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FTC Warns Google And FB
August 30, 2013 by admin
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has promised that her organisation will come down hard on companies that do not meet requirements for handling personal data.
FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez gave a keynote speech at the Technology Policy Institute at the Aspen Forum. She said that the FTC has a responsibility to protect consumers and prevent them from falling victim to unfair commercial practices.
“In the FTC’s actions against Google, Facebook, Myspace and others, we alleged that each of these companies deceived consumers by breaching commitments to keep their data confidential. That isn’t okay, and it is the FTC’s responsibility to make sure that companies live up to their commitments,” she said.
“All told, the FTC has brought over 40 data security cases under our unfairness and deception authority, many against very large data companies, including Lexisnexis, Choicepoint and Twitter, for failing to provide reasonable security safeguards.”
Ramirez spoke about the importance of consumer privacy, saying that there is too much “shrouding” of what happens in that area. She said that under her leadership the FTC will not be afraid of suing companies when it sees fit.
“A recurring theme I have emphasized – and one that runs through the agency’s privacy work – is the need to move commercial data practices into the sunlight. For too long, the way personal information is collected and used has been at best an enigma enshrouded in considerable smog. We need to clear the air,” she said.
Ramirez compared the work of the FTC to the work carried out by lifeguards, saying that it too has to be vigilant.
“Lifeguards have to be mindful not just of the people swimming, surfing, and playing in the sand. They also have to be alert to approaching storms, tidal patterns, and shifts in the ocean’s current. With consumer privacy, the FTC is doing just that – we are alert to the risks but confident that those risks can be managed,” she added.
“The FTC recognizes that the effective use of big data has the potential to unleash a new wave of productivity and growth. Like the lifeguard at the beach, though, the FTC will remain vigilant to ensure that while innovation pushes forward, consumer privacy is not engulfed by that wave.”
It’s all just lip service, of course. Companies might be nominally bound by US privacy laws in online commerce, and that might be overseen by the FTC, but the US National Security Agency (NSA) collects all internet traffic anyway, and makes data available to other US government agencies and even some private companies.
NOAA Super Computer Goes Live
August 21, 2013 by admin
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has rolled out two new supercomputers that are expected to improve weather forecasts and perhaps help better prepare us for hurricanes.
The two IBM systems, which are identical clones, will be used by NOAA’s National Weather Service to produce forecast data that’s used in the U.S. and around the world.
One of the supercomputers is in Reston, Va.; the other is in Orlando. The NWS can switch between the two in about six minutes.
Each is a 213-teraflop system running a Linux operating system on Intel processors. The federal government is paying about $20 million a year to operate the leased systems.
“These are the systems that are the origin of all the weather forecasts you see,” said Ben Kyger, director of central operations at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction.
NOAA had previously used identical four-year-old 74-teraflop IBM supercomputers that ran on IBM’s AIX operating system and Power 6 chips.
Before it could activate the new systems, the NWS had to ensure that they produced scientifically accurate results. It had been running the old and new systems in parallel for months, comparing their output.
The NWS has a new hurricane model, which is 15% more accurate in day five of a forecast for a storm’s track and intensity. That model is now operational and running on the new systems. That’s important, because the U.S. is expecting a busy hurricane season.
IBM Still Talking Up SyNAPSE
IBM has unveiled the latest stage in its plans to generate a computer system that copies the human brain, calculating tasks that are relatively easy for humans but difficult for computers.
As part of the firm’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project, IBM researchers have been working with Cornell University and Inilabs to create the programming language with $53m in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
First unveiled two years ago this month, the technology – which mimics both the size and power of humanity’s most complex organ – looks to solve the problems created by traditional computing models when handling vast amounts of high speed data.
IBM explained the new programming language, perhaps not in layman’s terms, by saying it “breaks the mould of sequential operation underlying today’s von Neumann architectures and computers” and instead “is tailored for a new class of distributed, highly interconnected, asynchronous, parallel, large-scale cognitive computing architectures”.
That, in English, basically means that it could be used to create next generation intelligent sensor networks that are capable of perception, action and cognition, the sorts of mental processes that humans take for granted and perform with ease.
Dr Dharmendra Modha, who heads the programme at IBM Research, expanded on what this might mean for the future, sayng that the time has come to move forward into the next stage of information technology.
“Today, we’re at another turning point in the history of information technology. The era that Backus and his contemporaries helped create, the programmable computing era, is being superseded by the era of cognitive computing.
“Increasingly, computers will gather huge quantities of data, reason over the data, and learn from their interactions with information and people. These new capabilities will help us penetrate complexity and make better decisions about everything from how to manage cities to how to solve confounding business problems.”
