August 28, 2013
by sjvn01
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How the Syrian Electronic Army took out the New York Times and Twitter sites

Once more, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a pro-Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad organization, has struck on the internet.

This time, SEA hit The New York Times (NYT), Twitter, and other popular sites. Unlike previous attacks that relied on phishing attacks to gain password information from the target site’s authorized users, SEA is using the weak security of the internet’s master address book, the Domain Name System (DNS), to re-route internet traffic from its real destination to SEA-controlled sites.

How the Syrian Electronic Army took out the New York Times and Twitter sites. More >

August 28, 2013
by sjvn01
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Red Hat releases new OpenStack cloud certification

How do you judge if someone really has the expertise you need to run your OpenStack Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud? Red Hat, the Linux giant and OpenStack backer, has a suggestion: Look for someone with a Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (RHCEI).

Red Hat releases new OpenStack cloud certification. More >

August 27, 2013
by sjvn01
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The lunacy of trying to avoid NSA spying by moving e-mail and cloud out of the US

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation recently claimed that thanks to the National Security Agency (NSA) spying programs, US cloud providers would lose at least 10 percent of its foreign market, $21.5 billion, to European or Asian competitors. Others are considering abandoning American Internet companies and e-mail providers in favor of European providers.

But if I were the NSA, I could only say, “Yes! Please move out of the US so we don’t need to deal with the he Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)!”

Why would the NSA want you to move your data to cloud and e-mail providers in other countries?

Because, in the United States, the NSA and friends need to jump through the FISC hoops to listen in to your e-mail, cloud data transfers, phone calls, whatever. If you’re doing any of the above to someone or some site outside of the US, any of your communications are pretty much fair game.

The lunacy of trying to avoid NSA spying by moving e-mail and cloud out of the US. More >

August 27, 2013
by sjvn01
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Not fast enough, not broad enough: The US Internet in 2013

Say good-bye to Internet’s narrowband yesterday of modems when a great connection could bring you the Internet at up to a breath-taking 53.6Kbps (Kilobits per second). Today, only 3 percent of U.S. Internet users are stuck at dial-up speeds. Better still, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reports that “As of May 2013, 70 percent of American adults ages 18 and older have a high-speed broadband connection at home.”

That’s 4 percent better than April 2012, but don’t get ready to throw a party quite yet. Both Pew and the FCC define broadband as being 4Mbps (Megabits per second) down and 1Mbps up. According to the Akamai State of the Internet report for the first quarter of 2013, the United States’ average broadband speed is only 8.6Mbps (PDF Link).

Not fast enough, not broad enough: The US Internet in 2013. More >

August 26, 2013
by sjvn01
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New virtualization benchmark for clouds and datacenters

Everyone uses virtualization, but almost no one talks about benchmarking it. It’s easy to understand why. It’s hard to do. Fortunately, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), recently released a new benchmark for datacenter-level virtualization, SPECvirt_sc2013.

New virtualization benchmark for clouds and datacenters. More >

August 25, 2013
by sjvn01
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Nginx, the popular open-source Web server, goes commercial

Anyone who pays any attention to Web servers knows that Apache is the most popular Web server. What only professional Web developers and administrators know is that Nginix, a high-performance, open-source Web server, is battling with Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) for second place.

Now, in order to leapfrog IIS and claim the No. 2 spot for itself, Nginx (pronounced Engine-X) has announced the availability of Nginx Plus, a fully supported version of the server program. This new version comes not only with professional support services, which have been available since February 2012, but with additional features. The commercial version has been developed and supported by Nginx’s core engineering team and is available on a subscription basis starting at $1,350 per instance per year.

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