county manager, department head or agency chief to support today's intranet because it will be tomorrow's foundation for worker knowledge?
"They aren't used to dealing with technology," Winston-Salem MIS Director Dennis Newman pointed out. "I have to explain it to them in terms of the overall solution." | <urn:uuid:4079f0ba-ffe4-4789-9124-c846865b0772> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.govtech.com/magazines/gt/Intranets-More-Than-a-Messenger.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282202.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00187-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940998 | 1,962 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Eliminate Distortion in Wide Angle ImagesAuthor: John Honovich, Published on Dec 09, 2008
Today's megapixel cameras have many advantages as long as you have the right lens for the job. When that includes covering large areas or reducing cost by installing fewer cameras, that lens is a wide angle lens. Until recently only fisheye lenses were available for an ultra wide field of view. Fisheye lenses create a curved and distorted image which no one seems to like. This significant distortion causes loss of resolution at the image edges.
In the past year a new rectilinear lens giving a different ultra wide view without the barrel distortion or loss of edge resolution of fisheye lenses has been developed. This report is an overview of wide angle lens technology and how we at Theia Technologies overcome fisheye distortion using Linear Optical Technology.
The real world is full of three dimensional people and objects. Creating a representation of this world on a two dimensional plane in a camera creates some optical effects, especially when viewed through a wide angle lens.
There are two approaches used when designing wide angle lenses:
- Equal angular slices – each pixel receives an equal angle leading to barrel distortion in the image
- Equal planar distances – each pixel images an equal distance in a plane, this is a rectilinear lens.
The two families of wide angle lenses create very different views of the world.
|Rectilinear wide angle lens||Barrel distortion wide angle lens|
Most wide angle lenses including fisheye lenses have barrel distortion which comes from imaging equal angular slices of the world onto the sensor. A close kin, similar in application but different design, is to image equal planar distances in the real world onto the image sensor using a rectilinear lens. Until recently, rectilinear lenses were not available for wide angle applications. Theia Technologies has worked to develop this type of lens.
Rectilinear lenses keep straight lines in the real world straight on the image sensor. This creates an effect called 3D stretching or lean-over in which objects at the image edge seem to be stretched because they are being “flattened” onto a plane along the tangent angle from the lens. The wider the field of view (for rectilinear lenses), the more noticeable this effect. There is an additional benefit in increased resolution at the edges of the image because of 3D stretching.
In the picture below, both cars are the same width but since Car B is seen much more obliquely it appears to be stretched. The cars are the same width because they are in the same plane perpendicular to the camera and the lens images these equal planar measurements to equal distances on the sensor. The length is stretched due to flattening onto the sensor plane.
|Image showing 3D stretching from an ultra wide angle rectilinear lens.|
The wide angle cousin of the rectilinear lens has the well known barrel distortion seen in almost all wide angle lenses with fields of view greater than 80deg, including fisheye lenses. This distortion causes the image to look curved and resolution to be reduced as the object moves farther from the center of the image.
|Distortion reduces the object width the further it is from the image center.|
|The same image taken with a rectilinear lens shows increased resolution towards the edge of the image.|
The distortion effect can be eliminated with software (creating a rectilinear lens image) but at a cost in time or processing power. Objects at the edges of the image are compressed and detail information is lost. The information was already lost travelling through the lens and no amount of software (contrary to Hollywood’s view of video surveillance) will be able to recapture the information.
Natural habitat of wide angle lenses
Wide angle lenses are not a panacea but there are many applications that benefit from their use. For applications requiring large areas of coverage, an ultra wide angle lens on a megapixel camera is a cost saving opportunity that should be considered. Wide angle lenses can.
- Reduce the number of cameras required to cover an area, reducing cost of installation, maintenance and monitoring,
- Be used in place of a PTZ camera when post-incident PTZ is desired.
- Effectively monitor large areas like parking lots, schools, and construction sites and
- Be used in close-up applications such as ATMs, card-locked garage entries, and multi-door entryways where both high image detail and wide fields of view are required.
Megapixel cameras need high performance wide angle lenses that can display high resolution images of large areas. Fisheye lenses create barrel-distorted curved images requiring software image correction whereas rectilinear lenses correct distortion optically in the lens, an elegant and efficient solution.
Mark Peterson is the VP Advanced Technology at Theia Technologies.
2 reports cite this report:
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The world's leading video surveillance information source, IPVM provides the best reporting, testing and training for 10,000+ members globally. Dedicated to independent and objective information, we uniquely refuse any and all advertisements, sponsorship and consulting from manufacturers. | <urn:uuid:05e2cda9-2421-4518-a967-d46912753715> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://ipvm.com/reports/eliminate-distortion-in-wide-angle-images | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282202.61/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00187-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9241 | 1,082 | 2.65625 | 3 |
What are the components of a decision support system?
by Dan Power
Traditionally, academics and practitioners have discussed building a decision support system (DSS) in terms of four major components: 1) the user interface, 2) the database, 3) the models and analytical tools, and 4) the DSS architecture and network (cf., Sprague and Carlson, 1982). A component is a distinguishable part of a larger entity. Component may be implemented with different technologies and each component has a different function or purpose unless redundancy exists in the system.
According to Sprague (1980), "Opening the large DSS box reveals a database, a model base, and a complex software system for linking the user to each of them (p. 14)." Sprague argued a decision support system "is comprised of three sets of capabilities: database management software (DBMS), model base management software (MBMS), and the software for managing the interface between the user and the system, which might be called the dialogue generation and management software (DGMS). These three major subsystems provide a convenient scheme for identifying the technical capability which a DSS must have (p. 14)."
Wikipedia uses the Sprague definition and also defines components of DSS in terms of: "Inputs: Factors, numbers, and characteristics to analyze; User Knowledge and Expertise: Inputs requiring manual analysis by the user; Outputs: Transformed data from which DSS 'decisions' are generated; Decisions: Results generated by the DSS based on user criteria." This is a broad view of components and it creates some confusion for software design. Inputs come from users. Outputs are intended for users and decision are made by users using a DSS. This is the blackbox view of ccomponents and we need a transparent box to build innovative DSS.
Focusing on technical components can assist in application design and can assist in implementing services to provide all or part of the functionality of a component. A component may be implemented as an independent software package or it may be implemented as a module in a DSS generator or development environment. Identifying needed software components for categories of DSS can enhance reusability and reduce the cost and complexity of building systems.
Overall, the traditional Sprague (1980) list of major technical components remains useful because it helps identify similarities and differences between categories or types of DSS. Also, understanding the technical system components can help managers and information systems analysts build innovative DSS. From a broad system perspective, the DSS user is the key component determining the effectiveness of the DSS. DSS designers need to recognize the important role of the targeted user and involve them in customizing components for a specific DSS purpose.
Decision support system, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia at URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_support_system.
Power, D. J. (2002). Decision support systems: concepts and resources for managers. Westport, Conn., Quorum Books.
Sprague, R, H., Jr., "A Framework for the Development of Decision Support Systems," Management Information Systems Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 4, Dec. 1980, pp. 1-26.
Sprague, R. H., Jr. and E. D. Carlson. Building Effective Decision Support Systems. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.: 1982.
Last update: 2005-08-26 20:14
Author: Daniel Power
You cannot comment on this entry | <urn:uuid:0b850f6f-76ce-4a1a-ae20-be9c1a92abc5> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://dssresources.com/faq/index.php?action=artikel&id=101 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284411.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00095-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.873445 | 728 | 3.3125 | 3 |
Microsoft Azure - Virtual Networks (VNets) Explained
What is a Virtual Network?
A Virtual Network, also known as a VNet is an isolated network within the Microsoft Azure cloud.
VNets are synonymous to AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), providing a range of networking features such as the ability to customize DHCP blocks, DNS, routing, inter-VM connectivity, access control and Virtual Private Networks (VPN).
Azure Portal (ARM) Screenshot ; Shows various networking options
Always Deploy VNet First - You should always build your VNet before you deploy your VM instance. If you do not then Azure will create a default VNet, which may contain an overlapping address range with your onprem network.
Moving VMs between VNets - A VM can be moved from one subnet to another within a VNet. However to move a VM from one VNet to another VNet, you must delete the VM and recreate using the previous VHD.
Azure provides 2 deployment models, Classic (ASM) and ARM.
ARM is the new deployment model that all resources within the Azure Cloud are being transition to. The key point to note is that the configuration, management, and functionality of resources (Compute, Network and Storage), along with portals are different between the 2.
Below outlines the key differences,
|ASM (Azure Service Management)||ARM (Azure Resource Manager)|
|Also known as Classic||Also known as IaaS v2|
|Old deployment model||New deployment model|
|REST based API||REST based API|
|Uses XML data serialization||Uses JSON data serialization|
|Does NOT support Resource Groups||Supports Resource Groups|
What are resource groups ?
A Resource Group is a logical container for a collection of resources, on which monitoring, provisioning and billing can be performed.
Below are the key components within Microsoft Azure Virtual Networks.
A subnet is a range of IP addresses in the VNet, you can divide a VNet into multiple subnets for organization and security. Additionally you can configure VNet routing tables and Network Security Groups (NSG) to a subnet.
There are 2 types of IP addresses that can be assigned to an Azure resource - Public or Private.
- Used for internet/Azure public facing communication.
- A dynamic IP is assigned to the VM, by default. At the point the VM is started /stopped the IP is released/renewed.
- A static IP can be assigned to a VM which is only released when the VM is deleted.
- Used for connectivity within a VNet, and also when using a VPN gateway or ExpressRoute.
- A dynamic IP, by default, is allocated to the VM from the resources subnet via DHCP. At the point the VM is started/stopped the IP may be released/renewed based on the DHCP lease.
- A static IP can be assigned to the VM.
Network Security Groups
Network Security Groups (NSGs) allow you to permit or deny traffic (via a rule base), to either a subnet or a network interface. By default the inbound and outbound rules include an implied deny all. Finally NSGs are stateful, meaning that the TCP sequence numbers are checked in addition to, if the connection is already established.
Azure provides three different load balancing solutions. They are,
- Azure Traffic Manager - Similar to Route53 within AWS, DNS is used to direct traffic to necessary destination. There are 3 destination selection methods - failover, performance or round robin.
- Azure Loadbalancer - Performs L4 loadbalancing within a Virtual Network. Currently only supports round robin distribution.
- Azure Application Gateway - Performs L7 loadbalancing. Supports HTTP Request based loadbalancing, SSL Termination and cookie based persistence.
Although Azure automates the provisioning of system routes, there may be a scenario where you need to further dictate how your traffic is routed.
Routes are applied on traffic leaving a subnet, and traffic can be sent to a next hop of either a virtual network, virtual network gateway or virtual machine.
There will be times when you will need to encrypt your data when sending it over the internet. Or there may be times where you need to send traffic between 2 VNets. This is where Azure VPNs come into play.
There are 2 types of gateways, VPN and Express Route. Further details are shown below,
- VPN - Traffic is encrypted between the endpoints. There are 3 modes,
- Site-to-Site - Traffic is secured using IPSEC/IKE between 2 VPN gateways, for example between Azure and your onprem firewall.
- Point-to-Site - Via a VPN client, a user connects onto Azure, and traffic is encrypted using TLS.
- VNet-to-VNet - Traffic is secured between 2 Virtual Networks using IPSEC/IKE.
- Express Route - This provides a dedicated peered connection into Azure. This is covered in more detail within the Express Route section.
The amount of traffic and/or tunnels that your gateway can support is controlled via a set of 3 SKUs, these SKUs are updated via powershell cmdlets.
There are 2 types of VPN - policy based and route based. Each coming with their own caveats.
Policy Based - Traffic is encrypted/decrypted based upon a policy. This policy contains the IPs and subnets or the endpoints on each side. Policy based VPNs are named 'static routing gateway' within the Classic (ASM) deployment model. However there are some key caveats,
- Supports IKEv1 only.
- Only 1 Site-2-Site VPN can be configured. Multi-point not supported.
- Point-to-Site is not supported.
- VNet-to-VNet VPN is not supported.
Route Based - Traffic is routed via a tunnel interface. This interface then encrypts or decrypts the packets that pass the tunnel. Route based VPNs are named 'dynamic routing gateway' in the Classic deployment model. Additionally they only supports IKEv2.
Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute lets you extend your on-premises networks into the Microsoft cloud over a dedicated private connection facilitated by a connectivity provider. This offers greater bandwidth, improved reliability, and also greater security due to bypassing the internet.
Express Route offers 2 connectivity options:
You connect into Azure via a point-to-point connection, through an Exchange provider who has a direct connection into Azure. With this option you have full control over routing, however is not ideal for multi-point WANs, due to the point-to-point connection requirement.
Network Service Provider
With this option you connect your MPLS WAN into Azure via your Network Service Provider.
Routing is typically managed via your Network Service Provider. However this option does provide multiple-point connectivity (i.e each branch/site) into Azure, unlike point-to-point as this goes via an Exchange Provider.
Further details on the 2 options can be found at http://windowsitpro.com/networking/q-what-are-differences-between-network-services-provider-nsp-and-exchange-provider-exp. | <urn:uuid:62af84ea-6e76-4c80-b1be-98ab8d8d7d7a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.fir3net.com/Miscellaneous/Cloud/microsoft-azure-virtual-networks-vnets.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279657.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00491-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.897541 | 1,528 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Racism means many things to many people. Oxford says it’s “the belief that there are characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to each race”. That’s a pretty broad definition, and arguably isn’t negative in and of itself.
The common use of the word is far more malicious and, in my opinion, ill-informed. Most people use the word to mean “any sort of behavior or view that reflects negatively on a race other than their own.” Both of those definitions are incorrect, in my opinion. Here’s my view:
True racism is when a person has negative feelings toward someone based on race alone. When person A has all of the characteristics that person B normally accepts as constituting a “decent” person (education, dress, speech, attitude, etc.), but they reject them anyway because of their race, that makes them a racist.
Too often this is confused with behavior-based judgment, and this misunderstanding harms society greatly. When a group of 15 black men walk into a mall dressed as gangsta-rappers — shouting, laughing, and ogling every woman that passes by — the hate that is directed at them is based on their behavior, not their race.
This is in stark contrast to the stereotypical white father who won’t let his daughter marry a black guy from a great family who just got his MBA from Harvard. That’s racism. And until we as a society can openly acknowledge and discuss this distinction we’re doomed to continue in our fear-based silence that does nothing but harm us.: | <urn:uuid:2faee13d-e1e3-4ca0-8763-531f31f3ba90> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-true-definition-of-racism/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282926.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00031-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970823 | 334 | 3.015625 | 3 |
I'm often asked for advice as to how someone can improve their own personal level of security and the second topic I bring up (installing antivirus software is the first) surrounds the use of passwords.
As stressed elsewhere here at Comparitech, there is no substitute for a long, complex, hard to guess password made up of numbers, letters and symbols. There is also no alternative to the use of unique passwords for each and every site you visit - reusing the same one for every account under your control is a prelude to disaster should any one of those accounts be breached because, as you may have seen in the news, the compromised login credentials often then find their way onto certain sites from which the criminals can then harvest and use them.
But how do you remember a different password for every account you have?
Especially when the number of passwords we have to recall seems to grow by the week (the average person has 118 online accounts now and will likely have over 200 within the next ten years).
Well, the answer is to use a password manager.
By employing such a piece of software, along with a browser extension, you can let go of the dozens of passwords you need to remember and focus instead on just one master password for the particular program you are using.
Not quite as slick as a commercial password manager such as 1Password, which itself has been in the news this week, KeePass gathers much deserved praise over the way in which it generates and stores encryption keys locally, and the fact that it does not store your passwords on a centralised database that could be susceptible to hacking.
As an open source program it is, as already mentioned, free. But in its most basic form it is only compatible with the Windows platform. And for the vast majority of you that won't be a problem.
If, however, you are using Linux or OS X there is an alternative in the form of KeePassX and iOS users are catered for with iKeePass. Android users need not feel left out either as Keepass2Android has been designed to take care of their needs. Each of these alternatives to the main Windows version fall out of the scope of this article though so be sure to let us know via the comments if you want more info on any of them and we'll see what we can do to help.
Security and Privacy
The fact that KeePass is open source means its code is up for scrutiny by anyone who cares to look at it. Given the number of gifted coders using such software, that means there is a good chance that any vulnerabilities will not only be spotted, but spotted quickly.
Encryption presents itself as a double-edged sword with this password manager - its end-to-end nature means the only person who will ever know your master password is you. The advantage of this is that no-one will ever be able to access your password database unless you choose to divulge that password. Not only that, but your encrypted database will be inaccessible to any attacker who gains access to it, making it a good option should you wish to store it on a platform that may otherwise be insecure (a cloud storage platform, for instance). On the flip side, if you ever forget your own master password you're in trouble - there is no recovery option.
The wide array of plugins that can be added to KeePass allow for a wide range of additional security features to be added including, for example, software keyboards which are an excellent defence for anyone concerned about the possibility of a keylogger being installed on their system.
Drawing a conclusion on the usefulness and effectiveness of KeePass is a tricky proposition because of its open source nature.
As previously mentioned, that has its advantages in terms of security, something that is further enhanced by the inclusion of end-to-end encryption and a lack of a centralised database. These are excellent plus points.
- It's open source nature lends itself well to security
- It offers end-to-end encryption
- The default encryption method uses a strong AES-265 cipher with SHA-256 hash authentication
- A wide range of plugins are available which can add browser integration and many other features
- A comprehensive FAQs and community support is strong
- Did I mention its free?
On the other hand, it is nowhere near as polished as a commercial password manager and that could be a serious point of consideration for the less technically inclined among you. If you follow our companion how to guide you should be OK, but that doesn't detract from the fact that the user interface is one of the less welcoming I've seen, or the fact that browser integration is not as smooth as with some of the alternatives.
What's not so hot
- The user interface could be better - non-technical users may feel intimidated by it
- The aforementioned browser integration cannot be achieved as seamlessly as with other password managers. Likewise, adding in other plugins isn't as straightforward as it perhaps could be
Overall, however, KeePass does a sterling job of keeping your passwords secure and there are few, if any, password managers that can beat it on that front.You can try it for free and make your own mind up, safe in the knowledge that you will have lost nothing but your time if you discover its not for you. And if you do decide to pass on KeePass, please do go with an alternative such as LastPass, 1Password, Dashlane or even a password manager built into your browser - either are a far better option than using no password manager at all.
Sticky Password Premium is a good quality password manager that offers a decent range of features packaged up in a clear and pleasant interface. With a free trial available, its well worth a test drive.July 27, 2016 / by Lee MunsonLastPass Review
LastPass is free, excellent and packed full of genuinely useful features. It may not have the slickest interface among password managers but, beyond that, there is nothing to dislike. In fact, it’s so good, I use it myself.May 19, 2016 / by Lee MunsonDashlane Review
If an open source password manager looks too complex for your needs, why not try a closed source one instead? Depending on your needs, the free version of Dashlane may just offer everything you need in a package that is easy to use and even nice to look at.May 18, 2016 / by Lee Munson+ More reviews from Password Managers | <urn:uuid:3d401bcc-cf65-4913-be6d-f5383ccbf4c8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.comparitech.com/password-managers/reviews/keepass-review/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280763.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00151-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961182 | 1,321 | 2.609375 | 3 |
That may mean those sites have been shut down or that their content has been consolidated into larger sites in accordance with a White House plan to drastically cut the federal Web presence over the coming year, said Benjamin Balter, a new technology fellow at the Federal Communications Commission and graduate student at The George Washington University who designed the analysis tool as a personal project.
In other cases, it could mean the sites were temporarily down during the search or that the collection system made an error, Balter said. He stressed that his analysis tool, which also gathers information about sites' content management systems and the sophistication of their Internet protocol addresses, has not been rigorously tested and that the results are by no means 100 percent accurate.
"This [data set] is nothing to bet the house on," he said, "but, it should give a good general picture of where things are."
Agencies have acknowledged shuttering some sites as part of the website cutting initiative, but so far there's been no central list of closed or consolidated government sites.
Balter said he developed the Web analysis tool out of "idle curiosity" and when he saw the list of top-level dot-gov domains it was a "no brainer" to try it out.
Though far from an official endorsement of his findings, White House New Media Director Macon Phillips Tweeted Balter's results approvingly.
About 70 percent of the dot-gov domains have no detectable content management system or may be using a custom-built system, according to Balter's analysis, and more than one-tenth of the sites are unreachable without typing the sites' "www" prefix into the address bar.
For simple, run-of-the-mill websites, requiring the "www" prefix typically means the sites are extremely old or unsophisticated. In the case of higher traffic sites such as NASA.gov and FAA.gov it may mean the sites are a complex mesh of public and private information, which makes modernizing the addresses more complicated, Balter said.
Balter's data show only a handful of the sites are hosted in a public cloud service, which allows website owners to save money on storage and to more easily handle surges in use.
About 200 of the sites are using some form of Web analytics to track what sections of the site are most popular, the data said.
Only nine of the sites appear to be fully compliant with Internet protocol version 6, or IPv6, standards for how the site transfers information, according to the data. The federal government has been working to transition to IPv6 for more than half a decade. Agencies are required to have fully transferred public facing content on their sites by the end of 2012 and to have moved internal content by 2014.
The federal website cutting initiative is aimed at saving money by consolidating sites into a few uniform architectures and content management systems, and at raising the overall standards of government websites, which are often disorganized, slow and clunky. The project is modeled, in part, on an ongoing British government effort that has cut or consolidated about 75 percent of the country's 2,000 websites over five years. | <urn:uuid:e4c5d5dc-a9cd-49ec-be5a-777800ad19b0> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.nextgov.com/cloud-computing/2011/09/nearly-a-quarter-of-dot-gov-domains-dont-work-analysis-finds/49751/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279176.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00272-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959184 | 643 | 2.53125 | 3 |
22.214.171.124 How does one find random numbers for keys?
Whether using a secret-key cryptosystem or a public-key cryptosystem, one needs a good source of random numbers for key generation. The main features of a good source are that it produces numbers that are unknown and unpredictable by potential adversaries. Random numbers obtained from a physical process are in principle the best, since many physical processes appear truly random. One could use a hardware device, such as a noisy diode; some are sold commercially on computer add-in boards for this purpose. Another idea is to use physical movements of the computer user, such as inter-key stroke timings measured in microseconds. Techniques using the spinning of disks to generate random data are not truly random, as the movement of the disk platter cannot be considered truly random. A negligible-cost alternative is available; Davis et al. designed a random number generator based on the variation of a disk drive motor's speed [DIP94]. This variation is caused by air turbulence, which has been shown to be unpredictable. By whichever method they are generated, the random numbers may still contain some correlation, thus preventing sufficient statistical randomness. Therefore, it is best to run them through a good hash function (see Question 2.1.6) before actually using them [ECS94].
Another approach is to use a pseudo-random number generator fed by a random seed. The primary difference between random and pseudo-random numbers is that pseudo-random numbers are necessarily periodic whereas truly random numbers are not. Since pseudo-random number generators are deterministic algorithms, it is important to find one that is cryptographically secure and also to use a good random seed; the generator effectively acts as an "expander" from the seed to a larger amount of pseudo-random data. The seed must be sufficiently variable to deter attacks based on trying all possible seeds.
It is not sufficient for a pseudo-random number generator just to pass a variety of statistical tests, as described in Knuth [Knu81] and elsewhere, because the output of such generators may still be predictable. Rather, it must be computationally infeasible for an attacker to determine any bit of the output sequence, even if all the others are known, with probability better than 1/2. Blum and Micali's generator based on the discrete logarithm problem [BM84] satisfies this stronger definition, assuming that computing discrete logarithm is difficult (see Question 2.3.7). Other generators perhaps based on DES (see Section 3.2) or a hash function (see Question 2.1.6) can also be considered to satisfy this definition, under reasonable assumptions.
