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Can Lenovo Succeed With Tablets?
July 31, 2014 by admin
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Lenovo on Friday said it would continue selling sub-10-in. Windows tablets in the U.S., backing away from statements it made the day before, when it said it was pulling the ThinkPad 8 from the North American market and had discontinued offering a model of the Miix 2.
“We will continue to bring new Windows devices to market across different screen sizes, including a new 8-inch tablet and 10-inch tablet coming this holiday,” Lenovo said in a press release published on its website Friday.
“Our model mix changes as per customer demand, and although we are no longer selling ThinkPad 8 in the U.S., and we have sold out of Miix 8-inch, we are not getting out of the small-screen Windows tablet business as was reported by the media (emphasis in original),” the statement continued.
On Thursday, the IDG News Service — like Computerworld, owned and operated by IDG – reported the withdrawal of the ThinkPad 8 and the 8-in. Miix from the U.S. market. The ThinkPad 8 had debuted in January at prices starting at $449, and the similarly-sized Miix had launched in October 2013.
Lenovo told IDG News that it was diverting remaining stocks of the ThinkPad 8 to other countries, including Brazil, China, and Japan, where demand was stronger for smaller Windows 8.1-powered tablets.
The China-based company, which has made impressive gains in the global market — it was the world’s largest personal computer seller during the second quarter, ahead of Hewlett-Packard and Dell, according to IDC — did not say exactly when it would return with an 8-in. device. If it begins selling the unnamed device in October, typical of OEMs that seed the channel then for the holiday sales season, it will have been absent from the market for two or more months.
Brits Investigate Facebook
July 15, 2014 by admin
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The British data watchdog is looking into whether Facebook Inc violated data-protection laws when it gave permission to researchers to conduct a psychological experiment on its users.
A Facebook spokesman acknowledged that the experiment on nearly 700,000 unwitting users in 2012 had upset users and said the company would change the way it handled research in future.
The study, to find if Facebook could alter the emotional state of users and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content, has caused a furor on social media, including Facebook itself.
“We’re aware of this issue and will be speaking to Facebook, as well as liaising with the Irish data protection authority, to learn more about the circumstances,” the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) spokesman Greg Jones said in an email.
Jones said it was too early to tell exactly what part of the law Facebook may have infringed. The company’s European headquarters is in Ireland.
The Commissioner’s Office monitors how personal data is used and has the power to force organizations to change their policies and can levy fines of up to 500,000 pounds ($839,500).
Facebook said it would work with regulators and was changing the way it handled such cases.
“It’s clear that people were upset by this study and we take responsibility for it,” Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld said in an email.
“The study was done with appropriate protections for people’s information and we are happy to answer any questions regulators may have.”
Is IBM Going After HP?
IBM has announced a unified branding for its commerce cloud based enterprise products and services with a presentation at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Tampa, Florida.
Hot on the heels of HP, which unified its cloud offerings under the Helion brand last week, IBM Experienceone is designed to allow companies to improve engagement with their customers by leveraging big data through the cloud.
Deployment comes from a unified offer of consulting services, software and infrastructure from IBM subsidary Softlayer, which can be used to gather data, mine analytics and improve customer commerce via a mixture of traditional and cloud services.
IBM has already committed 1,000 new employees for its IBM Interactive Experience who will staff 10 “IBM Interactive Experience Labs” that are being set up to help customers understand the rules of engagement and hopefully increase their level of customer engagement.
IBM GM of Industry Cloud Solution Craig Hayman said, “IBM Experienceone provides a secure and simplified portfolio – including innovation from more than 1,200 partners – to help clients design and deliver more valuable customer engagements. With cloud, on premise and hybrid options, IBM Experienceone quickly scales to engage every customer in the moment while protecting their privacy.”
The IBM Experienceone brand is a coming together of many acquisitions that IBM has made in the field over recent years, including Sterling Commerce, Tealeaf, Coremetrics, Unica, Demandtec, Xtify and Silverpop. The only obvious omission from the top to tail offer is a specific CRM database, however IBM Experienceone is compatible with most of the leading solutions, including those of its arch rivals. This leads to the question, could a CRM be next on the company’s shopping list?