The hardware for IBM’s cognitive computers mimic the brain, as they are built around small “neurosynaptic cores”. The cores are modeled on the brain, and feature 256 “neurons” (processors), 256 “axons” (memory) and 64,000 “synapses” (communications between neurons and axons).
IBM suggested that potential uses for this technology could include a pair of glasses which assist the visually impaired when navigating through potentially hazardous environments. Taking in vast amounts of visual and sound data, the augmented reality glasses would highlight obstacles such as kerbs and cars, and steer the user clear of danger.
Other uses could include intelligent microphones that keep track of who is speaking to create an accurate transcript of any conversation.
In the long term, IBM hopes to build a cognitive computer scaled to 100 trillion synapses. This would fit inside a space with a volume of no more than two litres while consuming less than one kilowatt of power.
WiLan Loses In Court
July 25, 2013 by admin
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Wi-Lan has suffered defeat in its patents trial against Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, HTC and Sony, as a Texas court decided that the firms did not infringe its patents.
Wi-Lan filed a lawsuit against Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, HTC and Sony in 2010 claiming the firms infringed patents that relate to data transmission over wireless networks. However a Texas court ruled that the four firms did not infringe Wi-Lan’s patents and found one patent Wi-Lan asserted against HTC and two it asserted against Alcatel Lucent invalid.
Wi-Lan had asserted that Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson infringed three patents, none of which claims were upheld by the court. The firm also asserted that HTC and Sony infringed another patent, and there the court not only judged against infringement but invalidated the patent.
Alcatel Lucent and HTC both said that Wi-Lan was trying to stretch its patents to cover technology in their devices.
Sally Julien, a spokeswoman for HTC said, “HTC believes that Wi-Lan has exaggerated the scope of its patent in order to extract unwarranted licensing royalties from entities who have been focused on bringing innovation forward in their own products.”
Kurt Steinert, an Alcatel Lucent spokesman said, “We think this validates our belief that Wi-Lan was stretching the boundaries of its patents, and the jury confirmed that belief.”
Wi-Lan has managed to get several companies to license its technology including Dell and Panasonic, and in May it initiated legal proceedings against Blackberry over a patent relating to Long Term Evolution network technology. However in this case the firm did not prevail against two large telecom equipment companies and two big smartphone makers.
Tech Hiring Up This Year
July 22, 2013 by admin
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Hiring of technology professionals has been increasing since the first half of this year, with new IT hires accounting for about 10% of all the job growth in the U.S. in June, according to two independent assessments.
Total tech employment reached 4.47 million in June, an increase of 22,600 jobs from the prior month, or a .51% gain, according to TechServe Alliance, an IT services industry group which tracks employment data month-to-month. The total excludes tech manufacturing employment.
Similarly, Foote Partners, which researches IT employment trends, reported a gain of 18,200 new tech jobs last month.
These gains are coming at the same time that some tech employers are cutting jobs.
IBM has cut more than 3,000 workers over the past few weeks, struggling Hewlett-Packard is still eliminating jobs, and Symantec is seeing layoffs as well.
The U.S. economy added 195,000 jobs overall in June, according to the Labor Dept.
Foote said that IT employment in the first half of this year is averaging 13,500 new jobs per month.
“While the pace of job creation in the national labor force appears stuck at 7.6% unemployment and new jobs are heavily in part-time positions and low wage full-time segments, IT jobs have been on a sustained growth upswing and wages are holding steady if not growing slightly,” said David Foote, chief analyst, in a statement.
Reports on IT employment figures from analyst can differ widely depending on what U.S. labor department categories are use in the calculations.
Another firm that analyzes the labor market, Janco Associates, reported a gain of 9,900 jobs in June based on the categories it tracks.
Despite the increase in hiring, IT salaries remain flat, said Janco.
“Based on our interviews with over 96 CIOs in the last 30 days, we concluded that CIOs are not in a great hurry to hire new staff except to meet short term needs until they see a clear trend as to what is happening with the economy,” said Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis in a statement.
Janulaitis said that “67% of the CIOs we interviewed do not see any real push to expand staffing over the next 12 months.”
IBM Buys SoftLayer
IBM has signed an agreement to purchase SoftLayer Technologies, as it looks to accelerate the build-out of its public cloud infrastructure. The company is also forming a services division to back up the push.
The financial details of the deal were not announced, but SoftLayer is the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider, according to IBM.
IBM already has an offering that includes private, public and hybrid cloud platforms. The acquisition of SoftLayer will give it a more complete in-house offering, as enterprises look to keep some applications in the data center, while others are moved to public clouds.
SoftLayer has about 21,000 customers and an infrastructure that includes 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe, according to IBM. SoftLayer allows enterprises to buy compute power on either dedicated or shared servers.
Following the close of the acquisition of SoftLayer, which is expected in the third quarter, a new division will combine its services with IBM’s SmartCloud. IBM expects to reach $7 billion annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015, it said.
