IBM Breaks Big Data Record

IBM Labs claims to have broken a speed record for Big Data, which the company says could help boost internet speeds to 200 to 400Gbps using “extremely low power”.

The scientists achieved the speed record using a prototype device presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.

Apparently the device, which employs analogue-to-digital conversion (ADC) technology, could be used to improve the transfer speed of Big Data between clouds and data centres to four times faster than existing technology.

IBM said its device is fast enough that 160GB – the equivalent of a two-hour 4K ultra-high definition (UHD) movie or 40,000 music tracks – could be downloaded in a few seconds.

The IBM researchers have been developing the technology in collaboration with Swiss research institution Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to tackle the growing demands of global data traffic.

“As Big Data and internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, future networking standards have to support higher data rates,” the IBM researchers explained, comparing data transfer per day in 1992 of 100GB to today’s two Exabytes per day, a 20 million-fold increase.

“To support the increase in traffic, ultra-fast and energy efficient analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) technology [will] enable complex digital equalisation across long-distance fibre channels.”

An ADC device converts analogue signals to digital, estimating the right combination of zeros and ones to digitally represent the data so it can be stored on computers and analysed for patterns and predictive outcomes.

“For example, scientists will use hundreds of thousands of ADCs to convert the analogue radio signals that originate from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to digital,” IBM said.

The ADC technology has been developed as part of an international project called Dome, a collaboration between the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), DOME-South Africa and IBM to build the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope when it’s completed.

“The radio data that the SKA collects from deep space is expected to produce 10 times the global internet traffic and the prototype ADC would be an ideal candidate to transport the signals fast and at very low power – a critical requirement considering the thousands of antennas which will be spread over 1,900 miles,” IBM expalined.

IBM Research Systems department manager Dr Martin Schmatz said, “Our ADC supports Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for data communication and brings together speed and energy efficiency at 32 nanometers, enabling us to start tackling the largest Big Data applications.”

He said that IBM is developing the technology for its own family of products, ranging from optical and wireline communications to advanced radar systems.

“We are bringing our previous generation of the ADC to market less than 12 months since it was first developed and tested,” Schmatz added, noting that the firm will develop the technology in communications systems such as 400Gbps opticals and advanced radars.

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SEC Plans Cybersecurity Meeting

The Securities and Exchange Commission said that its making plans to conduct a roundtable next month to discuss cybersecurity, after massive retailer breaches refocused the attention of the business community and policymakers on the area.

The SEC said that it would hold the event on March 26 to talk about the challenges cyber threats pose for market participants and public companies.

Recent breaches at Target Corp and Neiman Marcus have sparked concern from lawmakers and revived a long-running spat among retailers and banks over who should bear the cost of consumer losses and technology investments to improve security.

Last Thursday, trade groups for the two industries announced they are forming a partnership to work through the disputes.

U.S. lawmakers have also considered weighing in on how consumers should be notified of data theft. But progress on legislation is not guaranteed in a busy election year.

The SEC in 2011 drafted informal staff-level guidance for public companies to use when considering whether to disclose cyber attacks and their impact on a company’s financial condition.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White last year told Congress that her agency was reviewing whether a more robust disclosure process is needed. But she told reporters last fall she felt the guidance appeared to be working well and that she didn’t see an immediate need to create a rule that mandates public reporting on cyber attacks.

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Disney To Lay Off Workers

Walt Disney Co is making plans to lay off several hundred people in its interactive unit, the division that includes gaming products and the Disney.com website, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.

The job eliminations are expected to begin after Disney releases its quarterly earnings today, the Journal said. Playdom, a social gaming business Disney acquired in 2010, is one division expected to see cutbacks, the newspaper said.

Disney is trying to turn around the interactive unit, which has about 3,000 employees. Its new Infinity video game enjoyed strong initial sales after its release last August, helping the division report a $16 million profit for the quarter that ended in September, an improvement from the $76 million loss a year earlier.

A Disney spokeswoman had no comment.

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Facebook Goes Ten

Facebook plans on celebrating its 10th birthday today, an occasion likely to spur an outpouring of reflection on its past and speculation about its future.

Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” from his dorm room at Harvard University on Feb. 4, 2004. The site was conceived as a way to connect students, and let them build an online identity for themselves.

It has since expanded to cover a large swath of the planet, with more than 1.2 billion people — one-seventh of the world’s population — using its site on a monthly basis, according to the company’s own recent figures.

Zuckerberg reflected on the 10-year milestone at an industry conference in Silicon Valley this week. Not surprisingly, at the start he never envisioned Facebook becoming so large or influential. After launching the initial version, “it was awesome to have this utility and community at our school,” he said at the Open Compute Project Summit.

He figured at the time that someone, someday would build such a site for the world. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could be us,” he said.

Since then, Facebook’s site and its business, now a public company, have changed dramatically. There are now more than a trillion status updates, text posts and other pieces of content stored within its walls — the company is trying to index them as part of its Graph Search search engine.

