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Enterprise Needs Driving Cloud Sales Boom
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The cloud continues to gain major ground, driven by enterprise storage needs.
Sales are way up for little-known manufacturers that sell directly to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook, while the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, according to research company IDC.
Internet giants and service providers typically don’t use specialized storage platforms in their sprawling data centers. Instead, they buy vast amounts of capacity in the form of generic hardware that’s controlled by software. As users flock to cloud-based services, that’s a growing business.
Revenue for original design manufacturers that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew by 25.8 percent to more than US$1 billion in the second quarter, according to the latest global IDC report on enterprise storage systems. Overall industry revenue rose just 2.1 percent from last year’s second quarter, reaching $8.8 billion.
These so-called ODMs are low-profile vendors, many of them based in Taiwan, that do a lot of their business manufacturing hardware that’s sold under better known brand names. Examples include Quanta Computer and Wistron.
General enterprises aren’t buying many systems from these vendors, but the trends at work in hyperscale deployments are growing across the industry. Increasingly, the platform of choice for storage is a standard x86 server dedicated to storing data, according to IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. Sales of server-based storage rose 10 percent in the quarter to reach $2.1 billion.
Traditional external systems like SANs (storage area networks) are still the biggest part of the enterprise storage business, logging $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter. But sales in this segment were down 3.9 percent.
Overall demand for storage capacity continued to grow strongly, with 37 percent more capacity shipped in the quarter compared with a year earlier.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/enterprise-storage-needs-driving-cloud-sales-boom.html
Is Acer Open To A Takeover?
Acer Inc founder Stan Shih said he would welcome a takeover of the struggling Taiwanese computer manufacturer after a drastic decline in its stock price, while warning any potential buyer would have to pay a heavy amount.
“Welcome,” Shih told reporters in response to a question about whether Acer would be open to a takeover. He added however that any buyer would get an “empty shell” and would pay dearly.
“U.S. and European management teams usually are concerned about money, their CEOs only work for money. But Taiwanese are more concerned about a sense of mission and emotional factors,” he said.
His remarks were first reported by Taiwanese media on Thursday and were confirmed by a company spokesman.
Acer has reported steep on-year sales falls in recent months, including a 33 percent drop in July.
It suffered a T$2.89 billion ($90 million) loss in the first six months of 2015, versus a slight profit in the same period last year. It booked losses for all of 2011, 2012 and 2013 amid cratering PC sales.
Its stock price has fallen by nearly half since early April.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/acer-warms-to-takeover-possibility.html
Web.com Latest Hacking Victim
Hackers gain unauthorized access to the computers of Internet services provider Web.com Group and stole credit card information of 93,000 customers.
According to a website set up by the company to share information about the incident, Web.com discovered the security breach on Aug. 13 as part of its ongoing security monitoring.
Attackers compromised credit card information for around 93,000 accounts, as well as the names and addresses associated with them. No other customer information like social security
numbers was affected, the company said.
According to the company, the verification codes for the exposed credit cards were not leaked. However, there are websites on the Internet that don’t require such codes for purchases.
Web.com has notified affected customers via email and will also follow up with letters sent through the U.S. Postal Service. Those users can sign up for a one-year free credit monitoring service.
The company did not specify how the intruders gained access to its systems, but has hired a “nationally recognized” IT security firm to conduct an investigation.
Web.com provides a variety of online services, including website and Facebook page design, e-commerce and marketing solutions, domain registration and Web hosting. The company claims to have over 3.3 million customers and owns two other well known Web services companies: Register.com and Network Solutions.
Register.com and Network Solutions customers were not impacted by this breach unless they also purchased services directly from Web.com.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/web-com-latest-victim-of-credit-card-hacking.html
Microsoft Updates Yammer
August 28, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Microsoft unveiled a bevy of improvements to its Yammer enterprise social network, focused on helping people connect more easily with their teams.
By default, people who access Yammer via their web browser will be taken to a new “Discovery” feed on the service’s home page that is supposed to better show them relevant content from their groups along with other public teams across their company’s network. It’s supposed to help keep people in closer touch with important discussions they may be missing on Yammer.
