It's full of stars!

Obviously, NASA has a great image library you can use for background screen images.  Luckily, the The Art Institute of Chicago has also put 50k high-res images online! (news) The Smithsonian has some stuff too, but it only highlights how Chicago did a fantastic job.

Coolest thing in desktop computing I've seen in a long while

LunaDisplay: No idea why Apple hasn't either bought these guys out, or just reproduced this on their own.  I have a friend who has this and it is soooo cool!  He uses his ipad as a second monitor to his laptop.  The total solution is incredibly portable, and he gets to have an ipad rather then just a dumb 2nd monitor.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over QUIC will officially become HTTP/3

Daniel Stenberg's writes that HTTP/3 will be defined soon to incorporate QUIC.

Robert Graham explains more about QUIC, and Googles QUIC project.

- IETF#103 Meeting (Nov,2018) to discuss the new name http/3
- HTTP/3: From root to tip 

Cisco's new Licensing and why I'm leaving Cisco.

Cisco's new "SMART Licensing" is anything but that.  It needs each switch to call home every month.  If it fails three months in a row, the switch will shut down.  (hows that for "never fail networking"!  This does a couple of things that are inexcusable.

(1) It creates a major threat to the stability of your network.  It becomes the most critical item to monitor in your network (you need to make sure that it's calling home successfully or you go down hard!).

(2) It forces you to do the one thing you NEVER want to do in a production system: allow your management network direct internet access.

(3) It breaks the value proposition you had with cisco when you originally purchased your gear.  I paid an extra penny for their poor TAC support because I knew that I could recoup some of that cost when I was done with the gear by reselling it.  Now when I'm done with a cisco switch, it becomes nothing better then a boat anchor.

BGP Hijacking

	On Nov 12th 2018, everyone lost their shit because Google traffic was being rerouted to Putin.   This is not new news.   Back in DefCon-16 (2013)  Anton Kapela & Alex Pilosov made a great presentation "Stealing The Internet - A Routed, Wide-area, Man in the Middle Attack". Kim Zetter at Wried even did a good writeup on this for the mainstream.

Winner of the Cool Network Map Award!

Gotta hand it to the folks over at HE.  I stumbled across their network map, and it's SO stocked full of eye candy!  Other companies maps might do a better job at getting the information you want to you, but this think definitely wins the WOPR Blinkenlights award!

Water Cooled 72,000 Lumen LED Flashlight!!

Hats off to Samm Sheperd for making the coolest flashlight ever!  (so cool as in water cooled and beyond crazy bright!)

TCP Sucks

WAN Accelerators have been around for a while ( see Peribit ) to try and deal with how TCP blows over larger distances (latency).  The real goal is to bring that tech directly to the computers and rejigger the way computers talk to each other.  Looks like that is happening:

•  HTTP/3 (HTTP/QUIC) : Looks like IETF is making this formal.  

TLS Security

(not a bad form of modern security, right?  ... except for the not being able to hit anybody issue)

• João Poupino has a great writeup in probe.ly on "How to deploy modern TLS in 2018?" which covers what it is, it's background and history of TLS as well as recommendations for you to use.  Good for explaining to managers, as well as simply reading for yourself.  
• Sergiu Gatlan points out that TLS 1.0 / 1.1 Deprecated in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge Starting 2020 (IETF is expected to formally deprecate TLS 1.0 / 1.1 in 2018)