A summary of methods for generating random numbers in software can be found in [Mat96].
Note that one does not need random numbers to determine the public and private exponents in RSA. After generating the primes, and hence the modulus (see Question 3.1.1), one can simply choose an arbitrary value (subject to the standard constraints) for the public exponent, which then determines the private exponent. | <urn:uuid:4b9fcfd6-afa4-4e36-b152-fb4523d8c2c2> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.emc.com/emc-plus/rsa-labs/standards-initiatives/find-random-numbers-for-keys.htm | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281426.63/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00390-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914633 | 640 | 3.609375 | 4 |
Refer to the exhibit:What will Router1 do when it receives the data frame shown? (Choose three.)
Refer to the exhibit. Which three statements correctly describe Network Device A? (Choose three.)
Which layer in the OSI reference model is responsible for determining the availability of thereceiving program and checking to see if enough resources exist for that communication?
Which of the following describes the roles of devices in a WAN? (Choose three.)
Refer to the exhibit.Host A pings interface S0/0 on router 3. What is the TTL value for that ping?
A network administrator is verifying the configuration of a newly installed host by establishingan FTP connection to a remote server. What is the highest layer of the protocol stack thatthe network administrator is using for this operation?
Refer to the exhibit.After HostA pings HostB, which entry will be in the ARP cache of HostA to support thistransmission?
A network interface port has collision detection and carrier sensing enabled on a sharedtwisted pair network. From this statement, what is known about the network interface port?
A receiving host computes the checksum on a frame and determines that the frame isdamaged. The frame is then discarded. At which OSI layer did this happen?
Which of the following correctly describe steps in the OSI data encapsulation process?(Choose two.) | <urn:uuid:e7fa0688-046d-40f2-b842-be7ed4d7f3c6> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.aiotestking.com/cisco/category/exam-200-120-cisco-certified-network-associate-ccna-update-december-20th-2015/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280425.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00510-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906571 | 285 | 3 | 3 |
Fiber media converter, also known as fiber transceiver or Ethernet media converter, is a simple networking device which receives data signals, sents via one media, converts the signals and then transmits the signals into another kind of media. A fiber optic media converter makes it possible to connect two dissimilar media types with fiber optic cabling, can transform between different media, different cable types and different equipment interfaces. They were introduced to the industry nearly two decades ago, and are important in interconnecting fiber optic cabling-based systems with existing copper-based and structured cabling systems.
Fiber media converters support many different data communication protocols including Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, T1/E1/J1, DS3/E3, as well as multiple cabling types such as coax, twisted pair, multi-mode and single-mode fiber optics. Fiber media converters can connect different local area network (LAN) media, modifying duplex and speed settings. Switching media converters can connect legacy 10BASE-T network segments to more recent 100BASE-TX or 100BASE-FX Fast Ethernet infrastructure. For example, existing half-duplex hubs can be connected to 100BASE-TX Fast Ethernet network segments over 100BASE-FX fiber.
Fiber media converters are also used in metropolitan area network (MAN) access and data transport services to enterprise customers. When expanding the reach of the LAN to span multiple locations, fiber transceivers are useful in connecting multiple LANs to form one large campus area network that spans over a wide geographic area.
Media converter types range from small standalone devices and PC card converters to high port-density chassis systems that offer many advanced features for network management.
There are singlemode converters (also called WDM fiber optic converters) and multimode converters. For singlemode converters, there are dual fiber type and single fiber type which the fiber cable functions both as transmitting media and receiving media. While for multimode converters, there are only dual fiber types. Working distance is also different. For typical multimode fiber optic converters, their working distance max is about 2km, for single mode fiber media converters, their working distance can be 20km, 40km, 60km, 80km and up to 120km.
Some fiber optic converters will work with any type of Ethernet cable while others only have ports for either the 100 Megabit or the 10 Gigabit speed Ethernet cables. Different brands and models of converters have different speed caps.
Fiber media converter protects your investment in existing copper Ethernet-based network, is an economical solution to achieve long distance transmission based on current status. With the rapid development of society, the transmission of different types of information, like audio, video and data, has become more and more important and Ethernet has been a good way to deal with this need. Traditional Ethernet fiber converter has its disadvantages because it use copper wires and its working distance is very short (about 100meters). Fiber media converter is the solution of this problem, it could extend the Ethernet working distance to max 100km or more, what is more ,the fiber optical converter used today is cheap and reliable. | <urn:uuid:abc720b9-4bca-4988-904f-d2c374bc7dfe> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.fs.com/blog/economical-fiber-media-converter-to-long-distance-transmission.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280133.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00446-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910883 | 657 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Approaches to navigation
Choose a navigation structure based on the most important features in your app and the type of content that the app provides. Let users access the most frequent tasks quickly and don't overwhelm them with content or tasks that are less important. Determine which of the following approaches work the best for your app.
Tabs allow you to structure content so that users can move easily between content of relatively equal importance.
You have distinct sections of content of relatively equal importance. Tabs always appear along the bottom of the screen in an action bar.
A clock might include tabs for a world clock, an alarm, a timer, and a stopwatch.
A music app might include tabs for artists, albums, songs, and playlists.
A tab menu (also known as a sidebar) is a vertically stacked, scrollable list of tabs. You can use a tab menu to hold less frequently accessed tabs, or you can use it instead of tabs along the bottom of the screen. When users tap the tab menu button at the bottom of the screen, the tab menu slides in from the left and appears to the left of the main view.
Place the most frequently used tab in the middle tab position. This area of the action bar is the easiest place for users to target.
Include tabs on the first level of an app hierarchy only.
Use up to four tabs in an action bar. Include additional tabs in a tab menu.
In a tab menu, place the most frequently used tabs at the top. Place any tabs in the first level of the hierarchy at the top of the list.
Drill-down directories let you structure content in a hierarchy and show selected parts of the content at each level.
A lot of structured, hierarchical content will be added to the app.
A photo app might have vacation photos grouped by different trips. All of the photos can't be displayed on the first level, so users click an album to see that trip's photos. At the second level, you might present the photos from the trip as thumbnails. Clicking one of the photos opens it in full screen, as the third level in the hierarchy.
Include a Back button in an action bar at the bottom of the screen so that users can navigate through the hierarchy.
Tab and drill down
A tab and drill down strategy allows you to combine both navigation approaches. Use tabs at the first level of an app, and then let users drill down into the content.
A music app can have tabs for different genres. Users tap a playlist to see a list of songs.
Custom or unstructured navigation
Make sure that your custom approach provides a better experience than the approaches listed above. You should test the model thoroughly and refine it so that it's easy for users to learn.
In a map, all information (such as points of interest and directions) appears directly on the map.
Back and peek behavior
If your application uses drill-down navigation, the content is structured in a hierarchy. Back and peek behavior lets users return to previously viewed levels of a hierarchy easily.
When users return to a previous screeen in a BlackBerry app, the movement is hierarchical. Moving back takes users to the previous level in the app hierarchy. Users don't necessarily return to screen that they viewed earlier.
The Back button can contain an icon and the title of the screen or tab that users would navigate back to. If the context is clear, you can use the title "Back" instead.
You create deeper levels in an app hierarchy. Make sure the Back button appears in the far left position in an action bar.
Users can return in three ways:
- Tap the Back button.
- Swipe their finger to the right on the content area.
- Peekat the previous level by touching the Back button and dragging their finger to the right, allowing them to see the previous level's contents without leaving their current screen.
Don't put a Back button (or any other button) on the screen as a way for users to close an app. The only way for users to leave an app is by swiping up from the bottom of the screen.
In most cases, save automatically when users move back to the previous screen.
If you combine tabs and drill downs, make sure that the Back button navigates within the tab your user chose and does not unexpectedly move them to another tab's hierarchy. | <urn:uuid:73ccbbf3-587c-45e7-8c5e-e7bbe8fb89b7> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://developer.blackberry.com/design/bb10/application_structure.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279379.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00382-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.878364 | 906 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Smarter and FasterBy Mel Duvall | Posted 2003-11-01 Email Print
The Ohio utility's systems protected its 4.9 million customers during the Aug. 14 blackout. But did they knock out power to 50 million people in the process?
Smarter and Faster
Electromechanical relays perform just one function: Measuring the flow of power. The rotation of a metal disk may indicate how much electricity is passing through; and if the measurement gets too high, a "trip" may be set off, cutting the flow.
But that's all such a relay can do. It cannot watch other variables, such as demands for power coming from other networks; it cannot store information; and it cannot communicate with other devices.
Digital relays change the game completely, says Dolezilek. Sold by such vendors as Schweitzer, General Electric, Alstom SA, Cooper Industries, and Siemens AG, such relays have one or more microprocessors, memory chips, and the ability to communicate electronically.
These relays don't just monitor the flow of electricity, they analyze it and act on it. Information is stored, processed and forwarded to other relays as well as to central control systems, where either computers or humans can deal with it. AEP maintains such a control center in Columbus, which is fed information by its digital relays. Based on the input, computers monitor such factors as the level of power being pushed through the system, known as current; the speed at which it is being pushed, known as voltage; the "reactive power" that generates protective magnetic fields which help maintain that voltage as it passes through lines; whether breakers have been tripped; and whether any equipment in the network is in need of servicing.
Whereas an electromechanical relay can only measure or monitor one factor at a time, a digital relay can monitor a number of factors simultaneously.
The greatest advantage is instant communication within the grid, computer to computer and relay to relay. Relays can use built-in diagnostic capabilities to detect a problem and isolate it. They can reroute and restore power automatically without slower human intervention. The fastest digital relays make decisions in eight thousandths of a second. Investigators determined more than 100 power plants were shut down in about 15 seconds, at the height of the August blackout.
Even if all utilities used digital relays, the blackout still could have happened. Utilities have not set up their own Internet: Their relays are not interconnected and there is little sharing of data. While AEP's digital relays may have been smart enough to act against the swings in voltage on lines it shared with FirstEnergy, it could not pass that information on to Michigan.
The result was a sucker punch. "We got hit by the equivalent of a tsunami, and we didn't have a clue that it was coming," says Joseph Welch, president and chief executive of International Transmission Co. (ITC), the regional organization that oversees transmission lines in southeastern Michigan. "The results were devastating."
The blackout was a rude awakening for ITC. It had only taken over responsibility for the transmission grid in southeast Michigan in February of this year after purchasing the assets from DTE Energy. "On August 14, it was apparent that parties were choosing to operate the grid within their sphere of influence for their own purposes, without regards to rules procedures, or the impact of their actions on other users of the grid," Welch told the House energy committee in September, taking a slap at AEP.
CERA's Stauffer says Congress will have to address not just whether digital technology gets deployed by utilities and transmission companies, but how the deployments are coordinated so that information is ultimately shared nationwide in thousandths of a second. Otherwise, there will always be gulfs of information between stakeholders in the nation's power grid that can't be bridged at a moment of crisis.
"The right strategy is not isolation. There was a breakdown here where the information was available to some people and not to others," Stauffer says. "As a result, the people who could have done something [to prevent the blackout] didn't have it in time. Those that did used it to protect themselves." | <urn:uuid:d274b8ee-c12c-4e6f-9a37-d43a68bc5766> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Processes/American-Electric-Power-Hero-or-Zero/2 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281659.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00500-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969384 | 861 | 3.109375 | 3 |
NASA issued a study today that said if life ever existed on Mars, the longest lasting environments were most likely below the planet's surface.
The hypothesis comes from analyzing tons of mineral data gathered over the years from more than 350 sites on Mars gathered by NASA and European Space Agency Mars space probes.
More on space: 8 surprising hunks of space gear that returned to Earth
The idea is that "Martian environments with abundant liquid water on the surface existed only during short episodes. These episodes occurred toward the end of a period of hundreds of millions of years during which warm water interacted with subsurface rocks. The types of clay minerals that formed in the shallow subsurface are all over Mars but the types that formed on the surface are found at very limited locations and are quite rare. This has implications about whether life existed on Mars and how the Martian atmosphere has changed."
NASA says another clue is the detection of a mineral called prehnite which forms at temperatures above about 400 degrees Fahrenheit (about 200 degrees Celsius). These temperatures are typical of underground hydrothermal environments rather than surface waters., NASA said.
"If surface habitats were short-term, that doesn't mean we should be glum about prospects for life on Mars, but it says something about what type of environment we might want to look in," said the report's lead author, Bethany Ehlmann, assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology and scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The most stable Mars habitats over long durations appear to have been in the subsurface. On Earth, underground geothermal environments have active ecosystems."
Layer 8 Extra
Check out these other hot stories: | <urn:uuid:c5376843-03e7-4524-812f-fd92e76160b3> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2221025/smb/nasa--if-there-was-life-on-mars--it-was-likely-underground.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279468.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00226-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94868 | 340 | 4.15625 | 4 |
BGP Routing Tutorial Series, Part 2
More Basics: Advertising, Homing, and Cardinal Sins
In part 1 of this series, we established that BGP is the protocol used to route traffic across the interconnected Autonomous Systems (AS) that make up the Internet. We also looked at why effective BGP configuration is an important part of controlling your destiny on the Internet, and we covered some of the basic building-block concepts needed to understand what BGP does and how it does it. We'll continue on that path in this post, adding more concepts and digging deeper into how BGP works and what makes it of value.
The core function of BGP is provide a mechanism through which any Autonomous System — a network connected to the Internet — can get traffic to any other AS. As discussed in Part 1, the path traveled by traffic is referred to as a route, and BGP is the protocol by which one “advertises” to the Internet the routes available to get traffic to your AS.
One way of thinking about the BGP routes that you advertise to other entities is as promises to carry data to the IP space represented by the advertised route. For example, if you advertise 184.108.40.206/24 (in class C terms, the block starting at 220.127.116.11 and ending at 18.104.22.168), you promise that you know how to carry to its ultimate destination data that is destined for any address in 22.214.171.124/24.
Another important BGP-related concept is “single-homed” vs. “multi-homed,” which is a major determinant in who uses BGP and who doesn't:
- Single-homed means that you have only one upstream provider giving your network transit to the rest of the Internet.
- Multi-homed means that you connect to multiple providers to provide transit to the rest of the world.
When you're single-homed, you usually won't want to use BGP to your upstream providers because you only have one path out of your network. So filling your router with 500,000+ BGP routes isn't going to do you any good, since all of those routes point to the same place (your one upstream provider). You can get the same result much more simply by using a “default route” to point all packets that aren't otherwise matched in your internal routing table to your upstream provider.
Also, if you have one upstream provider, it's almost guaranteed that your IP space is a sub-allocation (CIDR delegation, to be precise) of their larger IP blocks (aggregates). So you won't be advertised to the outside world specifically; instead your provider will just advertise the overall block. If you have any other networks (e.g. an old Class C, customers with address space, etc.), then your provider will statically announce those routes to the world and statically route them inside their network to your router interface(s). So even if you did advertise to your provider the routes to your IP space, they're not going to re-advertise them to the rest of the world because there already is a route to your provider for one of the larger aggregates of address space that you are inside of.
Despite the above, there is one circumstance where you might wind up using BGP as a single-homed customer, which is if you have multiple connections to a single ISP. In some cases, you will use BGP to manage the load-balancing across these links. Often, your provider will want to help configure, monitor, and manage BGP since it will affect the service they deliver.
To better understand the practical value of BGP if you're either multi-homed or you have multiple connections to a single ISP, let's look at what happens when you connect to the Internet without speaking BGP to your provider:
- You create a default route toward your upstream provider, and all non-local packets go out of the interface specified by that route.
- Your provider probably puts static routes toward you on their side, and redistributes those static routes into their interior gateway protocol (IGP). Then — unless all of their BGP is done statically — they probably redistribute their IGP into BGP.
What happens differently if you do use BGP? Your provider will give you all of the routes that they have (that's the easy part), will listen to your route announcements, and will then redistribute some or all of those to their peers and customers (that's the hard part for them). The net differences boil down to this:
- They may start advertising a more specific route, which is no mean task in a complicated network designed, as most networks are, to prevent the accidental leaking of more specific routes.
- The routes that they normally advertise for you under just their ASN will now have your ASN attached as well.
So what's the most important benefit to you of using BGP? It's not that you get full or partial routes from your providers. That's cool — and maybe even useful — but you can do almost as well by just load-balancing all outgoing traffic in either a round-robin or route-caching manner. The most important thing for you about BGP will actually be the ability to have your routes advertised to your providers, and by them to their providers and peers (i.e. to the rest of the Internet).
So now we understand why you might want to use BGP. Does that mean that you're now ready to start configuring? Doing a basic level of route advertisement using BGP is not hard, but if you screw it up, you may get slapped down pretty hard, because screw-ups with BGP route advertisements can be felt all over the Internet. That's right: screw ups with BGP route advertisements can be felt all over the Internet!
The first cardinal sin of BGP is advertising routes to which you are not actually able to deliver traffic. This is called “black-holing,” which is one form of “route hijacking.” If you advertise some part of the IP space that is owned by someone else, and that advertisement is more specific than the one made by the owner of that IP space, then all of the data on the Internet destined for that space will flow to your border router. This will effectively disconnect that black-holed address space from the rest of the Internet. Let's say, for example, that you announce a route for Instagram's servers that's more specific than the otherwise-best route. The result is that you've just black-holed Instagram for a period of time. Needless to say, that will make many people very unhappy.
The second cardinal sin of BGP routing is not having strict enough filters on the routes you advertise. If you don't filter well and have a BGP-speaking customer, you can pass on their poor hygiene and be an inadvertent vector for disrupting networks far from you on the Internet. If your provider is smart, there are filters in place to prevent you from a spectacular fail, which would hurt them and everyone else. But don't count on it.
The key to avoiding these sins is multi-level:
- Implement good filtering on your end.
- Check that your provider is also doing excellent filtering wherever possible.
- Be paranoid when configuring your BGP: Test your configs and watch out for typos! Think through everything that you do in terms of how it could screw things up and land you on the front page of the New York Times.
Remember: the vast majority of the route hijacking on the Internet is due to misconfiguration! That doesn't mean that someone couldn't be attempting to disrupt service or intercept packets, but usually the issue is a typo in someone's config. Focusing on the points listed above is your best defense against shooting yourself in the foot when configuring BGP.
In future posts we'll cover more BGP fundamentals: peering sessions, injecting routes, basic filtering, and best-path selection. Because the adverse consequences of not quite knowing what you're doing are so severe, I don't advise that you go ahead and start playing with BGP yet. But if you just can't wait, and you're implementing BGP for the first time, then please at least get a friend or another provider to review your proposed configs for you before implementing them. | <urn:uuid:86a629cf-bc0f-4a7e-8e18-7c871f9e9aef> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.kentik.com/bgp-routing-tutorial-series-part-2/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284376.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00252-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955256 | 1,754 | 3.515625 | 4 |
For more than a half century, computer processors have increased in power and shrunk in size at a phenomenal rate, but the exponential advances described by Moore’s law are winding down. Electronics based on silicon complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology are coming up against the physical limitations of nanoscale. Currently, there is no technology to take the place of CMOS, but a number of candidates are on the table, including graphene, a one-atom thick layer of graphite. Research suggests this incredibly strong and lightweight material could provide the foundation for a new generation of nanometer scale devices.
|Scanning electron microscopy image of graphene device used in the study. The scale bar is one nanometer.|
As an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, graphene is a promising electronics substrate, yet other characteristics of this material have stymied its progress as a silicon alternative. To address these limitations, researchers at the University of California Riverside have taken a completely new approach.
Semiconductor materials have an energy band gap, which separates electrons from holes and allows a transistor to be completely switched off. This on/off switch enables Boolean logic, the foundation of modern computing.
Graphene does not have an energy band gap, so a transistor implemented with graphene will be very fast but will experience high leakage currents and prohibitive power dissipation. So far, efforts to induce a band-gap in graphene have been unsuccessful, leaving scientists to question the feasibility of graphene-based computational circuits.
But Boolean logic is not the only way to process information. The UC Riverside team showed that it was possible to construct viable non-Boolean computational architectures with the gap-less graphene. Their solution relies on specific current-voltage characteristics of graphene, a manifestation of negative differential resistance. The researchers demonstrate that this intrinsic property of graphene appears not only in microscopic-size graphene devices but also at the nanometer-scale – a finding that could set the stage for the next generation of extremely small and low power circuits.
“Most researchers have tried to change graphene to make it more like conventional semiconductors for applications in logic circuits,” Alexander Balandin, a professor of Electrical Engineering, said. “This usually results in degradation of graphene properties. For example, attempts to induce an energy band gap commonly result in decreasing electron mobility while still not leading to sufficiently large band gap.”
“We decided to take alternative approach,” Balandin continued. “Instead of trying to change graphene, we changed the way the information is processed in the circuits.” | <urn:uuid:1532c007-9c0f-495b-a70a-0b4fb3c2b023> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.hpcwire.com/2013/09/06/new_hope_for_graphene-based_logic_circuits/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280723.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00464-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934353 | 531 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Use XQuery for the presentation layer
Separate concerns without being tied to a particular language
From the developerWorks archives
Date archived: December 6, 2016 | First published: March 10, 2009
Many Web applications use the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern to separate the three concerns. These applications frequently use PHP or JavaServer™ Pages (JSP) technology in the presentation layer. While those technologies are widely accepted and certainly effective, they do not represent a language-independent means of presentation. On the other hand, like Structured Query Language (SQL), XQuery is a lookup specification tied to the XML standard, which is language- and platform-independent. Using XQuery for presentation enables view-side developers to create robust presentation effects without tying the view to any particular underlying application server or programming language. In this article, explore the advantages of XQuery over other view technologies, how XQuery is implemented in the presentation layer, and a realistic example of such an implementation.
This content is no longer being updated or maintained. The full article is provided "as is" in a PDF file. Given the rapid evolution of technology, some steps and illustrations may have changed. | <urn:uuid:ccac7ef9-b04d-4fdc-a713-f2465933b98e> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-presXQuery/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279176.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00273-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.857723 | 241 | 2.71875 | 3 |
The use of fiber optic cables for communication has exposed gates for communication multiplexing technologies that maximize the capabilities at minimum costs. CWDM(Coarse wavelength division multiplexing), modulates different wavelength lasers with multiple signals. In effect, what this means is maximized use of a single optical fiber to deliver and receive a many signals, minimizing costs for telecom companies. Companies simply use the best optical amplifiers, multiplexers and demultiplexers to boost capacity from the fiber optic using CWDM technology.
Related technologies are DWDM(dense wavelength division multiplexing) and conventional WDM. Conventional WDM make use of the 3rd transmission window with a wavelength of 1550nm, accommodating as much as 8 channels. DWDM is identical but with a higher density channel. Systems could use 40 channels, each at 100 GHz spacing or 80 channels spaced 50 GHz apart. A technology, the ultra dense WDM is capable of working at a spacing of just 12.5 GHz, allowing more channels. DWDM and WDM are expensive in contrast to CWDM.
In CWDM technology, there is an increase in channel space. This means requirement of less sophisticated and cheaper transceiver devices. Operating in the same window of 1550 nm and using OH-free silica fibers, maximum efficiencies are achieved in channels 31, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59 and 61. The channels are spaced 20 nm apart. DWDM spaces them 0.4 nm apart. Less precision optics minimizing cost, uncooled lasers with lower maintenance requirements can therefore be utilized in CWDM devices, operating in the region of 1470, 1490, 1510, 1530, 1550, 1570, 1590 and 1660nm. 18 different channels can be used with wavelengths as much as 1270 nm. In addition to being cost effective, power consumption for laser devices utilized in CWDM technologies are also far less. CWDM signals can not be transmitted long term but they are ideal for applications inside a selection of 60 km for example inside a city as well as for CATV(cable tv) networks allowing upstream and downstream signals.
