Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
Seagate Gobbles Up Lacie
Seagate has signed a deal to buy consumer storage vendor Lacie that values the firm at $186m.
Seagate, which recently completed the acquisition of Samsung’s hard disk unit and swiftly cut warranties on most of its drives to just one year, has now announced that it will buy hard drive packager Lacie. Seagate has signed an agreement with Philippe Spruch, Lacie’s chairman and CEO, to purchase his 63.5 percent stake in the company at $7.05 per share in cash, which values the firm at $186m.
According to Seagate the purchase should help the firm grow in Europe and Japan. The firm also announced that Spruch will be employed by Seagate and run its consumer products division.
Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, CEO and president said, “Lacie has built an exceptional consumer brand by delivering exciting and innovative high end products for many years. This transaction would bring a highly complementary set of capabilities to Seagate, significantly expand our consumer product offerings, add a premium branded direct attached storage line, strengthen our network-attached storage business line and enhance our capabilities in software development.”
Lacie’s fancy portable hard drives are popular among those who like fancy cases wrapped around bog-standard consumer hard disks. Seagate’s purchase of Lacie should see the firm not only become the sole supplier of hard drives in Lacie products but make a renewed push in the consumer portable hard drive market following last year’s floods in Thailand that affected the three big hard drive manufacturers.
Seagate said the deal should be completed by the third quarter of 2012 pending regulatory approval in the US, France and Germany.
.
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.
Are Cloud Services A Risk?
Security experts have warned that the cloud could suffer the same kind of collapses that plague the financial system. Bryan Ford at Yale University in New Haven says that the full risks of this migration have yet to be explored. Complex systems, such as the Cloud, can fail in many unexpected ways and outlines various simple scenarios in which a cloud could come unstuck.
He said that a cloud could experience a full meltdown that could threaten any business. Ford said that while individual systems on a cloud might play nice, if you have other application providers in the same cause problems for another. He came up with a scenario were two conflicting load balancing programs operate with the same refresh period and when these periods coincide, the control loops start sending the load back and forth between the virtual servers in a positive feedback loop.
He said that “This simplistic example might be unlikely to occur in exactly this form on real systems—or might be quickly detected and “?xed” during development and testing—but it suggests a general risk.” Ford said that similar problems happened during ?nancial industry crashes.
Western Digital Debuts 2TB Passbook HD
Comments Off on Western Digital Debuts 2TB Passbook HD
Western Digital is about to introduce a 2TB My Passport Essential series external drive. According to some early listings, the new 2.5-inch drive should set you back just over $200.00, more important is that it seems like a pretty interesting external drive.
It measures 110x83x18mm, so we assuming this is a 12.5mm drive and as such it won’t fit into most notebooks. However, as an external drive it is second to none. It features USB 3.0, but it won’t be the fastest thing around, as it is a 5400rpm unit.
WordPress Attacked By Hackers
March 14, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on WordPress Attacked By Hackers
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.
Hitachi-LG Executives Plead Guilty
December 19, 2011 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
Comments Off on Hitachi-LG Executives Plead Guilty
Three executives at Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) have agreed to plead guilty and serve prison time in the U.S. for their participation in a number of conspiracies to rig bids and fix the prices of optical disk drives sold to large computer manufacturers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
Young Keun Park, Sang Hun Kim and Sik “Daniel” Hur conspired with others to suppress competition by rigging bids for optical disk drives sold to Dell and Hewlett-Packard and to fix prices for optical disk drives sold to Microsoft, the DOJ said. The conspiracies happened at various times between November 2005 and September 2009, the DOJ said.
Under a plea agreement in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Park and Kim each have agreed to serve eight months in prison and Hur has agreed to serve seven months in prison. Each has also agreed to pay a US$25,000 fine.
.
Will Help Desks Become Extinct?
Tom Soderstrom, CTO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), views everything through the clouds.
NASA’s JPL uses 10 public or private clouds to store everything from photos of Mars for public purview to top-secret data.
Pretty soon, Soderstrom told attendees of Computerworld‘s SNW conference, data stored by large enterprises like NASA will be measured in Exabytes; one Exabyte is equal to 1.5 billion CDs or a million terabytes.
And, he noted, the only place to store Exabytes of data is on public and private clouds.
The good news is that with data in the cloud, people will be able to “work with anyone, from anywhere, with any data, using any device at any time,” he said.
And the not-so-bad news is that IT help desks, as we know them, will become a thing of the past, and IT workers in general will have to rethink how they approach application development and security.
“Now the workforce and consumers of IT are becoming mobile. Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it. If you can’t get the answer there, you ask your kids. If you can’t get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that’s the workgroup,” Soderstrom said.
Samsung’s New Chip Line To Boost Flash Memory
Comments Off on Samsung’s New Chip Line To Boost Flash Memory
Samsung Electronics, the world’s No.1 memory chip maker, said it began mass production at a new $10 billion chip line, as it seeks to raise its profile in the booming flash memory chip market fueled by robust demand growth in mobile products.
Samsung’s new production line, its first in about five years, will help the company sharply lower production costs of the chips and could exacerbate oversupply in the market, stifling smaller rivals.
Apple Inc, the maker of popular iPhones and iPads, and Sony, which joined the crowded tablet market last month with two new devices, buy flash memory chips from Samsung.
The cost-competitive facility will make it difficult for its major customers to shift away to other suppliers.
Apple, Samsung’s biggest customer locked in a series of patent legal battles with the South Korean firm, is trying to reduce sourcing from the emerging competitor.
“The new line won’t have any immediate impact on the supply side, as it will take some nine months to fully raise capacity run rates, but it shows Samsung’s attempt to take more share in the flash chip market,” said Song Myung-sup, an analyst at HI Investment & Securities.
Microsoft To Overhaul Hotmail
Microsoft will debut next month a major overhaul of its Hotmail webmail service, with upgrades across the board, including in areas like spam, security and performance.
“We listened. We learned. We reinvented Hotmail from the ground up,” reads an invitation sent on Friday to journalists for press events to be held on Oct. 3 simultaneously in New York and San Francisco.
“Forget everything you thought you knew about Hotmail. Just don’t forget this date,” reads the invitation.
Hotmail’s primary competitors are Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail. The last time the consumer webmail market got a product jolt was in 2004, when Google surprised the world with Gmail and its then-unprecedented amount of email storage.
At that point, innovation in webmail services had stagnated for years but Gmail shook Microsoft, Yahoo and other webmail providers like AOL out of their comfort zone, as they quickly responded by increasing the size of their email inboxes.