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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.
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.
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.
Yahoo Goes-DO NOT TRACK
April 6, 2012 by admin
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Yahoo websites worldwide will comply with users “do not track” settings starting later this year, Yahoo announced Wednesday.
Most major browsers are now able to send a message to sites visited, indicating whether users want their surfing behavior to be tracked by cookies for the purposes of displaying personalized ads. In February the last major hold-out, Google, announced that its Chrome browser will include do-not-track support by the end of the year.
That message, an HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) header accompanying a request to display a Web page, avoids the awkward paradox that to store a visitor’s preference not to be tracked by cookies, sites had to store a cookie containing that preference, and provides a consistent way to store and indicate such preferences across all Web sites that respect the do-not-track header.
Support for the do-not-track header has been in the works since last year, Yahoo said. All Yahoo sites will respect the header, including those of Right Media and Interclick, two Yahoo subsidiaries specializing in behavioral or data-driven advertising, the company said.
The company’s announcement comes the same day that the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade is set to hold a hearing on balancing privacy and innovation, and in the same week that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission called for creation of a do-not-track tool for Internet users.
In a statement announcing its plans for allowing visitors to opt out of tracking, Yahoo maintained that allowing advertisers to regulate themselves was the best and quickest way to introduce protections to the market place without sacrificing innovation or value creation.
Yahoo To Release Secret Documents
April 3, 2012 by admin
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Yahoo has ceased its efforts to keep documents related to Microsoft’s failed bid to buy the firm sealed.
Yahoo tried to keep documents relating to the failed 2008 buyout attempt by Microsoft sealed from investor Dan Loeb. Loeb, who runs the Third Point hedge fund with a five per cent stake in Yahoo led a shareholder’s revolt against Yahoo’s board and wanted to see documents related to Microsoft’s bid to buy the company.
Microsoft tried to take over Yahoo in 2008 with an offer of $31 a share, over double Yahoo’s share price now. According to Loeb, the documents will highlight the then Yahoo board’s “misjudgments and failures”.
Loeb is after documents that made up part of a shareholder lawsuit that was settled. According to Yahoo, its decision to cease efforts at keeping the documents sealed was due to the lawsuit being settled and unable to be reopened.
Loeb had tried to get his preferred board members onto Yahoo’s board or directors including himself, however the firm announced that it had appointed three new board members, none of which were on Loeb’s list.
WordPress Attacked By Hackers
March 14, 2012 by admin
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Security outfit Websense said that more than 200,000 infected pages that redirect users to websites displaying fake antivirus scans have been created. The latest compromises are part of a rogue antivirus distribution campaign that has been going on for months, the Websense researchers said.
Cybercriminals gangs have switched to drive-by download attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in outdated browser plug-ins to automatically download and install their rogue software. The large number of infected Web pages seen in this campaign is an indication that these scams still work. Vulnerable websites are a rich source of opportunity for cybercriminals. More than 85 percent of the compromised sites were located in the US, but their visitors were geographically dispersed.
The U.S. Is Falling Behind
February 16, 2012 by admin
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The U.S. government is losing a race in cyberspace — a social-networking race for the hearts and minds of the Internet community, a computer security expert said Wednesday.
Other countries — and many companies — are using social-networking tools to their advantage, while the U.S. government has taken tiny steps forward, said Rand Waltzman, a program manager focused on cybersecurity at the U.S.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The Chinese government pays citizens to patrol social-networking sites and dispute negative talk about all levels of government or any aspect of Chinese life, and companies such as Dell and Best Buy are training workers to respond to complaints on Facebook and other social-networking services, Waltzman said at the Suits and Spooks security conference in Arlington, Virginia.
U.S. regulations prevent the government from undertaking similar campaigns, he said. “Any time you want to go to the bathroom, you need presidential approval,” he said.
The U.S. will not be able to protect its residents if it cannot engage in its own covert social-media operations, Waltzman said.
Waltzman told about a U.S. special forces unit in Iraq in 2009 that attacked an insurgent paramilitary group, killed 16 of the members of the group and seized a “huge” weapons cache. As soon as the U.S. unit left the scene, the Iraqi group returned, put the bodies on prayer mats, and uploaded a photograph from a cheap mobile phone, he said. The group put out a press release in English and Arabic.
Google Goes Pay To Track
February 15, 2012 by admin
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Amid widespread concern about its new privacy policies, Google is now facing additional criticism over a deal to offer users Amazon gift certificates if they open their Web movements to the company in a program called Screenwise.
Google says the program launched “near the beginning of the year,” but the company’s low-key offer was disclosed Tuesday night on the blog Search Engine Land.
Google is asking users to add an extension to the Chrome browser that will share their Web-browsing activity with the company. In exchange, users will receive a $5 Amazon gift when they sign up and additional $5 gift card values for every three months they continue to share. (Amazon is not a partner in the project.) Users must be over age 13, and minors will need parental consent to participate. The tracking extension can be turned off at any time, allowing participants to temporarily close their metaphorical shades on Google.
The company says the program will help it “improve Google products and services and make a better online experience for everyone.”
Hacked Companies Still Not Alerting Investors
February 9, 2012 by admin
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At least a half-dozen major U.S. companies whose computer networks have been breached by cyber criminals or international spies have not admitted to the incidents despite new guidance from securities regulators urging such disclosures.
Top U.S. cybersecurity officials believe corporate hacking is widespread, and the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a lengthy “guidance” document on October 13 outlining how and when publicly traded companies should report hacking incidents and cybersecurity risk.
But with one full quarter having elapsed since the SEC request, some major companies that are known to have had significant digital security breaches have said nothing about the incidents in their regulatory filings.
Defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp, for example, said last May that it had fended off a “significant and tenacious” cyber attack on its networks. But Lockheed’s most recent 10-Q quarterly filing, like its filing for the period that included the attack, does not even list hacking as a generic risk, let alone state that it has been targeted.
A Reuters review of more than 2,000 filings since the SEC guidance found some companies, including Internet infrastructure company VeriSign Inc and credit card and debit card transaction processor VeriFone Systems Inc, revealed significant new information about hacking incidents.
Yet the vast majority of companies addressing the issue only used new boilerplate language to describe a general risk. Some hacking victims did not even do that.
Motorola Goes After Apple
February 1, 2012 by admin
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Motorola has filed a new lawsuit in Florida charging Apple with six patent infringements in the iPhone 4S and four of those patents in iCloud.
The suit names the same six patents that Motorola cited in its complaint against Apple filed in 2010 in the same court. Motorola tried to add the iPhone 4S and iCloud to the list of Apple products in the original suit but the judge ruled that it was too late to do so.
The new suit is notable amid the lengthy battle between Motorola and Apple because it must have been sanctioned by Google, noted Florian Mueller, who has been closely following mobile patent lawsuits, in a blog post. Mueller is a patent expert who is sometimes paid by companies including Microsoft for his work.
The merger agreement between Google and Motorola stipulates that Motorola not assert any new intellectual property actions without an agreement in writing by Google. That means Google must have expressly authorized Motorola to pursue this new case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Many experts believe that Google may have agreed to purchase Motorola for the cellphone maker’s extensive intellectual property portfolio, since Android has come under attack in the courts by companies including Microsoft and Apple.