A quantity of manufacturers offer all related CWDM multiplexers, demultiplexers and optical amplifiers. Networking solution providers are the right people to seek guidance for use of CWDM, DWDM or WDM technology. They carry out the entire installation and commissioning from the right, integrated devices for error-free high-speed, high data transmissions over fiber optic lines. Cost and gratifaction optimized CWDM solutions with built in expansion capabilities can be found from reliable and trusted online network solution companies.
Fiberstore could possibly be the right choice with experience and technological expertise to provide the best CWDM solution. We’re experienced on fiber optic network products. Our CWDM multiplexers and CWDM transceivers have the best warranty and very competively priced as well as being of the highest quality. So you can buy our products with confidence. | <urn:uuid:7a43de9a-217d-4509-81f9-ec05bccca1d2> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.fs.com/blog/buy-cost-effective-cwdm-fiber-optic-products.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279224.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00117-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930579 | 635 | 3.359375 | 3 |
Table of Contents
The Windows Task Manager is a program that comes with Windows and displays information about the processes running and the resources being utilized on your computer. This utility allows you get a good overview of the tasks your computer is performing and the amount of resources each task is utilizing. Using this information you can tune your computer to run optimally and efficiently by disabling programs that may be using too many resources and thus slowing down your computer.
The Windows Task Manager program is broken up into multiple tabs. Each tab is associated with a particular category such as the running applications, running processes, Windows services, the computer's performance, network utilization, and the users that are currently logged in. This tutorial will discuss how to start the Windows Task Manager and provide information about each category of the Windows Task Manager.
Please note, that tutorial only applies to Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. As the Task Manager has changed in Windows 8, a separate tutorial will be created for that version of Windows.
The Windows Task Manager can be started by using two methods. The first, and easiest method, is to simply right click on the time shown in your Windows taskbar. When you right click the time, you will be shown a dialog box similar to the one below:
Simply left click on the Task Manager option and the Windows Task Manager will open.
The second method to start the Windows Task Manager is to click on the Start button and type in taskmgr.exe and press the Enter on your keyboard. If you are using Windows XP, then you will need to click on the Run option before typing taskmgr.exe. Once you press Enter on your keyboard, the program will start.
When the Windows Task Manager opens, it will open to the last tab that you viewed before you closed it in the past. If this is the first time you have run the program, then the Task Manager will start in the Applications tab as shown below.
The information displayed by the Windows Task Manager is broken up into different categories. These categories can be accessed by clicking on the particular tab that is associated with them. More information about each category is provided in the sections below.
Finally, Task Manager displays basic information at the bottom of the windows labeled Processes, CPU Usage, and Physical Memory. The Processes number is the amount of processes currently running on the computer, the CPU Usage is the percent of the total CPU processing power that is currently being used, and the Physical Memory percentage is the percentage of total memory currently being used by your running programs and Windows.
The Applications tab will show you all running programs that can be interacted with by the currently logged in user. That means that you will only see applications that have been started by the user you are currently logged in as. If there are other applications running that were launched by another user, you will not see these applications listed.
The Applications Tab
There is not much information provided on this tab other than the name of the application that is running and its state. Some application states that you may see are Running and Not Responding. Running means that the application is running normally, while Not Responding means that the program is frozen or having an issue.
To close a Not Responding program, you click left click once on the application name so that it is highlighted and then click on the End Task button. This will cause Windows to attempt to terminate the program. If the program is not terminated after you click on the End Task button, you should wait a minute and click on the End Task button again. If that does not work you can try terminating the program through the Processes tab that is discussed in the next section.
The Processes tab displays a list of all the running processes that are on the computer. Unlike the Applications tab, this tab has the ability to display all programs that are running even if they were started by another user or the operating system itself. When you start Windows Task Manager and go to the Processes tab, by default it will only show the processes for the currently logged in user and some basic operating system processes. An example of this limited view can be seen in the image below.
The Processes for the current user
If you click on the Show processes from all users button, Windows Task Manager will be restarted with Administrative privileges that will allow you to see all processes currently started on the computer. An example of what this looks like can be seen in the image below. Notice how there are much more processes now listed.
Processes tab showing all processes
The standard information that is shown in this tab includes the image name, or file name, the name of the user that launched the process, the amount of CPU power that the process is currently using, how much memory it is using, and a description that is found within the process. It should be noted that not all processes will contain a description, which will cause the description field to be blank. It is also possible to add other columns of information by clicking on the View tab and then selecting Select columns. This will open a screen where you can enable other columns of information for each process.
It is also possible to get more detailed information about the particular process by right-clicking on the process and selecting properties. This will allow you to see the digital signatures of a process, where it is located, and other information.
One of the most common tasks that people use this tab for is to terminate a particular process that may be causing problems on the computer. Whether it is because the program is not responding or it is suspected that the process is related to malware, you can terminate a process by left-clicking on it once so it is selected and then clicking on the End Process tab. You will then be presented with a dialog box asking if you are sure you wish to terminate the process.
The Services tab is only available in Windows Vista and Windows 7. This tab will show you all the Windows Services currently configured in Windows. A Windows Service is a special type of program that is started by Windows when it starts or as necessary and runs in the background performing a particular task. Windows Services are an integral part of the operating system and if they are not running or have been deleted they can cause serious problems with the proper operation of Windows.
The Services Tab
This tab displays information about each service, whether they are running or not, and the service's description. You can also start and stop an individual service by right-clicking on a service and selecting Stop or Start.
For more details about the services on your machine, you can click on the Services... button to open the Services control panel.
The Performance tab allows you to see the current and historical CPU and memory utilization on your computer. This tab is useful if you are trying to diagnose why your computer or an application is running slower than normal.
The Performance Tab
The CPU Usage and CPU Usage History boxes show how much CPU processing power your computer is currently using and has been using over time. The Memory and Physical Memory Usage History boxes display the amount of memory that is being used and how much has been used over time. As you can imagine, this information is very useful in determining why your computer may be running slow. For example, if you find your computer is slow and find that the CPU utilization is at 100%, then you know the slow down could be caused by a process using up to much CPU power. You can then go to the Processes tab to see which process may be using up all the CPU power and close it. If you find that there is no particular CPU causing a problem, then this just may be a indication that it is time to upgrade your CPU.
The same diagnostics can be used with memory. Many people do not realize that memory is a vital component of fast computer. If your applications are using up all of your memory than Windows will start writing pieces of memory to a file a on your disk drive. This process is called paging and when it occurs your computer slows down significantly. By using the Performance and Processes tab of the Task Manager, you can quickly determine if a lack of memory is causing your computer to perform more slowly.
The Networking tab allows you to have a general idea of how much traffic is flowing over a particular network interface on your computer. At the bottom of this screen you will see a list of all the network interfaces on your computer. Above that you will see graphs for each interface that show the network traffic flowing over them.
The Networking Tab
This information can be useful if you are wondering why your Internet or network connection may be to slow. For example, if you see that your network interface is at 100% utilization then something in Windows is using up all of the available bandwidth. You can then determine what program is using the network connection and close it.
The Users tab will display all the users that are currently logged in. An example of what this screen looks like is below.
The Users Tab
From this screen you can Disconnect or Logoff users. If you choose to Disconnect a user, it will terminate that users connection to the computer, but not necessarily log them off. That means that their programs will continue to run on the computer. On the other hand, if you select Logoff, then all of the user's running programs will be closed and the user will logged off of the computer.
It is not uncommon for a system administrator, or even malware, to disable the Windows Task Manager by changing a setting in the Windows Registry. When the program is disabled, the Task Manager option will be greyed out when you right-click on the taskbar and if you attempt to run the program manually by opening taskmgr.exe, you will receive a message stating "Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator.".
The Task Manager is disabled by creating the following Registry value:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System "DisableTaskMgr" = 1
When the DisableTaskMgr value is set to 1, Windows will not allow you to launch the Task Manager. To enable the Task Manager, you can simply change that value to 0. As making changes in the Registry can be dangerous, it is suggested that you instead download the following registry file if you find that the Task Manager is disabled.
Simply download the above registry file and save it on your desktop. Once it is downloaded, you can double-click on the file and when it prompts you to merge the data, please allow it to do so. Once that data has been merged you will be able to launch the Windows Task Manager again.
When using Windows there may come a time where you will need to close a program or process that is not responding or that you are concerned is a computer infection. This tutorial will walk you through using the Windows Task Manager to close a program when you cannot close it normally.
It is important to know how to properly shut down or restart your computer so that you do not lose data or corrupt important Windows files or Registry locations. Many people think that you shut down your computer simply by pressing the power button. On some configurations, this will work as Windows will recognize that you press the power button and shut it down gracefully. On the other hand, if ...
If you use a computer, read the newspaper, or watch the news, you will know about computer viruses or other malware. These are those malicious programs that once they infect your machine will start causing havoc on your computer. What many people do not know is that there are many different types of infections that are categorized in the general category of Malware.
A very common question we see here at Bleeping Computer involves people concerned that there are too many SVCHOST.EXE processes running on their computer. The confusion typically stems from a lack of knowledge about SVCHOST.EXE, its purpose, and Windows services in general. This tutorial will clear up this confusion and provide information as to what these processes are and how to find out more ...
If you are a system administrator, IT professional, or a power user it is common to find yourself using the command prompt to perform administrative tasks in Windows. Whether it be copying files, accessing the Registry, searching for files, or modifying disk partitions, command-line tools can be faster and more powerful than their graphical alternatives. This tutorial will walk you through ... | <urn:uuid:b59543b5-3a64-4ae2-99fc-24fdb5c6c1ed> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/how-to-use-the-windows-task-manager/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280133.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00447-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924461 | 2,533 | 3.453125 | 3 |
Even before the Internet, computer security was a problem. In the 1986 movie War Games, we saw a young Matthew Broderick hacking his way into the computer that controls the U.S.' nuclear command and control. Today's hackers are the phone freakers of the 1980s, emulating telephone noises to obtain free long-distance calls. Viruses and worms have been part of the background noise of cyberspace since its earliest days. So what's new?
Well, the numbers tell the tale. In 2000, there were 21,000 reported virus incidents. Three years later, the number was more than six times higher. In 2002, the worldwide cost of worms and viruses was estimated at $45 billion; August 2003 alone saw costs of almost the same magnitude, while the annual cost will rise 300% year over year. Twenty-seven million Americans have been the victims of identity theft in the past five years, but one-third of that total were victimized in the past 12 months. Patches to correct the kind of commercial-software vulnerabilities that hackers target most frequently were once issued at a rate of maybe 10 per month. In 2002, they appeared at a rate of dozens per week. And in 2003, worms that used to take several days to travel around the globe spread to more than 300,000 systems on six continents in less than 15 minutes from launch.
The implications are huge for corporate America. Five years ago, U.S. corporations spent 2% to 3% of their IT budgets on security; now that portion is roughly 8% to 12% (see chart at left). And the worst is, it hasn't helped. In recent months, even the most security-aware companies have been victimized. These include airlines, large banks, electric utilities, investment houses, railroads, and other critical infrastructure enterprises that have developed IT security policies and spent lavishly on defensive technologies. Put simply, it's becoming easier--and more profitable--to be a hacker, and harder--and costlier--to defend an enterprise. We'll describe the problem and offer a 10-point road map to keep your security spending on track.
There was a time when a hacker had to spend years learning how to write and read complex computer code. Once in a great while, a hacker would discover a software vulnerability--read "glitch"--and then spend weeks developing an exploiter, an "attack script," that could take advantage of the vulnerability to permit unauthorized entry into a network. Then, after getting privileges--such as "system administrator" access--the hacker would install a Trojan, or "back door," breach and spend additional weeks exploring the network. It's much more sophisticated now. A hacker can go to a Web site to develop a virus or worm by piecing together downloadable scripts that can be easily tailored for specific targets. One recent version of the Sobig virus went after Internet addresses belonging only to banks and other financial institutions.
Hackers have programs that scan the Microsoft, Bugtrack, and CERT Web sites to notify them when a new software vulnerability is announced. Then they spring into action, often using prewritten code as a platform for new exploits. Often, within hours, a new attack code is developed and tested. Once perfected, the blended virus-worm is launched into cyberspace in a "fire and forget" attack. The attack script takes on a robotic-like life of its own, wandering for months in cyberspace looking for victims. Code Red, a virus-worm launched in July 2000, still comes alive once a month to search for unpatched computers.
The difficulty of defense
IT executives used to think that computer security was about establishing a virtual perimeter, a medieval castle in cyberspace protected by firewalls and "demilitarized zones." To get inside, team members had to stand at the gate and speak their password. It's clear now that concept is about as modern as the walled town.
Free software allows just about anyone to crack most passwords in seconds. Many enterprises have opened holes in their firewalls for road warriors who slip into the fortress by tunneling through virtual private networks. Unfortunately, the road warriors are usually using unclean laptops that allow viruses and other malicious code to burrow in along with them. Networks also open the gates to itinerant traders, called consultants, supply-chain partners, or customers, that are allowed on your network and into your systems--that's at the heart of collaboration. Or sometimes you eject a town member from the community, but the person copies the key to the gate before leaving. These are disgruntled employees or those recently fired. So much for the perimeter-defense theory.
Software protection isn't much better. Where you used to run an operating system with 8 million lines of code, you now run one with 40 million lines or more. Now think about a recent Carnegie Mellon University study that found that most computer program writers make an error every thousand lines of code, and you begin to see why there are so many vulnerabilities and patches.
Complexity compounds the problem. The sleepy guard on the wall tower of our medieval fortress can't be relied on to see the attack coming and to respond. Indeed, no longer can your staff alone handle IT security in a 24/7 environment where new attacks can sweep the globe in the time it takes to page you. "Whenever a risk appears in one area, it has the potential to infect and seriously hamper another," says a spokesman at the Chubb Group of Companies in Warren, N.J. "It's imperative that operational, information-technology and financial managers across the enterprise join together to assess and mitigate their organization's most serious exposures." That's the model Chubb follows as it builds up its security team.
IT security audits can no longer be an annual event by an outside team that charges $100,000 and is gone in two weeks. Such audits must be automated and continuous. Knowing the password and yelling it up at the guard shouldn't be enough for him to drop the gate over the moat. Access and authorization to enter the network can't be limited to the password on the yellow stickie under the mouse pad. Perimeters must be created within perimeters, so the enemy can't waltz into the gold vault and the courier who's intercepted outside of town doesn't reveal his message. Firewalls and anti-virus programs have to run on desktops. E-mail, hard disks, and storage should be encrypted.
One approach to cyberspace security involves arrests and rewards to catch the bad guys. Microsoft has offered up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of hackers who attack vulnerabilities in its software. This is about .1% of the cost of damages caused by viruses and worms launched against Microsoft software in August 2003.
Clearly, helping law enforcement catch hackers is necessary remediation of cyberspace. But it's just a small part of the overall solution. Few hackers have been caught despite the efforts of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other three-letter entities. The major attacks of the past few years are, almost without exception, open cases.
The real answer lies in designing safer software. Products already exist that help software developers scan code for common errors. New products are coming that let enterprises lock down code that's been tested and certified, preventing any subsequent insertions (back doors) without multiple authorizers' approval. Until they arrive, the best solution is "defense in depth." This mission, however, can't just be handed to the town's watchman. Those who come to trade their wares must accept a little added scrutiny. And, the funds allocated to the defense of the town must keep pace with the threat outside the walls.
If we could line up all of the lessons learned since the initial Morris Worm attack in the mid-1980s, we could draw several conclusions about the challenge:
* Risk managers must integrate IT security across major corporate functions. Human resources, business continuity, and operations don't generally meet around the water cooler, but managing risk demands cooperation across these and other disciplines.
* The challenge is far more complex than initially assumed. Standards are lacking not only in various areas of IT security, but also for calibrating IT performance and financial returns.
* Finally, managing risk demands a long-term strategy. The road map for success is steeped in business process as well as awareness, education, and training. Successful strategies must motivate employees, as well as vendors, suppliers, and others not controlled by the corporation.
Cybersecurity road map
Our security road map has 10 components that operate across corporate functions, technologies, cultures, and business processes. It will help you think of this large-scale implementation in manageable steps as follows:
* Establish a governance structure that resolves complex security risks, educates corporate communities, and involves senior decision makers.
Good security starts and ends with governance. These processes also let risk managers resolve complex issues that affect multiple segments of the company such as integrating IT concerns into outsourcing considerations.
One positive trend in the past several years is the creation of corporate security councils comprising representatives from key business functions. The council's role is to review strategic issues unique to cybersecurity and provide input into corporate decisions.
* Create policies for the full scope of IT security; where such materials already exist, ensure that processes are in place to update policy statements and guidelines on an ongoing basis. IT security should incorporate management expectations and orchestrate corporatewide behavior. In creating or updating such policies, consider the following:
- Do policies adequately capture relevant business considerations, such as supply-chain management and business continuity?
- Do they take into account tangential issues such as training, awareness, and resource limitations?
- Are policies enforced consistently; if not, why not?
- Do policies reflect management's orientation toward such issues as tolerance for risk?
- Do policies extend to suppliers, customers, and business partners?
* Develop a risk-assessment program. There's nothing new about having to perform risk assessments. What has changed, however, is the complexity, scope, and cost of these assessments, and that they may not always be timely or conducive to making good business decisions. Congress now requires federal agencies to perform criticality assessments in addition to threat and vulnerability reviews. Risk managers should consider following suit and establishing their own criticality reviews.
* Extend business-continuity and disaster-recovery planning to IT assets. Risk managers should review the extent to which emergency planners have fully integrated IT systems into their recovery strategies. This includes restoration strategies as well as long-term recovery programs.
In conducting this review, managers should take a broad-based approach. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the August 2003 blackout, for example, power shortages created computing problems, and many network administrators and computing professionals were unable to get to work. Planning should include these and other contingencies.
* Enhance business-case arguments and capital planning for IT goals and objectives. Last August's blackout reinforced the need to recalibrate cybersecurity-investment arguments. According to the Michigan State Public Service Commission, the Slammer attack significantly undermined efforts to restore electric power. More generally, the need to reboot plants and factories after power was restored caused further delays.
The Michigan report reveals the importance of planning and funding appropriate IT projects. There will no doubt be follow-on cyberattacks and additional blackouts. Absent changes in the pattern of capital planning, damages can show up as a restatement of earnings or an unwelcome confession in a financial-disclosure statement. When articulating your business case and capital requirements, state the ROI in terms that are meaningful to the board. Balance prudent security with limited resources.
* Integrate IT and physical security planning. Risk managers should ensure that security plans include both physical and virtual assets. At many companies, physical and cybersecurity programs are completely separate. In other cases, security planners assume that mainframes should be protected, but fail to extend their planning to other assets that provide essential services.
* Let audit professionals enhance controls and compliance objectives. Security planners should use internal and external auditors to help define cybersecurity objectives and review progress against those objectives. In defining objectives, audits should take into account standards and other requirements, such as The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
* Heighten security vigilance through education, publicity, and training. The best way to capture a fortress is from within. But spies and saboteurs aren't the only danger; corporate dupes are an even greater liability. Take advantage of pre-existing internal communications and education programs to increase preparedness, familiarize employees with security procedures, and improve compliance throughout the enterprise.
* Work with corporate counsel to address compliance and liability issues. Sarbanes-Oxley is only part of the story. Cybersecurity requirements for the electric power, banking, and health-care industries are well-known, but regulators are also insisting on rules that mandate IT integration capabilities for things like cross-border trade and port security--both of which require secure electronic messaging and resilient communications.
By meeting regularly with corporate legal counsel and including its representative on the corporate security council, risk managers can ensure they're in compliance and avoid being blindsided by new requirements.
* Prioritize IT assets and the essential services they support. Managing infrastructure risks means prioritizing the business services that are essential to the company and the IT resources on which they depend. In addition to mission-critical information systems, essential infrastructure services include electric power, telecommunications, transportation, banking, and others that the company often takes for granted. Risk managers should identify which information services are vital to the company's core services and place special emphasis on ensuring that those assets are secure.
This 10-point game plan will push the risks and liabilities associated with cybersecurity to the forefront of the corporate agenda and help to dramatically increase your preparedness. But this program won't remove the threat or eliminate the need for strong walls until the technology industry puts better weapons at our disposal. For now, a truly secure enterprise remains the Holy Grail.
Richard Clarke is chairman of Good Harbor Consulting LLC, specializing in homeland security. Lee Zeichner is an attorney and publisher of a newsletter covering risk-management laws and policies.
Please send comments on this article to email@example.com.
The 90-Day Plan
True cybersecurity requires that financial, IT, and operational managers from across the enterprise--and outside it--come together to assess and guard against their company's most serious risk and exposures. This three-month plan will get you started.
First month: Update, review, and set up new processes
* Update and implement an enterprisewide governance program or begin one if it's not already in place.
* Establish processes for creating cross-enterprise cybersecurity policies and begin a risk-assessment program with definite expectations.
* Review IT disaster-recovery and emergency planning if you haven't done so recently.
Second month: Focus on ROI and objectives
* Calculate capital requirements and security ROI to the extent possible. Then, create processes to protect your most important--and costly--cyberassets.
* Conduct a review of audit and control objectives.
Third month: Fill security holes and spread the word
* Identify areas of security noncompliance. Launch an internal PR campaign to heighten awareness and improve performance at all levels of the business.
* Meet with corporate legal counsel to review compliance requirements and be sure you're up-to-date on new regulations.
* Prioritize and focus on those IT assets that support mission-critical services.
This article originally appeared in the January 2004 issue of Optimize magazine. | <urn:uuid:e72126ad-6903-4645-82a0-2aae7f91cf9a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.banktech.com/beyond-the-moat-new-strategies-for-cybersecurity/d/d-id/1289682 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280485.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00355-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950563 | 3,214 | 2.578125 | 3 |
An optical switch developed at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) spurs the mark integration of photonics and electronics.
What, isn’t electronics adequate? Well, nothing travels faster than light, as well as in your time and effort to hurry in the processing andtransmission of knowledge, the combined use of photons along with electrons is desirable for developing a workable opto-electronic protocol. The JQI switch can steer a beam of light from one direction toanother in only 120 picoseconds, requiring hardly any power, no more than 90 atto joules. At the wavelength used, in the near infrared,this amounts to about 140 photons. This is actually the setup of a waveguide made from a photonic crystal, a great device put into the fiber optic transmission area.
A quantum dot is placed inside a tiny zone free from holes. Light is distributed into and from the waveguide via endcaps. If properly timed, a pump laser pulse allows probe pulse to exit the side. When the probe and pump beams are not aligned, the probe beam will exit the farend of the waveguide. The center piece of most electronic gear is the transistor, a solid-state component where a gate signal is used to a nearby tiny conducting pathway, thus switching on and off the passage of the information signal.
The analogous process in photonics would be a solid-state component which provides a gate, enabling or disabling the passage of light through a nearby waveguide, or as a router,for switching beams in different directions. Within the JQI experiment, prepared and conducted in the University of Maryland and at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) by Edo Waks and his colleagues, an all-optical switch has been created utilizing a quantum dot placed in the resonant cavity. The dot, consisting of a nm-sized sandwich of the elements indium and arsenic, is so tiny that electrons moving inside can emit light at only discrete wavelengths, as though the dot were an atom. The quantum dot sits inside a photonic crystal, a material that has been tired of many tiny holes.
The holes preclude the passage of sunshine with the crystal except for a narrow wavelength range. Actually, the dot sits in the small hole-free arcade which acts just like a resonant cavity. When light travels on the nearby waveguide a lot of it gets into the cavity, where it interacts using the quantum dot. And it is this interaction which could transform the waveguide’s transmission properties. Although 140 photons are needed in the waveguide to create switching action,only about 6 photons actually are required to bring about modulationof the quantum dot, thus throwing the switch.
