58292523
submission
alphadogg writes:
Oracle has overtaken rival IBM as the world's second-largest software vendor by pulling in $29.6 billion in software revenue during 2013, according to analyst firm Gartner. "Global trends around big data and analytics with business investment in database and cloud-based applications helped to drive Oracle's top-line growth," Gartner research vice president Chad Eschinger said in a statement. Microsoft retained its first-place ranking, at $65.7 billion in software revenue, while IBM moved down to third place with $29.1 billion. SAP remained in fourth place, at $18.5 billion, Gartner said.
58263265
submission
alphadogg writes:
Technology that remotely makes a stolen smartphone useless could save American consumers up to $2.6 billion per year if it is implemented widely and leads to a reduction in theft of phones, according to a new report. Law enforcement officials and politicians are pressuring cellular carriers to make such technology standard on all phones shipped in the U.S. in response to the increasing number of smartphone thefts. They believe the so-called "kill switch" would reduce the number of thefts if stolen phones were routinely locked so they became useless. But carriers have resisted these requests and there are now bills proposed at the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives and California State Senate that would mandate such a system. The report, by William Duckworth, an associate professor of statistics, data science and analytics at Creighton University, found most of the savings for consumers would come from reduced insurance premiums.
58190035
submission
alphadogg writes:
Attorneys say they're making progress toward a possible settlement in Silicon Valley's employee poaching case, in which Google, Apple and other companies are accused of conspiring not to hire employees from other tech giants. During a hearing on Thursday in a San Jose court, attorneys on both sides said they were working daily with a mediator to resolve the dispute, which involves alleged secret agreements among the firms not to poach each other's workers. Those agreements would violate federal antitrust laws. The case dates back to 2011, when Silicon Valley software engineers alleged that Adobe Systems, Apple, Google, Intuit, Intel, Lucasfilm and Pixar engaged in an "overarching conspiracy" to fix and suppress employee compensation and to restrict employees' mobility. The class covered by the suit is estimated at 60,000 workers.
58103891
submission
alphadogg writes:
Google has revamped its portfolio of enterprise cloud services, by cutting prices, adding new features, and touting a refreshed enthusiasm for the cloud market. "We have been very seriously committed to the cloud as a business and product family," one executive said, noting that Google now runs over 4.75 million active applications on its services. Cloud Storage is now priced at $0.026 cents per GB per month, and $0.020 cents per GB per month for an option with reduced availability, regardless of the amount of data stored. Formerly, the company had a number of pricing tiers for storage, based on the amount of data being stored. Prices previously ranged from $0.085 per GB per month to $0.054 per GB per month. Google's news follows Cisco's pledge to put $1B into cloud services, http://www.networkworld.com/co... while Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday is expected to make a big cloud announcement. http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
57943641
submission
alphadogg writes:
Web servers running a long-outdated version of the Linux kernel were attacked with dramatic speed over two days last week, according to Cisco Systems. All the affected servers were running the 2.6 version, first released in December 2003. "When attackers discover a vulnerability in the system, they can exploit it at their whim without fear of it being remedied," Cisco said. After the Web server has been compromised, the attackers slip in a line of JavaScript to other JavaScript files within the website. That code bounces the website's visitors to a second compromised host. "The two-stage process allows attackers to serve up a variety of malicious content to the visitor," according to Cisco. http://blogs.cisco.com/securit...
57833617
submission
alphadogg writes:
Leslie Lamport, a Microsoft Research principal, has been named the winner of the 2013 ACM A.M. Turing Award, http://amturing.acm.org/ also known as the “Nobel Prize in Computing.” The computer scientist was recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery for “imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages.” His algorithms, models and verification systems have enabled distributed computer systems to play the key roles they’re used in throughout the data center, security and cloud computing landscapes.
57679177
submission
alphadogg writes:
It’s the holiday for every mathematician small and large: Pi Day. If you’re not familiar, math enthusiasts around the world embrace March 14 to commemorate the mathematical constant. No matter the size of the circle, the ratio of its circumference to its diameter will always be 3.14. What better way to celebrate this than on 3/14? Here are fashion, food, activities and more to get you into the spirit.
