Oldest dot-com address sits sadly underused 30 years after its historic registration

Someone had to go first, so on March 15, 1985, Lisp computer maker Symbolics, Inc., registered the Internet’s first dot-com address: Symbolics.com.

Someone had to go first, so on March 15, 1985, Lisp computer maker Symbolics, Inc., registered the Internet’s first dot-com address: Symbolics.com.
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The Cambridge-headquartered company went out of business about a decade ago (though remnants live on) and in August 2009 the Symbolics.com address was sold for an undisclosed sum to XF.com Investments, whose CEO Aron Meystedt said in a press release: “For us to own the first domain is very special to our company, and we feel blessed for having the ability to obtain this unique property."

Today it looks like more of a white elephant than a blessing, what with a largely empty “cityscape” design and a blog that hasn’t been updated in two years. Yet Meystedt remains optimistic, at least outwardly.

“We created the city concept to make browsing the site fun, but it also could grow into a revenue-generating property if we allow advertisers to sponsor elements in the cityscape,” he says.

The design includes clickable elements that reward the visitor with nuggets of information about the Internet, such as: “Gmail first launched on April 1st, 2004. It was widely assumed the service was an April Fools Day joke.”

Not exactly Reddit’s “Today I Learned.”

“As far as traffic, the daily visitors can range from several hundred to several thousand,” Meystedt says. “This usually depends on how well Symbolics.com is circulated on social media or news blogs.”

And that probably picks up around March 15.

The problem here appears obvious: Symbolics.com is not Plymouth Rock; it would appear to be valuable – at least in a business sense – only if you’re running a company called Symbolics.

I asked Meystedt if Symbolics.com might be for sale.

“We have no plans to sell the name at this time.”

Make him an offer.

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The myth about how Amazon’s Web service started just won’t die

The myth about how Amazon’s Web service started just won’t die

How AWS got started and what its co-founder is doing now that he says could be bigger than cloud

There’s a rumor that goes around cloud circles about how Amazon.com created what is now the multi-billion dollar infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing industry in the early 2000s.

Some people wrongly assume that Amazon had spare, excess computing capacity from their ecommerce site that was used as the basis for Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud.

It’s something that Benjamin Black has heard a lot. But it’s not true. And he would know: Black is widely credited with co-authoring the initial proposal at Amazon that led to the creation of AWS.

“Why will that not die?” Black says about the rumor. “It’s totally false.”

Black, who recently accepted a new position at cloud company Pivotal, says from day one, every part of AWS has been purpose built for AWS. And now he’s hoping to work on a new project that he says could be even bigger than the cloud he helped create at Amazon.

How AWS actually got started
Benjamin Black co-authored a paper at Amazon.com in 2003 that helped kick off Amazon Web Services and the IaaS cloud computing market. Black now works at Pivotal.

In 2003 Black was running a website engineering team at Amazon. The company was growing fast and IT wasn’t keeping up. Black worked with Chris Pinkham, who he says is one of the best managers he’s ever worked with. Pinkham pushed Black to consider how Amazon’s infrastructure could more efficiently scale up. They explored how abstraction and decoupling the applications from the infrastructure could make it easier to manage.

“We realized there could be a lot of value in doing that, and a lot of value to others potentially outside of Amazon,” Black told Network World. “We could sell it (the infrastructure) as a service.” Black and Pinkham wrote up the idea, which made its way to Jeff Bezos, who greenlighted the proposal. Pinkham then led a team to build Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which are virtual machines as a service and one of AWS’s first products released in 2006.

"Right off the bat we just thought it would be an interesting thing to do. It took a while to get to a point of realizing that this is actually transformative."

Benjamin Black
That seed of an idea turned into what is now the market-leading IaaS public cloud computing company. Amazon was estimated last year by Gartner to have a public cloud that is five times larger than its next 14 competitors combined. Needless to say, the idea Black helped start took off. Pinkham went on to found startup Nimbula, which Oracle bought and used as the basis for its cloud platform. Pinkham now works as an engineering vice president at Twitter.

How did Bezos receive the idea? Black recalls Bezos envisioning a platform that would give anyone, such as college kids in a dorm room, the tools they would need to start a new company.

“That’s still the idea people have about it,” Black says. “At the same time, it’s taking over the world.” He says the fundamental key to AWS, which remains today, is that it provides the undifferentiated technical infrastructure to anyone who wants it – whether that’s VMs, storage, or Hadoop as a service.

Some of the directions Amazon has taken AWS have surprised Black. AWS is moving further and further “up the stack” to provide application services, like virtual desktops and email. Not everything he and Pinkham proposed made it into the initial version, but every change was for the better, he wrote in a blog post describing the origins of EC2.

