BlackBerry Sells Cylance For $160M, a Fraction of the $1.4B It Paid in 2018 (techcrunch.com) 35
Arctic Wolf has acquired Cylance, BlackBerry's beleaguered cybersecurity business, for $160 million -- a significant discount from the $1.4 billion BlackBerry paid to acquire the startup in 2018. From a report: Under the terms of the deal, which is expected to close in BlackBerry's fiscal Q4, BlackBerry will sell its Cylance assets to Arctic Wolf for $160 million in cash. BlackBerry will get ~$80 million at closing and the rest of the tranche a year later, along with roughly 5.5 million common shares in Arctic Wolf.
Holdup! (Score:5, Funny)
Blackberry still exists!?!
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Blackberry still exists!?!
We actually used Cylance until the year after BlackBerry bought it. BlackBerry is a threat to all of its assets.
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Blackberry still exists!?!
I imagine that was the reaction of a lot of Slashdotters.
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AFAIK, they still own QNX, which is used in all kinds of embedded systems, including some cars.
I didn't know Blackberry still existed (Score:2)
I thought it had gone bust a few years back. Haven't seen one of their phones for over a decade now.
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It sounds like at this point, Blackberry is basically a holding-company who buys and sells other companies.
The way it buys-high, destroys, then sells-low, is Eddie Lampert in charge?
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They seem to have IBMified, dropping all hardware and real product sales in favor of vague corporate services.
Slashdot Ad Blocking Extra Broken (Score:2, Insightful)
It's been a bit ridiculous in the past few months with half the screen being full of ads, but they've finally taken the extra step to make the site unusable if it can't access its ad server. Not sure why they thought that would be a good idea, probably just hoping to kill of the site once and for all to save money
Re:Slashdot Ad Blocking Extra Broken (Score:5, Interesting)
They are trying to kill it. One cannot even sign up for a new account anymore.
I suspect that the only reason it isn't already dead is it's well enough known that whomever owns it would face more costs for killing out outright and subsequent loss of reputation among fairly senior nerds who might contribute to the decision making process in their respective employers than the cost to keep it withering away like this. Eventually when the perceived cost to kill it is less than the cost to maintain it, it'll go the way of kuro5hin or i-am-bored or any of a number of other sites that formerly had massive online communities but eventually stopped growing.
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Hell, I still even check things out on https://everything.blockstacke... [blockstackers.com], even though they are throwing me an expired cert right now!
Remember Blockstackers?
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Seems like you could host slashdot from a first gen raspberry pi with power to spare.
Re: Slashdot Ad Blocking Extra Broken (Score:2)
The problem is not the hosting power, the problem is maimtaing a codebase that dates from the late 90s, and is hels together with less than duct tape "pabilo y saliva de loro" we say in mu country
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How much does that code need to change though? Outside of security or bug fixes, there's not much that could be done to improve on things. I'm sure some would even argue that the changes that were made over the years have generally been mistakes or a bad decision. Too many good things are ruined by incapable idiots trying to improve upon something that was already good enough for the purpose it served.
Is fixing bugs that appear from time to time, after all, if the linux kernel had bugs hidden for 10+ years (nothing against the linux kernel, Windows has the same problem, just, many more eyes on Linux), imagine what may lurk beneath the surface on /.
Is also keeping the code base and the service itself chugging along. IIRC, that codebase is (very old) PERL and PHP. PErl and PHP have evolved, new programmers have dexterity in the new incarnations, not the old ones.
IS also moving the SW to new VMs (yes, even
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The Linux kernel's complexity due to the way it interacts with hardware is a very different thing than a bit of web scripting on a site which has run for decades. The question is if you find a bug, is it worth fixing if they are so rare? It's unlikely there's going to be some major undiscovered security vulnerability lurking in the code base now 10 years later.
The thing is, you're postulating something as difficult, and yet it already exists and was started by nothing more than an angry nerd raging against
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It probably would benefit from supporting a more advanced character set than Code Page 437, or at least to have input filters that could detect characters that end up formatted funny, like single and double quotes that Apple browsers seem bent on using the unicode versions of, and rewriting those to the characterset that the site can handle.
