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Cisco Hits 50 Million Milestone For Its IP Phones
April 26, 2012 by admin
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Cisco Wednesday announced Wednesday that it has sold its 50 millionth IP phone, a significant increase in just two years when 30 million were sold.
The switching technology giant today also said it will make software for presence, instant messaging and Cisco Jabber IM clients available for free to its Unified Communications Manager customers.
The latter move means organizations with UCM can roll out presence and IM to employees simply and cheaply to smartphones and tablets running various operating systems, Barry O’Sullivan, senior vice president of Cisco’s voice technology group, said in a blog post.
The supported OSs include Windows, Mac, iPad, Cisco Cius, iPhone, BlackBerry and, later in 2012, Android, O’Sullivan said.
The move helps companies “deploy a unified communications client that is BYOD-ready,” he added. BYOD refers to Bring Your Own Device, a trend where companies allow workers to use devices of their choosing to connect to company data wirelessly.
Privacy Advocates & Lawmakers Push For Google Probe
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Privacy groups and lawmakers are pushing for a new and more expansive investigation into Google and its privacy practices after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced that it found no evidence that the company violated eavesdropping laws.
Late last week, the FCC reported that there was no legal precedent to find fault with Google collecting unprotected home Wi-Fi data, such as personal email, passwords and search histories, with its roaming Street View cars between 2007 and 2010.
However, the FCC did fine Google $25,000 for obstructing its investigation.
A Google spokesperson took issue with the fine.
“We disagree with the FCC’s characterization of our cooperation in their investigation and will be filing a response,” said the spokesperson in an email to Computerworld. “It was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data, but we believe we did nothing illegal. We have worked with the relevant authorities to answer their questions and concerns.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a national privacy watchdog, disagreed with the FCC findings.
In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder today, EPIC asked that the Department of Justice investigate Google’s surreptitious collecting of Wi-Fi data from residential networks.
“Given the inadequacy of the FCC’s investigation and the law enforcement responsibilities of the attorney general, EPIC urges the Department of Justice to investigate Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data from residential Wi-Fi networks,” wrote Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the advocacy group.
“By the [FCC’s] own admission, the investigation conducted was inadequate and did not address the applicability of federal wiretap law to Google’s interception of emails, usernames, passwords, browsing histories and other personal information,” Rotenberg added.
Rackspace Goes Openstack
Rackspace has finally deployed an Openstack based cloud, playing down claims that it benefits the most from the alliance.
Rackspace is one of the leaders of the Openstack alliance, an open source cloud initiative that aims to break Amazon’s stranglehold on the industry by offering open application programmable interfaces (APIs). Until now Openstack has largely been all talk, but Rackspace has deployed a production Openstack cloud that the firm claims will help it sell Openstack to the enterprise.
Fabio Torlini, VP of cloud at Rackspace said the firm has been “going flat out to make the code production ready”. Torlini said Rackspace’s decision to deploy an Openstack based cloud could be a tipping point in deployment. “It’s going to be the catalyst for many other companies deploying Openstack,” said Torlini.
Rackspace has been the largest contributor to Openstack and the fact that it has the first major Openstack deployment support claims that Rackspace is getting the most out of Openstack.
However Torlini said, “For us, we’re able to be the first one to launch a large scale Openstack compute platform because, yes, we are one of the main providers of the original code and we are a founder of Openstack, so we have tried to develop Openstack as a neutral foundation and it is a foundation to provide a service to all its members. But we’re lucky enough to be one of the founder members, to be able to drive it, and get there [deployment] first.”
Torlini defended Rackspace’s role in the Openstack alliance, claiming the strong leadership shown by the firm is good for the community. Torlini said, “Openstack is beneficial to the product itself but that’s the whole point. The whole idea of many more providers going onto Openstack helping develop the Openstack cloud, helping advance the actual products and code is the whole point of Openstack. On the counter side of that argument is if it’s beneficial for us it is just as beneficial for any other member of Openstack because they have access to the same code and they are able to provide.”
Torlini admitted that Openstack and the community is an advantage for the firm but claimed it wasn’t possible for Rackspace to dominate. “You have companies in Openstack that are far larger than Rackspace enabled to put much more resources into Openstack as well, it’s impossible for us to dominate Openstack – it’s an independent foundation. Is it advantageous from a product perspective? I should damn well hope so,” said Torlini.
Is Samsung Pursuing The Server Market?
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It is certain that Korean electronics giant Samsung will soon be entering the server chip market.
Reports are coming in that the company has been picking up key server personnel from Intel and AMD. Samsung has been focused on developing ARM chips and stayed clear of the x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD.
But the companies latest hires seem to indicate that might change.
Samsung’s latest recruits include veterans of the chip business like Jim Mergard, Frank Helms, who is a Fusion APU architect, Brad Burgess who designed the Bobcat APU and Patrick Patla (VP of AMD’s server business). Patla was behind the success of the Opteron chip set and has done well using the x86-server system.
Are Medical Implants Vulnerable To Hackers?
April 16, 2012 by admin
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Security experts have warned that many medical implants are vulnerable to cyber attacks that could endanger their users’ lives. While an increasing number of patients are being fitted with devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps to manage chronic conditions apparently the inventors did not think anyone would be evil enough to try and hack them.
For some reason they installed unprotected wireless links so that they could be updated easily. Therefore this means that hackers could gain remote control of such implants because they rely on unprotected wireless links to update them. After gaining access to the device, a cyber criminal could then switch it off or tell it to deliver a dangerous dose of medicine to the patient.