The company was slow to react to the important mobile market, and when it went public in 2012 investors were skeptical it would be able to monetize its service on smaller screens. But this week it reported that more than half its ad revenue now comes from mobile devices.

All the while, Facebook is making its ad business smarter, using targeting tools to show ads it deems most relevant.

The company is also experimenting with new ways to present content. Next week it will release Paper, an iPhone app that provides a new way to share photos and published articles.

It’s part of a larger effort Facebook hinted at this week to release a variety of standalone apps for different tasks.

The company is also trying to bring the Internet to more people in the world, an effort that’s part philanthropy and part business sense as Facebook aims to reach its next billion users. Asked this week why he launched the project, called Internet.org, Zuckerberg suggested he feels a weight of responsibility.

“There aren’t that many companies in the world that have the resources and the reach that Facebook has at this point,” he said.

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Amazon, Microsoft Cut Cloud Storage Prices

Last April, Microsoft agreed that it would match Amazon’s Web Services’ (AWS’) prices for compute, storage and bandwidth.

So when Amazon announced last Thursday  that it would cut its S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) prices by up to 22%, Microsoft followed suit the very next day.

“We are matching AWS’ lowest prices (US East Region) for S3 and EBS, reducing prices by up to 20% and making the lower prices available in all regions worldwide,” Microsoft posted in its official blog.

For Microsoft’s “Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage,” the company is reducing prices by up to 28%. It is also reducing the price of Azure Storage service by 50%.

Amazon’s new prices take effect Feb. 1. Microsoft’s price cuts begin March 13.

“We’re also making the new prices effective worldwide, which means that Azure storage will be less expensive than AWS in many regions,” Microsoft said.

Amazon said it dropped its prices for its S3 storage by 22% and its EBS standard volume storage and I/O operations by up to 50%.

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Venture Capaitalist Going Internet Again

Venture capitalists invested more money into Internet companies last year than they have since the dot-com bust, according to a survey published last Friday.

Internet companies in the U.S. took in $7.1 billion from VCs in 1,059 deals in 2013, the highest level of Internet investment in terms of dollars and deals since 2001, according to The MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters. In comparison, VC investment in Internet companies totaled $6.7 billion in 995 deals in 2012, another strong year, according to the MoneyTree report.

In addition, VCs invested $110 billion in 1,523 software industry deals last year, the highest level in both dollars and number of deals for the sector since 2000, according to the MoneyTree report. VC dollars going into software rose 27 percent year over year, while the number of deals increased 10 percent.

The amount of money invested in the software industry accounted for 37 percent of total VC investments in 2013, the highest percentage since the MoneyTree report was initiated in 1995.

All this is taking place against a backdrop of a generally strong VC environment, as VCs invested $29.4 billion in 3,995 deals across all sectors in 2013, a year-over-year increase of 7 percent in dollars and 4 percent in deals, according to the report.

Companies involved in big data, mobile apps, security, digital marketing, and medical and health software are among those that are especially interesting to VCs, according to Mark McCaffrey, PwC’s U.S. and global software leader.

Top deals in the fourth quarter of 2013 included a $225,000 investment in Pinterest, a site for sharing photos, recipes and other items of personal interest, and a $177,514 investment in Palantir Technologies, a government contractor in the systems integration business, according to MoneyTree data.

Going into 2014 a sense of optimism prevails, but this does not mean that the tech industry is going through a bubble of the sort that arose in 1999 and 2000, McCaffrey said.

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ZTE Attempts To Double Marketshare

China’s ZTE Corp, the world’s seventh-largest smartphone maker, wants to nearly double its U.S. market share in the next three years by increasing spending on marketing.

ZTE, which trails nearby rival Huawei Technologies Co Ltd in selling both smartphones and telecoms equipment, wants more share of the fat profit margins promised by sales of high-end phones in the United States.

But the company needs to first work on its image. Its mainstay telecom equipment business was essentially shut out of the U.S. and other markets after government officials flagged security concerns about Chinese-made equipment.

ZTE targets a U.S. market share of 10 percent by 2017 from 6 percent in 2013, Lv Qianhao, global marketing director of mobile devices, told Reuters at a company event on Thursday.

That would place it a distant third behind Apple Inc with 41 percent and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd with 26 percent, according to September-November data from researcher comScore.

To that end, ZTE will increase its U.S. marketing budget by at least 120 percent this year from last, Lv said without elaborating. Like other Chinese handset makers, ZTE is grappling with low brand awareness in the world’s second-largest smartphone market and perceptions of inferior quality.

Samsung Electronics, which earns around two-thirds of its operating profit from its mobile division, spent $597 million on marketing in the United States in 2012, according to researcher AdAge.

Last year, ZTE signed a deal with the Houston Rockets basketball team and released a Rockets-branded phone.

“We want young U.S. consumers to participate in our marketing activities, so we will have more NBA (National Basketball Association) stores and channels that sell our products,” Lv said.

Globally, ZTE aims to ship around 60 million smartphones this year compared with about 40 million smartphones last year, said Senior Vice President Zhang Renjun.

