When we think about artificial intelligence, what comes to mind is usually none-too-friendly fictional examples like HAL and the machines from The Matrix, although there are some more friendly AIs, like Data from Star Trek. Friendly or not, we’re a long way from having functional AIs of this type, but over the next few years

If you’ve been in the IT industry for a while, you’ll have an almost instinctive familiarity with what the cloud is, its various modalities, deployment models, and types. Intuitively, one would think that a deep understanding would make the cloud easy to explain to less technical people, but in fact the opposite is true

There has always been a lot of confusion around the exact meanings of the various cloud service models and their intersection with deployment strategies. That’s hardly surprising given that IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and a dozen

Even the smallest of modern companies use networks that are both heterogeneous and dispersed. Business networks are composed of multiple services spread over many servers in diverse locations. I’m a writer, so you’d think I could make do without much of a network, but when I add up all the services

There’s a dream of the cloud in which data flows freely around the globe, available anywhere, stored wherever is convenient, and detached from the normal concerns of information management. Technologically, companies don’t have to care about where their data is stored: it’s in the cloud and the cloud

If there’s one thing that’s obvious to anyone who’s spent even a little bit of time online, it’s that security is one of the biggest hot-button issues on the modern web. As we store more and more information online, cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly lucrative – and the stakes involved in securing

There’s probably no one with access to the Internet who isn’t aware that the security of Apple’s iCloud platform was called into question recently. I’m not going discuss the appalling theft of private data that ensued, but I do want to look at a related issue: rate limiting. While we’re not entirely sure

The first time a user visits your site, it’s likely that they won’t have a DNS mapping for your IP stored in their browser cache, and it’s possible their ISP doesn’t have a result cached either. For many of your visitors, the Domain Name System will have to retrieve and return the DNS record from the authoritative

When a popular site switches content management systems, particularly a site like CMS Critic, whose writers we can expect to be well-informed of content management issues, it’s useful to have a look at the reasons behind the change. At the very least, they serve as input for future site deployment decisions.

Keeping you, our clients, happy and providing the services you need is the reason Cartika exists. We recently sent out a survey so we could find out how well you think we’re doing. We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to respond. The results made all of us happy. You love our service, support, and performance.

DDoS attacks have been hitting the headlines with increasing frequency over the last few months. They’re a favored strategy of “hacktivists”, extortionists, and online criminals hoping to create a distraction. In principle, DDoS attacks are quite simple. At the most basic level, a collective of compromised

Site security is a complex issue. The online economy is huge and hackers stand to reap considerable benefits from attacks against sites that store sensitive data or give them access to large numbers of visitors. Hackers are a motivated and intelligent group of people, albeit a group with a consistent

Occasionally, I wonder what might happen if the Internet just stopped working one day. It’s not a terribly pleasant thought, is it? These days, we’re so reliant on our connectivity that if some outside force were to strip it away from us, it’d likely lead to a complete societal collapse. There are upsides to this reliance

DNS amplification attacks are one of the most pernicious vulnerabilities in the Internet’s infrastructure and a favored tool of online criminals with an axe to grind or a need to create a distraction. They’re also a useful example of how infrastructure that grows organically over many years can cause problems

GitHub is a developer’s dream: not just for managing their own code, but for discovering new and exciting scripts, frameworks, and tools to use in their work. Among the tens of thousands of projects, it can be difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. GitHub’s popularity means that there are plenty

Later this month, the HTTPbis working group will make their last call for input into HTTP 2.0, the first major revision in a decade and a half to the protocol on which the web runs. This November, assuming all goes according to schedule, HTTP 2.0 will be submitted to the Internet Engineering Steering

They say money makes the world go round, and that’s certainly true of the world wide web. In spite of its early and idealistic origins as a platform for unhindered communication, the Internet has grown to its current size and influence because of its commercial potential. eCommerce is one of the strongest

Much of the thinking around data storage and processing construes enterprise data as an undifferentiated mass. The reality is very different. Data is differentiated across multiple axes: from low to high value, from business critical to potentially useful, from highly sensitive to publishable, and from time sensitive to archival