The above quote by Theodor Holm Nelson, the pioneer of information technology, states a deep interconnectedness among the myriad topics of this world. The biological systems are no exceptions, which comprise of a complex web of biomolec- ular interactions and regulation processes. In particular, the field of computational systems biology aims to arrive at a theory that reveals complicated inte…
In the summer of 2005, systems administrators and security researchers from all over the world gathered in Las Vegas, Nevada for Black Hat, one of the largest computer security conferences in the world. On the morning of the first day, Michael Lynn, one of the authors of this book, was scheduled to speak about vulnerabilities in Cisco routers. These vulnerabilities were serious: an attacker cou…
It was mid-January 2003. Things were going well in my role as a network engineer supporting data center networks at Cisco. My team celebrated on January 21 when our site vice president powered off the last Avaya PBX; the Research Triangle Park (RTP) campus telephony was now 100% VoIP. We had just completed several WAN circuit and hardware upgrades and were beginning to see the highest availabil…
The Yii framework, hosted at http://www.yiiframework.com/, is a PHP-based application framework built around the Model-View-Controller composite pattern. It is suitable for building both web and console applications, but its feature set makes it most useful for web applications. It has several code generation facilities, including the full create-read-update-delete (CRUD) interface maker. It re…
Up until a few years ago, storage, computing, and network resources were intentionally kept physically and operationally separate from one another. Even the systems used to manage those resources were separated—often physically. Applications that interacted with any of these resources, such as an operational monitoring system, were also kept at arm’s length significantly involved access pol…
An economist must be “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher, in some degree . . . as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.” So remarked John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist who, as much as anyone, could be called the father of macroeconomics. No single statement summarizes better what it means to be an economist. As Key…
businesses move more toward cloud computing, one important factor for success is adopting multi-tenant software-defined networking (SDN) solutions in data centers. Hyper-V Network Virtualization (HNV) is a key enabler for a multi-tenant SDN solution and is essential for implementing a hybrid cloud environment where tenants can bring not only their own IPs, but their entire network topology sinc…
Thanks for purchasing the second edition of this book. It’s been almost five years since the first edition was published, and that meant that a lot has changed in the world of web security. Our goal for this edition of the book was simple: reorganize the book from a web developer’s perspective, update important new information as it applies to PHP security, and leave out any information tha…
We begin to jump into the PHP code within this chapter. You will learn about PHP best coding practices when it comes to performance. You will learn about constructing a faster-running for loop, how to include files using the optimal PHP function, and, most importantly, how to use and install VLD, strace, and Xdebug. Once VLD and strace are installed, you will analyze Opcode, as well as the Apac…
This PhoneGap 4 cookbook is a practical guide to developing hybrid applications using PhoneGap or Cordova. The sample applications here are based on real-world use cases and are shown step by step. This book covers the standard workflow using the Cordova command-line interface, and the extension of hybrid applications using various Cordova plugins. It also covers the development of hybrid appl…
These days, security is the most vital subject for any organization irrespective of their size or the kind of the business they do. The primary reason for this is that organizations don't want to lose their reputation or business over compromises affecting security; secondly, they have to meet legal and regulatory requirements. When it comes to technical security of the infrastructure, Vulnerab…
Metro apps are an important addition to Microsoft Windows 8, providing the cornerstone for a single, consistent programming and interaction model across desktops, tablets, and smart- phones. The Metro app user experience is very different from previous generations of Windows applications: Metro apps are full-screen and favor a usability style that is simple, direct, and free from distractions. …
After you’ve spent some time in the networking field, you tend to notice that there is rarely a single way to do things, and in many cases, rarely a single, precise definition for terms. After all, often a network engineer’s best answer is “it depends.” Such is the case with enterprise routing, so let’s start off with a definition question: what is an enterprise network? Is it a large…
The enterprise begins when you carefully put the first two computers together, and complexity grows with every step thereafter. Haphazard IT building practices can easily lead to an enterprise network that is poorly planned or composed of random, one-off projects undertaken as standalone goals. An e-mail consolidation project can unexpectedly derail concurrent licensing projects intended to vas…
The Berkeley Socket API (where API stands for Application Programming Interface) is a set of standard functions used for inter-process network communications. Other socket APIs also exist; however, the Berkeley socket is generally regarded as the standard. The Berkeley Socket API was originally introduced in 1983 when 4.2 BSD was released. The API has evolved with very few modifications into a …
Financial services companies in the United States are a major industry group, providing five to six million full-time jobs. Banks, insurance companies, and securities firms offer good to excellent employment prospects in many job classifications, including many opportunities in the emerging new economy—the online world of Internet banking, brokerage and e-commerce financial services. Employme…