After users finish reviewing new content in one group, Yammer will display a pop up banner with a link to the next group they’re subscribed to that has new content. Yammer’s mobile apps will get similar functionality through a new Group Updates feed that lets users see a list of different conversations in various groups all on one screen. That way, they won’t have to look through individual groups to get the same information. That feature will begin rolling out on Android first before making it to Yammer’s iOS app.
In addition, Yammer is also tweaking the design of individual groups’ pages. Now, each group will have a full-width banner at the top of its page, and discussions within the group can now take up a wider space on the page to aid in lengthier discussions. The whole page has also been redesigned to focus users’ attention on important content.
Icons in the left-hand sidebar will show the users that are active in groups they are a part of, so they can stay up-to-date on where conversations are happening in real time. It’s a move that could make Yammer more competitive with popular chat solutions like Slack, which has been growing incredibly rapidly and was recently valued at $2.8 billion.
Yammer’s mobile app also gained support for attaching files from external storage services like OneDrive and Dropbox, inviting coworkers to a user’s network by email and mentioning people in comments.
There’s even more up Yammer’s sleeve on top of all these updates. The social network’s iPhone app will soon have a companion version for the Apple Watch that will let people interact with content from their coworkers.
The updates come at a time when Microsoft is putting more effort into improving its workplace collaboration tools.
Apple TV Service Delayed Again
August 26, 2015 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Apple Inc will push back rolling out its live TV service to at least next year, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the iPhone maker’s plans.
The company had planned to introduce the service, which is delivered over the Internet, this year.
Discussions with broadcasters such as CBS Corp and Twenty-First Century Fox Inc to license programming are progressing slowly, and lack of content has led Apple to scrap plans to announce the service at a Sept. 9 event, Bloomberg said.
Apple also lacked the computer network capacity to ensure a good viewing experience, Bloomberg said.
The company still plans to introduce a more powerful version of its Apple TV set-top box at the event, which will be held in San Francisco.
Apple was aiming to price the new service at about $30 to $40 a month, media reports have said.
Dropbox Beefs Up Security
August 25, 2015 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Two-factor authentication is widely regarded as a best practice for security in the online world, but Dropbox has announced a new feature that’s designed to make it even more secure.
Whereas two-step verification most commonly involves the user’s phone for the second authentication method, Dropbox’s new U2F support adds a new means of authenticating the user via Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) security keys instead.
What that means is that users can now use a USB key as an additional means to prove who they are.
“This is a very good advancement and adds extra security over mobile notifications for two-factor authentication,” said Rich Mogull, Securosis CEO.
“Basically, you can’t trick a user into typing in credentials,” Mogull explained. “The attacker has to compromise the exact machine the user is on.”
For most users, phone-based, two-factor authentication is “totally fine,” he said. “But this is a better option in high-security environments and is a good example of where the FIDO standard is headed.”
Security keys provide stronger defense against credential-theft attacks like phishing, Dropbox said.
“Even if you’re using two-step verification with your phone, some sophisticated attackers can still use fake Dropbox websites to lure you into entering your password and verification code,” the company explained in a blog post. “They can then use this information to access your account.”
Security keys, on the other hand, use cryptographic communication and will only work when the user is signing in to the legitimate Dropbox website.
Dropbox users who want to use the new feature will need a security key that follows the FIDO Alliance’s Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard. That U2F key can then be set up with the user’s Dropbox account along with any other U2F-enabled services, such as Google.
Malware Turns Computers Into Cellular Antenna
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A team of Israeli researchers have improved on a way to steal data from air-gapped computers, thought to be safer from attack due to their isolation from the Internet.
They’ve figured out how to turn the computer into a cellular transmitter, leaking bits of data that can be picked up by a nearby low-end mobile phone.
While other research has shown it possible to steal data this way, some of those methods required some hardware modifications to the computer. This attack uses ordinary computer hardware to send out the cellular signals.
Their research, which will be featured next week at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C., is the first to show it’s possible to steal data using just specialized malware on the computer and the mobile phone.
“If somebody wanted to get access to somebody’s computer at home — let’s say the computer at home wasn’t per se connected to the Internet — you could possibly receive the signal from outside the person’s house,” said Yisroel Mirsky, a doctoral student at Ben-Gurion University and study co-author.
