John Ribeiro
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Salesforce to acquire data center optimization startup Coolan
Salesforce.com has signed a definite agreement to acquire Coolan, the developer of a platform for data center hardware analysis and optimization.The acquisition appears to be designed to help Salesforce boost its own infrastructure for its customer relationship management software.“Once the transaction has closed, the Coolan team will help Salesforce optimize its infrastructure as it scales to support customer growth around the world,” Amir Michael, Coolan’s cofounder and CEO wrote in a blog post on Thursday.A Salesforce spokeswoman confirmed the acquisition. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Petition urges Apple not to release technology for jamming phone cameras
Over 11,000 people have signed a petition asking Apple not to deploy technology that would allow third parties like the police to use it to disable cameras on user phones under certain circumstances.Apple got a patent for this infrared technology in June and bagging a patent does not necessarily mean that the company is going to use the technology in its new devices.But there is considerable anxiety that the technology that appears designed to prevent people from recording copyrighted and prohibited material could also be used by the police to remotely disable cameras that could be recording misconduct by law enforcement."The release of this technology would have huge implications, including the censoring of political dissidents, activists, and citizens who are recording police brutality," according to the petition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Petition urges Apple not to release technology for jamming phone cameras
Over 11,000 people have signed a petition asking Apple not to deploy technology that would allow third parties like the police to use it to disable cameras on user phones under certain circumstances.Apple got a patent for this infrared technology in June and bagging a patent does not necessarily mean that the company is going to use the technology in its new devices.But there is considerable anxiety that the technology that appears designed to prevent people from recording copyrighted and prohibited material could also be used by the police to remotely disable cameras that could be recording misconduct by law enforcement."The release of this technology would have huge implications, including the censoring of political dissidents, activists, and citizens who are recording police brutality," according to the petition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Southwest Airlines delays flights after computer issues
Southwest Airlines in Dallas, Texas, said Wednesday that performance issues with its technology systems had led to flight delays.The airline said it began experiencing intermittent performance issues in the afternoon with multiple technology systems as a result of an outage. “We are now managing flight delays across our system, with a temporary ground stop in place for those flights that have not left the gate,” it said in a statement.The airline’s website www.southwest.com also had a notice saying, "We're working hard to get you where you want to be......Thank you for your patience," suggesting that online reservations, check-ins and other customer services would not be immediately possible. Users were asked not to refresh their browsers as they would be automatically transferred to the site as soon as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM grows in cloud and data analytics but overall revenue slides
IBM’s revenue continued to decline in the second quarter but growth in some of its strategic initiatives like cloud computing and data analytics suggest that the company may be on track in its transition plans.The Armonk, New York, company said Monday that revenue from its new “strategic imperatives” like cloud, analytics and security increased by 12 percent year-on-year to US$8.3 billion. That increase was, however, lower than the growth the company had reported in these businesses in the first quarter.Cloud revenue – public, private and hybrid – grew 30 percent in the second quarter, while revenue from analytics grew 4 percent, revenue from mobile increased 43 percent and the security business grew 18 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM grows in cloud and data analytics but overall revenue slides
IBM’s revenue continued to decline in the second quarter but growth in some of its strategic initiatives like cloud computing and data analytics suggest that the company may be on track in its transition plans.The Armonk, New York, company said Monday that revenue from its new “strategic imperatives” like cloud, analytics and security increased by 12 percent year-on-year to US$8.3 billion. That increase was, however, lower than the growth the company had reported in these businesses in the first quarter.Cloud revenue – public, private and hybrid – grew 30 percent in the second quarter, while revenue from analytics grew 4 percent, revenue from mobile increased 43 percent and the security business grew 18 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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SoftBank said to acquire ARM for about $32 billion
Japan’s SoftBank is set to acquire UK chip design company, ARM, to cash in on growing demand for processors and other technologies for the internet of things and mobile markets, according to news reports.Softbank is paying up to US$32 billion for the chip design company that licenses its designs to a large number of chip suppliers to smartphone makers and to the emerging IoT market, according to the reports.SoftBank has invested in a number of media and technology companies, including Internet retailer Snapdeal in India and ride-hailing app company Didi Chuxing in China. It also acquired Sprint Nextel in 2013.But the acquisition of ARM would place the company in a market where it would be an upstream supplier to some of the biggest names in the tech industry as licensees of ARM’s designs like Qualcomm gear up to supply chips to the the connected devices market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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SoftBank will acquire ARM for $32 billion