Is E-Commerce Next For Facebook?
April 13, 2012 by admin
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A group of e-commerce start-ups, backed by some of the tech world’s most respected financiers, are hoping that Facebook Inc will become an e-commerce powerhouse to rival Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc.
As the world’s largest social network moves toward a $5 billion initial public offering, it will come under more pressure from Wall Street to generate new sources of profit growth and reduce its reliance on advertising, which accounted for 85 percent of its 2011 revenue.
Some entrepreneurs and investors increasingly think “f-commerce” – meaning e-commerce on Facebook – is the answer. Start-ups such as BeachMint, Yardsellr, Oodle and Fab.com are coming up with novel ways to persuade Facebook users to not just connect with friends on the social network, but to shop as well.
Backed by tens of millions of dollars from venture capital firms like Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, and other big investors like Goldman Sachs, these start-ups are pushing out shopping apps, hosting online garage sales and testing out new business models on Facebook.
“E-commerce is a huge category with very strong tailwinds and it’s a natural move for Facebook,” said Sam Schwerin of Millennium Technology Value Partners, which owns Facebook shares and has a stake in BeachMint.
Amazon revolutionized online shopping by crunching lots of customer and purchase data to come up with relevant, personalized recommendations. In the same vein, Facebook’s combination of data, analytics and payment technology could fuel the next generation of e-commerce, Schwerin said.
Samsung Making Ultra MicroSD Card
Samsung Electronics has started mass producing a microSD card that uses an Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) interface to greatly improve data transfer speeds, the company said in an announcement on Wednesday.
The microSD HC card stores up to 16GB and has a maximum sequential read speed of 80MBps (megabytes per second), according to internal tests conducted by Samsung. That is more than four times the read speed of today’s advanced microSD cards, which have speeds up to 21MBps, Samsung said.
What real-world speeds that will translate into remains to be seen. The card will be a good fit for LTE smartphones and tablets, according to Samsung.
Is NFC Taking Off?
April 4, 2012 by admin
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Analyst working for Berg Insight have noted a growth in global sales of handsets featuring Near Field Communication (NFC) increased ten-fold in 2011.
More than 30 million units were sold in 2011 and the market was growing at a compound annual growth rate of 87.8 percent. It predicts that shipments will reach 700 million units in 2016. The global rise in smartphone adoption is also driving higher attach rates for other wireless connectivity technologies in handsets including GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN, the report said.
Some of the reason for the growth is the reduction in the cost of the technology. It is now a staple feature on high-end smartphones and most medium- and low-end models. Declining costs will also enable broader integration in the featurephone segment that is rapidly gaining smartphone-like functionality.
Shipments of WLAN-enabled handsets have more or less doubled annually in the past four years and the attach rate increased to 33 percent in 2011.
Microsoft Seizes Botnet Servers
Microsoft Corp scored a win in efforts to fight online banking fraud, saying it had seized several servers used to steal login names and passwords, disrupting some of the world’s most sophisticated cybercrime rings.
The software giant said on Monday that its cybercrime investigation group also took legal and technical actions to fight notorious criminals who infect computers with a prevalent malicious software known as Zeus.
By recruiting computers into networks called botnets, Zeus logs the online activity of infected machines, providing criminals with credentials to access financial accounts.
“We’ve disrupted a critical source of money-making for digital fraudsters and cyber thieves, while gaining important information to help identify those responsible and better protect victims,” said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, which handled the investigation in collaboration with the financial industry.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit is worldwide team of investigators, lawyers, analysts and other specialists who fight cybercrime. A year ago they helped U.S. authorities take down a botnet known as Rustock that had been one of the biggest producers of spam e-mail. Some security experts estimated that in its heyday Rustock was responsible for half the spam in junk email bins.
Did HP Really Need Intel?
Back in the day HP said it chose Intel to co-develop Itanium due to its process technology, as it didn’t have the cash to fund next generation fabs.
Intel has often been the butt of Itanium jokes, but HP invested as much, if not more into the enterprise. Kirk Bresniker, CTO of HP’s Business Critical Systems told The INQUIRER that HP needed Intel’s manufacturing capability. Bresniker said HP’s decision to partner with Intel was due to the firm realising it couldn’t afford the VLSI manufacturing process iteration needed for developing competitive chips.
Bresniker said, “It is really an extension of the CISC processor that led us to partner with Intel on the Itanium. We knew we weren’t going to be able to maintain the investment levels neccessary to continue to fund deep sub-micron fabs.”
Until HP’s foray with Itanium, the firm was known for its PA-RISC systems, some of which Bresniker designed himself back in the early 1990s. Bresniker said, “We got to the point of microprocessor development and more importantly the economics of fabrication environments and realised we were facing transition to the deep sub-micron [fabrication processes] and potentially writing billions and billions of dollars worth of cheques for fabrication, and part of the impetuous for us to partner with Intel on the Itanium design was that we wanted to have access to the world’s number one microprocessor silicon fabrication.”
While HP continued with PA-RISC chips well into the new millennium, HP’s decision to offload the work of actually producing chips onto Intel could be seen as shrewd move, and one that firms such as AMD did a decade later. The cost of process node iteration is getting ever higher, which is something that Intel itself admits.
Not surprisingly, Bresniker wouldn’t be drawn on the demise of Itanium, though HP did announce Project Odyssey late last year, which effectively mixes and matches the firm’s Itanium kit with Intel Xeon servers. He did admit that the firm had to go towards x86 in the mission-critical market, Bresniker was quick to point out that while Intel is porting more features from the Itanium chip, not everything will be moved over.