Peter Sayer, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Peter Sayer

Author Archives: Peter Sayer

UK mobile operator loses phones following data breach

In a twist, thieves in the U.K. hacked personal data to steal high-end smartphones, rather than hacking phones to steal personal data.The thefts came to light after mobile network operator Three noticed a recent increase in levels of handset fraud, the company said Friday.By accessing the system Three uses to manage handset upgrades, the perpetrators were able to intercept new high-end handsets on the way to the operator's customers.Three, however, said only eight devices have been illegally obtained through the upgrade activity -- compared to 400 stolen from its retail stores over the past four weeks.The company sought to reassure customers concerned that their personal information may have been accessed in the attempt to steal the upgrade phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK mobile operator loses phones following data breach

SAP offers cash for referrals in new cloud channel program

To sell its cloud services, ERP vendor SAP is crowdsourcing its sales team.SAP began offering its 15,000 software partners a share of revenue from cloud services they helped sell back in August, under a program called Cloud Choice Profit. It was a way to reward them for helping businesses migrate from traditional on-premise systems, where partners could capture a larger share of the revenue.At a sales conference in New York on Thursday, it extended the program to offer any businesses, partner or not, referral fees if leads they provide result in a sale of cloud services, an option SAP calls Cloud Choice Referral.The program covers sales of SAP's ERP Cloud and HCM Cloud, among other services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ISPs ordered to block LinkedIn in Russia

LinkedIn's network just got a little smaller: Russia's communications regulator ordered ISPs to block access to the business networking company on Thursday.Roskomnadzor made the order after a Moscow appeal court last week upheld an earlier ruling that LinkedIn breached Russian privacy laws.Tagansky district court ruled against LinkedIn on Aug. 4, following a complaint from the Russian federal service for the supervision of communications, information technology and mass media that its activities breached a law requiring businesses handling Russians' personal data to process that data in Russia.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 6 simple tricks for protecting your passwords Roskomnadzor said it filed suit after LinkedIn failed to respond to two requests for information about its plans for relocating the data to Russia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ISPs ordered to block LinkedIn in Russia

Five things AIs can do better than us

For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet -- dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like -- in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing.In recent years, though, our species has created new forms of intelligence, able to outperform us in other ways. One of the most famous of these artificial intelligences (AIs) is AlphaGo, developed by Deepmind. In just a few years, it has learned to play the 4,000-year-old strategy game, Go, beating two of the world's strongest players.Other software developed by Deepmind has learned to play classic eight-bit video games, notably Breakout, in which players must use a bat to hit a ball at a wall, knocking bricks out of it. CEO Demis Hassabis is fond of saying that the software figured out how to beat the game purely from the pixels on the screen, often glossing over the fact that the company first taught it how to count and how to read the on-screen score, and gave it the explicit goal of maximizing that score. Even the smartest AIs need a few hints about our social mores. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung boosts audio, connected car businesses with $8B Harman buy

Samsung Electronics wants to buy its way into the connected car market, with a plan to acquire Harman for US$8 billion.It's the latest in a line of acquisitions by Samsung, as it seeks to diversify its business beyond the slowing smartphone market. Other recently announced deals include last month's buy of artificial intelligence startup Viv Labs, which has developed a virtual personal assistant Samsung hopes to put in its consumer electronics products, and the June purchase of Joyent, a supplier of cloud services for the internet of things.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

European Parliament clears drone regulations for takeoff

Regulations to protect people from falling drones moved a little closer to takeoff at the European Parliament on Thursday.Ensuring drone safety took on a new urgency this week, with GoPro's recall of its Karma drone after unexplained mid-air power failures caused a number of them to drop out of the sky.Under the European Union's proposed regulations, drones will have to be registered so that their owners can be identified. While that won't in itself stop drones from falling, it could lead pilots to take their responsibilities more seriously, legislators hope.A 1-kilogram drone like the Karma falling from as little as 11 meters (around three stories) could kill even someone wearing a safety helmet, according to a calculator developed by the Dropped Object Prevention Scheme, which promotes safety in the oil and gas industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