Previous optical switches happen to be able to work only by utilizing bulky nonlinear-crystals and high input power. The JQI switch, by comparison, achieves high-nonlinear interactions using a single quantum dot and very low power input. Switching required only 90 atto joules of power, some five times less than the very best previous reported device made at labs in Japan, which itself used 100 times less power than other all-optical switches. Japan switch, however, has the advantage of operating at room temperature, as the JQI switch needs a temperature close to 40 K.
Continuing our analogy with electronics: light traveling on the waveguide by means of an information-carrying beam could be switched from one direction to another using the presence of asecond pulse, a control beam. To steer the probe beam the side from the device, the slightly detuned pump beam needs toarrive simultaneously with the probe beam, that is on resonance with the dot. The dot lies just off the middle tabs on the waveguide, inside the cavity. The temperature from the quantum dot is tuned to become resonant using the cavity, leading to strong coupling. If the pump beam doesn’t reach the same time as the probe, the probe beam will exit in another direction. | <urn:uuid:ec8c6585-238f-496e-aa51-5529d84533d0> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.fs.com/blog/a-new-type-of-optical-switch-using-a-quantum-dot.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281649.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00079-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927219 | 817 | 3.75 | 4 |
ICT Assistive technology is a term used to describe a technology developed to help people with a disability access ICT. The problem with assistive technologies is that they are often expensive to develop and have a limited audience so they can be expensive for the end user and this further limits the number of users. The best way to bring down the cost is to extend their use to a wider community, preferably by making it relevant to most ICT users.
I was reminded of this when I was watching a new version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar on television recently. I enjoy watching Shakespeare but I, like many other people, can often only follow 80-90% of the dialogue and this limits my full appreciation of the stories. The version I was watching was set in a modern African country and all the actors were coloured. The actors were superb and annunciated beautifully but I suspect the unusual setting did not help my understanding.
After ten minutes of struggling to follow the story I suddenly remembered that nearly all digital television channels include subtitles for the benefit of people with hearing impairments. After a little playing with my remote I managed to switch the subtitles on. My enjoyment of the rest of the play increased dramatically as I was able to follow all the subtleties of the plot.
I would encourage anyone to switch on subtitles when watching a program they are having difficulty understanding either because it in an archaic language, such as Julius Caesar, or includes dialects (I confess to finding some of the minor characters in Vera hard to follow), or because English is not their first language.
Now that the television companies subtitle most programmes they should promote the benefits to the widest possible audience, not just the hearing impaired, but people where English is not their first language and people like myself who can better understand some dialogue through subtitles.
Promoting subtitles in this way would change the view of subtitles from a significant cost to a significant benefit.
Up to now I have been discussing television but the same argument applies to video delivered through any channel. In particular video clips are now commonplace on corporate web sites and should be subtitled to provide the benefits I have discussed. | <urn:uuid:cbc379c1-5b84-4240-a78a-4ddd06bb45cd> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.bloorresearch.com/blog/accessibility/subtitles-promoted-users/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284270.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00409-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975533 | 430 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Discover the reverse DNS entries for an IP address, a range of IP addresses or a domain name. IP based reverse DNS lookups will resolve the IP addresses in real time, while the domain name or hostname search uses a cached database (see below for details).
Recon: Find host names with Reverse DNS Lookups
A reverse DNS record (or
PTR record) is simply an entry that resolves an IP address back to a host name. Most people are aware of the forward lookup, also known as an
A record that finds an IP address from a host name so that an Internet service is able to be accessed.
When an attacker or penetration tester assesses an organization, they will commonly attempt to map the footprint of the organization in order to find the all the weak points to attack. By gathering a list of possible host names, IP addresses and IP network blocks that are related to the targeted organization an attack surface is able to developed. With this reverse DNS tool you are able to not only resolve single IP addresses but also a range of IP addresses or a search for all the reverse DNS containing a domain name.
Perform a query using either a single IP
220.127.116.11 , a range such as
127.0.0.1-10 or CIDR notation
127.0.0.1/27. You are also able to search for hostnames such as
example.com. Reverse DNS resolution of a range of IP addresses is limited to 254 addresses (a
/24 or smaller subnet).
Reverse DNS hostname search
Use the hostname search ability of the DNS reverse lookup to find all the reverse DNS entries for a particular organisation. Simply enter an organisations domain name
example.com to get the results. Currently the results are limited to a maximum of 5000 results - this will typically only be an issue for big Internet services companies and ISP's.
Much of the data used for the hostname search comes from the excellent scans.io project that is run out of the Rapid7 labs. The database of reverse DNS entries was last updated on 11/10/16 and covers the full IPv4 address space. This equates to 57GB of plain text DNS PTR records.
Where are Reverse DNS entries used
Many Internet services, network tools and server logging will use reverse DNS to populate IP address fields with a more human readable hostname. An example of this can be seen in the output of a traceroute tool.
Configuring Reverse DNS
Reverse DNS is configured and controlled by the IP block owners. The reverse DNS host name will often be configured to indicate the netblock owner such as ISP or web hosting provider.
If you are hosting a server with a dedicated IP address and would like to have reverse DNS configured (required if you are running an Internet mail server). The PTR record will usually be configured through your IP block hosting provider (usually the server hosting company).
Reverse DNS API
In addition to the web form you can also quickly access the reverse DNS tool using the API. The output will be in plain text and will include the IP address and the reverse DNS host name with a
space separating them. Access the API using a web
curl or any common scripting language.
This query will display the reverse DNS from the public DNS server provided by Google (18.104.22.168).
The API is designed to be used as a quick reference tool and not for bulk queries; like all our IP Tools there is a limit of 100 (total) requests from a single IP Address per day. | <urn:uuid:2810a677-b338-48e6-9178-ca23190a15c8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://hackertarget.com/reverse-dns-lookup/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279650.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00071-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907135 | 740 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Today’s one of the most admired network service “E-mail” has been modernized the concept of how to communicate worldwide with simplicity and speed without spending extra money. However, to run this service on a computer system or any other end device, e-mail is needed some specific applications as well as services such as application layer protocol “Post Office Protocol” (POP).
|Check out some other Layer 7 protocols:|
But the Post Office Protocol and the Post Office Protocol (version 3) are bounded for as the e-mail deliverance protocols and are best known usual protocols for the client/server environment. These two protocols can transport e-mail from server to the client (Mail user agent). And a Mail User Agent (MUA) application is used to compose the email messages. But two types of configuration for the e-mail service usage (such as to configuring the e-mail clients) you may be required either IMAP e-mail or POP e-mail client configuration. Although, standard SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer) protocol, in the internet world, is used to send e-mail but POP protocol can be used just to retrieve the e-mails.
POP is designed for the application-layer in order to be used as a local electronic mail service for the clients who want to retrieve the messages in the form of e-mails from a remote server via a TCP/IP link or connection. This protocol is endowed with absolute and intricate remote right of entry to the usual mailbox processes. But in case of POP clients, problem such as downloading of the same message many times may occur by the e-mail clients. Likewise, POP clients in general are connected to the mail server thus to get back all the messages, and to store up them on the user computer. After that, deletion of these messages is performed on permanent basis from the server. At last, connection sever is done.
But on the other hand, many Post Office Protocol clients are having the right of leaving the e-mail messages existed on the server even after downloading them. In other words, e-mails are not going to be deleted from the e-mail server after their retrieval by the client. This trait in certain situation is really proved very valuable. POP3 server is listened in via port 110. It supports safe and secure messaging with the help of mail server through the port 995. But with the e-mail protocol POP, certain tasks like friends & family contacts and appointments can’t be handled.
Anyway, the POP is planned for the application-layer of OSI layered suite and is being used by the local e-mail clients for the retrieval of e-mails from a server. But current version 3 of this protocol is recognized as POP3 which is almost supported by the every webmail service including g-mail and yahoo services. You can say that the oldest two internet message access protocols are POP3 and the POP. Purpose of both is to support the “offline” but limited e-mail processing. When e-mails are distributed to the e-mail server then a far-flung e-mail client from time to time downloads messages from that e-mail server to the user computer. | <urn:uuid:4d7dc1f2-c177-4769-9400-73fd85cac2b2> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://howdoesinternetwork.com/2012/pop-post-office-protocol | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280888.62/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00373-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92577 | 665 | 2.71875 | 3 |
The Crepate virus was found in Italy in August 1993. It has some quite advanced methods, such as variable encryption, multipartite infection and semi-stealth capabilities. Crepate infects hard disk master boot records, floppy DOS boot records and COM, EXE and Overlay files.
Depending on the settings of your F-Secure security product, it will either automatically delete, quarantine or rename the suspect file, or ask you for a desired action.
More scanning & removal options
More information on the scanning and removal options available in your F-Secure product can be found in the Help Center.
You may also refer to the Knowledge Base on the F-Secure Community site for more information.
The virus has several phases of execution. When an infected file is executed on an uninfected system, it will install it's own modified boot sector on the primary hard disk. The original boot sector is stored along with the virus code which all in all occupies 7 sectors. The virus makes no attempt to mark these sectors as bad; the contents of the selected sectors are simply overwritten. After this stage has been completed, the virus will check the date by reading the Real Time Clock. (INT 1Ah function 4) If the day is the 22nd, the virus will completely format the primary hard disk.
The second phase of execution begins when the computer is rebooted. The boot sector code that the virus installed in the first phase will then load the main body of virus code into memory. The main virus code takes control of INT 1Ch installing a routine which checks if COMMAND.COM has been loaded by the system boot code. After installing this routine, the virus executes the original boot code and the boot process continues as normal. Since INT 1Ch is called 18.2 times a second, it can continually monitor whether COMMAND.COM has been loaded yet. Once COMMAND.COM is loaded, the virus takes control of INT 21h effectively bypassing many anti-virus programs which are loaded after COMMAND.COM.
Once control has taken of INT 21h, the virus becomes a Stealth COM/EXE infector. The virus traps the following subfunctions of INT 21h in order to infect files:
3Dh (Open) 3Eh (Close) 43h (Lseek) 41h (Delete) 4Bh (Load and execute program) 6C00h (Extended open/create)
The following functions are trapped to give the virus it's Stealth ability:
11h (Find first/FCB) 12h (Find next/FCB)
Also, when an infected program is executed, the DOS boot record of current disk is infected.
The virus considers a file to be infected if the word before the last byte at the end of a file is equal to 6373h ("cs"). All infected files will also have an invalid time stamp; the seconds field contains 62. The stealth routines in the virus uses this technique to identify infected files.
The virus creates a "garbage" header for every file that is infected. The virus also employs techniques to confuse Heuristic scanners.
Once the damage routine is activated, the virus is effectively able to bypass many programs monitoring INT 13h because during the original address of INT 13h is taken during the boot process.
When virus is active in memory, CHKDSK will give allocation errors. This is due the stealth method used by the virus.
Virus contains two strings: "Crepate (c)1992/93-Italy-(Pisa)" and "Crepa(c) by R.T." The second strings is located right in the end of the infected files and, unlike rest of the code, is unencrypted.
Technical Details: Jeremy Gumbley, Symbolic, Parma | <urn:uuid:6e69bcd2-8123-461c-a173-3db67001d867> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/crepate.shtml | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279657.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00493-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924951 | 784 | 2.515625 | 3 |
What is AD? An introduction to Active Directory
The simplest Active Directory definition is that it is a directory service designed for Windows operating systems. But what does this actually mean? What is Active Directory used for? How can you manage it? Whether you are a new system administrator who wants to learn Active Directory basics, such as its structure, services, components and essential terminology, or a seasoned administrator looking to find new best practices for AD management and improve your skills even further, this e-book has something for you.
Learning about Active Directory structure, services and more
MS Active Directory can seem overwhelming, even to experienced admins. This e-book helps you to get a solid grasp on what it is all about; it is an Active Directory cheat sheet, if you will. You might have questions about what is included in the directory service technologies from Microsoft: What is Active Directory Domain Services, what is Active Directory Federation Services and so on? You might be confused about the structure of Active Directory and need to know more about domains, domain controllers, forests, trees and trusts. Or perhaps you want to know more about Active Directory administration and auditing. Whatever your questions about AD, this e-book has you covered. | <urn:uuid:93544950-c9e2-47f3-8c70-315b3ce6aee2> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.netwrix.com/what_is_active_directory_e-book.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280308.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00401-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955449 | 246 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Optical power meter (OPM) is a device used to measure the absolute optical power or the relative length of optical fiber optical power loss in fiber optic systems, similar to the multimeter of electronics. By measuring the optical network transmitter or absolute power, a power meter will be able to evaluate the performance of the light side of the device. In addition, connection loss and continuity can be measured and tested as well as helping to evaluate the quality of the fiber transmission link. A typical optical power meter consists of a calibrated sensor by using a combination of OPM and the steady laser source. A traditional optical power meter responds to a broad spectrum of light, however the calibration is wavelength dependent.
A typical optical power meter consists of a calibrated sensor, measuring amplifier and display. The sensor primarily consists of a photodiode selected for the appropriate range of wavelengths and power levels. On the display unit, the measured optical power and set wavelength is displayed. Power meters are calibrated using a traceable calibration standard such as a NIST standard. Some optical power meters are combined with a different test function such as an Optical Light Source (OLS) or Visual Fault Locator (VFL), or may be a sub-system in a much larger instrument. When combined with a light source, the instrument is usually called an Optical Loss Test Set.
Units of the optical power is dbm, the specification of the fiber transceiver or switch the light emitting and receiving optical power, typically light emitting less than 0dbm minimum optical power that can be received by the receiving end is called sensitivity, is able to receive the maximum optical power lessto the sensitivity value of the unit is db (dbm-dbm = db), called dynamic range, the light-emitting power subtracting the receiving sensitivity is permissible fiber attenuation values of the test the actual light emitting power by subtracting the actual received optical powervalue of fiber attenuation (db), the receiver receives the optimum value of the optical power is the maximum optical power that can be received – (dynamic range / 2), but generally not so good due to each of the optical transceiver and the optical modulethe dynamic range is not the same, so the fiber concrete to allow attenuation of the number depends on the actual situation. Generally allowed attenuation is about 15-30dB.
Some manual, only the light emitting power and the transmission distance of the two parameters, and sometimes the attenuation per km of optical fiber transmission distance calculated, mostly 0.5dB/km minimum transmission distance is divided by 0.5, which is able to receive a maximum lightpower, if the received optical power is higher than this value, the optical transceiver may be burned. with maximum transmission distance is divided by 0.5, is the sensitivity, if the received optical power is lower than this value, the link may be unreasonable.
There are two ways for fiber connection. One is fixed connection and the other is active connection. Fixed connection is welding, using special equipment to discharge and melt the optical fiber together. The advantage is low attenuation while disadvantage is inflexible and complicated operation. The other way is active connection. Active connection connect fiber pigtail through connector, usually on ODF. The advantage is simple and flexible operation and disadvantage is high attenuation. Generally speaking, an active connection is equivalent to one kilometer optical fiber attenuation. Fiber attenuation could be evaluated in this way, including fixed and active connection, will attenuate 0.5db optical power per kilometer. If the active connection is very few, the value could be 0.4db. pure fiber doesn’t include active connection, so the value could reduce to 0.3db. the theoretical value of pure fiber is 0.2db/km; for insurance in most case the value is 0.5db. | <urn:uuid:8935cce9-a64c-4245-8099-e72563034943> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.fs.com/blog/optical-power-meter.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280746.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00309-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918807 | 783 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Anyone who commutes by car (or has driven to the beach) knows that traffic is getting worse. In May, the Texas Transportation Institute released its 2005 Urban Mobility Report, a study that measures trends in traffic congestion from 1982 to 2003. Today’s average traveler spends 47 hours in rush-hour traffic annually, up from 16 hours in 1982. And those delays come at a cost: In 2003, Americans were out $63.1 billion in time and gasoline due to idling in traffic.
Obvious solutions to alleviate traffic would be increased road capacity, more mass transit and more carpools, but these can be problematic; road construction is expensive, and collective commuting goes against Americans’ independent mind-set. But don’t you fret, there are a number of technology-related initiatives that promise to ease our chronic traffic woes.
At the Center for Infrastructure and Transportation Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), director George List is leading a pilot project called the Advanced Traveler Information System, or ATIS. With ATIS, the speed, location and direction of approximately 200 cars equipped with wireless GPS and pocket PC devices are tracked by a central server at RPI. When these cars travel along U.S. Route 4 and other roadways near Albany, N.Y., their location is plotted on a map. Based on the progress of the cars, the drivers are sent voice-based updates that alert them to impending traffic problems and that recommend alternate routes.
Drivers of Acura’s 2005 RL sedan can get real-time traffic information from XM Radio Service, a company that transmits radio signals to cars via satellite. The Acura system monitors traffic speed, accidents, construction and the weather. Drivers receive voice-based updates and—because the broadcasts are integrated with the navigation system—also receive suggestions for alternate routes. The Acura option isn’t for everyone. For starters, the service is only available in 20 metropolitan areas (including notoriously congested Los Angeles and New York). And then, of course, there’s the RL’s base price of nearly $50,000.
Something else that could ease traffic congestion is often given short shrift by state and local transportation agencies, and yet doesn’t have to include whiz-bang technology: "Making traffic signals work more efficiently can improve traffic," says Shelley Row, the associate executive director of technical programs at the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). Specifically, says Row, municipalities need to analyze signal timing at specific intersections every three to five years and make adjustments, something that a majority of agencies don’t do. Recently, the National Transportation Operations Coalition released the National Traffic Signal Report Card, in which 378 transportation agencies in 49 states rated their own traffic signal operations. The overall grade: a D-minus.
When it comes to managing signals, the city of Bellevue, Wash., came in at the head of the class. Mark Poch, the city’s traffic engineering manager, says 90 percent of Bellevue’s 173 traffic signals are networked to a central computer. Closed-circuit TV cameras monitor traffic flow, enabling engineers—with the help of a PC—to tweak signal timing as situations warrant. And while Poch can’t quantify time or money savings, he knows the incremental effect is significant. Take a busy intersection with 50,000 cars and then shave delays for each car by just five seconds. Multiply that throughout a metropolitan area, and there will be huge savings in time, gas and, ultimately, driver frustration. | <urn:uuid:1e97b893-4d36-4aa4-84fb-4060a6abc63d> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.cio.com/article/2448637/mobile/transportation--stuck-in-traffic--it-can-ease-the-commute.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279923.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00337-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940285 | 737 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Chen M.,Beijing Centres for Disease Control and Prevention |
Zhu Z.,Chinese National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention |
Huang F.,Beijing Centres for Disease Control and Prevention |
Liu D.,Beijing Centres for Disease Control and Prevention |
And 4 more authors.
PLoS ONE | Year: 2015
Background: Adenovirus is one of the most common causes of viral acute respiratory infections. To identify the types of human adenoviruses (HAdVs) causing respiratory illness in Beijing, a sentinel surveillance project on the viral aetiology of acute respiratory infection was initiated in 2011. Principal findings: Through the surveillance project, 4617 cases of respiratory infections were identified during 2011-2013. Throat swabs (pharynx and tonsil secretions) were collected from all the patients, and 15 different respiratory viruses were screened by multiplex one-step PCR method. 45 were identified as adenovirus-positive from sporadic and outbreak cases of respiratory infection by a multiplex one-step RT-PCR method, and a total of 21 adenovirus isolates were obtained. Five HAdV types among three species, including HAdV-3 (species HAdV-B), HAdV-4 (species HAdV-E), HAdV-7 (species HAdV-B), HAdV-55 (species HAdV-B), and an undefined HAdV type (species HAdV-C) were identified. The comparison results of the penton base, hexon, and fiber gene sequences of the Beijing HAdV-3, HAdV-4, HAdV-7, and HAdV-55 strains in this study and those from the GenBank database indicated significant spatial and temporal conservation and stability of sequences within the genome; however, the phylogenetic relationship indicated that both strain BJ04 and strain BJ09 isolated in 2012 and 2013, respectively, may have recombined between HAdV-1 genome and HAdV-2 genome within species HAdV-C, indicating intraspecies recombination. Conclusions: This study confirmed that at least 5 HAdV types including HAdV-3, HAdV-4, HAdV-7, HAdV-55 and an undefined HAdV type were co-circulating and were the causative agents of respiratory tract infections in recent years in Beijing. HAdV-3, HAdV-4, HAdV-7, and HAdV-55 showed the apparent stability of the genomes, while intraspecies recombination was identified in strain BJ04 and BJ09. The recombinants carrying penton base gene of HAdV-1 as well as hexon and fiber genes of HAdV-2 might be a novel type of HAdV worthy of further study. © 2015 Chen et al. Source
Zhang Y.,Chinese National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention |
Wang H.,Chinese National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention |
Xu S.,Chinese National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention |
Mao N.,Chinese National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention |
And 33 more authors.
Clinical Microbiology and Infection | Year: 2014
With the achievement of high coverage for routine immunization and supplementary immunization activities (SIAs), measles incidence in mainland China reached its lowest level in 2010. The proportion of measles cases in the vaccination-targeted population decreased during 2007-2010 after the SIAs. More than 60% of measles cases were in adults or infants, especially in the coastal and eastern provinces during 2009 and 2010. A total 567 isolates of measles virus were obtained from clinical specimens from 27 of 31 provinces in mainland China during 2009 and 2010. Except for two vaccine-associated cases, one genotype D4 strain, two genotype D9 strains, and four genotype D11 strains, the other 558 strains were genotype H1 cluster H1a. Genotype H1 has been the only endemic genotype detected in China since surveillance began in 1993. Only genotype H1 was found in mainland China during 1993-2008, except for one detection of genotype H2. More recently, multiple genotypes of imported measles were detected even with the background of endemic genetotype H1 viruses. Analysis of the 450-nucleotide sequencing window of the measles virus N gene showed that the overall genetic diversity of the recent geneotype H1 strains decreased between 2008 and 2010. The lower genetic diversity of H1 strains suggested that enhanced vaccination may have reduced the co-circulating lineages of endemic genotype H1 strains in mainland China. © 2014 The Authors. Source | <urn:uuid:b059fffb-c03b-4ad3-a3ad-78bfc88e9358> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.linknovate.com/affiliation/beijing-centres-for-disease-control-and-prevention-1640578/all/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279923.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00337-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928583 | 986 | 2.53125 | 3 |
CLEAN Technology INC. | Date: 1997-02-11
recycled plastic in the form of pellets and flakes for use in manufacturing and for general industrial use.
CLEAN Technology INC. | Date: 1994-09-16
food grade recycled plastic in the form of pellets and flakes for use in manufacturing and for general industrial use.
Clean Technology Inc. and Plastipak Packaging Inc. | Date: 1991-12-24
Clean Technology LLC | Date: 2008-10-21
Li T.,Tokyo Institute of Technology |
Choi S.,Tokyo Institute of Technology |
Watanabe T.,Tokyo Institute of Technology |
Nakayama T.,Clean Technology Co. |
Tanaka T.,Clean Technology Co.
