Peter Sayer, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Peter Sayer

Author Archives: Peter Sayer

UK seeks end to end-to-end encryption

It could put an end to end-to-end encryption in services such as WhatsApp: The U.K. government wants telecommunications providers to help it tap their customers' communications, removing any encryption the provider applied.The government's desires are set out in a draft of the regulations obtained by Open Rights Group (ORG), which campaigns for digital civil rights."These powers could be directed at companies like WhatsApp to limit their encryption. The regulations would make the demands that [Home Secretary] Amber Rudd made to attack end-to-end encryption a reality. But if the powers are exercised, this will be done in secret," said ORG executive director Jim Killock.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Salesforce to access SAP? Pour yourself a stiff drink

The week after a U.K. court favored SAP in a US$70 million licensing dispute, the software developer took another brewery to arbitration in the U.S., this time seeking damages of over $600 million.The disputes -- both are ongoing -- bode ill for companies using platforms such as Salesforce.com to indirectly access data held in SAP systems subject to named-user licensing."SAP investors may welcome this litigation, but it's yet one more reason why new customers are fleeing to the hills, choosing Amazon Web Services or Google, where they can, for their future software needs," Robin Fry, legal director at software licensing consultancy Cerno Professional Services, said Thursday. "Why choose SAP if, despite being a loyal customer and careful attempts at compliance, there’s a real risk that they might bring a gun at your head, or force you to restate your earnings, down the line?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google echoes Amazon’s assurance on EU data protection compliance

Google has joined Amazon Web Services in promising customers of its cloud services that it will be compliant with new European Union data protection rules due to take effect next year.Neither company is fully compliant yet, but both have now made public commitments to meet the requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by May 25, 2018, echoing a promise Microsoft made back in February.The GDPR replaces the 1995 Data Protection Directive. Among its biggest changes are requirements that companies:- erase personal data on request unless there is a legitimate reason to retain it; - inform those affected by data breaches, and- design data protection into their products and services from the earliest stage of development.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat beefs up its OpenShift containerization platform

Red Hat is beefing up its OpenShift containerization-as-a-service offering with a new developer tool for packaging apps into containers, foundations for incorporating microservices into those applications, and tighter integration of Amazon Web Services functionality with the platform. The biggest news, as far as Red Hat is concerned, is that it will offer native access to AWS from within OpenShift Container Platform later this year. That will make it possible for enterprises to configure AWS services from within the same interface they use to create and deploy containerized applications.It made the announcements at the Red Hat Summit in Boston on Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA suggests using virtualization to secure smartphones

The U.S. National Security Agency is now suggesting government departments and businesses buy smartphones secured using virtualization, a technology it currently requires only on tablets and laptopsThe change comes about with the arrival of the first virtualization-based smartphone security system on the U.S. Commercial Solutions for Classified list.CSFC is a program developed by the NSA to help U.S. government agencies and the businesses that serve them to quickly build layered secure systems from approved components.An HTC A9 smartphone security-hardened by Cog Systems using its D4 virtualization platform is now on that list, alongside devices without virtualization from Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, and BlackBerry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA suggests using virtualization to secure smartphones

IBM applies AI to factory QA

IBM's Watson artificial intelligence technology has found plenty of white-collar work in places like hospitals and banks, but soon it will be off to get its hands dirty on the factory floor.Working with ABB, a maker of industrial plant, IBM has developed a new AI assistant to help factory workers spot manufacturing defects on the production line.Connected to an existing industrial monitoring system, ABB Ability, it will help manufacturers improve speed, yield, and uptime, according to ABB.The Cognitive Visual Inspection system, as IBM calls it, pipes images from a UHD (ultra-high-definition) camera to an instance of IBM's Watson software that has been trained to detect and classify production faults in real time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Read all about IT: CEOs see IT as more important than ever

As IT rises up the list of business priorities, CEOs are more likely to read about new technologies than they are to ask their CIOs for information.That's one of the findings in a new survey by Gartner, in which 31 percent of business leaders questioned put IT among their top three priorities. It's the highest-ever ranking in the survey for IT, which was trumped only by profits and growth, cited by 58 percent.The 388 business leaders questioned -- mostly CEOs, with a smattering of CFOs and COOs -- are twice as likely to want to build up in-house IT capabilities (57 percent) as to outsource it (29 percent), which ought to be good news for CIOs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers build a microprocessor from flexible materials

Researchers have built a primitive microprocessor out of a two-dimensional material similar to graphene, the flexible conductive wonder material that some believe will revolutionize the design and manufacture of batteries, sensors and chips.With only 115 transistors, their processor isn't going to top any benchmark rankings, but it's "a first step towards the development of microprocessors based on 2D semiconductors," the researchers at Vienna University of Technology said in a paper published in the journal Nature this month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

By Djingo, there’s a new virtual assistant

How many virtual assistants can you fit in one smartphone? European network operator Orange is hoping there's room to squeeze in one more.With the right apps, you can already talk to Alexa, Cortana and Google through your smartphone -- and maybe also to Siri or Bixby if you went with one of the big brands.Orange wants to add Djingo to that list.Djingo will be able to answer questions, send text messages, place calls, play music and video from Orange's set-top box, and control smart home devices.It draws on the company's research into linguistics and artificial intelligence, and will even offer financial advice in conjunction with a new banking service Orange is launching, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle adds attention analytics to its data cloud with Moat buy

