The VMware-AWS deal could drive more companies into the cloud

The cloud partnership AWS and VMware announced Thursday makes Amazon's public cloud even more attractive for enterprises by letting them take the popular virtualization platform with them.The appropriately named VMware Cloud on AWS , announced at a press conference in San Francisco, will bring cloud-optimized versions of vSphere, VSAN and NSX software to the cloud platform. When users spin up a VMware environment on AWS, they'll get a cluster running the entire Software-Defined Data Center stack in the public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Winners and losers from the big AWS-VMware pact

Amazon Web Services and VMware on Thursday announced what executives at both companies call a long-term strategic partnership to make it easier to run VMware workloads on AWS’s cloud.At a press conference in San Francisco each company’s CEO boasted about the VMware on AWS offering which will be available as part of an invite-only beta early next year and rolled out to the masses in mid-2017.In a nutshell, AWS has dedicated a portion of its bare metal cloud infrastructure for running VMware’s core management software: vSphere (the ESXi hypervisor and virtualization management platform), vSAN (the virtual storage area network platform) and NSX (the virtual networking software). Customers can spin up three sizes of AWS on VMware and pay for it through a credit card or their existing VMware account. AWS is VMware’s “preferred” public cloud and VMware is AWS’s preferred private cloud, CEOs Andy Jassy of AWS and Pat Gelsinger of VMware said during the press conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon signals Yahoo data breach may affect acqusition

Verizon has signaled that Yahoo's massive data breach may be enough reason to halt its US$4.8 billion deal to buy the internet company.On Thursday, Verizon's general counsel Craig Silliman said the company has a "reasonable basis" to believe that the breach involving 500 million Yahoo accounts has had a material impact on the acquisition. This could give the company room to back out or get a large discount."We're looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact," he added. "If they believe that it's not, then they'll need to show us that."In response, Yahoo said, "We are confident in Yahoo’s value and we continue to work towards integration with Verizon."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon signals Yahoo data breach may affect acqusition

Verizon has signaled that Yahoo's massive data breach may be enough reason to halt its US$4.8 billion deal to buy the internet company.On Thursday, Verizon's general counsel Craig Silliman said the company has a "reasonable basis" to believe that the breach involving 500 million Yahoo accounts has had a material impact on the acquisition. This could give the company room to back out or get a large discount."We're looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact," he added. "If they believe that it's not, then they'll need to show us that."In response, Yahoo said, "We are confident in Yahoo’s value and we continue to work towards integration with Verizon."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

46% off Earth Pak Waterproof Dry Bag Compression Sack – Deal Alert

Whether you are Kayaking, Beaching, Rafting, Boating, Hiking, Camping or Fishing, Earth Pak believes they have created the best dry bag on the market for any adventure. Toss in your gear, roll it down, and don't be afraid to toss this bag around. It's designed to last for years and will keep your phone, gadgets and gear dry and protected. It comes in 10L, 20L and 30L size, and all models feature 24-42 inch adjustable shoulder straps. Included is Earth Pak's IPX8 certified waterproof phone case that can fit even the largest phones, with simple snap and lock access and clear windows that allow for picture taking without removing from the case. This bag is currently discounted 46% from $35 down to just $18.99, and averages 5 out of 5 stars from over 1,295 customers (read reviews). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sprint to get into managed SD-WAN game with VeloCloud-based offering

Sprint today said it would get into the managed SD-WAN arena in early 2017 with an offering using VeloCloud’s technology.+More on Network World: Branch office links, big bandwidth needs drive SD-WAN evolution+Sprint said it is currently teaming with VeloCloud to support customer trials for its SD-WAN service during the fourth quarter of 2016, with a global launch planned for early 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sprint to get into managed SD-WAN game with VeloCloud-based offering

Sprint today said it would get into the managed SD-WAN arena in early 2017 with an offering using VeloCloud’s technology.+More on Network World: Branch office links, big bandwidth needs drive SD-WAN evolution+Sprint said it is currently teaming with VeloCloud to support customer trials for its SD-WAN service during the fourth quarter of 2016, with a global launch planned for early 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oops, blog post announcing VMware-Amazon pact leaks early

Last week reports surfaced of a coming partnership between VMware and Amazon Web Services. Both companies declined to comment on the rumors, but earlier this week Amazon Web Services called a press conference for Thursday afternoon.Hours before the press conference in San Francisco with AWS CEO Andy Jassy a blog post from VMware leaked onto the Internet announcing the deal between the two companies. Tech Crunch was the first to report it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

40% off Sound Intone P6 Stereo Bluetooth Over-ear Foldable Headphones – Deal Alert