Thin Solid Films | Year: 2012
Arc discharge with argon and nitrogen was generated across the long electrode gap distance of 400 mm to produce a stable thermal plasma and large volume with low power under atmospheric pressure. In the case of nitrogen as plasma forming gas, an increase of the gas flow rate increases the arc voltage, thus the center temperature of the arc column reached higher. For the argon arc, the arc voltage decreases with increasing gas flow rates. Due to the arc constriction in both cases of nitrogen and argon, the center temperature of the arc column increases under the constant current. The result of emission intensity distribution across nitrogen arc column reveals that the arc column diameter increases with increasing gas flow rate because of the increase of the input power. On the other hand, in the argon arc, the diameter decreases by strong thermal pinch in large flow rate of argon. The measured excitation temperature is uniform along with axial direction of the arc column which is an important feature for waste materials processing due to the long direct current arc plasma that provides long residence time for injected materials. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Source | <urn:uuid:babe419f-d0a6-4b4d-b2ba-a27929a130f1> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.linknovate.com/affiliation/clean-technology-co-825514/all/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282932.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00455-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.854962 | 392 | 2.625 | 3 |
Chu: eWEEK Labs believes a new magnetic recording technology called perpendicular data recording is the shape of HDD storage to come.
Hard disk drive vendors, looking beyond serial technologies, are developing even more advanced technologies to improve the physical data recording capacities of HDD magnetic media.
Many HDD manufacturers, including Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and Seagate Technology, are exploring a new magnetic recording technology called perpendicular data recording. Based on its potential capacity boosts, eWEEK Labs believes this is the shape of HDD storage to come, although it probably wont emerge for several years.
In todays "longitudinal" HDD products, data bits are recorded on magnetic mediums using a recording method in which data bits are placed parallel to the media plane. Current recording techniques can carry storage densities beyond 100 gigabits per square inch, but new recording methods will be necessary in coming years to maintain the growth rate in HDD capacity, industry experts said.
To achieve higher storage capacity, drive makers must increase the areal density of the magnetic media. Current methods involve making data bits smaller and placing them closer together, but there are several factors that can limit how small the data bits can be made.
As the data bits get smaller, the magnetic energies holding the bits in place also decrease and thermal energies can cause demagnetization over time, leading to data loss. This phenomenon is called the superparamagnetic effect. To counter it, HDD manufacturers can increase the coercivity (the magnetic field required for the drive head to write the data on the magnetic media) of the disk.
However, the amount of coercivity that can be applied is determined by the type of magnetic material used to make the head and the way the data bits are writtenand vendors are approaching the upper limits in this area.
Perpendicular recording places data bits perpendicular to the magnetic media surface. The data bits are formed in upward or downward magnetic orientation corresponding to the 1s and 0s of digital data. Perpendicular recording gives hard drives a much larger areal density in which to store data because it can achieve higher magnetic fields in the recording medium.
HDD vendors have been harnessing current technology to double their drive capacities every year, and advances in Serial ATA and SCSI drives will make large storage systems cheaper, faster and more efficient than before.
We therefore dont expect to see HDD systems that use perpendicular recording technology for several years, but this recording method will take future HDD systems to densities many times greater than the current longitudinal recording methods. Some experts estimate this new recording method can create areal density up to the terabit-per-square-inch range.
Imagine being able to store terabytes of data in your iPod or handheld devicesthe possibilities are almost endless.
What new storage technologies catch your eye? Share them with me at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:94fb70ce-1c04-46a0-83f8-606afcb71953> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Hard-Drive-Vendors-Think-Perpendicular | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280065.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00182-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910703 | 587 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Optical networking uses thin glass or plastic optical fiber to transmit information in the form of light pulses. It is far more reliable and offers greater transmission capacity than conventional copper-wire networks.
SONET and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) are the most common optical transport protocol standards used in optical networking. They both meet the needs of traditional voice traffic, where all traffic is high-priority and patterns are generally predictable.
Extremely demanding enterprise networking solutions can use Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (DWDM) platforms. These deliver high-speed Ethernet connectivity and carrier interconnect, in addition to managed Storage Area Network (SAN) extension services.
DWDM typically supports all point-to-point and ring topologies, along with a variety of transmission distances. Transparent and protocol-independent, DWDM can carry SONET, SDH, storage protocols, data, and video.
Using DWDM, multiple signals can be transmitted simultaneously on one optical fiber, with each signal on a different wavelength. This allows multiple traffic types to be aggregated on to a single wavelength and transmitted over long distances uninterrupted, to deliver different types of services.
One recent optical networking innovation is the Cisco Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM). It delivers uninterrupted high-speed, high-capacity services to customers on meshed and multi-ring networks. A ROADM can be configured remotely to add or drop capacity at each network node, so capacity can be managed as needed.
Each ROADM offers outstanding manageability and scalability for transport networks, and have proven to be vitally important for wavelength services delivery. A ROADM-enabled DWDM node can scale to 40 wavelengths. By using automated signal and power management, a ROADM can eliminate truck rolls to intermediate locations to support or redirect services. | <urn:uuid:ef5dc8d8-0cb1-4980-8319-7ce04bc05107> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/optical-networking/technology.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280128.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00026-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903159 | 385 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Definition: An interactive proof system in which provers follow a fixed strategy, that is, one not affected by any messages from the verifier. The prover's strategy for a given instance x of a decision problem can be represented by a finite oracle language Bx, which constitutes a proof of the correct answer for x.
Note: From Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook, page 29-20, Copyright © 1999 by CRC Press LLC. Appearing in the Dictionary of Computer Science, Engineering and Technology, Copyright © 2000 CRC Press LLC.
If you have suggestions, corrections, or comments, please get in touch with Paul Black.
Entry modified 17 December 2004.
HTML page formatted Mon Feb 2 13:10:40 2015.
Cite this as:
Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook, CRC Press LLC, 1999, "probabilistically checkable proof", in Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [online], Vreda Pieterse and Paul E. Black, eds. 17 December 2004. (accessed TODAY) Available from: http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/probabilisticallyCheckableProof.html | <urn:uuid:232ac180-399e-4314-a8d1-e1a66285ad2b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/dads/HTML/probabilisticallyCheckableProof.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280801.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00420-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.813441 | 248 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Fiber optical cable and the old common (RF or coaxial) cabke are two different cable system technologies that can be used to distribute various services to end users-homes. In general, they differ only in technical (electrical or communication) point of view. This is mainly important for the network operators because end users or viewers don’t care about the technology, they are insterested in services and TV channels.
There are serveral different methods that can be used to release public services like television channel through a cable television network. Each has some advantages and disadvantages and require different topology structure and network infrastructure.
The first cable television network was just extension of the broadcast in the air. This was implemented by deploying ordinary antenna cable (but with lower losses) from the cable system headend to the homes. Because of distance and many amplifier at a particular point, to ensure that the required signal level. Special communication is one-way, but then most of these cable network to expand to DocSys allows two-way communication need to access the Internet through the use of the system.
This approach can be used with radio frequency coaxial and optical fiber cable. Fiber optic cables are also used in some cases to distribute the old analog cable television. The advantage of optical network because it can use the available fiber in the existing optical fiber cable and the cable loss is very low.
Digital television in cable networks can be divided into two totally different ways of distribution. The first one is an equivalent to digital broadcasting and the other way mainly used in fiber optic networks is IP television.
Digital Cable Broadcastingn
This is equivalent to analog distribution over (RF) cable but with digital signal. The same technology (modulation) can be used as the ground broadcasting but usually, there are more efficient systems, considering the specific properties of the cable system. One typical example is DVB-T system which is used in Europe for digital terrestrial video broadcasting but cables use similar DVB-C system.
This is one of the most popular digital television distribution used with fiber optic cable systems. This means that the distribution channels with IP protocol is the backbone of network communication. Each TV channels is encoded with either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 system and then distributed over fiber optical cable network to the homes. The advantages are enormous. The capacity for the number of channels is pretty high, all the channles can be encoded and distributed with very high quality, it is very easy to distribute HD channels, access to the internet is very simple because of the IP protocol and native technology.
Regardless of distribution cable technology the changes are also happening in the consumer industry. The old CRT television sets are replaced by plasma or LCD flat panel displays and aspect ratio or picture format is also changing from 4:3 to 16:9. Since computer LCD monitors use similar display panels they can be converted to televisions by just adding a simple TV tuner. | <urn:uuid:43f9e76b-5ac2-4012-ac49-51e8f18a6ef5> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.fs.com/blog/how-do-fiber-optics-and-cable-television-work.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280133.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00448-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930129 | 595 | 3.453125 | 3 |
10 Ways Cloud is Changing the World
The cloud revolution is truly a revolution - the way we work, learn and even play is very different now than it was just 10 or 15 years and will probably be a lot more different in 10 or 15 years. With this in mind, let's look at 10 ways the cloud will (and to a large degree already has) changed the world.
One of the most common and visible ways that the Internet affects us is in entertainment, so let’s start with how we play.
We’ll begin with audio. Almost 100 years ago, you got whatever a handful of broadcasters chose to put on the radio, and if you weren’t listening when it was broadcast, you missed it. You might have had a few records to listen to for music, but that was about it. Records got scratched, skipped and weren’t very portable. Not much changed until the 1960s with eight-track tapes, which were more portable, but by today’s standards pretty large. In the ’70s and ’80s cassette tapes became much more popular, but you couldn’t skip between songs easily and the tape would occasionally come out of the case and get wrapped around the internals of the player. Not fun! Cassettes were smaller and lighter and much more portable, but they still required a (relatively) large player, at least by today’s standards.
The next big revolution was the CD-much smaller and lighter than records, though a little larger than tapes. CDs could skip between tracks instantly and play in high definition. Things changed again in 2001 with the introduction of the iPod. It could hold thousands of songs and fit in the palm of your hand, and the battery would last for many hours. This was a huge improvement! Nevertheless, who has an iPod today? We stream music over the Internet from a variety of sources like iTunes Radio, AccuRadio, Rhapsody, Spotify or Google Music, to name just a few. CD collections have become a rarity as we can store all the music in the cloud. It’s possible to maintain an active music library of millions of songs for less than $10 a month.
Video was much the same, starting with broadcast TV in the 1930s. Reception often wasn’t good, necessitating either rabbit ears on top of the TV or an unsightly antenna on the roof. You still had to be home and watching when your TV show came on. In the 1940s, those who lived where TV reception was poor began to put big antennas on a hill and then run cable to a bunch of homes-the start of the cable TV industry. In the 1980s and ’90s, cable TV channels multiplied rapidly, providing ever more variety of programming to watch. Still you had to be watching when your show was on, unless you had a VCR, but even then you had to know how to program the thing as well as when and what channel a show was on. That changed in the 2000s with the advent of the DVR, enabling you to record the shows you wanted to watch, and with its integration with the Internet, the DVR would know what shows were playing when and on which channel. This was much simpler and a big game changer.
Today, we watch “TV” on many devices that aren’t televisions, such as tablets, phones and computers. DVDs are now stored in the cloud and can be watched from any device. Even more disruptive to the old cable TV industry is streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet using services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, to name just a few. Video can now be watched on demand, not only when broadcast. This has led to a whole new term, “cord cutters”, for those who have gotten rid of cable to watch online only and save the monthly cost of cable (now around $125 a month on average). | <urn:uuid:26a90672-1616-4e67-8508-f8bfac2253f5> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.globalknowledge.com/ca-en/resources/resource-library/white-paper/10-ways-cloud-is-changing-the-world/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280485.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00356-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97933 | 821 | 2.609375 | 3 |
The amount of data that the world continues to amass will surely tip the scales of comparable computing power, yes? After all, Emerson Network Power, in its 2011 State of the Data Center infographic, says that by year’s end, humans will have created 1.2 trillion gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 75 billion 16 GB iPods. And according to Emerson Network Power, a provider data center infrastructure management solutions, that’s more than enough for every person on earth to own 10 iPods.
Where will it all go? Is there enough infrastructure in place to handle all that? Are today’s data centers – the pillars of the Internet on which much of this data traverses – up to snuff? They better be, Emerson Network points out. After all, if all 509,147 data centers (with square footage equal to 5,955 football fields) went out 2.5 times (based on an average) for a duration of 134 minutes, that would equal 2,842,737 hours of downtime, at a total loss of $426 billion a year.
What could one do with those billions of dollars? Not pay off the U.S. government’s debt of course, but it’s enough at least to buy every person in Munich, Germany, a yacht, the company says.
Here are more fun facts illustrating just how busy and loaded the Internet is. Every second, 1,157 people start watching Youtube, which turns into the viewing of 100 million videos each day. One of my favorite fun facts: every hour enough information is consumed by Internet traffic to fill 7 million DVDs. Oh, and stack them side by side and they’d scale Mt. Everest 95 times. Ninety-five!
It’s a good thing then, Emerson Network Power points out in its infographic, that servers purchased in 2011 have on average 45 times more compute capacity than similarly configured servers installed in 2001. On that curve, who knows what we’ll see in a decade! | <urn:uuid:1f457542-3ecc-4200-abbd-2e73516b2c55> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.itworld.com/article/2733307/data-center/yachts-equals-money-equals-data-center-downtime.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279379.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00384-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933393 | 422 | 2.5625 | 3 |
“The internet is creating a global community,” a thought leader probably said recently. But take a closer look at internet traffic data, and the theory that the web is turning the world into a borderless digital utopia doesn’t hold up.
There’s no question that internet traffic in general is skyrocketing. One hundred hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Facebook recently announcedthat it would upgrade its data warehouse to a capacity of 300 petabytes. (One petabyte is enough to store over 1 million HD movies.)
And more of this data crosses borders than ever before. Global flows in a digital age, a report released yesterday by McKinsey Global Institute, attempts to quantify the circulation of three major types of “flows”: financial, human, and digital. Using data from TeleGeography, McKinsey estimates that the total transfer of data across borders has increased 20-fold from 2005 to 2012, from 2.2 trillion megabytes per second to over 41 trillion.
This is a dramatic rise, no doubt, but a little context makes it clear that data flow—or the growth of that flow—is not inherently international. In fact, cross-border web traffic has barely kept up with the sum total of internet activity. The vast majority of digital transactions are still domestic.
The rise of cross-border activity is simply a function of the digitization of everything. Basically, “lots more data” also means “lots more cross-border data.”
“Data underlie all other flows,” says Susan Lund, one of the report’s authors and a partner at McKinsey. Whether domestic or intercontinental, transfers of physical goods, cash, messages, services—the list goes on—are becoming rearrangements of 1s and 0s.
For the most part, global web transfers are just digital versions of transactions that were already happening. In many ways, data is still more protected than finance, the original globetrotting medium. China, for example, belongs to the WTO but is partially cut off from the global internet community. One-third of all financial flows cross a border, according to McKinsey, compared with only 17% of data flow. | <urn:uuid:1d02513c-05b4-4709-8ea0-6c526928cbcb> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2014/04/web-not-actually-getting-any-more-global/83191/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284270.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00410-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941028 | 464 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Birds and high-performance jet aircraft don't mix. So at a base in Germany, the Air Force is fighting birds with birds - specifically trained falcons that patrol the base and help eliminate at least some of the feathered threat to the F-16 Fighting Falcons and other aircraft.
According to an Air Force release, Ronald Leu of the 52nd Civil Engineer Squadron has been the Spangdahlem Air Base falconer, part time anyway - he also makes machine parts -- for 10 years. "These birds prey on rabbits, but more importantly, crows," Leu said. "It's important to keep airspace clear so the aircraft can fly as normal."
Leu has trained Gina, a 5-year-old falcon to hunt wildlife near the base's flightline to help in preventing aircraft damage. Other falcons are part of the patrol as well, according to the Air Force. Leu brings the birds to the base two to four times each week, the Air Force stated.
Once the falconer sees that a bird has made a successful catch, Leu said he quickly meets with it to limit how much the falcon chows on. As long as the bird is still hungry it will continue hunting in the area, the Air Force stated.
The Air Force though is no stranger to falcons as they are the symbol of the Air Force Academy and are used in demonstrations during many of the school's sporting events. In fact the Academy keeps and breeds falcons under special permits issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, according to the Air Force.
At least one other air base has used falcons to help keep airspace clear. See here.
Follow Michael Cooney on Twitter: nwwlayer8
Layer 8 Extra
Check out these other hot stories: | <urn:uuid:e1669550-0a4d-4655-94ae-65daf14376a8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2231737/security/air-force-uses-real-birds-of-prey-to-protect-its-own-predators.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279468.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00228-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962602 | 371 | 2.515625 | 3 |
In today’s computing world, energy- and power-efficiency in data centers is critical to reducing a system’s overall total cost of ownership. Energy-efficiency is so important that the energy cost of operating a datacenter far exceeds its initial capital investment.
In addition to cost savings, improvements in energy-efficiency also translate into lower carbon emissions. As Omar Al-Saadoon, System Specialist at EXPEC Computer Center puts it, “one megawatt generates close to 8,000 metric tons of C02 per year when burning petroleum to produce electricity.” In short, it behooves data center specialists to educate themselves on the energy-efficiency (or inefficiency) of their system to save on operating costs and on the environment.
To promote an energy- and green-conscious way of computing, Al-Saadoon and his team have developed a simulation framework that provides an intuitive view of the energy costs of a workload. His goal is to “empower simulation engineers to better assess the environmental effect of their simulation runs and become green-conscious.”
His team collected the energy and power characteristics of their Hydrocarbon Reservoir simulation on 1024 compute nodes over the course of three months. Overall, they provide insight on the energy usage of datacenter level computers and incorporates environmental metrics such as carbon emission on a per job basis.
Energy usage in data centers is bifurcated into two groups: servers and support infrastructure. Servers are the physical computing systems that perform computation. The supporting infrastructure includes components such as cooling, lighting, UPS batteries, interconnects, and AC/DC conversation. Typically, the supporting infrastructure adds a significant component to the overall costs of running a data center. In fact, data center efficiency is measured with both the physical computing system and supporting infrastructure using a metric called Power Usage Efficiency (PUE).
PUE is a combination of server and infrastructure power. A PUE value of 2 means that for every 1 kWh of server power, another 1 kWh is spent on cooling, lighting, and other infrastructure needs. The most efficient PUE value tends towards 1 — suggesting the ideal environment that little to no power is used for infrastructure needs. | <urn:uuid:a7ae6e04-ea8c-4ea3-b033-23c535deeda1> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.hpcwire.com/2014/02/21/simulating-hpc-workload-energy-costs/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279468.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00228-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930943 | 451 | 3.28125 | 3 |
In other words, success or failure at spreading a message through social media looks kind of random. When a social media campaign goes viral, "you don't have to assume it's because some people are influential--you can still get some random thing that gets 50 million views on YouTube," said Filippo Menczer, director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. "Maybe the answer is that there is no answer."
Or, to put it another way, when computer scientists (or social media marketing gurus) try to prove cause-and-effect, they need to do a better job of correcting for the element of chance. "You have to ask, is it just a spurious correlation, where someone was going to win," Menczer said in an interview.
The paper on Competition among memes in a world with limited attention was published on Nature Magazine's Scientific Reports website. Indiana University Ph.D. candidate Lilian Weng was the lead author, with co-authors Menczer, Alessandro Flammini, director of undergraduate studies for Indiana University Informatics, and Alessandro Vespignani, Sternberg distinguished professor of physics, computer science, and health sciences at Northeastern University.
The term meme, coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, describes ideas that reproduce and spread like genes in biological systems. The Indiana University study also alludes to a related theory that ideas and concepts spread like infections, with fads and viral videos breaking out like epidemics. Another theoretical underpinning of the study was the idea of an attention economy in which information is plentiful but human capacity to focus on it is scarce.
The researchers built a computer model of a system with a network structure similar to that of Twitter, and a limited attention span for the software agents simulating the role of users (meaning they would only "remember" or focus on any given meme for a short time). By pumping simulated memes into this virtual Twitterverse and picking winners and losers according to a few simple rules, the computer scientists were able to reproduce the same kind of behaviors seen in the real network. The real-world analysis was based on 120 million retweets connected to 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags.
"Our question was, can we look at these things to explain why some become very popular--why some YouTube videos go viral and others don't. There might be one dancing cat that gets a million views, but another dancing cat where only two people watch," Menczer said. Other studies have tried to make connections to the time of day an item is posted or the number of connections the person issuing the post has, but those may be misleading, he said.
Like an ecosystem that can only support a limited number of species and individuals within that species, social networks pick winners that go viral and losers that die without a trace according to a brutal process of natural selection, where chance plays a big role, according to the study.
The rules of the game can be summarized as "ideas propagate on the network, and people forget after a while," Menczer said. The researchers found that if they altered the assumptions in the model--for example, by altering the degrees of separation between social media users or their ability to pay attention--their model no longer matched reality. On the other hand, when they stuck to their base model--in which no post was inherently more interesting or popular than the other--the data matched up closely.
This does not really mean that there are no ideas more interesting or people more influential than others, only that the role of those factors is easy to overestimate, Menczer said.
"Of course, there are things that are more objectively interesting than others and if you write about them, probably yes, that will receive a bunch of following. However, even if you don't you might get lucky. And even if you do, someone else might be posting the same thing and get the attention instead of you," he said.
The Enterprise 2.0 Conference brings together industry thought leaders to explore the latest innovations in enterprise social software, analytics, and big data tools and technologies. Learn how your business can harness these tools to improve internal business processes and create operational efficiencies. It happens in Boston, June 18-21. Register today! | <urn:uuid:182e6f03-aeca-4464-876e-c938d778b828> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/science-probes-why-tweets-go-viral/1156935268 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280266.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00136-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954089 | 896 | 2.703125 | 3 |
A spy, data or password stealing trojan is usually a standalone program that allows a hacker to monitor user's activities on an infected computer. Password stealing trojans are quite popular. Some backdoors and worms drop password stealing trojans to a system they try to infect.
Various spying and data stealing trojans compromise system security by providing authentication information (logins and passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) to hackers. So it is very important to change all logins and passwords after cleaning a computer from these trojans. Also, if your credit card number has been stolen or your on-line bank account info has been compromised, it is recommened to contact your credit card company or on-line bank for help.
Please note that stealing credit card or online bank information information is a serious abuse, so you might want to contact the local cybercrime authorities for investigation. In this case do not perform any disinfection actions on your computer before it is inspected by the authorities.
Allow F-Secure Anti-Virus to disinfect the relevant files.
For more general information on disinfection, please see Removal Instructions .
A password stealing trojan is usually a standalone application that installs itself to system and sometimes drops a keylogging component. Such trojan stays active in Windows memory and starts keylogging (recording keystrokes) when a user is asked to input a login and a password. Then a trojan stores the recorded keystrokes data for later submission or sends this data to a hacker immediately. In many cases such trojans also send information about user's computer IP, RAS (remote access server), and network configuration. A hacker who gets this info is capable of misusing other person's Internet account and in some cases hack into user's network. Stolen logins and passwords can allow a hacker to read user's e-mail on public and corporate mail servers.
A data stealing trojan is usually a standalone program that searches for specific files or data on an infected computer and then sends this data to a hacker. For example some data stealing trojans try to locate 'key' files that contain authentication information for some program or service. Other data stealing trojans try to steal serial numbers of software installed on an infected system. A few e-mail worms attach random data files (excel or word files, images) to e-mails that they send from infected systems.
A spy is usually a standalone program that installs itself to system and records certain events on an infected computer. For example such trojan can record keyboard activities, keep the list of applications that a user ran, archive URLs that a user opened and so on. A spying trojan sends out a recorded log to a hacker at certain intervals. In some cases spying trojans have a certain time window. For example they work only until a certain date and then uninstall themselves from a system.
Most famous spies, data and password stealing trojans: Coced, Hooker, GOP, Kuang, Platan, Klogger.
Description Details: Alexey Podrezov, July 14th, 2003
Description Last Modified: Alexey Podrezov, November 17th, 2004 | <urn:uuid:233ae4f3-ed3d-4161-a0e8-7f07fd45daf5> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/pswsteal.shtml | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280266.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00136-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.887259 | 653 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Next generation 911, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning applied to video surveillance, gunshot detection, the growing threat of ransomware, and the risk posed by homegrown terrorists were all hot topics at Secured Cities 2016. The combination of IoT and machine learning are having a revolutionary impact on state and local governments and touch on almost all aspects of public safety and the Smart City.
