IoT Devices are a Security Threat, Akamai Goes Green and More in This Weeks News

IoT devices are a security threat

Dyn delivers an informative article about IoT devices and how these can actually represent a big threat in terms of security. By some estimates, there will be 6.4 billion connected devices this year and roughly 21 billion by 2020, and this is something we can all be worried about. This week a massive DDoS attack happened which was aimed at a brick-and-mortar jewellery shop, what was unusual about this attack is that it was performed by 25000 internet-connected TV devices – IoT devices.

“When I go into the dentist he won’t ask if I brushed. He will say what’s your login to your Philips account. There will be a whole new level of transparency with my dentist”
– Marc Benioff (Salesforce)

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Read more about the attack & see the mentioned article: Dyn Blog

Akamai goes green

Akamai, the world’s largest distributed computing platform announced on June 28th that it plans to initiate long term investment in renewable energy projects thereby insuring that its carbon emissions in 2020 will be lower than those in 2015. The company announced it wants to get to a point where half of their 200,000 servers which are running in data centers spread across 126 countries are powered with renewable energy in 4 years.

“It is our hope that our procurement strategy can be a model for other companies with similar small-scale, distributed operations”
– Akamai

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Read on Akamai Blog

HTTP Referer Blacklisting is MaxCDNs new feature

HTTP Referer Blacklisting enables the content owner to prevent hotlinking and save on CDN bandwidth costs. If you don’t know what hotlinking is – it’s when someone uses your content on their website by sending requests to your server instead of their own. When your server is a CDN server, you’re paying money to make your content available on someone else’s website, and not your own. Before this MaxCDN had a whitelisting feature and no blacklisting options available.

Learn more about blacklisting & whitelisting on MaxCDN Blog

The super giants of the global video streaming industry

Streaming industry is still on the rise, with companies from different verticals introducing dozens of business models either out of necessity to stay relevant in a highly competitive space or are highly commoditized. One thing they all have in common is that they all need to sell in volume in order to flourish. This is how all this looks like right now:

CDNs: Akamai, Limelight….
OVP’s: Brightcove, Ooyala, Wordpres…
B2C: Vimeo, Facebook,
OTT: Netflix, Hulu…
Operators: Comcast, Time Warner…
Telcos: AT&T, Verizon….
Mfg: Alcatel, Harmonic….
Tools: Encoding.com, Flow Player, Telestream …

Read more about the video streaming infrastructure: Bizety

Level 3 issues a statement on special access letter

Verizon Communications and INCOMPAS, a trade association that represents technology companies filled a letter with the FCC which proposes a framework for reform of the market for business data services, also known as special access, to promote competition for enterprise communications services. Level 3 has been pleased to support this letter with the following statement:

“For more than a decade, American consumers, businesses, nonprofits and government institutions have been waiting for the FCC to take action and spur competition in the market for business data services, the wireline connections powering our data-driven world. While it may not get much attention, the business data services market is a $45 billion business enabling everything from mobile phones to the internet to ATMs. We’d like to thank FCC Chairman Wheeler for committing to bringing long-overdue reform to this critical market, which begins the process of breaking the incumbents’ hold for the benefit of consumers, competitors and the broader U.S. economy.”
– Joseph Cavender, VP at Level 3

Read the full article at: Level 3 News