As well as on desktop and server equipment, Experienceone analytics will also be available through apps for iOS and Android.
HP’s Z-station Goes Nvidia
HP has added its Z Workstation family with a solution that delivers access via a virtual desktop route to workstation applications hosted in the data center.
Set to be available from next month, the HP DL380z Virtual Workstation enables organisations to provide remote access to workstation-class applications, even those calling for heavy-duty graphics, which allows them to keep data stored securely in the data centre wherever employees might be based.
As its name suggests, the HP DL380z is based on the same hardware as HP’s ProLiant DL380p server, a 2U rack-mount two-socket system based on Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 processors, which allows it to slot right into existing data centre infrastructure.
Where the HP DL380z differs is that it can be configured with up to two Nvidia Grid K2 graphics cards supporting the graphics firm’s Grid GPU virtualisation technology. This enables up to eight users to be hosted on each system, each with access to a virtual machine with GPU acceleration capabilities.
Jeff Groudan, worldwide director for HP Thin Client and Virtual Workstations, said, “For employees who work from A to B and everywhere in between, the HP DL380z allows them to access data that is securely stored in the data centre. Furthermore, the powerful HP DL380z is an always-on workhorse that can be used by businesses when not in use for virtual workstation sessions.
Remote access is delivered either by operating Citrix’s XenServer with its HDX 3D Pro technology, which the HP DL380z is certified for, or by utilising HP’s own Remote Graphics Software (RGS). The latest HP RGS release 7 adds the ability to have true workstation productivity from a tablet while bringing intuitive touch controls to non-touch applications, according to HP.
Either way, customers can provide engineers or other professional users with access to workstation-class applications from a variety of devices, including thin clients, laptops or tablets.
Pricing for the HP DL380z has yet to be confirmed.
HP & Foxcomm Head To The Cloud
May 20, 2014 by admin
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HP and Foxcomm have announced a joint venture to create a line of cloud optimized servers for service providers.
The venture involving a non-equity, strategic commercial alliance will see the pair offering a range of products. Particulars and specifications are yet to be announced but the companies are aiming to target low total cost of ownership (TCO), scale and service.
This announcement is separate to the existing HP Proliant server portfolio, which includes the software defined server codenamed Moonshot.
HP CEO Meg Whitman said, “With the relentless demands for compute capabilities, customers and partners are rapidly moving to a New Style of IT that requires focused, scalable and high-volume system designs. [The partnership] will enable us to deliver a game-changing offering in infrastructure economics.”
News of the alliance will raise eyebrows at Apple, which reportedly returned an eight million unit shipment of iPhones to Foxconn last year, describing them as “dysfunctional” and “non-compliant”.
HP has had its own troubles recently, after settling two lawsuits this month, one to the former shareholders of Palm over its handling of WebOS, and another that revealed that HP executives were guilty of corruption in negotiations for lucrative contracts. Total payouts across the two settlements totaled $165m.
The HP joint venture with Foxconn will take effect from 1 May, when we hope to find out more details about what it will entail.
Will Sprint Acquisition Efforts Succeed
May 19, 2014 by admin
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Sprint Corp is meeting with banks to devise a funding plan for its bid for smaller rival T-Mobile US Inc, a source familiar with the situation said, as the mobile carrier works to ease regulatory concerns that the deal would hurt competition.
The source said that Sprint, which is owned by Japan’s SoftBank Corp, is looking to fund the bulk of T-Mobile’s estimated $50 billion price tag with corporate bonds and cover the rest with syndicated loans and convertible bonds.
Sprint is currently having discussions with at least five banks, the source told Reuters, including JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.
Bloomberg, which first reported that Sprint was in talks with banks on Thursday morning in Asia, said the carrier was also talking to Mizuho Financial Group Ltd and Citibank. Softbank is expected to make a formal offer in June or July, Bloomberg added.
Sprint spokeswoman Roni Singleton told Reuters the company does not comment on rumors and speculation. T-Mobile and SoftBank both declined to comment on the Bloomberg report.
