Computers were first invented to do math, and they do it really well. But it didn’t take long for users to repurpose their futuristic calculators into fancy, dynamic typewriters. Now human-readable text drives computing, so it’s important to choose the right format for the text you write. DocBook is an XML schema. XML is an…

It has long been known that due to WeChat keeping its servers inside China, the lack of legal protection of privacy data, and the control over companies by police, that WeChat data is not safe, and can, without protection, be accessed by police or other state actors more or less at will. This has naturally…

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) promises benefits in several dimensions: streamlining deployments across compute, storage and networking; scaling linearly as needs grow; and unifying and simplifying management. When examining prospective HCI solutions, it’s important to ensure this set of promises is fulfilled, but more importantly that checking those boxes with HCI doesn’t create new IT silos. A…

Suppose for a moment that you are the victim of a wicked ISP that engages in disallowed “throttling” under a “neutral” regime for Internet access. You like to access streaming media from a particular “over the top” service provider. By coincidence, the performance of your favoured application drops at the same time your ISP launches…

The world of Ethernet switching and routing used to be more predictable than just about any other part of the datacenter, but for the past decade the old adage – ten times the bandwidth for three times the cost – has not held. While 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was launched in 2010 and saw a fair…

This Friday, all certificate authorities will have to honor a Domain Name System (DNS) record that allows HTTPS website owners to restrict who can issue SSL certificates for their domain names. It’s a long-needed defense against the issuance of fraudulent certificates, a security risk that domain owners had few protections for until now. The Problem:…

Miserable at work? You’re not alone. More than half of U.S. employees were not engaged at work between 2010 and 2012 according to Gallup’s recent State of the American Workplace report, which collected data from more than 195,000 employees. Many of those who were not engaged wanted a reason to be, such as the company…

An increasing number of malware families employ SSL/TLS encryption in order to evade detection by Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). In this blog post I’m gonna have a look at Adwind, which is a cross-platform Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that has been using SSL to conceal it’s traffic for several years. AdwindRAT typically connects SSL…

A distributed database that is used to maintain a continuously growing list of records, called blocks. That sounds nice, but how does it work? To illustrate a blockchain, we will use an open source command-line interface called Blockchain CLI. If you haven’t already, install Node.js. —Sean Han @ Free Code Camp

Protecting data from losses requires a well-planned data-management strategy. Many strategic plans include using cloud services, but IT and other departments must understand the cloud’s strengths and limitations when it comes to protection. The benefits of the cloud include inexpensive storage costs, instant scale, high availability and the elimination of on-premises hardware infrastructure. Used properly,…