The first responder of the future will very likely look something like the image below, fully-equipped with wearable IoT technology to provide complete situational awareness. They will know exactly where to go, what to expect, and who is expecting them. All the critical information, including the vital signs and health data of the in-field first responders, will be collected and communicated by next generation 911.To fully achieve the capabilities shown below, challenges in security, device management, network, analytics, immature technology, skills training, privacy, and standardization must first be met and overcome.
Next generation 911 builds on the concept of Computer-Aided Dispatch – the latest meaning of the CAD acronym. Last year 72% of 911 calls came from cell phones, but existing 911 centers have not yet adapted to that fact.
The Soaring Threat of Ransomware
Ransomware attacks, as defined above, are up dramatically and according to a survey this year by Osterman Research, nearly 50% of organizations have been hit. This is due in large part to the emergence of the bitcoin as international currency. To combat these attacks, a dual-pronged strategy is needed: secure the systems with technology and train users to avoid and report infections. Here’s what the FBI says you should do if hit with a ransomware attack.
Gunshot Recognition Systems
Whenever a shot goes off in a populated area, responders need to know the details immediately. Human witnesses typically react not to the source of the sound, but to the echo (remember the grassy knoll?), which leads responders in the wrong direction. Gunshot detection arrays, however, are not fooled. They can swivel a camera directly to the source of the shot within one second 97.22% of the time. With current systems, the shot detection is done in the field at the pole. These systems are capable of filtering out routine sounds like car doors slamming. They can also detect suspicious sounds like door rattling.
Gunshot detection systems have the same effect on crime as video surveillance systems: transgressions dramatically drop or completely disappear after the systems are installed. The Cherry Hill section of Baltimore is an example. Celebratory gun firing there had been especially terrible every July 4th and New Year’s Eve. But after installing the detectors, that activity dropped to zero, making the community much safer.
The Threat of Homegrown Terrorism
Since 9/11, 74 Americans have been killed by terrorists, but the majority of the killers were grown and trained in the United States.Dr Errol Southers, dir. of homegrown violent extremism (HVE) studies at USC, reported on the trends and what is being done to address the issues. Southers has found that the terrorists are filled with anger and hate. Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a strong believer in conspiracy theories and follower of Neo-Nazi sites praising Hitler. Hybrid ideologies emerge: one former leader of the Aryan Brotherhood carried his hateful outlook with him after he converted to Islam. According to Southers, a particularly dangerous group is Jamiyyat Ul Islam Is Saheeh (JIS; Assembly of Authentic Islam) which is active in the California prison system. The hatred festers until a “Cognitive Opening” creates a trigger. The Branch Davidian siege near Waco was this sort of trigger for Timothy McVeigh.
Many of these terrorist leaders end up killing each other, and although it is controversial, drones have eliminated a high proportion of the foreign terrorist organization leaders. A more peaceful route has been to engage with American extremists and steer them back into the mainstream or at least monitor them.
A team of public sector experts was on hand at Secured Cities in Houston, Texas, to help government agencies and integrators plan out their smart city projects including wireless surveillance systems and wired and wireless network infrastructure needs. Learn more about Extreme Networks public sector solutions. | <urn:uuid:65269ad9-76c5-4e55-9b50-c6b073edd5c2> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.extremenetworks.com/ransomware-short-takes-secured-cities-2016/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279176.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00275-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951179 | 877 | 2.5625 | 3 |
An online criminal has created a new type of malware to hack into IoT devices, push them into a botnet, to launch DDoS attacks.
The new Linux/IRCTelnet malware was discovered by security researchers from MalwareMustDie.org and is thought to have infected around 3,500 devices in just five days.
Like the Mirai Botnet, which also targeted the Internet of Things (IoT), the IRCTelnet IoT botnet uses default hard-coded credentials in a bid to get into IoT devices that are vulnerable and at risk.
IoT botnet targets vulnerable devices
It also shares similarities with a previous botnet called Bashlight, using a telnet-scanning method to make and sustain attacks. This is where connected devices become vulnerable.
According to MalwareMustDie, this new botnet is based on the same source code as Aidra, which was malware that also infected thousands of IoT devices and services.
Aidra was found in 2013 and infected over 420,000 connected products as part of a research project to test the global network, but many experts question how ethical it was.
Culprit still unknown
Although the exact identity of the culprit is unknown, researchers believe they’re from Italy because they’ve been using Italian in the botnet’s communication interface.
“The malware (the bot client) is designed to aim IoT device via telnet protocol, by using its originally coded telnet scanner function, which is brute-forcing the known vulnerable credential of the Linux IoT boxes, via command sent from a CNC malicious IRC server,” the researchers wrote.
“The botnet is having DoS attack mechanism like UDP flood, TCP flood, along with other attack methods, in both IPv4 and IPv6 protocol, with extra IP spoof option in IPv4 or IPv6 too.”
While any form of malware is inconvenient, it doesn’t actually damage infected devices. It can be easily removed by turning the device off and powering it back up.
“This malware variant can be easily removed by rebooting the infected device. But if you don’t secure the telnet after reboot, it will come to infect you again,” the researchers continued.
Mike Pittenger, vice president of security strategy at Black Duck Software, explained that there isn’t a question of vulnerability here. Rather, there’s an underlying flaw in the architecture of IoT devices.
“The issue is not a vulnerability (per se) in these devices, but an architectural flaw in that they don’t require the default password to be changed, and passwords can be bypassed using Telnet,” he said.
“Unsecure IoT devices are putting the Internet, and those services that depend on a reliable communication channel, at risk. A reasonable company, to use the due care standard, would not build and sell a car without brakes.
“At what point are companies that put our infrastructure at risk held accountable? I think we’re going to see that happen soon.” | <urn:uuid:82b7ca65-5f5b-4d93-841d-68afd8fb5b21> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://internetofbusiness.com/iot-botnet-infects-3500-iot-devices/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279176.20/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00275-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940606 | 643 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Although vaccines are responsible for saving millions of lives annually, there are still millions more who die from curable diseases. IoT may hold the answer.
There are a number of causes here, including challenges surrounding transport and storage. But technology giant Microsoft believes that the latest IoT technologies can help.
One leading example is the Weka Smart Fridge, which has been developed to let clinicians better manage distribution and save lives while working in the field.
Protection for vaccines
It helps by automating vaccine storage and dose dispensing in a bid to make treatments quicker and more effective for patients. The fridge also sports a remote monitoring feature that ensures vaccines are always stored in the right temperatures.
Another common issue for caregivers is having to find the right vaccine quickly. However, this problem is fixed thanks to an automatic inventory tracking system. As well as this, all vaccines are stored in separate cartridges based on rules set out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To protect vaccines from getting damaged due to temperature change, there’s a small drawer where health professionals can access the fridge’s contents. The idea is that vaccines are protected at all times but are easily accessible.
Utilising Big Data
The smart fridge comes with a dedicated IoT platform, too. It collects data from a variety of sensors on each unit in real-time, helping doctors and nurses to monitor and analyse the vaccines 24/7.
BlueMetal, which is the 2016 Microsoft IoT Worldwide Partner of the year, developed the fridge with Weka. And because it has real-time functionalities, Weka can understand vaccination rates per location.
Microsoft’s Azure machine learning platform is also playing a pivotal role. Combined with the IoT network, fridge operators can alert organisations if vaccines are running low in specific areas or clinics.
Alan Lowenstein, COO of Weka Health Solutions, said: “Clinicians in areas of Africa and other regions where power is unstable or inaccessible can use our Smart Fridge to store and dispense vaccines.
“And the Fridge is small enough that you can put it in a van. So if you can’t bring the people to the vaccine, you can bring the vaccine to the people.
There’s also an emphasis on helping organisations save money and avoid financial losses. He added: “Physicians generally have $40,000 to $60,000 worth of vaccines in their refrigerators.
“If the clinic suffers a power outage or the traditional fridge fails, they risk losing the entire inventory of vaccines. By using automated processes to manage inventory through IoT sensors, the Fridge can deliver proactive alerts on inventory shortages or changes in temperature.”
Rise of healthcare IoT
Roman Chernyshev, SVP for healthcare and life sciences at global technology consulting firm DataArt, said connected technologies are doing great things in the healthcare world.
“Developments in IoT and big data are allowing healthcare to be administered more remotely. It is only a matter of time before technological developments of IoT and implants will allow various medical devices to continuously collect vital data from millions of patients around the world in real-time and simultaneously compare them,” he said.
“These developments will radically change how diseases are diagnosed. Medical conditions will be predicted as a result of big data and constant monitoring of health information using IoT platforms.
“Technological advancements will result in healthcare being everywhere, although it will be almost invisible. One IoT device that is currently being developed will soon be used to autonomously treat metabolic diseases such as diabetes. An implant will constantly collect and analyse blood data from diabetes sufferers and independently inject insulin without the need for human interaction or prompting.” | <urn:uuid:ce428a7f-06dd-47c1-98a3-932a300ea3b0> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://internetofbusiness.com/iot-smart-fridge-vaccine-care/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280410.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00091-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926034 | 761 | 3.046875 | 3 |
The BeagleBoard is an open source, single-board computer built on TI’s OMAP3 processor line. Small, low-power, and high-performance, the versatile BeagleBoard fits a wide variety of embedded systems applications
The BeagleBoard combines the latest technology in mobile computing, traditional computer interfaces, as well as direct pin-bus hardware hackability into a single 3-inch by 3-inch module.
BeagleBoard C5 carries an OMAP3530 processor, the 720 MHz, ARM-Cortex A8 processor also found in the Motorola Droid and Palm Pre. The board also features 2GB NAND and SDRAM, which is mounted directly to the processor itself.
The lightweight Angstrom distribution of Linux is designed to provide embedded software programmers with a familiar and fully-functional interface to custom hardware development. Google’s open source Android is another popular platform for mobile application development compatible with the BeagleBoard.
- Mobile computing
- Industrial control panels
- Medical tablets
- Rapid embedded device prototyping
The BeagleBoard can output to S-video or DVI-D (through a partial HDMI interface), and also includes onboard stereo out and stereo in connections.
A single USB outlet, typically attached to a powered USB hub, can power any number of USB-driven peripherals.
The BeagleBoard can be programmed over serial (RS232) and also has a USB mini AB port that doubles as a power connection.
The BeagleBoard can be debugged over a 14-pin JTAG header, GPIO pins, UART or onboard LEDs.
An SD/MMC slot offers read-write and boot options to the board from much larger external media sources.
The BeagleBoard operates from a 5V power supply, or directly from the mini AB USB connection.
Unpopulated expansion pins make the BeagleBoard hardware hackable. These pins support a broad range of capabilities including UART, McBSP, McSPI, I2C, MMC, and PWM, along with general purpose I/O. Pins dedicated to 5V/1.8V power allow add-on modules like the BeagleTouch to tap into the BeagleBoard’s power supply.Resources | <urn:uuid:b5f8501a-ac59-46f7-97e2-5fc5e3d7aeab> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.liquidware.com/shop/show/BB-C4/BeagleBoard+C4 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280774.51/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00577-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.84899 | 466 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Q. Which of these is not one of the six classic simple machines?
A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force. They act as the simplest ways to use mechanical advantage to multiply force. There are six classic simple machines:
- Wheel and axle
- Inclined plane
A spring, however, is not one of them.
Now that you’ve been schooled on simple machines, it’s time to enroll at Lifesize University to learn everything there is to know about cloud video conferencing. Live sessions are held every Tuesday and Thursday to teach the basics of using and administrating Lifesize Cloud and to answer any questions you have about your implementation. Check out Lifesize University on the community for all the details. | <urn:uuid:58cc3737-5f3d-44dc-b322-2edb8d78b611> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.lifesize.com/video-conferencing-blog/12-days-of-geek-day-4/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280133.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00449-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921433 | 163 | 3 | 3 |
FileZilla, Other Open-Source Software From 'Right' Sources Is Safe
A basic tenet of open-source software security has long been the idea that since the code is open, anyone can look inside to see if there is something that shouldn't be there.
It's a truth that does work and many of us who use open-source software daily accept it as such. That's why some recent news about a Trojan in a popular File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program is a potential cause for concern.
The malware versions of FileZilla are corrupted versions of the software that steal users' credentials and could also be employed for spreading more malware. "Attackers also can download whole Web page source code containing database log-in, payment system, customer private information, etc.," Avast stated in a blog post.
What's important to note here, though, is the fact that it is not the official version of FileZilla that is at risk. Bogus versions of FileZilla are at risk.
Do a simple search on Google for FileZilla, and you'll find several sites with downloads for the program. Open-source software, by definition, is freely redistributable, so having FileZilla available from multiple locations is not a surprise or anything new.
It's a situation that the FileZilla project is also well aware of at this point.
"While this instance is one of the largest to date, there have been many cases of modified versions spreading malware hosted on third-party Websites for over a decade," the FileZilla site states. "We do not condone these actions and are taking measures to get the known offenders removed. Note that we cannot, in general, prevent tainted versions on third-party Websites or prove their authenticity, especially since the FileZilla Project promotes beneficial redistribution and modifications of FileZilla in the spirit of free open-source software and the GNU General Public License."
The lesson and the message here is simple, but very, very important. When consuming or downloading open-source software, make sure that you're getting it from the legitimate source.
For FileZilla, that means getting the FTP program directly from the project page itself.
The larger question here is whether the same type of issue could potentially exist with other open-source software. It can, and that is why it's important that users only download software from the "right" place. In my opinion, the "right" place is the actual project page of a given open-source application. Linux users should also generally feel safe getting applications for their respective Linux distribution software repositories, as well, since those have generally just been packaged for specific distributions from the upstream project.
So, the next time you look to download an open-source app, be sure to make sure you're getting it from a source that you can trust.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist. | <urn:uuid:7139a0b1-6c9d-4cb1-8315-236e2eb7fcab> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.eweek.com/blogs/security-watch/filezilla-other-open-source-software-from-right-sources-is-safe.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280587.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00201-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939298 | 616 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Using DNS Logs As a Security Information Source :
Occasionally this list is used as part of research into malware and domain security. Please drop us a note if you find such a reference in an article or presentation; if you are the author, let us know.
Two papers we’ve become aware of:
Understanding the Prevalence and Use of Alternative Plans in Malware with Network Games - http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~ynadji3/docs/pubs/gzaraid2011.pdf
A Demonstration of DNS3: a Semantic-Aware DNS Service – http://iswc2011.semanticweb.org/fileadmin/iswc/Papers/PostersDemos/iswc11pd_submission_106.pdf
The zone and text files are ONLY be available from a mirror and are no longer be available
on the main site. All requests for files on www.malwaredomains.com will be directed to
our main mirror, mirror1.malwaredomains.com.
MalNET serves as a low interaction HTTP server which responds with a ’200 OK’ for every request. When a malware attempts to retrieve http://bad.malwaredomain.com/som/bad/file.exe, MalNET basically says ‘yep, OK, here it is’ and then does nothing. To make this work you will need to run some sort of blackhole DNS setup in your environment such as the one on offer from malwaredomains.com. Once you have traffic redirected to your MalNET host, you should be able to see what the malware is trying to download.
Today, we’re happy to announce Google Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators — an experimental tool which allows Autonomous System (AS) owners to receive early notifications for malicious content found on their networks. A single network or ISP can host hundreds or thousands of different websites. Although network administrators may not be responsible for running the websites themselves, they have an interest in the quality of the content being hosted on their networks. We’re hoping that with this additional level of information, administrators can help make the Internet safer by working with webmasters to remove malicious content and fix security vulnerabilities.
To get started, visit safebrowsingalerts.googlelabs.com.
Nice article on SANs:
For example when seed data pulled from Malware Domains is correlated with passive DNS and ASN data, then visualized, it is possible to see how the majority of the authoritative nameservers are hosted in the same network block. This dependence indicates an investment by the aggressor into a particular hosting company and can provide an effective network-level block at relatively low cost. As always, be aware of potential collateral damage when blocking a network portion that may also contain legitimate IP hosting space.
Websense has an eye-opening writeup on how some malware is now using ARP cache-poisoning and making the infected machine into an HTTP proxy server. Poof! Your entire network is poisoned! Castlecops has a writeup from someone in China who has experienced this first hand: Machines which are declared clean by multiple AV products still suffer from the IFRAME. Yikes!
Dancho Danchev.’s blog lists several domains full of exploits, using “comprehensive multiple IFRAMES loading campaigns”:
8v8 (dot) biz uc147 (dot) com 070808 (dot) net qx13 (dot) cn sbb22 (dot) com uuzzvv (dot) com 55189 (dot) net 749571 (dot) com jqxx (dot) org mm5208 (dot) com 68yu (dot) cn 2365 (dot) us loveyoushipin (dot) com yun878 (dot) com xks08 (dot) com
In better news, shadowserver reports that the 17 Storm Worm domains including i-halifax.com and i-barclays.com, appears to have all been placed in a status of “NOT DELEGATED” over at nic.ru, preventing A records from being returned when looking up the domains. (Some of the other holiday-related Storm Worm domains still have their NS record.) | <urn:uuid:510db999-a3d1-4a23-a368-e0c3fe0af0a0> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.malwaredomains.com/?tag=news | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280587.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00201-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.865435 | 917 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013 users often complain that the recipients to their e-mails say they contain double spaces between lines. This situation may happen in HTML formatted e-mails making the message look unclear and scruffy.
The reason is the way the new Outlook handles new line signs in HTML messages. It is generally accepted in word processors that the Enter key starts a new paragraph, while hitting Shift + Enter starts a new line of the text. The difference between starting a new paragraph and proceeding to the next line may seem subtle, still it is important and known for a long time. Spacing between paragraphs is usually bigger than spacing between regular text lines. In HTML <p> tag is used to start a new paragraph, whereas <br> tag to move one line down.
Unfortunately Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013 violates this rule and, from the perspective of a user writing a new message, there is no difference if they hit Enter, or Shift + Enter. The result is the same, the word processor behaves as if proceeding to the next line, whereas when we hit Enter the <p> marker is being inserted, which means the actual beginning of a new paragraph. However, when we hit Shift + Enter, the <br> tag is inserted, which means proceeding to the next line. Inserting the <p> tag and the <br> tag looks the same to the user, which is caused by the way Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013 CSS style sheet was developed.
Because there is no noticeable difference between inserting a new paragraph (see image below), and proceeding to a new line, users often hit Enter twice to get the effect of a new paragraph with spacing they are used to from other word processors, including Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, which is an integral part of Microsoft Office 2007, 2010, 2013. As a result the users insert double paragraphs to their e-mails, which means two <p> tag (<p><p>) instead of a single <p> tag, or hit Enter instead of Shift + Enter to go to the next line – as a result they insert the <p> tag instead of <br>.
The problem appears when a recipient uses a mail reader which doesn’t support complex CSS style sheets used by MS Outlook. And there is quite a number of such readers.
Personally, I have no clue what pushed the makers of Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013 to the idea of treating a new paragraph, and proceeding to a new line, differently from other mail software makers, and differently from what is generally accepted and to which users are accustomed. What can Outlook users do to make their e-mails look the same on their and their recipients’ computers? There is a number of possibilities, and everyone can choose the most convenient one, though each of the solutions has some drawbacks.
The first solution is to always use Shift + Enter when proceeding to the next line or next paragraph. In order to proceed to a new paragraph, users will need to hit Shift + Enter twice. The drawback of this solution is that text formatting, such as indents or bullets, is based on paragraphs, and if we want to use this type of formatting, we will still have to create a new paragraph hitting Enter, because double-hitting Shift + Enter inserts two <br><br> tags instead of <p> tag, which in HTML stands for a paragraph.
If we want the Enter key to insert a new paragraph which will in fact have bigger spacing than a line space in a regular text, we can edit the Outlook style sheet used when composing a message. This is the second solution. The style sheet can be found in NormalEmail.dotm file in %appdata%\Microsoft\Templates. You need to open the file using Word and modify Normal style in such a way to achieve a 10 pts margin after each paragraph. To do this you should:
- Right-click Normal style on the ribbon and choose Modify from drop-down menu.
- In a dialogue screen click Format, and from drop-down menu choose Paragraph.
- In the window with formatting properties in Indents section in the field After type 10 pts.
After saving changes in NormalEmail.dotm file when composing a message in Outlook, when we hit Enter a new paragraph with a visible indent from the preceding paragraph will be created.
The third solution is to be a conscious user and be able to notice Outlook’s behavior with Enter and Shift + Enter keys, although the Outlook itself doesn’t show any difference between those two situations. If we want to insert a new paragraph, we should hit Enter. If we want only to proceed to the next line – hit Shift + Enter, and remember not to hit Enter twice if we want to make a new paragraph. This solution, however, has some obvious drawbacks. The message we created will look different in mail applications which can interpret MS Outlook CSS styles, and different in applications which can’t. The message will also be less readable in the first type of applications because of the lack of spacing between paragraphs.
It clearly shows from the presented ideas and solutions that the problems of spacing between paragraphs in MS Outlook can’t be completely solved. Unfortunately, it is a serious problem for some users. For the time being, however, they could apply one of the solutions presented in this article as a workaround of the MS Outlook inconvenience.
And a scriptless alternative: Press CTRL+0 (zero) before starting to write and email (or after highlighting its whole text). The keyboard shortcut resets paragraph spacing to single with 0pt before and after. See this Microsoft Word (the only email editor for Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013) KB article for reference: support.microsoft.com/kb/290938
© All rights reserved. No part or whole of this article may not be reproduced or published without prior permission. | <urn:uuid:4aea662a-117e-4d57-83b9-32514dd4f606> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.codetwo.com/blog/double-spacing-in-outgoing-messages-in-ms-outlook-2007-2010-2013/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280266.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00137-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910251 | 1,209 | 2.875 | 3 |
GCN at 25: NASA's expanding storage universe
DATA PAYLOAD: The Hubble telescope has collected 120T of data.
Electronic data storage has been a concern for government agencies for as long as there has been electronic data. And perhaps no agency has had to handle a bigger data load than NASA.
The Oct. 29, 1990, issue of GCN reported that the agency was concerned about satellite data straining its capacity. NASA already had 1.2 million magnetic tapes containing roughly 1,714 terabits of data, and it expected to add 63 terabits that year. (Terabits refer to data in transit. A terabyte, data at rest, is equal to 8 terabits.) And the agency wasn't kidding itself about the exponential growth of data, expecting the yearly load to reach 4,300 terabits by the end of the decade.
By then, of course, storage was being talked about in petabytes. And outer space is still the limit. | <urn:uuid:9d52585d-739d-442f-8920-8e52c5fc5ba4> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://gcn.com/Articles/2007/05/04/GCN-at-25-NASAs-expanding-storage-universe.aspx | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280723.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00467-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969813 | 203 | 2.84375 | 3 |
DDoS is an acronym for Distributed Denial-of-Service. It’s a type of attack where hundreds or even thousands of client computers are hijacked by a hacker to strike against a single system, network or application. If an organization becomes compromised by a DDoS attack, whatever service it provides becomes unavailable to its employees and customers.
DDoS attacks are often perpetrated by an army of virus-laden, remotely controlled computers. Since there are so many inbound server requests coming from so many distributed computers, it’s difficult to distinguish these attacks from legitimate traffic. The goal of a DDoS attack is either to cause costly downtime or to extract some form of ransom from the victim organization.
To protect against DDoS attacks, organizations need to prevent advanced application layer attacks, such as HTTP floods or Slowloris, and large-scale volumetric attacks. This requires high-performance solutions that can intelligently inspect, stop, and redirect application traffic at networks speeds.