The company sees much of that growth in developed markets – including Russia and China- which accounted for 68 percent of mobile device revenue last year compared with 35 percent in 2007, said Lv.

ZTE’s mobile device business sells feature phones as well as smartphones. It was the fifth-biggest mobile phone vendor in July-September, according to researcher Gartner, though it fell out of the top five smartphone sellers list in the same period.

ZTE expects to have swung to a profit for last year having booked its first-ever loss as a public company in 2012.

It based its turnaround on cutting costs, signing fewer low-margin contracts, and winning contracts to build fourth generation telecommunication networks.

The company expects global investment in 4G to reach $100 billion this year, Zhang said.

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Microsoft Buys Parature

Microsoft Corp said that they it will acquire cloud-based software maker Parature Inc, which assists businesses in managing help desks and provide other customer support services.

Parature’s software helps businesses provide automated customer service, manage online discussion boards and forums, and conduct online surveys.

The company’s customers include Ask.com, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, International Business Machines Corp and Saba Software Inc.

Microsoft did not disclose the terms of the deal.

The acquisition will boost Microsoft’s Dynamics unit, which makes business software and counts Mattress Firm Holding Corp, Pandora Media Inc and Nissan Motor Co as customers.

Cloud computing, a broad term referring to the delivery of services via the Internet from remote data centers, is a favorite with businesses because it is faster to implement and has lower upfront costs than traditional software.

Oracle Corp said in December that it would buy web-based marketing software maker Responsys Inc for about $1.39 billion to bolster its cloud computing offerings.

Salesforce.com Inc, the biggest maker of online sales management tools, said in June that it would pay $2.5 billion for marketing software maker ExactTarget, which helps companies reach customers on social networks through mobile devices.

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Yahoo Spreading Malware?

Some advertisements on Yahoo Inc’s European websites last week spread malicious software, Yahoo said on Sunday, potentially infecting the computers of thousands of users.

Last Friday, Fox-IT, a Delft, Netherlands-based computer security firm, wrote in a blog that attackers had inserted malicious ads served by ads.yahoo.com.

In a recently released statement, a Yahoo spokesman, said: “On Friday, January 3 on our European sites, we served some advertisements that did not meet our editorial guidelines, specifically they spread malware.” Yahoo said it promptly removed the bad ads, and that users of Mac computers and mobile devices were not affected.

Malware is software used to disrupt a computer’s operations, gather sensitive information, or gain access to private computer systems.

Fox-IT estimated that on Friday, the malware was being delivered to approximately 300,000 users per hour, leading to about 27,000 infections per hour. The countries with the most affected users were Romania, Britain, and France.

“It is unclear which specific group is behind this attack, but the attackers are clearly financially motivated and seem to offer services to other actors,” Fox-IT wrote in the January 3 blog post.

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Cryptolocker Infects 250K Systems

DELL’s security research team has revealed that a new form of ransomware, dubbed “Cryptolocker” has managed to infect up to 250,000 devices, stealing almost a million dollars in Bitcoins.

“Based on the presented evidence, researchers estimate that 200,000 to 250,000 systems were infected globally in the first 100 days of the CryptoLocker threat,” Dell announced in a Secureworks post.

The firm worked out that if the Cryptolocker ransomware threat actors had sold its 1,216 total Bitcoins (BTC) that they collected from September this year, immediately upon receiving them, they would have earned nearly $380,000.

“If they elected to hold these ransoms, they would be worth nearly $980,000 as of this publication based on the current weighted price of $804/BTC,” Dell said.

Cryptolocker is unique when compared against your average ransomware. Instead of using a custom cryptographic implementation like many other malware families, Cryptolocker uses third-party certified cryptography offered by Microsoft’s CryptoAPI.

“By using a sound implementation and following best practices, the malware authors have created a robust program that is difficult to circumvent,” Dell said.

Conventionally, ransomware prevents victims from using their computers normally and uses social engineering to convince them that failing to follow the malware authors’ instructions will lead to real-world consequences. These consequences, such as owing a fine or facing arrest and prosecution, are presented as being the result of a fabricated indiscretion such as pirating music or downloading illegal pornography.

“Victims of traditional forms of ransomware could ignore the demands and use security software to unlock the system and remove the offending malware,” Dell explained. “Cryptolocker changes this dynamic by aggressively encrypting files on the victim’s system and returning control of the files to the victim only after the ransom is paid.”

Dell said that the earliest samples of Cryptolocker appear to have been released on 5 September this year. However, details about its initial distribution phase are unclear.

“It appears the samples were downloaded from a compromised website located in the United States, either by a version of Cryptolocker that has not been analysed as of this publication, or by a custom downloader created by the same authors,” Dell added.

Dell seems to think that early versions of Cryptolocker were distributed through spam emails targeting business professionals as opposed to home internet users, with the lure often being a ‘consumer complaint’ against the email recipient or their organisation.

Attached to these emails would be a ZIP archive with a random alphabetical filename containing 13 to 17 characters, containing a single executable with the same filename as the ZIP archive but with an EXE extension, so keep your eye out for emails that fit this description.

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