Japan’s SoftBank will acquire UK chip design company, ARM Holdings, to cash in on growing demand for processors and other technologies for the internet of things and mobile markets.SoftBank is paying £24.3 billion (US$32 billion) in cash for the chip company that licenses its designs to a large number of chip suppliers to smartphone makers and to the emerging IoT market.The Japanese company will retain ARM's headquarters in Cambridge and plans to double the number of employees in the U.K. over the next five years, when it will also increase the company's headcount outside the U.K.ARM, with 4,064 employees, will be an independent business within SoftBank, which will pay for the acquisition from existing cash resources and a loan facility. SoftBank said it intends to retain the current ARM organization including the existing senior management team, brand, and partnership-based business model and culture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Tesla asked to brief Senate committee on fatal car crash
Tesla Motors has been asked by a U.S. Senate Committee to brief it on the circumstances leading to a fatal accident that killed the driver of a Tesla Model S, while the vehicle’s Autopilot driver-assistance software was turned on.The request by the committee on Thursday comes on the same day that Consumer Reports, a product-testing and rating nonprofit, called on Tesla to disable hands-free operation in its cars until it can be made safer. Though advanced active safety technology in vehicles could eventually make roads safer, today "we're deeply concerned that consumers are being sold a pile of promises about unproven technology,” said Laura MacCleery, vice president of consumer policy and mobilization for the organization, in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Fiat Chrysler launches bug bounty program for connected vehicles
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has launched a bug bounty program to attract white-hat hackers to spot out cybersecurity flaws in its products and connected services.The program is focused on FCA's connected vehicles, including systems within them and external services and applications that link to them.The move follows the remote hack and control of a Jeep Cherokee, one of the company’s products, by security researchers. That breach led to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles last year. Fiat Chrysler is also moving quite aggressively in the area of autonomous vehicles, announcing earlier this year the joint development of self-driven minivans with Alphabet's Google Self-Driving Car Project.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Fiat Chrysler launches bug bounty program for connected vehicles
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has launched a bug bounty program to attract white-hat hackers to spot out cybersecurity flaws in its products and connected services.The program is focused on FCA's connected vehicles, including systems within them and external services and applications that link to them.The move follows the remote hack and control of a Jeep Cherokee, one of the company’s products, by security researchers. That breach led to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles last year. Fiat Chrysler is also moving quite aggressively in the area of autonomous vehicles, announcing earlier this year the joint development of self-driven minivans with Alphabet's Google Self-Driving Car Project.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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US Senator has privacy concerns about Pokémon Go’s data collection
The popularity of augmented reality smartphone game Pokémon Go has raised a variety of concerns, including a warning by the National Safety Council, urging drivers not to play the game behind the wheel and asking pedestrians to be careful while playing it.U.S. Senator Al Franken, a strong privacy advocate, has raised the inevitable question about the privacy of the extensive data the game collects from its users, including children, and whether the data is used for other purposes.“I am concerned about the extent to which Niantic may be unnecessarily collecting, using, and sharing a wide range of users' personal information without their appropriate consent,” Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, wrote in a letter Tuesday to John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic, the developer of the game.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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US Senator has privacy concerns about Pokémon Go’s data collection
The popularity of augmented reality smartphone game Pokémon Go has raised a variety of concerns, including a warning by the National Safety Council, urging drivers not to play the game behind the wheel and asking pedestrians to be careful while playing it.U.S. Senator Al Franken, a strong privacy advocate, has raised the inevitable question about the privacy of the extensive data the game collects from its users, including children, and whether the data is used for other purposes.“I am concerned about the extent to which Niantic may be unnecessarily collecting, using, and sharing a wide range of users' personal information without their appropriate consent,” Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, wrote in a letter Tuesday to John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic, the developer of the game.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Seagate will cut 6,500 staff despite uptick in hard disk demand