Sprint is facing a battle ahead with U.S. regulators who oppose consolidation in the wireless market on the basis it would inhibit competition. The company is aware it may have to give up some of its spectrum holdings to win over critics, the source said.
Two of the most vocal opponents to the deal are Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler and U.S. antitrust chief William Baer, who have pointed to T-Mobile’s success since U.S. authorities rejected a 2011 merger between AT&T Inc and T-Mobile on the grounds the market needs at least four major players to be competitive.
The failure of that deal cost AT&T a $6 billion break-up fee, a penalty Sprint feels confident it can avoid, the source said, adding that it is leaning towards having Deutsche Telekom, which currently owns 67 percent of T-Mobile, retain part of that stake.
IBM Goes BlueMix
IBM has put together a vast array of hosted cloud services, and now it has a single location to offer them for sale.
At IBM Cloud online marketplace, that went live on Monday, enterprises can find the full range of IBM’s offerings behind a single gateway.
“So many of our customers want to build new cloud-based, front-end systems, but they want to tie them into their back-end infrastructure. We’re delivering a whole set of integration components and control services to do the connection, and monitor and control what is taking place,” said Steve Mills, IBM senior vice president and group executive for software and systems.
The marketplace has more than 100 hosted IBM applications, as well as middleware components from IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service (PaaS). It also serves as a portal to IBM’s SoftLayer infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and houses a collection of services from IBM partners.
“It’s an open platform. It supports all the popular application development tools and structures. So it’s not uniquely IBM. There’s a lot of open source and partners,” Mills said. In addition to IBM’s own offerings, other services will be offered on the site by SendGrid, Zend, Redis Labs and other IBM partners.
IBM is banking heavily on the cloud. The company’s revenue has been declining lately, due in part to sagging hardware sales. The cloud is likely to be a good place to look for more money: Gartner expects 80 percent of organizations to use cloud services in some form by the end of 2014.
Although IBM got a late start in the cloud, at least compared with rivals Amazon and Microsoft, it’s aggressively repositioning itself as a one-stop cloud services company. It generated $4.4 billion in cloud-related revenue in 2013 and has made a number of additional investments in the area as well.
In January, the company announced it would invest $1.2 billion into expanding its SoftLayer cloud service, which it acquired last year for $2 billion.
It is also investing $1 billion in the effort to adapt its middleware software as cloud services, part of the Bluemix offering.
The new online marketplace ties together a number of these initiatives from IBM within a single portal. It can be accessed from desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, and it can customize the service offerings based on the user’s needs.
Many Websites Still Exposed
The world’s top 1,000 websites have been updated to protect their servers against the “Heartbleed” vulnerability, but up to 2% of the top million remained unprotected as of last week, according to a California security firm.
On Thursday, Menifee, Calif.-based Sucuri Security scanned the top 1 million websites as ranked by Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon that collects Web traffic data.
Of the top 1,000 Alexa sites, all were either immune or had been patched with the newest OpenSSL libraries, confirmed Daniel Cid, Sucuri’s chief technology officer, in a Sunday email.
Heartbleed, the nickname for the flaw in OpenSSL, an open-source cryptographic library that enables SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Security Layer) encryption, was discovered independently by Neel Mehta, a Google security engineer, and researchers from security firm Codenomicon earlier this month.
The bug had been introduced in OpenSSL in late 2011.
Because of OpenSSL’s widespread use by websites — many relied on it to encrypt traffic between their servers and customers — and the very stealthy nature of its exploit, security experts worried that cyber criminals either had, or could, capture usernames, passwords,\ and even encryption keys used by site servers.
The OpenSSL project issued a patch for the bug on April 7, setting off a rush to patch the software on servers and in some client operating systems.
The vast majority of vulnerable servers had been patched as of April 17, Sucuri said in a blog postthat day.
While all of the top 1,000 sites ranked by Alexa were immune to the exploit by then, as Sucuri went down the list and scanned smaller sites, it found an increasing number still vulnerable. Of the top 10,000, 0.53% were vulnerable, as were 1.5% of the top 100,000 and 2% of the top 1 million.