These headphones from Sound Intone fit comfortably over your ears and isolate your music while reducing outside noise. They connect via Bluetooth, and feature a generous 6 hour play time per charge. They fold up nicely when not in use and feature a scratch-resistant coating, making them ideal to take with you when travelling. Control your music right from the headset with play/pause/next/previous buttons. And a built-in microphone comes in handy for taking calls. That's a pretty full set of features when you consider its current price after the 40% discount is just $36. The P6 headphones average 4 out of 5 stars from over 730 people on Amazon (read reviews). See the discounted P6 from Sound Intone now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adapteva Joins The Kilocore Club With Epiphany-V

The computing industry is facing a number of challenges as Moore’s Law improvements in circuitry slow down, and they don’t all have to do with transistor counts and memory bandwidth and such. Another problem is that it has gotten progressively more costly to design chips at the same time that mass customization seems to be the way to provide unique processing capability specifically for precise workloads.

In recent decades, the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency pumped huge sums of money into designing and manufacturing gigascale, terascale, and petascale systems, but in recent years this development arm of the US

Adapteva Joins The Kilocore Club With Epiphany-V was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Microsoft is changing how you use the Control Panel in Windows

We all know Windows 10 is a continuously evolving operating system with regular changes made over the course of its release cycle. It seems those changes are extending to the Control Panel, the central hub for system settings. Windows10Update.com noted that a modest but significant change in build 14942, the latest Fast ring preview version released by Microsoft, made a change to how the Control Panel is presented when using the Power Menu (the Windows and X key) Instead of the Control Panel shortcut that was placed between the Task Manager and File Explorer in the operating system, there is now a full menu of options that match the Control Panel's set of applets. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iOS 10’s one-month adoption rate hits 68%

iOS 10 adoption continued to climb a month after its release, with some sources pegging the upgrade on more than two-thirds of iPhones.At the one-month mark, iOS 10 accounted for 68.2% of all iOS editions detected by Mixpanel, whose analytics platform is used by mobile app developers to track usage and user engagement.That was slightly higher than the 62.8% accumulated by iOS 9 last year at the same post-release point, and far above iOS 8's 48.9% in September 2014.The modern record for iOS uptake remained with iOS 7 -- a major UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) overhaul -- which captured a 72.7% share in its first month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thousands of online shops compromised for credit card theft

Almost 6,000 online shops have been compromised by hackers who added specially crafted code that intercepts and steals payment card details.These online skimming attacks were first discovered by Dutch researcher Willem de Groot a year ago. At that time, he found 3,501 stores containing the malicious JavaScript code. However, instead of getting better, the situation is increasingly worse.By March the number of infected shops grew by almost 30 percent to 4,476, and by September, it reached 5,925. More than 750 online stores who were unwillingly skimming payment card details for attackers in 2015 are still doing so today, showing that this type of activity can go undetected for months, the researcher said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thousands of online shops compromised for credit card theft

Almost 6,000 online shops have been compromised by hackers who added specially crafted code that intercepts and steals payment card details.These online skimming attacks were first discovered by Dutch researcher Willem de Groot a year ago. At that time, he found 3,501 stores containing the malicious JavaScript code. However, instead of getting better, the situation is increasingly worse.By March the number of infected shops grew by almost 30 percent to 4,476, and by September, it reached 5,925. More than 750 online stores who were unwillingly skimming payment card details for attackers in 2015 are still doing so today, showing that this type of activity can go undetected for months, the researcher said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Real-time domain name lookups

Reverse DNS requests request the domain name associated with an IP address, for example providing the name google-public-dns-a.google.com for IP address 8.8.8.8.  This article demonstrates how the sFlow-RT engine incorporates domain name lookups in real-time flow analytics.

First, use the dns.servers System Property is used to specify one or more DNS servers to handle the reverse lookup requests. For example, the following command uses Docker to run sFlow-RT with DNS lookups directed to server 10.0.0.1:
docker run -e "RTPROP=-Ddns.servers=10.0.0.1" \
-p 8008:8008 -p 6343:6343/udp -d sflow/sflow-rt
The following Python script dnspair.py uses the sFlow-RT REST API to define a flow and log the resulting flow records:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import requests
import json

flow = {'keys':'dns:ipsource,dns:ipdestination',
'value':'bytes','activeTimeout':10,'log':True}
requests.put('http://localhost:8008/flow/dnspair/json',data=json.dumps(flow))
flowurl = 'http://localhost:8008/flows/json?name=dnspair&maxFlows=10&timeout=60'
flowID = -1
while 1 == 1:
r = requests.get(flowurl + "&flowID=" + str(flowID))
if r.status_code != 200: break
flows = r.json()
if len(flows) == 0: continue

flowID = flows[0]["flowID"]
flows.reverse()
for f in flows:
print json.dumps(f,indent=1)
Running the script generates the following output:
$ ./dnspair.py
{
"value": 233370.92322668363,
"end": 1476234478177,
"name": "dnspair",
"flowID": Continue reading