Success is far from certain: The public cloud market is becoming increasingly competitive as dedicated cloud providers, telecom operators and IT vendors such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard all want a piece. The growing competition should be a good thing for customers if it drives down prices. For example, Microsoft has already committed to matching Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as computing, storage and bandwidth.
Not all hardware vendors feel it’s necessary to have their own public cloud. Last month, Dell changed strategy and said it would work with partners including Joyent, instead of having its own cloud.
IBM’s Next-gen Transistors Mimick Human Brain
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IBM has discovered a way to make transistors that could be turned into virtual circuitry that mimics how the human brain operates.
The new transistors would be made from strongly correlated materials, such as metal oxides, which researchers say can be used to build more powerful — but less power-hungry — computation circuitry.
“The scaling of conventional-based transistors is nearing an end, after a fantastic run of 50 years,” said Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow at IBM Research. “We need to consider alternative devices and materials that operate entirely differently.”
Researchers have been trying to find ways of changing conductivity states in strongly correlated materials for years. Parkin’s team is the first to convert metal oxides from an insulated to conductive state by applying oxygen ions to the material. The team recently published details of the work in the journal Science.
In theory, such transistors could mimic how the human brain operates in that “liquids and currents of ions [would be used] to change materials,” Parkin said, noting that “brains can carry out computing operations a million times more efficiently than silicon-based computers.”
IBM Moves Into Oracle And HP Turf
Big Blue wants to take on competitors such as Oracle and Hewlett Packard by offering a cheap and cheerful Power Systems server and storage product range.
Rod Adkins, a Senior Vice President in IBM’s Systems & Technology Group said the company was was rolling out new servers based on its Power architecture with the Power Express 710 starting at $5,947. He said that the 710 is competitively priced to commodity hardware from Oracle and HP.
Adkins added that IBM is expanding its Power and Storage Systems business into SMB and growth markets. The product launches on Tuesday. IBM said it will start delivering by February 20.
Will Lenovo Go Public In 2K14?
Lenovo’s parent firm Legend Holdings could float an initial public offering (IPO) as soon as 2014, according to the firm’s chairman.
Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Legend Holdings told China Business News that the firm plans to list on the China A-share market between 2014 and 2016. Chuanzhi also reportedly said the company will invest $3.2bn by 2014 to develop its various businesses.
Legend Holdings is 36 percent owned by the Chinese state controlled Academy of Sciences, with a further 20 percent owned by the private investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings Group.
Legend Holdings also has venture capital and real estate interests outside of Lenovo Group. The firm’s system building operations however have gone from strength to strength since it bought IBM’s PC business back in 2005, and it is now heavily promoting its Yoga tablet-laptop hybrid device.
Earlier this year Gartner reported that Lenovo had overtaken HP to become the largest PC vendor, something that HP disputed by offering IDC’s figures. Regardless of HP’s protestations then, Lenovo is set to overtake HP as its PC business continues to grow while HP’s has been shrinking for some time.
Legend Holdings might want to cash in on Lenovo’s high flying status and a cash injection from an IPO could help the company invest in designing products for the smartphone and tablet markets.
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IBM Sued Over Disaster
IBM has been hit with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by chemical products manufacturer Avantor Performance Materials, which alleges that IBM lied about the suitability of an SAP-based software package it sells in order to win Avantor’s business.
In 2010, Avantor decided to upgrade its ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform to SAP software, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
“Seizing upon Avantor’s decision — and fully aware that, given the competitive pressures of Avantor’s industry, and the specialized demands of its customers, Avantor could not tolerate any disruptions in customer service — IBM represented that IBM’s ‘Express Life Sciences Solution’ … was uniquely suited to Avantor’s business,” the lawsuit states. “The Express Solution is a proprietary IBM pre-packaged software solution that runs on an SAP platform.”
But Avantor discovered a different truth after signing on with IBM, finding that Express Life was “woefully unsuited” to its business and the implementation brought its operations to “a near standstill,” according to the suit.
IBM also violated its contract by staffing the project with “incompetent and reckless consultants” who made “numerous design, configuration and programming errors,” it states.
In addition, IBM “intentionally or recklessly failed” to tell Avantor about risks to the project and hurried towards a go-live date, the suit alleges.
“To conceal the System’s defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live as scheduled — even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantor’s ability to service its customers,” the suit states.
The resulting go-live, which occurred in May, “was a disaster,” with the system failing to process orders properly, losing some orders altogether, failing to generate need paperwork for U.S. Customs officials and directing “that dangerous chemicals be stored in inappropriate locations,” the suit states.
Avantor has suffered tens of millions of dollars in monetary damages, as well as taken a hit to its reputation among partners and customers, the suit states.