Other scans found similar percentages of websites open to attack: On Friday, San Diego-based Websense said about 1.6% of the top 50,000 sites as ranked by Alexa remained vulnerable.
Since it’s conceivable that some sites’ encryption keys have been compromised, security experts urged website owners to obtain new SSL certificates and keys, and advised users to be wary of browsing to sites that had not done so.
Sucuri’s scan did not examine sites to see whether they had been reissued new certificates, but Cid said that another swing through the Web, perhaps this week, would. “I bet the results will be much much worse on that one,” Cid said.
Heartbleed Hits Oracle
Oracle issued a comprehensive list of its software that may or may not be impacted by the OpenSSL (secure sockets layer) vulnerability known as Heartbleed, while warning that no fixes are yet available for some likely affected products.
The list includes well over 100 products that appear to be in the clear, either because they never used the version of OpenSSL reported to be vulnerable to Heartbleed, or because they don’t use OpenSSL at all.
However, Oracle is still investigating whether another roughly 20 products, including MySQL Connector/C++, Oracle SOA Suite and Nimbula Director, are vulnerable.
Oracle determined that seven products are vulnerable and is offering fixes. These include Communications Operation Monitor, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Enterprise Server 5.6, Oracle Communications Session Monitor, Oracle Linux 6, Oracle Mobile Security Suite and some Solaris 11.2 implementations.
Another 14 products are likely to be vulnerable, but Oracle doesn’t have fixes for them yet, according to the post. These include BlueKai, Java ME and MySQL Workbench.
Users of Oracle’s growing family of cloud services may also be able to breath easy. “It appears that both externally and internally (private) accessible applications hosted in Oracle Cloud Data Centers are currently not at risk from this vulnerability,” although Oracle continues to investigate, according to the post.
Heartbleed, which was revealed by researchers last week, can allow attackers who exploit it to steal information on systems thought to be protected by OpenSSL encryption. A fix for the vulnerable version of OpenSSL has been released and vendors and IT organizations are scrambling to patch their products and systems.
Observers consider Heartbleed one of the most serious Internet security vulnerabilities in recent times.
Meanwhile, this week Oracle also shipped 104 patches as part of its regular quarterly release.
The patch batch includes security fixes for Oracle database 11g and 12c, Fusion Middleware 11g and 12c, Fusion Applications, WebLogic Server and dozens of other products. Some 37 patches target Java SE alone.
A detailed rundown of the vulnerabilities’ relative severity has been posted to an official Oracle blog.
Lavaboom Offers To Encrypt
A new webmail service named Lavaboom promises to provide easy-to-use email encryption without ever learning its users’ private encryption keys or message contents.
Lavaboom, based in Germany and founded by Felix MA1/4ller-Irion, is named after Lavabit, the now defunct encrypted email provider believed to have been used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Lavabit decided to shut down its operations in August in response to a U.S. government request for its SSL private key that would have allowed the government to decrypt all user emails.
Lavaboom designed its system for end-to-end encryption, meaning that only users will be in possession of the secret keys needed to decrypt the messages they receive from others. The service will only act as a carrier for already encrypted emails.
Lavaboom calls this feature “zero-knowledge privacy” and implemented it in a way that allows emails to be encrypted and decrypted locally using JavaScript code inside users’ browsers instead of its own servers.
The goal of this implementation is to protect against upstream interception of email traffic as it travels over the Internet and to prevent Lavaboom to produce plain text emails or encryption keys if the government requests them. While this would protect against some passive data collection efforts by intelligence agencies like the NSA, it probably won’t protect against other attack techniques and exploits that such agencies have at their disposal to obtain data from computers and browsers after it was decrypted.
Security researchers have yet to weigh in on the strength of Lavaboom’s implementation. The service said on its website that it considers making parts of the code open source and that it has a small budget for security audits if any researchers are interested.
Those interested in trying out the service can request to be included in its beta testing period, scheduled to start in about two weeks.
Free Lavaboom accounts will come with 250MB of storage space and will use two-way authentication based on the public-private keypair and a password. A premium subscription will cost a!8 (around US$11) per month and will provide users with 1GB of storage space and a three-factor authentication option.