DDoS attacks are increasing in both frequency and scale and have left some of the world’s largest data center and network operators dealing with their costly aftermath. Virtually every commercial and government organization is reliant on the availability of their online services, and service availability is at risk from the rising tide of DDoS attacks. All organizations should be concerned about major service outages due to DDoS attacks and take measures to ensure that their DDoS mitigation solution can scale to handle the largest multi-vector attacks at their network edge.
Learn how A10 helps organizations mitigate a DDoS attack. Download the white paper titled DDoS Attack Report: The Escalating Threat of DDoS Attacks. | <urn:uuid:76f3578c-858d-4d55-b5b5-f027e9446e29> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.a10networks.com/resources/glossary/ddos | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284411.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00099-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945581 | 339 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Cray to develop new supercomputer for the Los Alamos National Laboratory
Friday, Jul 18th 2014
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is being supplied with a new supercomputer by Cray Inc., reports the Washington Post. The new computer, which will have a storage capacity of 82 petabytes and a 1.7 terabyte processing speed, is being named, "Trinity," in honor of the launch tests done in 1962. The computer will run simulations that verify the safety, effectiveness, and security of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It is unknown as to whether or not the computer will use environmental monitoring technologies to ascertain the details of the weapons' composition.
This major new supercomputer is currently the fastest supercomputer projected to be built in the world. The data entered into the machine will likely be used to conduct simulations as to the continued efficacy of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as the weapons age. News Maine has reported that the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories made combined efforts to design the machine.
The device will leverage the new "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi processors, reports PC World. These chips use the Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube technology, and have "five times more bandwidth than the emerging DDR4 memory, which is not yet used in computers," PC World reports. The level of power involved will allow the computer to conduct a dazzling array of high-accuracy simulations involving trajectory, composition, environmental monitoring, and other potential risk factors that may go into the production, maintenance and launch of a nuclear device.
In many ways, this supercomputer is not merely a monitoring tool of the U.S., but a security measure in its own right. Trinity will be tasked with simulating the destruction of the nuclear stockpile reserves as well as hosting many classified national security applications, according to HPC wire. There have been no details released regarding the use of security systems based around the machine itself, like environmental monitoring, but there should be many for a project of this size. The sheer size of the deal - $174 million - marks this supercomputer as one for the history books, as it is one of the largest sums paid to Cray for its services as a network manufacturer. There hasn't been a single computer that runs as fast as this one around yet, and there may not be one even in 2016, when Trinity is set to launch. | <urn:uuid:da21e565-eb4c-4610-ae20-2fcec880cd07> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.itwatchdogs.com/environmental-monitoring-news/research-labs/cray-to-develop-new-supercomputer-for-the-los-alamos-national-laboratory-644083 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280308.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00403-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949991 | 489 | 2.5625 | 3 |
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The Forensic Chain of Evidence ModelBack to top Back to main Skip to menu
The Forensic Chain of Evidence Model
Improving the Process of Evidence Collection in Incident Handling Procedures
The Chain-of-Evidence Model illustrates the discrete sets of actions carried out by an insider attempting to inflict malicious damage in an intranet environment. One group of actions is separated from another, based on the level of authority required to execute them. Each group of actions has a different corresponding source of evidence that must be responsible for documenting activity for forensic purposes. However each such source of evidence must be linked to the logs next to it (see above figure) in order to form a complete chain of evidence.
The figure above starts with physical access to computer systems that must precede any malicious activity. It is in this stage that the crucial link between physical recognition and computer recognition take place. Following log-on procedures the user proceeds to invoke the services of a network application that must be used as a vehicle to inflict damage on a remote system. The network application issues the malicious network traffic that reaches a remote computer and executes the intended behavior.
As illustrated in the figure above, the link between each log is crucial to the establishment of a complete chain of evidence. Across all of the links the crucial factor upon which the integrity of the entire chain rests is the authenticity of the time-line. If the accuracy of the time in any of the links is questionable then the entire chain is rendered useless.
Another weak link is the interaction between network applications and the traffic they generate. In general there is not enough information in operating systems event logs to determine whether network traffic was directly initiated by the user or was generated by some other source like a network application running in the background. The author is in the process of researching the feasibility of a log of events that links a user session to the invocation of a network application, and the network application to the network traffic it produces. This log may improve the accountability of program behavior in a network environment.
The final link between the operating system where the damage has been caused to the network traffic that caused it is a matter of identifying the network traffic that caused the damage and tracing it back to the source system where the traffic was thought to have originated.
Using the Evidence Model to Improve Collection
Most guides to incident handling stress the importance of documenting observations and asking the basic questions of Who, What, When and Where [Hosmer98]. Many experts have suggested that a low-level backup is made to preserve the crime scene and for further causal analysis [Civie98].
Incident handling frequently involves a distinct collection phase in anticipation of prolonged analysis. Administrators follow procedures by which evidence is collected and stored. Following the collection the systems become subject to maintenance after which attempts are made to bring systems back on line.
The model in Figure 2 encourages administrators in their collection phase to think in terms of preserving chains of evidence as opposed to links of evidence that may or may not be useful in the analysis phase of the investigation. The model clearly defines a minimum number of areas in which evidence must be collected and in addition, stresses the importance of joining the links by respecting the importance of crucial factors like the accuracy of timing of each link and the quality of CCTV pictures, user identification in operating systems logs and so forth.
The administrator is able to direct resources in accordance with the identified areas and links to preserve evidence. For example, in the case of an approach to or intrusion on the systems areas the CCTV picture must be clear enough to identify a face to the requirements of the law. Additional authentication systems can be installed in the systems area to strengthen the user authentication procedures and supporting logs.
The main limitation of the Model is the lack of support from the event logging system underlying the operating system/network application/network. It may be necessary for administrators to implement their own monitoring and logging to supplement the standard facilities.
In addition, logs that preserve the action of a user with respect to a target file may depend on the contents of that file. If the malicious action was a modification attack then evidence of that cannot be established without the preservation of the contents before and after the attack.
The logs themselves, along with all of the sources of critical information like the timing, the security subsystem and so forth must be protected from an integrity attack.
In an Intranet-type environment where resources are distributed, events on one computer are frequently related to those on another. In these scenarios centralized logging leads to localized (and short) chains of evidence that are difficult to relate to other chains on other computers within the same Intranet.
Administrators must be aware of the Chain-of-Evidence model in order to plan for a complete trail of evidence across information domains that exist within an intranet. This model allows administrators in their collection phase to think in terms of preserving chains of evidence as opposed to individual links that may or may not be useful in the analysis phase of the investigation. The model defines a minimum number of areas in which evidence must be collected and in addition stresses the importance of joining the links by respecting the importance of crucial factors like the accuracy of timing of each link and the quality of CCTV pictures, user identification in operating systems logs and so forth.
In practice, the main limitation of the model will be the lack of support from the event logging system underlying the operating system/network application/network. It may be necessary for administrators to implement their own monitoring and logging to supplement the standard facilities.
[Civie98] Civie, V. and R. Civie (1998). "Future Technologies from Trends in Computer Forensic Science." IEEE: 105-108.
[Hosmer98] Hosmer, C. (1998). Time-Lining Computer Evidence. Information Technology Conference, IEEE.
[Murray98] Murray,J. D. (1998). Windows NT Event Logging, O'Reilly & Associates.
[SANS98] (1998). Incident Handling: Step by Step, The Sans Institute.
[Sommer92] Sommer, Peter (1992), Computer Forensics: an Introduction, Compsec '92, Elsevier.
[Sommer98] Sommer, P. (1998). Intrusion Detection Systems as Evidence. RAID 98, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgum. | <urn:uuid:6a81973f-77b3-4f0f-adee-ec52f0f27cfc> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.forensicfocus.com/index.php?name=Content&pid=47&page=2 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280791.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00000-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921112 | 1,320 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Multi-Axis Sensors is a sensor that can measure forces in up to 6 axes. It will measure in x, y, z, directions and moments. It is used to determine vector load in terms of directional coordinates. These sensors are better than having multiple single axis sensors because this will be cheaper, smaller and the connections will also be simpler. The multi axis sensor can be used in various sectors such as aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, biomedical instruments and robotics.
Inertial system equipment includes Gyroscopes, Accelerometers, Inertial Measurement Units, Inertial Navigation Systems and Multi Axis sensors. A comprehensive overview of the market for Multi-Axis Sensor systems over the next 5 years has been given in this report. It segments the market by area of application with an in depth analysis of every segment in each area. Aerospace, Land based, Marine and Subsea applications are explained with comprehensive market analysis of each segment.
The advancement of global lifestyle has resulted in need for equipment with greater ease of use. This is enabled by the use of motion sensing technology which uses inertial sensors extensively. This is a key driving factor to this market and will play an important role in defining the market for the next few years.
The report delves on the impact of rise of unmanned vehicles; Aerial, land and Water based, on the use of inertial sensors. The unprecedented rise in Unmanned vehicles across various applications in both civilian and defense applications has increased the need for complex navigational systems which include inertial sensors. The rapid advancement in technology has made sensors both accessible and affordable which has made their use abundant in day to day devices.
An extensive overview of the different grades of inertial sensors; Navigational, Tactical, Industrial and Automotive is also given. The key differences among them are explained and their market based on application is provided on a regional basis. Defense industry takes the major share of the market with applications like Missile Guidance, Control and Targeting, Precision Guided Munitions, Tank Turret Stabilization and Torpedo Guidance. The other primary industries where these systems are used are Industrial manufacturing, energy and infrastructure, transportation and aviation.
An analysis of the key players in the market has been provided with an outlook on the competitive landscape and an insightful outlook for the investors.
What the Report Offers
1. Market Definition for the Multi-Axis Sensor Market along with identification of key drivers and restraints for the market.
2. Market analysis for the Multi-Axis Sensor Market, with region specific assessments and competition analysis on a global and regional scale.
3. Identification of factors instrumental in changing the market scenarios, rising prospective opportunities and identification of key companies which can influence the market on a global and regional scale.
4. Extensively researched competitive landscape section with profiles of major companies along with their share of markets.
5. Identification and analysis of the Macro and Micro factors that affect the Multi-Axis Sensor Market on both global and regional scale.
6. A comprehensive list of key market players along with the analysis of their current strategic interests and key financial information.
1) Vendors who are into manufacturing of these products as they can get an overview of what competitors are doing and also which markets they can look forward to expand their operations
2) Investors who are willing to invest in this market
3) Consultants who can have ready made analysis to guide their clients
4) Anyone who wants to know about this industry | <urn:uuid:92baf2f6-cc84-4256-bc8e-367d6bcb46cf> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-multi-axis-sensor-market-industry | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281162.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00174-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945774 | 710 | 2.671875 | 3 |
Securing Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be difficult, but it is possible
Until recently, companies making physical devices probably didn’t need to worry about hackers too much and so few had security assessments of their devices. Unless there was a financial impact of compromising a physical device, hackers were unlikely to try and even less likely to succeed with a physical device. However, times are changing and now hobbyist hackers are even cracking kid’s toys just for fun.
The evidence of these changes is the wealth of research being published of people hacking their home routers, TV boxes, alarm units, cars, and even children’s toys.
Companies that produce or rebrand devices now need to assume that hackers, and not necessarily malicious hackers, will attempt to reverse engineer and modify their devices. The results may be blog posts, modifications, and even the creation of a subculture of people modifying their devices, which can all be great things. However, the flip side of people hacking devices is that some of those people may be malicious and be seeking to identify and exploit vulnerabilities, rather than modify the device. Furthermore, in MWR’s experience, the security of embedded devices is typically far behind that of full operating systems and so attackers are often successful in their efforts.
Securing embedded devices can be hard as there are multiple levels that need to be secured. However, the areas where MWR tend to find the most vulnerabilities are shown below.
At the end of the day, embedded devices are often a number of small processors/microcontrollers running software and as such, can be vulnerable to all the same software issues as computers. Worse still, embedded devices rarely have the sort of platform defences that can make exploiting traditional computers hard. MWR’s PinPadPwn research showed how software flaws in Chip&Pin payment terminals, which are well physically hardened, allowed exploitation and compromise of credit card data. Organisations should ensure that software on embedded devices is developed based on security best practices. A large number of embedded devices often run Linux or VXWorks, and so securely configuring the operating system can be just as important as on a desktop computer.
A common attack surface on embedded devices is the debug interfaces to the chips. Often these are the serial port and the JTAG ports. Where the device runs Linux, serial ports often allow access to a root console, whilst JTAG ports can allow full read and write of memory, as well as debugging of code. Where possible, companies should ensure that debug functionality is disabled when it leaves the factory. Serial ports can often be disabled in software and most processors will have a fuse that can be blown to prevent JTAG access. However, some attacks have shown it is possible to “re-blow” the fuse and gain access.
Another common attack is intercepting communications between chips on the device. These connections are typically unencrypted, and attackers can connect to the lines and both intercept and send messages to chips on the device. In one assessment, MWR intercepted communications between the master processor and the radio module, extracting ip addresses, ports, and credentials for the servers the device was contacting. Hardening can be difficult as components used in embedded devices are often too low powered to do effective encryption/decryption. Where possible, organisations should ensure that, for example, data is encrypted on the more powerful master processor and then just sent through other modules without them needing to decrypt it.
A related issue is that software should assume that inputs can be used as an attack vector. Even inputs where it is highly unlikely an attacker will communicate on that medium (i.e. GSM), if an attacker can connect directly to the connections between components they can attempt to trigger software vulnerabilities.
Another issue MWR often see is insecure storage of data, including the program data for the device. Data is typically stored on flash chips, and so attackers will attempt to compromise the data through either software vulnerabilities or by accessing the storage directly. Debug connections can allow reading from flash memory, or memory chips can be de-soldered and attached to a device to read the contents. Companies should look at using encrypted flash memory, or on-processor storage (which prevents an attacker from de-soldering the flash chips), and also ensure that debug connections are disabled. For sensitive information, organisations may look to using secure modules that do not allow access to the data itself (a SIM card is an example of a secure module).
A common assumption in the past was that attackers wouldn’t be able to intercept or modify radio communications. With SDR now readily available, this is no longer the case. MWR have successfully reverse engineered custom protocols that devices are using, leading to a compromise of data confidentiality and integrity, as devices often do not sufficiently verify the data they are receiving. Depending on the nature of the device, this can be a significant problem.
A common approach is to use a standard protocol such as wireless, Bluetooth, or ZigBee. However, organisations should be aware that all of these have implementation flaws and if not implemented correctly, can make attacker’s lives even easier as they can easily source equipment to communicate on these systems.
Organisations are recommended to distrust the communications layer and instead tunnel SSLencrypted traffic over it. MWR have assessed cases where companies implement their own encryption on their protocol and it has been found to be possible to break this custom encryption.
Although often possible to bypass, physically hardening of devices can be a cheap and easy solution to make reverse engineering harder. This can be implemented when designing devices, for example by using “system on chip” processors instead of separate modules so that there are fewer communication lines to attack. Using chips that attach to the circuit board using Ball Grid Array (BGA) solder points can prevent lower skilled attackers from removing the chips and interacting with them with their equipment.
Another common approach is using anti-tamper resin / plastic in the device. This can be slowly dissolved or chipped away, but for certain situations, for example where the attacker can only easily acquire a single device, it may dissuade attacks.
Although not directly related to the embedded devices themselves, the security of backend systems that might communicate with the device is crucial. MWR have seen examples where the devices are believed to be “safe”, and so the same standards applied to other inputs to a system are not applied to communications from embedded devices. For example, a website might have been checked for code execution and SQL injection vulnerabilities, whilst the custom service the embedded device communicates with had not been so closely scrutinised.
Thanks to better availability of tools and information, embedded devices are now squarely within the crosshairs of both hobbyist hackers and malicious attackers. Companies need to assume that their devices will be looked at, and if the device may be a target for an attacker (for example processing financial information, information that may be used for billing, or may have privileged access to the companies or customer’s networks), that attention may be malicious. | <urn:uuid:720b6bd2-a877-4efd-b98a-4e08b5befd4c> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.mwrinfosecurity.com/our-thinking/an-embedded-risk/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281162.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00174-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95004 | 1,437 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Performance Tuning & PC Tweaking
Be it a desktop machine or a server, when it comes to getting the most out of your hardware and software investment, there’s no substitute for a well-tuned machine. In fact, many operating systems–including Windows and most varieties of Linux or UNIX (which also means Mac OS X)–claim with some justification to be “self-tuning.” But that doesn’t mean that some investigation of available tools to help improve on performance, and some time spent learning to use them, won’t deliver a useful return on investment. Likewise, for major applications and services, tools to monitor, analyze and improve performance may also be available and equally worth putting to work.
In another vein, there’s a whole different take on performance turning that applies primarily to desktop machines. That’s because some individual tends to work on the same box day after day, and begins to develop an intimate knowledge of and relationship with that machine. This is the side of tuning that goes along with tweaking, tuning and fooling around to keep edging one’s PC ever closer to performance perfection (at least, in the regard of its primary user). Here, too, you’ll find a plethora of tools and techniques available that can repay assiduous study, inveterate tinkering and the occasional “what if?” experiment with a series of personal bests in computer performance.
The Serious Side of Performance Tuning
In fact, performance analysis, tuning and system optimization is a field of study in computer science in its own right. Based on various intensely mathematic ways to model computer behavior and service delivery, it consists of roughly equal parts of queuing theory, Monte Carlo simulations and various sophisticated ways to model how services behave and perform under varying loads.
Fortunately for most system or network administrators, a deep understanding of these technical details is not required to gain a decent working knowledge of performance tuning. Because what’s measured in the process of capturing information about performance is so deeply rooted in a computer’s operating system, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that most of the information used to tune a machine comes from that software. Most operating systems include all kinds of built-in hooks and reporting mechanisms–collectively known as “instrumentation”–that are designed to collect and report on what’s happening when a system monitor is activated. The self-tuning capability that most operating systems claim arises from their own use of that same data to adjust various parameters–usually related to consumption of resources like CPU cycles, disk space and memory–to provide a reasonable trade-off between letting the OS do its job and permitting applications and services to do their jobs.
This explains why Windows operating systems include a facility known either as Performance Monitor or System Monitor, and why other operating systems support similar capabilities or add-ons. Be they built-in or bolted on, these tools can acquire, interpret and present run-time data about system activity and performance to help careful observers:
- Examine what’s going on.
- Establish patterns of typical operation (usually called “performance baselines” or, more simply, “baselines”).
- Detect occasional problems or pathologies if and when they occur.
The desire for early problem detection (and pre-emption, where possible) explains why most performance monitors include the ability to watch certain counters or values and set alarms or alerts to fire off when certain conditions occur (for example, when network utilization tops 95 percent, when available disk space drops below 5 percent to 10 percent on any logical volume, when available RAM drops below some critical threshold and so forth).
Monitoring and reporting on performance reflects on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in an interesting way. In this case, a butterfly doesn’t flap its wings in California to cause a tornado in Kansas. Instead, the act of monitoring itself causes a performance impact. Most books and training materials therefore stress the need to recognize this impact and explain ways to mitigate where possible (for example, by running only performance agents on the machine being monitored, and running the management console and data collection on another machine across the network).
A quick recitation of the kinds of performance objects that Windows monitors will give a sense of what is accounted for in this oh-so-quantitative view of what a computer is up to. (Please note that applications can register with the System or Performance Monitor in Windows, so that other objects may appear on your machine for that reason.) Inside perfmon.exe (the name of the program that runs Performance Monitor/System Monitor on Windows NT, 2000, XP and Server 2003) you’ll find a plethora of items related to:
- Computer Hardware: Memory, processor and physical/logical disks, plus other devices that register with perfmon.
- Windows Add-Ons and APIs: Most notably, .NET and .ASP.
- Windows Services: Includes the NetBIOS browser and file system redirector, the server service, plus RSVP, telephony and Internet Authentication services, among many others.
- Networking: Various IP protocol and network interface objects (plus other protocols, if present).
- Windows OS: Cache, job objects, paging file, threads, processes and so forth.
Each of these many objects has a slew of associated counters, so what emerges is a set of numeric values that can tell savvy system or network administrators a lot about what’s happening on a Windows machine. Don’t forget that you’ll also find similar monitors or tools for other operating systems that provide the same kinds of information.
Working with such tools requires an understanding of what’s being measured and developing a sense of what’s normal for any particular machine under various load conditions (or building a set of baselines to snapshot normal operating conditions and counter values or ranges). Microsoft and third parties do a good job for Windows of pointing out what’s normal and what’s pathological, and also provide lots of information about interesting patterns of counters that help pinpoint diagnoses and potential cures for performance problems and other pathologies that might be revealed from their analysis and further testing.
This is a fascinating field, and it rewards time spent learning, measuring, experimenting and troubleshooting with desktops and servers that have been tuned to make the most of their capabilities. The usual approach is to identify which component in a system causes the biggest performance losses or limits performance most severely (called a “bottleneck” for that reason), then to devise methods to eliminate that bottleneck (or, at least, to widen it as much as possible). This also helps explain why the results of some system-tuning activities may include replacing older, slower hardware components with newer, faster ones (and also explains why the ultimate cure for a bottleneck is a wholesale system replacement).
Getting Personal: Tweaking and Tuning
Though some of the items that fall under this heading–such as disk defragmentation–can be good for disk subsystems on servers and desktops alike, this is a category of system tuning that typically applies more to desktops than to servers, simply because its rewards are most obvious to those who use a system on an everyday basis. Tweaks to boost performance run a gamut of options, from various methods to speed up system boot-up and shutdown to ways of manipulating various user interface characteristics to favor speed over appearance (and includes methods to remove drop shadows, complex shading and other techniques that enhance the way the interface looks and also impose modest, but noticeable, performan | <urn:uuid:6007efa6-c241-401d-8646-51bbfb356f43> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://certmag.com/performance-tuning-pc-tweaking/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281649.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00082-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921238 | 1,574 | 2.609375 | 3 |
ZIFFPAGE TITLEUncommon SensesBy Mel Duvall | Posted 2005-04-06 Email Print
How does Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan decide to raise rates a quarter point? By analyzing a potent mixture of raw pecuniary data and computerized economic intelligence against first-hand reports from key hubs of U.S. financial activity and five
Congress created the Federal Reserve in 1913 as a fail-safe bank to the banks. Its job was to accept other banks' deposits, make overnight loans to them and issue coin and currency. Today, it also processes 18 billion inter-bank checks each year.
Its most public roleGreenspan's roleis to set monetary policy.
The chairman regulates the supply and price of money to achieve three primary goals: maximize economic growth, advance employment and control inflation.
To achieve those objectives, he has a powerful set of tools. For starters, he can raise or lower interest rates, by ripple effect, throughout the country by adjusting either the Federal Funds Rate or the Discount Rate.
The Federal Funds Rate is the price commercial banks charge each other to borrow federal money overnight. The Discount Rate is the price the 12 reserve banks charge commercial banks to borrow funds on a daily basis.
By directive, Greenspan also can increase or decrease the amount of money banks lend by raising or lowering the amount of money they are required to hold in reserve against outstanding loans and investments, something known as the "reserve requirement." In effect, if a bank is required to hold $20 of each $100 it receives in a deposit, it can lend 80% of its deposits. If it must hold only $10, it can lend $90, which increases the amount of money in use.
Separately, Greenspan can manipulate the supply of money in the economy by selling or buying government securities such as Treasury bills.
Greenspan decides which tools to wield from an elaborate two-story boardroom in the center of the Federal Reserve building on Washington's Constitution Avenue.
On meeting mornings, like Feb. 1, Greenspan enters this room from his attached office and seats himself at the side of the 27-foot mahogany table. He prefers to be seen as participating in the discussion rather than leading it.
Still, attendees know who is in charge.
Greenspan arrives at these meetings with his mind largely made up, according to Laurence Meyer, vice chairman of private forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers and a Fed governor from 1996 to 2002.
