Cisco Live In his first in-person Cisco Live keynote in two years, CEO Chuck Robbins didn't make any lofty claims about how AI is taking over the network or how the company's latest products would turn networking on its head. Instead, the presentation was all about working with customers to make their lives easier.

"We need to simplify the things that we do with you. If I think back to eight or ten years ago, I think we've made progress, but we still have more to do," he said, promising to address customers' biggest complaints with the networking giant's various platforms.

"Everything we find that is inhibiting your experience from being the best that it can be, we're going to tackle," he declared, appealing to customers to share their pain points at the show.

A quick glance over the company's announcements this week reveals a common theme along these lines: tighter integrations between the company's existing product portfolios aimed at saving customers the trouble of flipping between multiple dashboards just to do their jobs.

"As an industry, we delivered more and more power, more sophistication every step of the way," said Todd Nightingale, EVP of enterprise networking and cloud at Cisco, during the keynote. "As we drove more sophistication, we unlocked things we never thought possible. But at the same time, too often, we passed the burden of complexity onto you."

Nightingale highlighted efforts to consolidate Cisco's two campus networking portfolios as an example of its intent, as Catalyst campus switching portfolio can now be managed and deployed in the same dashboard as Meraki wireless access points and gateways.

"No longer will we have to choose – nor will any of your teams have to choose – will they buy Meraki hardware or Catalyst hardware," Nightingale promised, adding that Catalyst hardware can be managed via the CLI, using DNA Center, or from Meraki's cloud dashboard.

Likewise, in the datacenter, Cisco revealed a cloud-based portal for its Nexus switch family that ties directly into its Intersight server-management platform. The combo enables customers to deploy and network their workloads all in one go. And for network disruptions outside the campus or datacenter perimeter, Cisco unveiled new functionality built on its ThousandEyes network performance monitoring stack, designed to predict and mitigate internet outages before they happen.

Liz Centoni, chief strategy officer and GM of applications at Cisco, said predictive functionality – alongside a tighter integration with the company's AppDynamics and Intersight platforms – allows dev teams to pinpoint disruptions faster and take preemptive actions to avoid them in the future.

The idea of stitching together functionality across Cisco's portfolio also extends to the security domain.

"Fifty-six percent of the breaches that occur, occur because of negligence. They don't occur because someone has actually had malicious intent," Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM of security at Cisco, told the keynote audience. "We have to make sure that this technology, to Chuck's point, gets to be simpler."

This complexity, he added, is driving customers toward tightly integrated services as opposed to point products.

The company bills its Secure Connect secure access service edge platform – which is built on Meraki – as the answer. The platform offers a full suite of networking and security services, ranging from SD-WAN and cloud firewalls to zero-trust network access, cloud-access security broker, and secure-web gateway under a single product.

What is important for Cisco's future "is this idea that we can combine domains into one user experience, stop shipping our org chart, and bring you simplicity and power without compromise," Nightingale said.

And according to Cisco, this not only means offering customers a simpler, more tightly integrated experience, but doing so without forcing them to adopt consumption models for which they aren't ready.

While the networking giant hasn't given up on its network-as-a-service ambitions – it still plans to offer all of the aforementioned services on a subscription basis – the company says the pivot to this model won't spell the end of established consumption models.

Robbins assured the crowd: "We want to give you the option of purchasing as a service or buying it the way you traditionally bought it. That's our commitment to you." ®

Science fiction is littered with fantastic visions of computing. One of the more pervasive is the idea that one day computers will run on light. After all, what’s faster than the speed of light?

But it turns out Star Trek’s glowing circuit boards might be closer to reality than you think, Ayar Labs CTO Mark Wade tells The Register. While fiber optic communications have been around for half a century, we’ve only recently started applying the technology at the board level. Despite this, Wade expects, within the next decade, optical waveguides will begin supplanting the copper traces on PCBs as shipments of optical I/O products take off.

Driving this transition are a number of factors and emerging technologies that demand ever-higher bandwidths across longer distances without sacrificing on latency or power.

QNAP is warning users about another wave of DeadBolt ransomware attacks against its network-attached storage (NAS) devices – and urged customers to update their devices' QTS or QuTS hero operating systems to the latest versions.