But fundamentally the problem is every new owner tried to use the site because it had a popular domain name for some purpose other than news for nerds, and each time thi
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... hels together with less than duct tape "pabilo y saliva de loro" we say in mu country
I had trouble finding a translation of the phrases you used, but I'm guessing the English-language equivalent is "held together with spit and baling wire". Any thoughts on why Spanish speakers chose "parrot spit" instead of just "spit"?
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... hels together with less than duct tape "pabilo y saliva de loro" we say in mu country
I had trouble finding a translation of the phrases you used, but I'm guessing the English-language equivalent is "held together with spit and baling wire". Any thoughts on why Spanish speakers chose "parrot spit" instead of just "spit"?
Thanks for the bailing wire part. PArrots have very little, if any, spit. We also use, "un pelo de rana calva" , as frogs do not have hair. Similar spirit to english's "the skin of your teeth" as tooth have no skin.
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You haven't seen some of the poor hygiene practices common among the less well-groomed nerds. I can assure you, there are plenty with something that could loosely be labeled as 'skin' on their teeth.
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Yeah, works fine on my computer, with ad-blocking, but I fairly often get a "your ad-blocker is misconfigured, we couldn't load this video", and I'm like "I didn't want video loading period for this site" on my tablet.
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I am replying from a basic HTML page which loads after throwing the error.
Well, I guess it was nice while it lasted, I am NOT going to whitelist their fucking ad server.
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Same - seems if you block fb.html-load.com then after showing the page correctly it just ruins the site.
Re:For real (Score:2)
Get that annoying pop up while using my phone because Pihole blocks it.
Where was the money from? (Score:2)
BlackBerry still exists??? And where did they even have this incredible amount of cash from to buy anything???
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From when they did enjoy waning, but residual mobile device success, they used their money to buy QNX. That platform enjoys continued licensing revenue, even as that business, too, wanes over time as less popular than Linux based solutions in most segments (some segments stick by QNX).
Re:Where was the money from? (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia:
As of June 26, 2023, QNX software is now embedded in over 235 million vehicles worldwide, including most leading OEMs and Tier 1s, such as BMW, Bosch, Continental, Dongfeng Motor, Geely, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo, and more.
That's why Blackberry is still around, because QNX has successfully become a popular OS underpinning many realtime control systems for automobiles and mechanical control systems. In the general scheme of things most people have never heard of it, and it's still obscure enough that even most developers haven't heard of it either, but for those in the industry, having a defined platform upon which to build has certain advantages over each device and component manufacturer trying to roll their own.
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From when they did enjoy waning, but residual mobile device success, they used their money to buy QNX. That platform enjoys continued licensing revenue, even as that business, too, wanes over time as less popular than Linux based solutions in most segments (some segments stick by QNX).
Also from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Revenue: $853M
Operating Income: -$125M
That is not a sustainable business.
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From when they did enjoy waning, but residual mobile device success, they used their money to buy QNX. That platform enjoys continued licensing revenue, even as that business, too, wanes over time as less popular than Linux based solutions in most segments (some segments stick by QNX).
Also from wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Revenue: $853M
Operating Income: -$125M
That is not a sustainable business.
As long as investors believe there will be value, they will keep "subsidizing" the company. Also, if you are able to cover all variable costs + some of your fixed costs, is better to keep operating than to shut down straight away.
Just to give you an example, AMD operated with net losses for years on end.
Here is from 2001 to 2023.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
If you go even farther, it gets even worse.
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Well you need to keep bringing in cash by either taking loans, selling equity, or selling property, like for instance Cylance.
That year might have been a blip, but unless you show a path to real profits you can't keep bleeding $100M chunks indefinitely.
Not just cash (Score:3, Informative)
> BlackBerry will sell its Cylance assets to Arctic Wolf for $160 million in cash. BlackBerry will get ~$80 million at closing and the rest of the tranche a year later, along with roughly 5.5 million common shares in Arctic Wolf.
That was poorly worded: https://www.crn.com/news/secur... [crn.com]
> The acquisition is pegged at $160 million in cash, in addition to shares in privately held Arctic Wolf,
Shares today apparently at 7.68, so another 42 million at today's price, say about 200 total.