European Parliament clears drone regulations for takeoff

French plan for biometric database of 60 million people sparks outcry

When the French government quietly announced, in the middle of a holiday weekend, the merging of two files to create a megadatabase holding the biometrics of almost 60 million French citizens, it was clearly hoping to avoid an outcry. It failed. Among those lining up to criticize the government's move are its own minister of state for the Digital Sector and Innovation, and the National Digital Council, a body created by the government to provide independent recommendations on all matters relating to the effect of digital technologies on society and the economy. Minister of State Axelle Lemaire told French journalists the megadatabase used 10-year-old technology and had real security problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

French plan for biometric database of 60 million people sparks outcry

SAP aims to simplify innovation with update to HANA in-memory database

SAP wants businesses struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation in its HANA in-memory database to relax as it readies a new version, to be known as HANA 2.Since introducing HANA in 2010, SAP has been releasing updates twice a year, providing customers with new capabilities but also pushing them to keep their software current to benefit from continuing support.The new version gives businesses two reasons to relax, according to Marie Goodell, vice president of product marketing at SAP.HANA 2 is designed to simplify things for the IT department, reducing the effort it takes to keep the lights on so that businesses can spend more time working on new, next-generation applications that take advantage of new types of data, she said. Even if they choose to keep upgrading, that should involve less work going forward.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK bank suspends online payments after fraud hits 20,000 accounts

The banking arm of U.K. supermarket chain Tesco has suspended online payments for its 136,000 checking account customers following a spate of fraudulent transactions.The bank suspended its payment service for all checking account customers after 40,000 experienced suspicious transactions, bank CEO Benny Higgins told BBC Radio 4 on Monday."Around half of them had money taken from the account," he said.The bank will bear any losses as a result of the fraudulent activity and customers are not at financial risk, he said.But they might be inconvenienced until the bank has secured its systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK bank suspends online payments after fraud hits 20,000 accounts

A second Privacy Shield legal challenge increases threat to EU-US data flows

The Privacy Shield transatlantic data transfer deal is now caught in a pincer action: A week after it emerged that Irish digital rights activists had filed suit to annul the deal come reports that a French campaign group has begun its own legal action.French civil liberties campaign group La Quadrature du Net filed suit against the European Commission, the European Union's executive body, on Oct. 25.Although the Court of Justice of the EU has not yet published details of the complaint, Brussels-based news agency Euractiv reported Thursday that La Quadrature's goal is to annul the Commission's decision that Privacy Shield provides adequate protection under EU law when the personal information of EU citizens is transferred to the U.S. for processing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Broadcom bids billions for Brocade in order to break it up

Chip maker Broadcom wants to buy storage vendor Brocade Communications Systems, stripping out its Fibre Channel business and selling the rest. Broadcom has agreed to pay around US$5.5 billion for Brocade, it said Wednesday. But it doesn't want all of it: After the deal closes -- between May and October 2017, Broadcom hopes -- it plans to sell off Brocade's IP-based wireless and campus networking, data center switching and routing, and software networking products. The bit Broadcom wants to keep, Brocade's Fibre Channel SAN business, is in for a challenging time as enterprises turn to cloud storage and hyperconverged infrastructures. Fibre Channel doesn't play well in the virtualized SANs that hyperconvergence entails.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Broadcom bids billions for Brocade in order to break it up

Uber drivers in the UK are employees, court rules

Uber should treat its drivers in the U.K. as employees, paying them at least minimum wage from the moment they are available to work until they log off and providing them with paid time off, a London employment tribunal has ruled.The drivers and Uber must now make proposals to the judge how they will comply with the ruling, made following a preliminary hearing.What they agree will have consequences for Uber and businesses like it across the U.K. It could push costs up, increasing Uber's incentive to develop its own self-driving car.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm agrees to buy NXP for over $37 billion

Microprocessor maker Qualcomm is spending its way out of a stagnating mobile phone industry, offering to buy NXP Semiconductors, a company with a strong position in automotive chips, for more than US$37 billion.Qualcomm formalized its offer Thursday, barely a month after rumors began circulating that a deal was in the offing.NXP has only just digested its own multibillion acquisition, of Freescale Semiconductor, which closed in December 2015.The combination of Qualcomm and NXP will have annual revenue of around $35 billion, Qualcomm said. That's still well behind the $55 billion Intel reported for its full fiscal year 2015, although catching up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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