Did Black realize the idea he and Pinkham proposed to Bezos would turn into what is has today? Far from it. “Right off the bat we just thought it would be an interesting thing to do,” he says. “It took a while to get to a point of realizing that this is actually transformative. It was not obvious at the beginning.”
How the Internet of Things could be the next cloud

Black has a new gig now. After stints at Microsoft, VMware, advising the company Chef and starting his own monitoring company named Boundry, cloud company Pivotal hired Black as senior director of technology. Pivotal, which is a spinout from VMware, EMC and has substantial backing from General Electric, is behind the open source platform as a service (PaaS) Cloud Foundry.

Whereas an IaaS like AWS is a massive distributed system of virtual hardware and services - like compute, storage and databases - a PaaS is an application development and hosting service.

In his new role at Pivotal Black hopes to spearhead the company’s burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) lab in Seattle, where he lives.
INSIDER: 5 ways to prepare for Internet of Things security threats

There’s an opportunity for a company like Pivotal to create a series of application components that can be used in IoT that serve as a basis for many other IoT apps, Black says. “There are some pretty basic patterns across all of these desired apps,” he says. “What we’re looking do is develop the primitives that would allow anyone to get into the IoT marketplace.”

When asked how the IoT market could compare to the cloud computing market that he helped usher in, Black said: “Bigger.”

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Update: A mobile payment battle is blazing

All eyes are on Samsung Pay and its embedded LoopPay inside the Galaxy S6 smartphone

Mobile in-store payments could grow dramatically in the U.S. as the result of a battle brewing among tech giants Google, Samsung and Apple.

In the latest development, Samsung today revealed Samsung Pay, a new mobile payment strategy, combined with its new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones. Samsung Pay relies on two technologies: a new magnetic transmission capability from startup LoopPay embedded as a copper ring inside the Galaxy S6 and the older Near Field Communications technology used in earlier Galaxy S smartphones.

The two phones will ship April 10 in 20 countries , including the U.S., but Samsung Pay will not go live until this summer, first in the U.S. and South Korea.

Having both mobile payment technologies embedded inside the Galaxy S6 will allow its users to make purchases at up to 90% of the estimated 12 million payment locations at U.S. stores. That's because the lion's share of the older point-of-sale terminals in use in the U.S. still have magnetic stripe card readers which support the new Galaxy S6 technology.

By comparison, Apple Pay and Google Wallet rely on newer NFC-ready terminals, which are gradually being rolled out in the U.S. and should reach about 50% of point-of-sale locations by year's end, according to estimates by credit and debit card companies. While NFC grows, magnetic technology could help fill the mobile payment gap.

"Samsung Pay certainly heats up the competition, and that's a good thing for mobile payment adoption," said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan in an interview. "But Samsung still has a lot of work to do to improve the user experience before it can effectively compete with Apple."

Informal field tests by Gartner of the magnetic LoopPay technology showed inconsistent performance when used with some magnetic readers on stores' point-of-sale terminals, Litan said. Gartner used LoopPay's magnetic technology incorporated inside its earlier phone cases and fobs, not the same technology embedded in the Galaxy S6. Embedding the copper ring inside the Galaxy S6 will hopefully reduce the inconsistent performance, she said, but LoopPay "is definitely not going to work at every magnetic-stripe reader."

Samsung and Visa were investors in startup LoopPay last summer, and Samsung on Feb. 18 announced it had acquired LoopPay for an undisclosed sum.

MasterCard confirmed that it will support Samsung Pay by deploying tokenization software for both magnetic and NFC transactions. Other credit and debit card companies, such as Visa and American Express, will follow suit with tokenization and will also support Samsung Pay, Samsung said. Major credit card companies and banks have backed Apple Pay with NFC, which rolled out last fall for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and have already widely marketed the concept. Bank of America, Chase, Citi and US Bank are also on board with Samsung Pay, Samsung said.

Google Wallet, which first emerged in 2011, was slow to catch on, but Google on Feb. 23 announced a deal to buy technology and capabilities from SoftCard, another NFC-based mobile payment system. The purchase means that Google Wallet will be pre-installed on new Android phones at Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile later this year.

MasterCard said it agreed to support Samsung Pay with the LoopPay magnetic payment option only after setting up the tokenization security technology to support it. Tokens are crytographs, a kind of code, that are used instead of a customer's actual credit or debit card number to bolster security, and have been used with NFC payments in Apple Pay and other payment systems.

"Tokenization is how we got comfy with the magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology portion, and we wouldn't have supported [Samsung Pay] without [tokenization]," said Sherri Haymond, group head of MasterCard channel management.

When a MasterCard customer with a Galaxy S6 ready to make a purchase approaches a point-of-sale terminal equipped to handle either magnetic or NFC payments, the system is set up to give preference to NFC payments, Haymond said in an interview.