57590115
submission
alphadogg writes:
A sneak peek at the annual Computing Research Association's (CRA) report on computer science enrollments at colleges shows that strong demand for technically-savvy workers is luring students in a big way. The full 2013 Taulbee Report will be published in May, but the CRA revealed a few tidbits this week in its Computer Research News publication. http://cra.org/resources/crn-o... Among the findings: Among 123 departments responding last year and the year before, there was a 22% increase in enrollment for computer science bachelor’s degree programs at U.S. schools. Degrees awarded increased 0.9% and new enrollments rose 13.7%
57585075
submission
alphadogg writes:
As a company that draws more than 2 billion eyeballs per month, Facebook was a fitting harbinger of trends to come at an optical networking conference. The social networking goliath is lighting up its own optical fiber, deploying 100Gbps links in its data centers and looking towards emerging silicon photonics technology, Facebook Director of Technical Operations Najam Ahmad said this week at an Optical Society of America meeting held alongside the annual Optical Fiber Communications Conference in San Francisco. Facebook's challenges mirror those of other enterprises and data center operators, with fast-growing data traffic and rapidly evolving network needs, but with 1.2 billion active monthly users, it's facing those issues sooner than some. Though his company is unique in some ways, Ahmad's comments in an on-stage interview may shed some light on the future of connectivity.
57409709
submission
alphadogg writes:
Having lots of Wi-Fi networks packed into a condominium or apartment building can hurt everyone's wireless performance, but Stanford University researchers say they've found a way to turn crowding into an advantage. In a dorm on the Stanford campus, they're building a single, dense Wi-Fi infrastructure that each resident can use and manage like their own private network. That means the shared system, called BeHop, can be centrally managed for maximum performance and efficiency while users still assign their own SSIDs, passwords and other settings. The Stanford project is making this happen with inexpensive, consumer-grade access points and SDN (software-defined networking).
57310819
submission
alphadogg writes:
A second federal bill that proposes "kill-switch" technology be made mandatory in smartphones as a means to reduce theft of the devices was introduced Monday. The kill switch would allow consumers to remotely wipe and disable a stolen smartphone and is considered by proponents to be a key tool in combating the increasing number of smartphone robberies. The Smartphone Theft Prevention Act was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives as H.R. 4065 by Jose Serrano, a New York Democrat, as a companion to a Senate bill that was introduced Feb. 13. The two follow a similar law proposed by officials in California last month.
57221263
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cisco today kicked off a contest with $300,000 in prize money that challenges security experts around the world to put together ways to secure what's now called the "Internet of Things," the wide range of non-traditional computing devices used on the electric grid, in healthcare and many other industries.
A Cisco SVP concluded his keynote at this week's RSA Conference by announcing what he called the “Internet of Things Security Grand Challenge.” http://blogs.cisco.com/securit... Christopher Young said the idea is “a contest of experts around the world to submit blueprints” for how security issues created by the Internet of Things could be addressed. It’s expected that up to six winning entries would be selected and the prize money awarded at the Internet of Things Forum in the fall.
57197945
submission
alphadogg writes:
Security and how to protect users from pervasive monitoring will dominate the proceedings when members of Internet Engineering Task Force meet in London starting Sunday. For an organization that develops the standards we all depend on for the Internet to work, the continued revelations made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have had wide-ranging repercussions. "It wasn't a surprise that some activities like this are going on. I think that the scale and some of the tactics surprised the community a little bit. ... You could also argue that maybe we needed the wake-up call," said IETF Chairman Jari Arkko. Part of that work will also be to make security features easier to use and for the standards organization to think of security from day one when developing new protocols.
57118845
submission
alphadogg writes:
Two recently-discovered flaws in Apple iOS and Mac OS X have security experts openly asking whether the software vulnerabilities represent backdoors inserted for purposes of cyber-espionage. “One line of code—was it an accident or enemy action? I don’t know, but it’s the kind of bug I’d put in,” remarked Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Co3 Systems, about the flaw in Apple OS X SSL encryption that was revealed last week. Schneier, a cryptography expert, alluded to the Apple SSL flaw during his presentation on government surveillance this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. The point, he says, is that the U.S. National Security Agency as well as other governments involved in aggressive mass surveillance are going to take any means necessary, including finding ways to put backdoors into commercial products, such as by code tampering. A FireEye researcher posed similar questions about the recently revealed iOS flaw.
57095759
submission
alphadogg writes:
Here's a whirlwind look at some of the wildest and potentially most useful technology research projects from university and vendor labs related to computer networking, from tracking down time travelers to imploding processors to a Web for robots.