The latest outbreak – detailed in a Friday advisory – is at least the fourth campaign by the DeadBolt gang against the vendor's users this year. According to QNAP officials, this particular run is encrypting files on NAS devices running outdated versions of Linux-based QTS 4.x, which presumably have some sort of exploitable weakness.

The previous attacks occurred in January, March, and May.

A US task force aims to prevent online harassment and abuse, with a specific focus on protecting women, girls and LGBTQI+ individuals.

In the next 180 days, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse will, among other things, draft a blueprint on a "whole-of-government approach" to stopping "technology-facilitated, gender-based violence." 

A year after submitting the blueprint, the group will provide additional recommendations that federal and state agencies, service providers, technology companies, schools and other organisations should take to prevent online harassment, which VP Kamala Harris noted often spills over into physical violence, including self-harm and suicide for victims of cyberstalking as well mass shootings.

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.

"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."

And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel today signed an order approving the extradition of Julian Assange to America, where he faces espionage charges for sharing secret government documents.

Assange led WikiLeaks, a website that released classified files including footage of US airstrikes and military documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan war that detailed civilian casualties.

It also distributed secret files revealing the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and sensitive communications from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, during the 2016 US presidential election. 

A group of senators wants to make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.

A bill filed this week by five senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), comes in anticipation the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling that could overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing access to abortion for women in the US.

The worry is that if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade – as is anticipated following the leak in May of a majority draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito – such sensitive data can be used against women.

A Russian operated botnet known as RSOCKS has been shut down by the US Department of Justice acting with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is believed to have compromised millions of computers and other devices around the globe.

The RSOCKS botnet functioned as an IP proxy service, but instead of offering legitimate IP addresses leased from internet service providers, it was providing criminals with access to the IP addresses of devices that had been compromised by malware, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California.

It seems that RSOCKS initially targeted a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as industrial control systems, routers, audio/video streaming devices and various internet connected appliances, before expanding into other endpoints such as Android devices and computer systems.

Interview 2023 is shaping up to become a big year for Arm-based server chips, and a significant part of this drive will come from Nvidia, which appears steadfast in its belief in the future of Arm, even if it can't own the company.

Several system vendors are expected to push out servers next year that will use Nvidia's new Arm-based chips. These consist of the Grace Superchip, which combines two of Nvidia's Grace CPUs, and the Grace-Hopper Superchip, which brings together one Grace CPU with one Hopper GPU.

The vendors lining up servers include American companies like Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro, as well Lenovo in Hong Kong, Inspur in China, plus ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Wiwynn in Taiwan are also on board. The servers will target application areas where high performance is key: AI training and inference, high-performance computing, digital twins, and cloud gaming and graphics.

The US could implement a law similar to the EU's universal charger mandate if a trio of Senate Democrats get their way.

In a letter [PDF] to Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, two of Massachusetts' senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, along with Bernie Sanders (I-VT), say a proliferation of charging standards has created a messy situation for consumers, as well as being an environmental risk. 

"As specialized chargers become obsolete … or as consumers change the brand of phone or device that they use, their outdated chargers are usually just thrown away," the senators wrote. The three cite statistics from the European Commission, which reported in 2021 that discarded and unused chargers create more than 11,000 tons of e-waste annually.

Microsoft is extending the Defender brand with a version aimed at families and individuals.

"Defender" has been the company's name of choice for its anti-malware platform for years. Microsoft Defender for individuals, available for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is a cross-platform application, encompassing macOS, iOS, and Android devices and extending "the protection already built into Windows Security beyond your PC."

The system comprises a dashboard showing the status of linked devices as well as alerts and suggestions.

Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has revealed details of its much anticipated 2nm production process node – set to arrive in 2025 – which will use a nanosheet transistor architecture, as well as enhancements to its 3nm technology.

The newer generations of silicon semiconductor chips are expected to bring about increases in speed and will be more energy efficient as process nodes shrink and the tech industry continues to fight to hang onto Moore's Law.

The company is due to go into production with the 3nm node in the second half of this year.

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