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Reinventing the Internet is a Silly Idea The Internet carries with it many problems, and over the decades, a large number of people have discussed reinventing the Internet. Some of these efforts have had a significant impact on the networking world. For example, IPv6 was created to solve the problem with the growth in Internet-connected computers and other devices, as we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses. IPv6 is happening, but at a much slower pace than its proponents intende...

A Contrary View: The internet (ARPANET) was designed to be secure Every couple of years, the media is full of articles, conference discussions, and blog posts about reinventing the internet. There are some valid reasons for these conversations. However, the one that I hear often is the one that offers the vaguest explanation: “The internet wasn’t designed for today’s scale”, meaning that the internet, or more precisely, its predecessor ARPANET wasn’t designed for security.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny I don’t mean that I sent one, I mean one that I received. In the 1970s, I worked for Honeywell Information Systems in technical marketing for the Multics operating system. Some of you may have heard about the system or studied it in college. It was a collaboration among AT&T Bell Laboratories, GE’s computer business (subsequently acquired by Honeywell) and MIT, with funding from ARPA (later renamed DARPA), to build a “C...

One of the healthy things about the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) movement has been that WAN and LAN network engineers are finding common ground.

When the legendary Admiral Grace Hopper would give a talk, she often handed out pieces of wire 11.8” in length, and educate her audience about the amount of time it took for electrons to traverse the length of the wire: 1/1,000,000,000 of a second, or, to round off a bit, electrons travel about one foot every nanosecond. In other words, it’s the same as the speed of light through free space.

Back on October 6 2016, one of my colleagues at Niagara wrote a post about the five reasons a Network TAP is better than a SPAN port. There is at least one other good reason. To explain it, I’ll start with a quote from a former CTO-tur...

Where did SDN come from? If you were to ask longtime telecom industry experts where Software-Defined Networking (SDN) originated, they might be quick to answer that the concept of controlling networks from a management console has literally been going on for decades in large telecommunication network environments. But that’s not the only valid answer to this question. If you want to know how the actual term SDN, came to be, here is the story.

Monitoring employees in the workplace is a sensitive topic because it touches on employee policies and an individual’s right to privacy, both of which often come with legal implications.

There are still a couple of weeks to go, but in the realm of computing technology, I already know what this year’s biggest impact has been on my personal computing security, cyber security, and my peace of mind.