WIRED: Go on a Psychedelic Journey of the Internet’s Growth and Evolution. “Security researcher Barrett Lyon, who makes visualizations of the internet’s network infrastructure, is back with a new piece chronicling the rise of the IPv6 protocol.”
EurekAlert: ACM publishes new journal of Proceedings of the ACM On Networking. “ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has announced the publication of the first issue of Proceedings of the ACM on Networking (PACMNET), a new peer-reviewed journal. Issued quarterly, PACMNET publishes original research papers on new technologies, novel experimentation, creative use of networking technologies, and new insights into network management. The journal features articles on system design and performance evaluations of computer networks, experience learned from deployments, traffic engineering, and network programmability from academic experts as well as practitioners working in public or private settings.”
MIT News: A universal system for decoding any type of data sent across a network. “Researchers at MIT, Boston University, and Maynooth University in Ireland have now created the first silicon chip that is able to decode any code, regardless of its structure, with maximum accuracy, using a universal decoding algorithm called Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND). By eliminating the need for multiple, computationally complex decoders, GRAND enables increased efficiency that could have applications in augmented and virtual reality, gaming, 5G networks, and connected devices that rely on processing a high volume of data with minimal delay.”
Pacific Business News: New website connects Native Hawaiians in the tech industry. “In April, [Emmit] Parubrub encountered a like-minded individual in Taylor Ho, a 31-year-old principal designer at Twitch, who like Parubrub grew up in Windward Oahu and was a transplant to California… They pooled their knowledge to launch Hawaiians in Technology, a digital directory for Native Hawaiians in tech jobs or those aspiring to get one. They also created a Hawaiians in Tech Discord channel for basic introductions. Requirements are fairly straightforward: people of Native Hawaiian ancestry, and people with tech jobs or tech aspirations.”
Search Engine Land: Google publishes SEO guide to HTTP status codes, network issues and DNS errors. “Ever wonder how your various HTTP status codes or how your network or DNS responds to GoogleBot may impact how well your site performs on Google Search? Well, Google has published a new guide and help document detailing how HTTP status codes and network or DNS errors impact your Google Search performance.”
PC Magazine: What Is Amazon Sidewalk and How Do You Disable It?. “When the Sidewalk Bridges(s) in your house are active, wireless signals that reach outside your home to the sidewalk and beyond will allow any passing Sidewalk-enabled device (called a Sidewalk Endpoint) to instantly connect. Sidewalk will also help set up new Amazon products on your home Wi-Fi. You’re not going to use Amazon Sidewalk to sidle up to the neighbor’s house, access their Wi-Fi on your laptop, and use their ISP bandwidth to watch Netflix. But your Echo devices and your neighbors can co-mingle, forming a low-energy, long-range mesh network over the whole area.”
Red Hat: A brief history of network connectivity: Connected mainframes. “The appearance of the modern data center was not a grand reveal. Rather, it resulted from the evolution and convergence of two technologies that emerged out of the early 1980s. The first is the personal computer. The other is ubiquitous networking. Without either, the modern data center would not exist. This article is the first installment in a four-part series that tells the story of how these two technologies transformed the personal computer from what was essentially a hobbyist obsession into the foundation of modern IT architecture. This evolution, from PC to data center, provides a way to understand not only our present but, more importantly, it allows us to anticipate what our future might become.”
ZDNet: Speed up your home office: How to optimize your network for remote work and learning. “Your network has become mission-critical. You need it to keep the paychecks coming and your kids need it to get through school. In this context, getting the most out of your network is essential. But what does that really mean? This comprehensive guide will help you answer that, and help guide you towards changes and improvements you might want to make. I’ll be covering three major topic areas that are inextricably related: understanding your bandwidth requirements, understanding your broadband provider’s offerings, and optimizing your home network.”
Ars Technica: Ten rules for … placing your Wi-Fi access points. Ars Technica is being cute in the headline. Often ASCII text does not work with cute headlines. So the cute part has been removed. “Here at Ars, we’ve spent a lot of time covering how Wi-Fi works, which kits perform the best, and how upcoming standards will affect you. Today, we’re going to go a little more basic: we’re going to teach you how to figure out how many Wi-Fi access points (APs) you need, and where to put them.”
Lifehacker: Introducing: Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Wifi. “You don’t have to memorize every setting in your router to set up a killer wireless network at home, but there are quite a few things you’ll want to know about wifi in order to get the best possible performance on your many devices. To help you out, we’ve put together a special page—Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Wifi—that you can bookmark and refer to whenever you’re messing around with your wifi (or find that your connection feels slower, but you have no idea why).”
Krebs on Security: P2P Weakness Exposes Millions of IoT Devices. “A peer-to-peer (P2P) communications technology built into millions of security cameras and other consumer electronics includes several critical security flaws that expose the devices to eavesdropping, credential theft and remote compromise, new research has found.”
EurekAlert: Heads in the cloud: Scientists predict internet of thoughts ‘within decades’ . “Imagine a future technology that would provide instant access to the world’s knowledge and artificial intelligence, simply by thinking about a specific topic or question. Communications, education, work, and the world as we know it would be transformed.” Two scenarios bloom in my mind. One is an amazing utopia of understanding. One is a hellscape. Guess which I’m betting on.
TechCrunch: The LibreRouter project aims to make mesh networks simple and affordable . “In the city, we’re constantly saturated with the radio waves from 10 or 20 different routers, cell towers and other wireless infrastructure. But in rural communities there might only be one internet connection for a whole village. LibreRouter is a hardware and software project that looks to let those communities build their own modern, robust mesh networks to make the most of their limited connectivity.”
Ars Technica: New Spectre attack enables secrets to be leaked over a network. “When the Spectre and Meltdown attacks were disclosed earlier this year, the initial exploits required an attacker to be able to run code of their choosing on a victim system. This made browsers vulnerable, as suitably crafted JavaScript could be used to perform Spectre attacks. Cloud hosts were susceptible, too. But outside these situations, the impact seemed relatively limited. That impact is now a little larger.”
LinkedIn: Introducing Ask for a Referral: Making It Easier to Find Your Way In. “If you’ve had your eye on a specific role or have always wanted to work for a particular company, referrals are one of the best ways to get your foot in the door. In fact, the #1 way that job seekers have reported first discovering a job, was through someone they knew. Not that surprising as nearly 50% of recruiters say referrals are the leading source of quality hires. And once you’ve asked for one and applied for the job, you’re 4X more likely to hear back from a recruiter at that company. Long story short – it’s important to know who in your network can help you find your next role – and how to reach out.”
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