"We're viewing this MST as a bridge technology to enable consumers to take advantage of digital payments while NFC catches on," she said. "We do believe NFC is the wave of the future."

Mobile payment adoption is based on a complex set of technologies and business relationships. A major stumbling block in the U.S. has been the conversion of millions of payment terminals at U.S. retailers to more secure technology that supports smart cards and, usually, NFC. In addition to Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Samsung Pay, many experts are watching a consortium of large retailers called MCX that includes WalMart and Best Buy to see how MCX will affect mobile payment rollouts. MCX is not relying on NFC, at least initially, and may or may not support the LoopPay magnetic approach.

"How MCX members respond to Samsung Pay will be fascinating to watch," said Tim Sloane, an analyst at Mercator Advisory Group. The mobile payment space "is really getting interesting."

Unlike MCX, Samsung Pay will still rely on credit and debit cards and the banks that extend credit to consumers. Many merchants, including those in MCX, object to paying banks a fee of about 3% per credit-card transaction while also having to update their point-of-sale terminals to support smart cards. Merchants have an Oct. 1 deadline to upgrade their terminals to accept smart cards to avoid financial liability in the event of credit card fraud with older magnetic stripe technologies. Many of the updated terminals, estimated at about 80%, also support NFC payments with smartphones.

The technology changes have been a burden for merchants. "Merchants are really frustrated with all these mobile payments," Litan said. "The systems are opaque and banks are keeping information close to the vest."

What's apparent with Samsung Pay and other mobile payments is that the rate of adoption is not only about new technologies, but also business partnerships. So far, Apple has excelled in creating partnerships with credit card companies and major banks, as well as many large retailers. Apple and its bank, card and retail partners have aired a steady stream of TV ads and other promotions to show the ease of using Apple Pay with NFC for quick in-store payments.

"The path to mobile payments is not only in the technology, but how many partnerships you can form with financial institutions and retailers willing to accept your particular solution," said analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates. "If Samsung can build an ecosystem that provides for its technology, then it can be a player. Apple, almost by default, will have such an ecosystem. Everyone seems to want to support whatever Apple does, because of its weight in the marketplace. We'll have to see if Samsung can bring the same weight with its payment technology."

Various things could happen to help Samsung with Samsung Pay. If, for example, Samsung decides to license the LoopPay magnetic transmission technology to other device makers -- even Apple and Google -- then Samsung could reap benefits. On the other hand, if Samsung Pay turns out to be highly successful, both Apple Pay and Google Wallet could ultimately be "marginalized," Sloan said.

While that scenario may seem far-fetched to many, Samsung Pay has opened a lot of eyes.

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600-211 Implementing Cisco Service Provider Mobility CDMA Networks (SPCDMA)

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QUESTION 1
Which interface carries signaling information between PCF and PDSN?

A. A8
B. A9
C. A10
D. A11

Answer: D

Explanation:

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QUESTION 2
Which underlying protocol is used for RADIUS messages in CDMA?

A. TCP
B. SCTP
C. UDP
D. ICMP

Answer: C

Explanation:

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QUESTION 3
Which protocol is used during PPP negotiation to assign an IP address to the mobile device for a
simple IP call?

A. LCP
B. IPCP
C. CHAP
D. EAP

Answer: B

Explanation:

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QUESTION 4
Which is an attribute in MIP RRQ?

A. Correlation ID
B. NAS-Identifier
C. Framed-IP-Address
D. Care-of-Address
E. Framed-Interface-ID

Answer: D

Explanation:

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QUESTION 5
Which bit in HA Registration Revocation message is used by PDSN/FA to determine Mobile
notification?

A. 'A' bit
B. 'I' bit
C. 'M' bit
D. 'R' bit

Answer: B

Explanation:

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7 critical things to cover in your disaster-recovery plan

As always, you never know when a disaster will strike, so better to have a checklist on hand so that panic doesn’t set in when the network goes down.

1. Creating a plan
Cloud services company Evolve IP has created a list of suggestions for executives to evaluate their current disaster avoidance plans or, should a plan not exist, provide directional measures to protect their information and communications systems.

2. Establish a disaster recovery functional team
Elect one spokesperson from the group for communication. In the event of a multi-location organization each location should have a core team or representative that works with the corporate entity.

3. Risk assessment
Identify risks in the following areas:

Information – What information and information systems are most vital to continue to run the business at an acceptable level?

Communication Infrastructure – What communications (email, toll free lines, call centers, VPNs, Terminal Services) are most vital to continue to run the business at an acceptable level?

Access and Authorization – Who needs to access the above systems and in what secure manner (VPN, SSL, DR Site) in the event of a disaster?

Physical Work Environment – What is necessary to conduct business in an emergency should the affected location not be available?

Internal and External Communication – Who do we need to contact in the event of an emergency and with what information?