Seagate Technology will cut about 6,500 jobs worldwide, or 14 percent of its workforce, with most of the cuts in manufacturing jobs, it said Monday.The data storage maker had said in June that it was aiming to cut 1,600 employees, or 3 percent of its global workforce, by the end of the September quarter to trim costs, but the new announcement suggests that the company feels the need to reduce costs further as its hard disk drives battle in a slowing PC market amid the emergence of flash storage in devices.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD 2016 tech industry graveyard +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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VPN provider cuts of service to Russia after servers seized
Private Internet Access, a provider of virtual private network services, has shut down its Russian gateways and won’t do business in the region any longer, as it believes that some of its Russian servers were seized by the government for not following new internet surveillance rules.The provider, which holds that it does not log traffic or session data, said it had likely fallen foul of new Russian rules that require that providers must log local traffic for up to a year.“We believe that due to the enforcement regime surrounding this new law, some of our Russian Servers (RU) were recently seized by Russian Authorities, without notice or any type of due process,” the provider’s team said in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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VPN provider cuts of service to Russia after servers seized
Private Internet Access, a provider of virtual private network services, has shut down its Russian gateways and won’t do business in the region any longer, as it believes that some of its Russian servers were seized by the government for not following new internet surveillance rules.The provider, which holds that it does not log traffic or session data, said it had likely fallen foul of new Russian rules that require that providers must log local traffic for up to a year.“We believe that due to the enforcement regime surrounding this new law, some of our Russian Servers (RU) were recently seized by Russian Authorities, without notice or any type of due process,” the provider’s team said in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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VPN provider cuts off service to Russia after servers seized
Private Internet Access, a provider of virtual private network services, has shut down its Russian gateways and won’t do business there any longer, as it believes some of its servers were seized by the government for not following new internet surveillance rules.The company said it had likely fallen foul of new rules that require providers to log local traffic for up to a year. Private Internet Access says it does not log traffic or session data.“We believe that due to the enforcement regime surrounding this new law, some of our Russian Servers (RU) were recently seized by Russian Authorities, without notice or any type of due process,” the provider said in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google aims to train 2 million app developers in India
India’s large number of software developers has top smartphone companies like Google and Apple trying to coax them to work on their operating systems.Google on Monday said it will be training, over the next three years, some 2 million developers in the country on its Android operating system.In a similar move, Apple announced in May it will set up a facility in Bangalore by early next year to help developers on best practices and to improve the design, quality, and performance of their apps on the iOS platform. That announcement came during CEO Tim Cook's first visit to India.India will have an estimated 4 million software developers by 2018, by then the largest population of developers in the world. Currently, less than 25 percent of these developers are trained to develop and build for the mobile platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Omni Hotels was hit by point-of-sale malware
Omni Hotels & Resorts has reported that point-of-sale systems at some of its properties were hit by malware targeting payment card information.The attack on the systems of the luxury hotel chain follows similar breaches of point-of-sale systems at various hotels and retailers like Hyatt Hotels, Target, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Hilton Worldwide Holdings.Omni in Dallas, Texas, said in a statement Friday that on May 30 this year, it discovered it was hit by malware attacks on its network, affecting specific POS systems on-site at some of its properties. “The malware was designed to collect certain payment card information, including cardholder name, credit/debit card number, security code and expiration date,” Omni said. There isn’t evidence that other customer information, such as contact information, Social Security numbers or PINs, was compromised, it added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Omni Hotels was hit by point-of-sale malware
Omni Hotels & Resorts has reported that point-of-sale systems at some of its properties were hit by malware targeting payment card information.The attack on the systems of the luxury hotel chain follows similar breaches of point-of-sale systems at various hotels and retailers like Hyatt Hotels, Target, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and Hilton Worldwide Holdings.Omni in Dallas, Texas, said in a statement Friday that on May 30 this year, it discovered it was hit by malware attacks on its network, affecting specific POS systems on-site at some of its properties. “The malware was designed to collect certain payment card information, including cardholder name, credit/debit card number, security code and expiration date,” Omni said. There isn’t evidence that other customer information, such as contact information, Social Security numbers or PINs, was compromised, it added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here