Oracle's online advertising analytics platform will soon know even more about what you are watching, where and when: The company has agreed to buy Moat, which aims to track how much attention consumers are paying to online media.Moat's platform tracks browsing and viewing habits on desktop and mobile devices, and even connected TVs. It touts its ability to separate out non-human traffic so advertisers don't pay for clicks from bots, and to quantify the audibility and visibility of ads.Oracle plans to add Moat's information about viewing habits to Oracle Data Cloud, which provides analytics tools and data about what consumers do and buy to marketers and publishers. Moat will continue to operate as an independent platform within that division, Oracle said Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft buys former employee Charles Simonyi’s Intentional Software

Serial space tourist Charles Simonyi is going back again -- to his former employer, Microsoft.When Simonyi quit as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect in 2002, it was to create a start-up devoted to making programming simpler. Now Microsoft has agreed to acquire that company, Intentional Software.During his absence from Microsoft, Simonyi also found time to fly to the International Space Station -- twice. He made his first trip in 2007 and liked it so much that he went back again two years later.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The goal of a new machine

Not every computer owner would be as pleased as Andrew Wheeler that their new machine could run "all weekend" without crashing.But not everyone's machine is "The Machine," an attempt to redefine a relationship between memory and processor that has held since the earliest days of parallel computing.Wheeler is a vice president and deputy labs director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He's at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, to tell people about The Machine, a key part of which is on display in HPE's booth.Rather than have processors, surrounded by tiered RAM, flash and disks, communicating with one another to identify which of their neighbors has the freshest copy of the information they need, HPE's goal with The Machine is to build a large pool of persistent memory that application processors can just access.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Peelytics turns peeing into a way to promote products

Not many companies would want you to pee on their product, but one at Cebit positively encourages it.Peelytics of Heidelberg, Germany, has developed a Bluetooth beacon that detects when someone is urinating on it, and for how long. If that person has a hand free to wake up their smartphone, they can "claim" that micturition as their own using the Peelytics app, and perhaps win a prize if they peed for longest.It's all a game designed to encourage people to improve their aim (keeping restrooms cleaner) and to pay attention to promotional messages while in toilets in bars and clubs -- areas that marketers have already identified as prime placements for advertising.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE unveils a new SimpliVity appliance

Two months after acquiring SimpliVity for US$650 million, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is beginning to reshape the company's converged infrastructure offering in its own image. SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure appliance, the OmniCube, replaces storage switches, cloud gateways, high-availability shared storage, and appliances for backup and deduplication, WAN optimization, and storage caching. The company also offers OmniStack, the software powering the OmniCube, packaged for other vendors’ hardware.Now HPE has qualified that software on its workhorse ProLiant DL380 server and will sell it as the snappily titled HPE SimpliVity 380 with OmniStack, Mark Linesch, the vice president for global strategy and operations of HPE's enterprise group, said Tuesday at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE unveils a new SimpliVity appliance

Huawei sees switch to flash as right time to rethink whole storage infrastructure

Huawei Technologies is going all flash with its latest enterprise storage system, the OceanStor Dorado V3.It's part of the new storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offering the company unveiled at Cebit on Monday, with which it aims to deliver the same experience on-premises and in the cloud. The Chinese equipment vendor is not the first to propose storage-as-a-service, but thinks now is the right time to make its move, as the convergence of big data, analytics and the internet of things increases the pressure on enterprise storage infrastructure. "Large enterprises are talking of storage transformation, whether they should restructure their storage," said Wing Kin Leung, CTO of Huawei's enterprise business group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bdrive secures files in the cloud with fingerprints and fragmentation

Maximum privacy seems to be the goal for the new enterprise authentication and cloud storage services Bundesdruckerei is showing at Cebit this week.The 250-year-old state printer has moved far beyond its origins as a printer of banknotes and, later, passports, offering all sorts of secure digital authentication services.At the exhibition in Hanover, Germany, this week it's showing Bdrive, a way for businesses to securely and reliably store important files in the cloud.Unlike services such as Dropbox, Bdrive doesn't store the files themselves, just metadata about them. The task of storing the files is left to other public cloud storage services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GelTouch adds a new dimension to touch-sensitive controls

The problem with a lot of touch-sensitive controls is that the communication is one-way: They can feel you, but you can't feel them. With touch-screen displays it's easy enough, as the button does what it says on the screen. Not all buttons are designed to be looked at as they are pushed, though. Take video-game controllers or car entertainment systems, for example, or some industrial controls. The user's attention is typically elsewhere when these are operated. Manufacturers can mold raised blobs into the surface to show where to press, perhaps even using the shape of the blob to identify the button's function, but that means that, unlike a touch-screen, the number and function of the buttons is fixed from the moment the device leaves the factory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Japan looks beyond Industry 4.0 towards Society 5.0

Declining birth rate, aging population, natural disasters, pollution: Do these sound like issues the IT industry can deal with? Japanese businesses say yes, and a number of them are at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, to explain why. Industry 4.0 -- the building of "smart factories" in which machines monitor one another and make decentralized decisions about production and maintenance -- has been a theme of recent Cebit shows. Now, under the banner Society 5.0, the show's partner country for 2017, Japan, wants to take the transformation beyond industry, making "smart society" one of the show's talking points. Behind the drive are some very real societal problems. Japan's population is falling, but the average age of its citizens is increasing. A consequence of a low birth rate and extreme longevity, this is leading to an imbalance between young, active workers and those needing care. But with the country in a seismically active area, and having an ageing industrial infrastructure, this shrinking workforce is likely to deal with natural disasters and incidents of pollution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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