Phone Mess

• Die, robocalls, die: A how-to guide to stop spammers and exact revenge: WashingtonPost Apr 2019
• AT&T and Comcast today said they have completed a successful cross-network test of a new Caller ID authentication system: Arstechnica: Mar 2019
• Britain’s spy agency delivers a scathing assessment of the security risks posed by Huawei to the country’s telecom networks: WashingtonPost Mar 2019
• A National Treasure: John Oliver fights robocalls... by robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC: Arstechnica, Mar 2019
• Criminals Are Tapping into the Phone Network Backbone to Empty Bank Accounts: Motherboard, Feb 2019
• How to Verify Phone Numbers with PHP, Symfony and Twilio: Chris Lush, Nov 2017
• Anatomy of a scam – how phone frauds harvest millions from us: Naket Security, Jun 2017
• THE CRITICAL HOLE AT THE HEART OF OUR CELL PHONE NETWORKS: Wired, April 2016

Update: Undersea Cables

• Submarine cable map.  The default goto map
• Times has a nice infographic thing on the oceanic fiber links   
• Big Tech (google/MS/FB/etc) are buying up oceanic fiber links   
• (oldpost) AS Peering 
• (oldpost) Undersea Cable Map   

Long Live the TIX!

The Tix Clock was an awesome timepiece by late inventor and native San Franciscan James Scott Thompson.

Unfortunately the clock stopped being available in 2014, and there has never been something even similar out there since.

Until NOW!! 
(Well... not now..  It's been available for a while now...  Since Sep 2018)

A kiwi hobbyist decided to build his own Tix clock, and now started manufacturing it for the public (It sounds like the blessing of the Thompson family).  He's calling it TIX2, and unlike the original with the all plastic frame, the TIX2 has a nice wooden body which I think makes it look even nicer.

Please Fix Google Docs!!!!

Google Docs is arguably one of the best (at least by value - it's free) word processors out there.  But there are a few things it's missing that really drive me nuts!!  Below I have a small list of (very simple) changes that would take this product (I think) way past the next level.

1. CSS: Or any basic editable style definitions!  Lets say that I want to have a specific look for text from a terminal, or code (maybe a gray background, paragraph border, and courier font)  Right now I only get H1, H2, and H3.   I want to be able to set my own.  Bonus points: Let me save that style sheet/style template so I can reference it from multiple docs!  (Imagine all those government folks who could now use this because it met their weird formatting requirements.)
2. Table of Contents: Yea, I know... there are plugins that you can add to, but I just want a TOC that works like with google sheets.  Nice and simple, and auto-updates.  
3. Paper!?!?: Why do I only get stuck with a view where everything is formatted to some random paper sheet?  Who does paper anymore?!?  Can't I say that this doc is for a screen, and then don't worry about the 8x11" page formatting?  

Fix this stuff and then your migration to your new sites pages will be sooo much easier!   

Those Pesky Drones

So Gatwick Airport in the UK was shutdown for a long time (more than 24 hours) causing everyone to go nutty, because someone was flying a drone in the airports airspace.

The Reg has "A few reasons why cops haven't immediately shot down London Gatwick airport drone menace", which is a thoughtful discussion about the sticky issue that drones cause at this point.

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.