The air-gapped computer that is targeted does need to have a malware program developed by the researchers installed. That could be accomplished by creating a type of worm that infects a machine when a removable drive is connected. It’s believed this method was used to deliver Stuxnet, the malware that sabotaged Iran’s uranium centrifuges.
The malware, called GSMem, acts as a transmitter on an infected computer. It creates specific, memory-related instructions that are transmitted between a computer’s CPU and memory, generating radio waves at GSM, UMTS and LTE frequencies that can be picked up by a nearby mobile device.
The GSMem component that runs on a computer is tiny. “Because our malware has such a small footprint in the memory, it would be very difficult and can easily evade detection,” said Mordechai Guri, also a doctoral student at Ben-Gurion.
Did Microsoft Intentionally Delay The Surface Pro 4?
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The latest rumors suggest that Microsoft was waiting to jack the latest Intel Skylake processor under its bonnet.
Redmond seemingly wants the new Surface Pro to be state of the art and be a tablet which is useful. Skylake will give it better battery life and performance with current industry standards like Bluetooth 4.1, Cat6 LTE, WiDi 6.0, and A4WP wireless charging weaved into it.
Intel will support the tablets through compatibility with 3D cameras and audio processing software plus better stylus interaction.
There is no sign of confirmation of the rumors. Microsoft has been quiet so far about the Surface Pro 4. We had been expecting it to highlight some of the better features of Windows 10.
However if the rumors are true it will be a hell of a lot better than the MacBook Air 2015 because it will feature innovation, rather than just being thin.
Latest news about its release date suggests a 2016 launch.
Yahoo Acquires Polyvore
August 12, 2015 by admin
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Yahoo Inc announced on Friday that it has agreed to acquire fashion start-up Polyvore to help drive traffic and strengthen its mobile and social offerings.
Yahoo, which did not disclose terms of the deal, said Polyvore will accelerate its ‘Mavens’ growth strategy.
The company has been focusing on four areas — mobile, video, native advertising and social — which it calls Mavens, to drive user engagement and ad sales as it battles intense competition from Google Inc and Facebook Inc .
Revenue from Mavens made up about one-third of the company’s total revenue in the quarter ended June 30.
The Mavens portfolio includes BrightRoll, mobile app network Flurry, mobile ad buying platform Yahoo Gemini and blogging site Tumblr.
Polyvore, the brainchild of 3 ex-Yahoo engineers, was started in 2007.
The Mountain View, California-based company allows users to mix-and-match articles of clothing and accessories and customize them into “sets”.
Polyvore’s co-founder and CEO Jess Lee was earlier part of Google Inc’s associate manager program, which Marissa Mayer headed before joining Yahoo as CEO.
Can OSX Make Macs Vulnerable To Rootkits?
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The software genii at Apple have redesigned their OSX software to allow malware makers to make designer micro-software that can infect Macs with rootkits.
Obviously the feature is one that Apple software experts designed specifically for malware writers, perhaps seeing them as an untapped market.
The bug in the latest version of Apple’s OS X allows attackers root user privileges with a micro code which could be packed into a message.
Security researcher Stefan Esser said that this was the security hole attackers regularly exploit to bypass security protections built into modern operating systems and applications.
The OS X privilege-escalation flaw stems from new error-logging features that Apple added to OS X 10.10. Plainly the software genii did not believe that standard safeguards involving additions to the OS X dynamic linker dyld applied to them because they were protected from harm by Steve Job’s ghost.
This means that attackers to open or create files with root privileges that can reside anywhere in the OS X file system.
“This is obviously a problem, because it allows the creation or opening (for writing) of any file in the filesystem. And because the log file is never closed by dyld and the file is not opened with the close on exec flag the opened file descriptor is inherited by child processes of SUID binaries. This can be easily exploited for privilege-escalation,” Esser said.
The vulnerability is present in both the current 10.10.4 (Yosemite) version of OS X and the current beta version of 10.10.5. Importantly, the current beta version of 10.11 is free of the flaw, an indication that Apple developers may already be aware of the vulnerability.
An Apple spokesman said that engineers are aware of Esser’s post of course they did not say they would do anything about it. They will have to go through the extensional crisis involved in realising that their product was not secure or perfect. Then the security team will have to issue orders, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to an internal inquiry, lost again, and finally bury it in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.