65690405
submission
poseur writes:
Just about every retailer has experienced a data breach due to insecure point-of-sale systems. Why is PoS security so hard? Experts say it's a moving target. The good news, experts say, is that payment solutions like Apple Pay could render PoS systems largely obsolete.
65456319
submission
storagedude writes:
With Amazon Web Services losing $2 billion a year, it’s not inconceivable that the cloud industry could go the way of storage service providers (remember them?). So any plan for cloud services must include a way to retrieve your data quickly in case your cloud service provider goes belly up without much notice (think Nirvanix). In an article at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman notes that recovering your data from the cloud quickly is a lot harder than you might think. Even if you have a dedicated OC-192 channel, it would take 11 days to move a petabyte of data – and that’s with no contention or other latency. One possible solution: a failover agreement with a second cloud provider – and make sure it’s legally binding.
65243629
submission
storagedude writes:
A blogger is calling for an end to liability limits for companies that expose users' personal and financial information, saying that 'Only when the cost of losing data exceeds the cost of protecting data will anything likely change.'
Writing on InfoStor, Henry Newman said the security problem ‘is one hundred percent solvable with the right amount of motivation and the right amount of resources.’
His petition requests that if organizations with more than 1,000 employees fail to protect data, 'the organization becomes responsible for that loss with no exclusions and no liability limits.'
64645285
submission
storagedude writes:
Imagine in the not-too-distant future, your entire genome is on archival storage and accessed by your doctors for critical medical decisions. You'd want that data to be safe from hackers and data corruption, wouldn't you? Oh, and it would need to be error-free and accessible for about a hundred years too. The problem is, we currently don't have the data integrity, security and format migration standards to ensure that, according to Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. Newman calls for standards groups to add new features like collision-proof hash to archive interfaces and software.
'It will not be long until your genome is tracked from birth to death. I am sure we do not want to have genome objects hacked or changed via silent corruption, yet this data will need to be kept maybe a hundred or more years through a huge number of technology changes. The big problem with archiving data today is not really the media, though that too is a problem. The big problem is the software that is needed and the standards that do not yet exist to manage and control long-term data,' writes Newman.
64000445
submission
darthcamaro writes:
Forget about HTML5, that's already passe — Google is already moving on to HTML5.1 support for the upcoming Chrome 38 release. Currently only a beta, one of the biggest things that web developers will notice is the use of the new "picture" tag which is a container for multiple image sizes/formats. Bottom line is it's a new way to think about the "IMG" tag that has existed since the first HTML spec.
63805209
submission
jammag writes:
A new trend has emerged where tech companies have realized that abusing users pays big. Examples include the highly publicized Comcast harassing service call, Facebook "experiments," Twitter timeline tinkering, rude Korean telecoms — tech is an area where the term "customer service" has an Orwellian slant. Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?
62559917
submission
storagedude writes:
Resource management and allocation for complex workloads has been a need for some time in open systems, but no one has ever followed through on making open systems look and behave like an IBM mainframe, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. Throwing more hardware at the problem is a costly solution that won’t work forever, notes Newman.
He writes: 'With next-generation technology like non-volatile memories and PCIe SSDs, there are going to be more resources in addition to the CPU that need to be scheduled to make sure everything fits in memory and does not overflow. I think the time has come for Linux – and likely other operating systems – to develop a more robust framework that can address the needs of future hardware and meet the requirements for scheduling resources. This framework is not going to be easy to develop, but it is needed by everything from databases and MapReduce to simple web queries.’
58906233
submission
jammag writes:
"Almost as devastating is the blow Heartbleed has dealt to the image of free and open source software (FOSS). In the self-mythology of FOSS, bugs like Heartbleed aren't supposed to happen when the source code is freely available and being worked with daily. As Eric Raymond famously said, 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'...Tired of FOSS's continual claims of superior security, some Windows and OS X users welcome the idea that Heartbleed has punctured FOSS pretensions. But is that what has happened?"
56151307
submission
storagedude writes:
A recent study of hard drive reliability by Backblaze was deeply flawed, according to Henry Newman, a longtime HPC storage consultant. Writing in Enterprise Storage Forum, Newman notes that the tested Seagate drives that had a high failure rate were either very old or had known issues. The study also failed to address manufacturer's specifications, drive burn-in and data reliability, among other issues.
'The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old! Since it is well known in study after study that disk drives last about 5 years and no other drive is that old, I find it pretty disingenuous to leave out that information. Add to this that the Seagate 1.5 TB has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to, it is no surprise that these old drives are failing.'
53511525
submission
jammag writes:
"Whether Ubuntu is declining is still debatable. However, in the last couple of months, one thing is clear: internally and externally, its commercial arm Canonical appears to be throwing the idea of community overboard as though it was ballast in a balloon about to crash." So claims a top Linux pundit, pointing out instances of community discontent and apparent ham-handeness on Mark Shuttleworth's part. Yet isn't this just routine kvetching in the open source community?
51252345
submission
storagedude writes:
Texas Memory and IBM; Cisco and Whiptail; STEC, Virident and WD: the storage industry seems to be in full merger mania over SSDs, but Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum doesn't think the current mania will work out any better than any other great mania of history. Not Invented Here opposition by acquiring engineering teams and the commodity nature of SSDs will make much of the money poured into SSD companies wasted, he says.
'I seriously doubt that the STEC Inc. technology will be seen in HGST/WD SSDs, nor do I think that Virident PCIe cards will be commoditized by HGST/WD to compete with LSI and others,' writes Newman. 'A Whiptail system will likely be put into a Cisco rack, but it’s not like Intel and Cisco are the best corporate partners, and we will likely see other SSDs put into the product. ... It all comes down to what I see as 'the buying arms race.' Company X purchased some SSD company so company Y needs to do the same or they will not be considered a player.'
51161009
submission
jammag writes:
"When the history of free software is written, I am increasingly convinced that this last year will be noted as the start of the decline of Ubuntu," opines Linux pundit Bruce Byfield. After great initial success, Ubuntu and Canonical began to isolate themselves from the mainstream of the free software community. Canonical, he says, has tried to control the open source community, and the company has floundered in many of its initiatives. Really, the mighty Ubuntu, in decline?
49007101
submission
storagedude writes:
As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less.
That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used.
The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues.
47193129
submission
storagedude writes:
You may have one of the best-known and respected brands in cloud computing, but that may not matter much when it comes time for RFPs, according to a new survey of IT buyers from Palmer Research/QuinStreet. A third of respondents view big names like Google, Amazon and Microsoft very favorably, yet at RFP time, less than 10% of those names get asked for formal proposals. It could be a sign that the cloud is a wide-open market that's up for grabs, as buyers seem much more interested in basics like reliability, technology expertise, pricing, maintenance and customer service, according to the survey. Oh, and trialware doesn't hurt either.