4. Cloud-based data centers and applications
Create a written recovery plan that is hosted remotely in a secure and redundant data center. Schedule and test your plan at least once per year or in accordance with regulatory/compliance requirements. Ensure employees can access the hosted environment (both from within the business confines and remotely) during fail-over mode from the designated locations.

5. Premise-based data centers
Produce a written recovery plan that is stored remotely. Identify water entry areas throughout the building and have sandbags available. Install VESDA smoke detection and thermal detectors. Have a fail-safe alarm system. Place high-temperature sensors on fire sprinkler heads if non-water based fire-suppression is unavailable. Keep your data center above street level. If you are in a single-floor building, raise your racks from the floor. Employ multiple Internet service/data providers and test for failover regularly.

6. Data back-up
Tape back-ups should be removed daily and stored in a secure, easily accessed public building with at least 2-3 individuals having keys to the location. Back-up data to a geographically distant location, either electronically, or ensure physical media is in a diverse location.

7. Hosted telephony systems
Employ multiple Internet providers and test for failover regularly. Verify that critical phone numbers have the ability to call forward in an unreachable condition.

8. Call center
Identify key business applications required and how call center staff will access these applications from alternative locations. Identify critical call types that must be answered and determine mechanism to segregate those calls. Identify alternative locations to house the staff with the appropriate systems, phones, and work environment. Ensure administrative staff has the ability to remotely change call routing, messaging, and related call center functionality.

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600-503 Designing with Cisco Network Programmability

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QUESTION 1
Which two advantages of an overlay network that consists of virtual switches on supervisors
compare with those of physical networks? (Choose two.)

A. Ability to change the logical network topology more easily.
B. Ability to experience higher performance of traffic forwarding.
C. Overlay networks integrate with virtual machines more closely
D. They can support more routing protocols.
E. They are more secure.

Answer: A,C

Explanation:

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QUESTION 2
Which two options are challenges to migrate a traditional network to an SDN type of network?
(Choose two.)

A. would cost to replace traditional network devices to new devices
B. would need more operators to run a more complicated network
C. would need operators with more programming skill
D. would need more bandwidth to secure redundant paths
E. would need to remove existing network management tools

Answer: A,C

Explanation:

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QUESTION 3
Which statement is an example of a requirement that is not well-formed?

A. The application should provide status messages every 60 seconds.
B. The application user interface must be easy to use.
C. The application must validate that the IP addresses that are input by users are valid IPv4 or
IPv6 addresses.
D. The application must be available for end users between 8am and 8pm EST/EDT, Monday
through Friday.
E. The application should restart within 15 seconds.

Answer: B

Explanation:

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QUESTION 4
Which option is a requirement represented in an Agile software development methodology?

A. interviews
B. product functions
C. product requirements document
D. user stories
E. home stenographer

Answer: D

Explanation:

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QUESTION 5
Which four components should be considered when gathering business requirements for a
customer project? (Choose four.)

A. alignment to corporate goals
B. compliance regulations
C. development team location
D. commitments to customers
E. supplier capabilities
F. business unit providing the developers

Answer: A,B,D,E

Explanation:

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The top demographic trends for every major social network

The demographics of who's on what social network are shifting — older social networks are reaching maturity, while newer social messaging apps are gaining younger users fast.

In a report from BI Intelligence, we unpack data from over a dozen sources to understand how social media demographics are still shifting.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from the BI Intelligence report:

Facebook still skews significantly female. Women in the U.S. are more likely to use Facebook than men by about 10 percentage points, according to a 2013 survey of social network adoption.

Facebook remains the top social network for U.S. teens. Nearly half of teen Facebook users say they're using the site more than last year, and Facebook has more daily teen users than any other social network.

That said, Instagram has edged out Facebook and Twitter in terms of prestige among young users. U.S. teens now describe Instagram as "most important," while Facebook and Twitter lost ground on this measure, according to Piper Jaffray's twice yearly teen survey. The survey also found that 83% of U.S. teens in wealthy households were on Instagram.

LinkedIn is actually more popular than Twitter among U.S. adults. LinkedIn's core demographic are those aged between 30 and 49, i.e. those in the prime of their career-rising years. Not surprisingly, LinkedIn also has a pronounced skew toward well-educated users.

Twitter has begun to lean worryingly toward male users, whereas previously it was a more gender-balanced social network. Pew found that 22% of men use Twitter, while only 15% of women do.

YouTube reaches more adults aged 18 to 34 than any single cable TV network. Nearly half of people in this age group visited YouTube between December 2013 and February 2014, according to Nielsen. It was rated by millennials as the top place to watch content, ahead of digital and TV properties like Facebook and ESPN.

Snapchat is the youngest social network of all. More than six out of 10 Snapchat users are in the 18-to-24 age group, compared to 28% of Instagram users, according to a survey by Informate.

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