Cisco to buy network-monitoring firm SamKnows for better last-mile visibility | Hacker News Reader

Cisco to buy network-monitoring firm SamKnows for better last-mile visibility

networkworld.com

57 pointslostpixel26 comments

Congratulations to HN user samcrawford, the founder.

Cisco has been moving from their position of a networking powerhouse to that of a surveillance cog.

Yeah, synthetic monitoring is totally surveillance.

To be fair: RUM is a pretty shady market. (I don't know anything about this particular company.)

RUM, as in getting samples of timing for the resources requested from your site? What's shady about that? (Or is there some other RUM concept?)

Another thing, is that viral video recently, where AI was able to give an explanation of the dream, the person said the sonar in Wifi routers can be transformed into showing positions of humans in buildings. Not that recent, actually found an article from Jan this year - https://boingboing.net/2023/01/19/new-study-shows-how-to-use...

Something we should keep in mind.

What do you mean, they clearly spell out how little they collect, in their privacy policy:

> The amount of personally identifiable information stored by SamKnows is limited to; name, email, and address. All metadata and personally identifiable information is both encrypted at rest and in transit on SamKnows servers. It is never stored or transmitted to or from the test agent

See? Nothing to worry about, just your name, email and address. Very little that could actually pinpoint who you are or where you are.

Ref: https://samknows.com/blog/testing-principles

That is only for people who volunteer to receive our custom hardware and we need the name and address to ship them the unit. For most units we have no name, address or any PII whatsoever.

Thank you for the clarification. The descriptions I'm seeing imply that your telemetry code is embedded in network enabled devices. It's good to know that this data collection only applies to your whitebox.

I can understand your concern. Thankfully we have no way of accessing any PII from within an embedded context - all the agent knows is its own MAC/IP addresses etc.

That ship sailed a long time ago, didn't it?

SamKnows is not surveillance, we generate synthetic traffic for our tests from our test agents. We do monitor byte counters for the WAN interface to tell if someone else is using the connection before we run our tests, but otherwise we can't see any ongoing traffic.

Oh, cool. I used to use the site to check DSL availability at exchanges. Looks like they’ve expanded massively since then!

I work at SamKnows, AMA (I know nothing)

What firewall rules can I put in place to block whatever telemetry my devices are shipping to you?

Presumably don't enable that feature or don't install the software?

Most likely deployment scenario is that the ISP has installed it in their home router, it's not running in their own device.

Block TCP connections on port 80 and 443 to dcs-global.samknows.com

Thank you. I appreciate the response.

My ISP can do what they want with their equipment but I prefer anything inside my firewall to not phone home.

Likely it isn't within your firewall anyway. Our integrations are typically on the router supplied by your ISP.

Thank god some ISPs allow deploying your own fiber routers both residential and commercial after the ONT.

Any ballpark estimate of the price Cisco paid for SamKnows?

I have been asking around but people in the know are keeping quiet. I'd love to know and will reply to this comment if I find anything out.

Cisco has been slowly moving move into cyber security it seems

Slowly? They started buying security companies in the late 90s. They bought Sourcefire back in 2013. They’ve been at this a while now.

They should buy RIPE Atlas!

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