The chairman knows what he wants to do, such as raise the Funds Rate, and has already drafted the statement the Fed will issue after the meeting.
Greenspan is guided by the advice of six governors, named to 14-year terms by the presiding U.S. president. The governors and the 12 reserve bank presidents each get an opportunity to speak, usually for about five minutes. But unless the majority strongly disagrees with the chairman's views, Greenspan's plan will be approved.
Meyer says Fed board members do debate. But the assumption is that everyone will vote with Greenspan at the end of the meeting. Perceived dissension at the Fed could shake confidence and set off financial-market chaos, he explains. A split vote would cause uncertainty in the markets about exactly where the Fed was headedto higher or lower rates.
"The committee doesn't want to fracture consensus," he says. "You never like to surprise markets."
Indeed, the Fed chairman does not give interviews, fearing his words could affect stock markets worldwide.
Greenspan has spent years in and out of government searching for ways to eliminate economic surprises.
He previously served as economic adviser to Presidents Nixon and Ford, but had made his mark in the business world by providing economic forecasts to paying corporate clients, like Republic Steel (since merged into LTV Steel).
At the firm of Townsend-Greenspan, the tenor-saxophone-playing New York University Ph.D. economist had become particularly adept at forecasting demand and prices for steel and raw materials, like iron ore and coke, involved in its production. He accurately forecast a glut of steel production in 1957, by comparing steelmaking capacity against consumption patterns. His advice allowed clients to escape some of the turmoil that hit the industry in 1958, when steelmakers were forced to curb production 20%. | <urn:uuid:61a0b22c-aeaf-41a5-a364-aad3a8ccc6f8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Data-Analysis/Inside-the-Mind-of-Alan-Greenspan/2 | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280239.54/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00294-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962704 | 890 | 3.15625 | 3 |
The pharmaceutical industry loses billions in lost sales annually to counterfeit and stolen drugs. In order to reduce the theft of high-value commodities, drug manufacturers must explore new ways to track drugs along the supply chain. An electronic pedigree (ePedigree) can help establish a chain of custody for pharmaceutical products.
The goal of ePedigree is to track medicines as they move along the supply chain using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags or some bar code variant. Each entity along the supply chain records and certifies data about the drugs it receives and distributes, as shown in Figure 1. The gathered data includes lot numbers and quantities, as well as information on shipping, receiving, handling, and past sales of the drugs. | <urn:uuid:5c1ddd12-f6df-49e1-b4c6-6a4e509d664a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.infotech.com/research/epedigree-safeguards-drug-supplies | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280835.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00110-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926638 | 146 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Put geographic elements on a map, and use the utilities and drawing tools that make a map readable.
You can use geographic elements such as points, markers, shapes, and lines on your map. The supporting classes make the geographic elements useful, and the utilities and drawing tools make a map readable.
To learn more about geographic elements and how to use them in your apps, visit the Maps documentation.
- AltitudeMode -
An enumeration that captures how the altitude attribute should be interpreted.
- BoundingBox -
A 2-dimensional, axis-aligned bounding box (rectangle) used to define the limits of a Geographic element, or any other bounding box.
- Coordinate -
A Coordinate in geographic space that is represented by latitude, longitude and altitude components.
- EdgeSize -
An enumeration of the available edge thickness values of a Style.
- EdgeStyle -
An enumeration of the available edge patterns of a Style.
- GeoDeviceLocation -
A point in geographic space that represents the device's current latitude and longitude coordinates.
- Geographic -
An entity that can be placed on a map.
- GeographicsProvisioningBridge -
A bridge to translate an external geographic data source into Geographic data and add it to a DataProvider.
- GeographicsProvisioningBridgeDataSource -
Indicates how data sources used with GeographicsProvisioningBridge will be interpreted.
- GeographicsProvisioningBridgeResult -
Represents the types of results that can occur when using GeographicsProvisioningBridge.
- GeoList -
A container of Geographic elements.
- GeoLocation -
A location in geographic space that represents a latitude and longitude coordinate, and is visually represented on the map using its Marker attribute.
- GeoPolygon -
A polygon is an arbitrary object in geographic space that is defined by a sequence of coordinates.
- GeoPolyline -
A polyline in geographic space that is represented by a set of ordered Points.
- GeoShape -
A base class for all geographic shapes.
- Marker -
A visual representation of a location on a map.
- Point -
A point in geographic space that is represented by latitude and longitude coordinates in degrees and an altitude coordinate in meters.
- Polyline -
A Polyline in geographic space that is represented by an ordered set of latitude and longitude coordinates (vertices).
- Style -
Visual information that can be applied to a Geographic.
- StyleSheet -
A collection of Styles to be used when rendering a set of map content. | <urn:uuid:d5e932df-2e6a-4864-bdfa-2e3756e14149> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://developer.blackberry.com/native/reference/cascades/location_geographic_elements.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280850.30/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00532-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.682435 | 546 | 3.796875 | 4 |
Proliferation of connected devices, systems and services has immense opportunities and benefits for our society. The connected devices, enabling seamless connections among people, devices and networks, play an essential role in our day-to-day life from fitness tracker, to cars, to health monitoring devices, to control systems and delivering utilities to our homes.
A new IoT device is coming online everyday with new features and functionalities. Through connected devices, health care is improving patient care such as a diabetic patient’s blood sugar level can now be monitored and analyzed by doctors remotely enabling quick treatment to a possible life-threatening situation.
Recent research study released by Juniper predicted about the future of human interaction with technology. The report indicates that gesture and motion control will become vital for human computer interaction in the coming years. The study found that by end of 2016 there will be 168 million devices that utilizes motion or gesture tracking such as wearables, virtual reality and more. With this adoption rate, the study suggests that there will be 492 million motion and gesture-tracking devices by 2020.
However, IoT security has not been up to date with the rapid pace of innovation and adoption creating substantial safety, privacy and economic risks. The recent hack on Dyn network exploited a security flaw in inexpensive connected DVRs, Webcams and surveillance cameras, which interrupted some of the biggest sites such as Twitter, Spotify and part of Amazon. Moreover, with connected cars, airplanes, house appliances, industrial systems connected to the internet, there is a real risk to the life and property damage.
[ ALSO ON CSO: How to approach keeping your IoT devices safe ]
While the benefits of IoT are unlimited, the reality is that security is not keeping up with the innovations and adoptions. The IoT ecosystem introduces risk that include malicious actors manipulating the flow of information to and from network-connected devices or tampering with the devices themselves. This can lead to the theft of sensitive data and loss of consumer privacy, interruption of business operations, slowdown of the internet, and potential disruptions to critical infrastructure and finally impacting the economy. As IoT devices become crucial for keeping up with evolving markets, businesses and technology leaders need to be mindful of the security implications of this new technology.
Why IoT devices are susceptible to compromise?
Studies indicate that three-quarters of IoT devices today are susceptible to getting compromised or hacked. Many of the vulnerabilities are due to the lack of password strength and weakness to protect these devices. Many IoT devices are low-profit products with little to no security built into them. It’s not possible to patch the open vulnerabilities as there is no way for consumers to know their devices are compromised not even the manufacturers have a way to fix the open vulnerabilities.
It's high time now for everyone including device manufacturers, suppliers, system integrators, network owners and consumers to get prepared and work in collaboration to secure and protect IoT ecosystem.
How to address IoT security challenges
Many of the IoT vulnerabilities can be mitigated by following best security practices, except the low-cost devices which do not incorporate even the basic security measures. They need to be replaced from any critical locations. At the same time, there is also a need to develop a comprehensive international standard and framework for IoT security. Security needs to be added at the beginning of the product design so to reduce the cost of fixing the bug or vulnerabilities later in the product lifecycle.
Moreover, cybersecurity efforts are a never-ending journey and should constantly evolve with innovations. Security should be evaluated as an integral component of any connected devices. By focusing on security as a feature of connected devices, manufacturers and service providers can have the opportunity for market differentiation in the IoT security management.
No doubt, even if security is included at the design of the production development lifecycle, vulnerabilities can be discovered in products after they are deployed. So it’s highly imperative to develop strong vulnerability management programs and continually scan and patch deployed devices if found with any new vulnerabilities.
It is highly critical to know and monitor the network of connected devices. If there is a clear inventory of connected devices in the network and the inventory database is regularly updated when a device is added or removed from the network, it is likely that we can secure the connected devices and prevent someone from exploiting them.
This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join? | <urn:uuid:def809c7-0729-4f22-b00b-9e85ca384944> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.csoonline.com/article/3142624/internet-of-things/the-unlimited-potential-of-iot-and-security-challenges.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281263.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00440-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947876 | 885 | 2.796875 | 3 |
WAF. A Knight in Shining Armor
Today we continue the blog series dedicated to various types of firewalls. In the first post we described basic categories of firewalls, gave a firewall mode overview and stated advantages and potential drawbacks of the types mentioned. In this post we will talk in detail about Web Application Firewall – WAF.
Each year more and more organizations move their operations to websites and web applications and maintain their information in the cloud, inevitably exposing sensitive data to sophisticated cyber attacks. To protect applications and stay compliant with regulatory requirements many companies implement Web application firewalls.
WAFs address threats attacking enterprise’s custom web applications and data. They include protection techniques designed specifically for web security. Traditionally WAF is the most effective tool for protecting organization’s internal and public-facing applications. Web applications can be deployed locally (on-premises) or remotely (hosted, cloud, or as a service). WAFs are aimed at blocking hacking attempts, monitoring access to web applications and collecting logs for compliance, auditing, and analytics.
What is WAF?
WAF is different from traditional network firewall, NGFW (Next Generation Firewall) and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). It provides protection at more granular level. It protects web servers and enterprise’s specific web applications against attacks at the application layer and nonvolumetric attacks at the network layer. It also identifies and patches “self-inflicted” vulnerabilities in custom-developed applications. Customization of rules to a given application allows to identify and block many attacks. WAFs are able to prevent XSS (Cross-site Scripting), SQL injection, session hijacking, buffer overflow, RFI (Remote File Inclusion), and cookie poisoning. They may also include protection techniques against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. Additionally, some WAFs protect against directory traversal, forced URL browsing, etc.
Web applications are vulnerable to many threats, that are not always recognized by regular network firewalls, NGFWs and IPSs. The most common attacks are as follows:
SQL Injection attacks are used by malicious users as a way to obtain access to restricted data or to embed malicious code onto a web server. This technique triggers the back-end database to execute the injected commands and allow unauthorized users to gain access to sensitive information contained in the database. In case of embedding malicious code, the infected web server will spread malware to unsuspecting clients.
Cross-site Scripting (XSS)
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF)
Cross-site request forgery attacks force end users to make information alterations they did not intend. It can be updating personal data, posting content, or initiating false transactions. An attacker provokes a user to transmit a malicious HTTP request, including the victim’s session cookie, to a target application or website. The vulnerable website trusts it without the user’s consent. In this case, the attacker exploits the trust a website has against user’s browser.
Sensitive Data Exposure
In case a web application does not properly protect sensitive data in transport and at rest, attackers can steal or manipulate the data to conduct identity theft, credit card fraud, or other crimes. This type of vulnerability deals with the lack of encryption of sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, authentication credentials, Social Security Numbers (SSN), tax Ids, etc.
Directory Traversal attacks allow to access restricted files and directories and execute commands outside of the web server’s root directory. An attacker manipulates a URL in such a way that the website reveals the confined files on the web server.
WAF can be run as physical, virtual or software appliance, server plug-in or cloud-based service. In the current moment, cloud services are mainly suitable for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), while large enterprises are more likely to invest in purpose-built physical or virtual appliances.
WAF can be deployed in front of a web server or integrated directly on a web server. Most often a WAF is deployed in-line, as a reverse proxy, but also can be deployed in bridge mode, mirror mode (being positioned out of band) or act as a transparent proxy. In case of mirror mode deployment, a WAF is working on a copy of the network traffic.
Each WAF deployment is different based on a use-case. It depends on primary goal of the technology implementation – whether it is used for virtual patching, HTTP audit logging, tracking sensitive data or application vulnerability identification. For some WAFs hybrid deployment mode is available offering in-line deployment combined with deploying sensors out-of-line to collect audit data and then communicate with agent application installed on a specific web server. Many WAF products support not only single but also multiple web server deployments.
How does WAF work?
Operating on application level, WAF functions as a flexible barrier between end users and applications. It monitors and filters both in-bound and out-bound HTTP traffic and blocks activity that contradicts with configured set of security rules. A WAF intercepts and analyzes every HTML, HTTPS, SOAP and XML-RPC data packet. Inspecting data traffic for unfamiliar patterns allows to detect and block new unknown attacks. This way WAF provides capabilities beyond those offered by NGFW and IPS, which cover only known vulnerabilities.
Integration with Other Security Technology
WAF integrates with other information security technology, such as application vulnerability scanners, DDoS protection appliances, database security solutions, web fraud detection, SIEM (Information and Event Management). Consolidation of WAFs with other security technology allows to maximize the detection and threat blocking rate for known and new evolving threats. Fine-tuned customization minimizes false positives and ensures accurate anomaly detection. This ultimately helps to mitigate risks and significantly minimize enterprise’s attack surface.
With all the benefits that WAF can offer come difficulties in deployment and ongoing software management. To provide the expected level of application and data security WAF should be effectively deployed and managed. This involves appropriate maintaining of firewall policies and customization of security rules, which in turn demands advanced level of WAF administrators’ skills.
There are issues that draw attention in the process of WAF deployment and implementation:
Ineffective Policies. Firewall policies and capabilities obviously should keep pace with new emerging threats, which is not always the case. Another problem is the lack of information and documentation on which policies are effective, so users have to put extra effort and time in figuring out what’s working and how to improve.
Customization of Security Rules. It takes time to determine all the necessary rules to block or allow traffic passing through the applications. Rules also have to be kept constantly updated as code changes and new functionality emerges. Blocking legitimate requests creates false positives leading to a malicious attack going ignored in this pool of irrelevant alerts.
Skills Gap. Customers often struggle to keep existing devices up and running since not all organizations have in-house skills to use a WAF correctly and effectively. Outsourcing WAF management is not always the best decision either. When choosing a WAF deployment, especially for compliance needs, administrators have to prioritize critical features which are best suited for the organization’s current needs. After deployment and configuration process the WAF requires team’s high technical proficiency to function efficiently and add sustainable value to the enterprise’s security system.
Moving Operations to the Cloud. As more and more companies are moving their applications and data into public cloud infrastructure, they inevitably have to migrate Web Application Firewall and associated policies to this new and fundamentally different architecture. The problem is that not all vendors provide sustainable substitution for the on-premises appliance, or they can be unable to offer the APIs an organization needs to realize deployment scenario in the dynamic cloud environment.
Web application firewalls are a common security tool used by enterprises to protect web applications against malicious exploits, impersonation, known vulnerabilities and new evolving threats as well as to identify self-inflicted vulnerabilities of custom-developed applications. It also helps to meet compliance requirements. And while this technology is definitely a must for companies aiming at securing their web resources, it is not sufficient when it comes to database security.
In our upcoming posts we will discuss Database Access Firewall and why Web Application Firewall alone is not able to completely secure databases.
Read the entire firewall series:
- Fifty Shades of Firewall
- WAF. A Knight in Shining Armor
- DAF. Save the Database from the Dragon
- WAF + DAF = Happily Ever After | <urn:uuid:591bc7b6-251c-48ee-8be0-dea88e0cb78f> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.datasunrise.com/blog/waf/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279650.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00074-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912771 | 1,779 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Netsparker detected a DOM based Cross-site Scripting (XSS).
The Document Object Model (DOM) is a convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. Objects in the DOM tree may be manipulated by using methods on the objects.
All HTML documents have an associated DOM, consisting of objects representing the document properties from the point of view of the browser.
DOM Based XSS is an XSS attack wherein the attack payload is executed as a result of modifying the DOM environment in the victim's browser used by the original client side script, so that the client side code runs in an unexpected manner. The response from the server does not change, but the client side code contained in the page executes differently due to the malicious modifications that have occurred in the DOM environment.
This is in contrast to other XSS attacks (stored or reflected), wherein the attack payload is placed in the response page (due to a server side flaw).
Suppose the following code is used to create a form to let the user choose his/her preferred language. A default language is also provided in the query string, as the parameter "default".
… Select your language: <select> <script> document.write("<OPTION value=1>" + document.location.href.substring(document.location.href.indexOf("default=") + 8) + "</OPTION>"); document.write("<OPTION value=2>English</OPTION>"); </script> </select> …
The malicious script can be embedded in the URL as follows in two ways:
Pay close attention to the second version of the attack. When the victim clicks on the second link, the browser sends a HTTP request to:
The technique to avoid sending the payload to the server hinges on the fact that URI fragments (the part in the URI after the "#") is not sent to the server by the browser. Thus, any client side code that references (i.e, document.location) may be vulnerable to an attack which uses fragments, and in such case the payload is never sent to the server.
Note that the HTTP response sent from the server does not contain the attacker’s payload. This payload manifests itself at the client-side script at runtime, when a flawed script accesses the DOM variable document.location and assumes it is not malicious.Server-side attack detection tools will fail to detect such hash (#) attacks; in some cases, depending on the type of the URL, the server might get the payload and block the request.
document.write). Instead use | <urn:uuid:160e9c13-eaba-4aa6-b353-769baf8aeb61> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.netsparker.com/web-vulnerability-scanner/vulnerability-security-checks-index/cross-site-scripting-dom-based/ | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279657.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00496-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.79553 | 539 | 3.375 | 3 |
NASA today said the final space shuttle flight should take place July 8 at about 11:40 am EDT from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the 135th and final mission of NASA's storied Space Shuttle Program
NASA said the July date is based on current planning and an official launch date will be announced following the June 28 Flight Readiness Review. That review of course could delay the flight, since there are a few technical issues to address.
More on space: Gigantic changes keep space technology hot
For example, NASA says there are several non-standard activities, including a tanking test followed by an X-ray inspection of a section of the external fuel tank, which may affect Atlantis' processing. The tank consists of three sections. Mission managers want to X-ray aluminum support beams, known as stringers, located where the liquid hydrogen tank meets the intertank.
Cracked intertank stringers were found during shuttle Discovery's first launch attempt in November 2010 and delayed its launch until the problem was resolved. X-ray inspection of the intertank stringers provides additional confidence that there are no stringer cracks in Atlantis' tank. The stringers located where the liquid oxygen tank meets the intertank were modified with extra material to add strength and do not require inspection, NASA said.
Atlantis' 12-day mission is set to include delivery of the Raffaello cargo module to the International Space Station. Raffaello is about 21 feet long and 15 feet in diameter, weighing almost 4.5 tons. It can carry up to 10 tons of cargo.
The shuttle will also carry an experiment designed to demonstrate and test the tools and technologies needed to robotically refuel satellites in space. Such capabilities are seen as crucial for long-term space success.
In fact NASA recently began to solicit proposals for space gas stations, or what it calls an In-Space Cryogenic Propellant Storage and Transfer Demonstration that will lay the ground work for humans to safely reach multiple destinations, including the Moon, asteroids, Lagrange points and Mars.
Meanwhile, Atlantis' crew is slated to bring back an ammonia pump that recently failed on the ISS. Engineers want to understand why the pump failed and improve designs for future spacecraft.
Atlantis has had a long history. Weighing in at 151,315 pounds when it rolled out of the assembly plant, the shuttle was nearly 3.5 tons lighter than Columbia. The ship's first mission on Oct. 3, 1985, STS 51-J was a classified payload for the U.S. Department of Defense.
According to NASA, the craft has served as the on-orbit launch site Magellan and Galileo, as well as the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. An array of onboard science experiments took place during most missions to further enhance space research in low Earth orbit.
NASA said Atlantis pioneered the Shuttle-Mir missions, flying the first seven missions to dock with the Russian space station. When linked, Atlantis and Mir together formed the largest spacecraft in orbit at the time. The missions to Mir included the first on-orbit U.S. crew exchanges, now a common occurrence on the International Space Station. On STS-79, the fourth docking mission, Atlantis ferried astronaut Shannon Lucid back to Earth after her record-setting 188 days in orbit aboard Mir, NASA said.
Atlantis has delivered several vital components to the ISS, including the U.S. laboratory module, Destiny, as well as the Joint Airlock Quest and multiple sections of the Integrated Truss structure that makes up the Station's backbone, NASA said.
With their 30-years of space journey behind them, NASA's three orbiters are destined for museums. Atlantis' new, old home will be in the Kennedy Space Center. Endeavour will reside at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and Discovery will be sent to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center next to Dulles Airport in Virginia.
NASA's Endeavour shuttle is currently on a 14-day mission to the ISS where it is delivering the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2, a particle physics detector designed to operate from the station and search for antimatter and the origin and structure of dark matter.
Follow Michael Cooney on Twitter: nwwlayer8
Layer 8 Extra
Check out these other hot stories: | <urn:uuid:634bc8e5-5581-4048-b648-68c0f42f8408> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.networkworld.com/article/2229299/wireless/nasa-lines-up-final-space-shuttle-flight-for-july.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281419.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00128-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943599 | 888 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Why is it that banking trojans are a problem when all online banks are HTTPS secured and many of them employ multi-factor authentication?
The answer: Humans are not digital.
If we would have a network cable attached to our brain, and our brain could decrypt and encrypt SSL, there would be no problem. However, due to the "analog" interfaces which human beings have, a web browser has to decrypt the traffic and convert it into images (text characters, icons, et cetera) and sounds. This means that a malicious application that can modify the browser memory can control what the user sees, and what he then sends to the bank via in-band communications. It is technically possible for malware to free ride on authenticated sessions with online services and feed or modify transactions.
If malware can modify the memory of the browser, or some other application, it can gain control. This is not just a problem for online banking and not just with malware. For example, current MMORPG games typically do quite a bit of the computation needed on the client side. Not all of this computation is graphics processing. This creates the possibility for cheating in games by patching the client or its memory locally on the host (Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw have written a book called "Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems " on the subject). Another good example of this "client-side dilemma" is voting. Imagine sitting at home on your couch while using your web browser to vote in your local/state/national elections. If and when this becomes possible, malware may be used to rig votes.
Today's browser is more powerful than yesterday's OS.
The browser is, for all practical purposes, a terminal of the bank, but it is running in a completely untrusted environment. Actually, you could say that the Browser is the new OS. Since important content is more and more in the cloud and accessed via the browser, malware, in theory, does not have to infect the OS at all. Malware only needs to infect the browser and it will be able to access, steal, and modify all the necessary content. Since most browsers have a cross-platform plugin architecture, it may even be possible to create data stealing malware that is not interested in the operating system or file system at all. It will only exist in memory of the browser.
Currently, banking trojans do infect the OS and are typically only a problem for Windows based systems. Banking trojans and other malware that need to bypass HTTPS security operate within the browser. This is called a Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) attack. If the malware would try to intercept the traffic from a lower OS level, it would already be HTTPS encrypted. This is not a new phenomenon but nevertheless it is still on the upswing within most malware author's armory. MitB malware is typically browser dependent and most of them only target Internet Explorer (and possible other browsers using MS WinINet API) and lately also Firefox.
Is safe online banking impossible then?
Aside from keeping your system clean of malware, at least "safe enough" is definitely possible. For example, out-of-band solutions, using an SMS message to review and confirm transactions, provide a good additional layer of security. Some have also suggested using something such as a Live Linux CD when doing online banking.
Alas, both SMS messaging and Live CDs are examples of the old "security versus usability" issue. They're an additional layer of security, but they can also rapidly overwhelm the analog brains of those using them. | <urn:uuid:f3c84f09-f001-47cd-9c4d-e265647d51e9> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001889.html | null | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280425.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00515-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929768 | 736 | 2.71875 | 3 |
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