Peter Sayer, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Peter Sayer

Author Archives: Peter Sayer

UN steps in to end marketing war over what 5G means

With mobile operators' marketing departments already throwing around claims about their 5G services, the United Nations is weighing in with its definition of what qualifies a network as next-generation.Verizon Wireless will begin delivering "5G" service to select users in 11 U.S. cities in mid-2017, even though some places don't yet have access to 4G. And at the Mobile World Congress 2017 trade show in Barcelona, companies including Intel, Qualcomm and Ericsson will be promoting their moves towards 5G.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Police arrest man suspected of building million-router German botnet

Last year, someone turned a German internet service provider into a million-router botnet. German police think they will soon have the culprit.The U.K.'s National Crime Agency (NCA) made an arrest on Wednesday in connection with the November 2016 hack on Deutsche Telekom. The agency said it arrested a 29-year-old man at Luton airport, acting on a European Arrest Warrant issued by the public prosecutor's office in Cologne, Germany.The German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA), which led the investigation, said it had worked with British law enforcement officials to arrest the man, a Briton.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Police arrest man suspected of building million-router German botnet

Kite-surfing could put rural Brits online

U.K. network operator EE plans to deliver 4G internet access from a kite-like balloon first developed as an observation and communications platform for the military.The Helikite was invented in the 1990s and has also found favor with Antarctic explorers, disaster relief workers and emergency services. EE revealed its plans to deliver wide-area network coverage from the helium-filled balloons on Tuesday, although it won't have the first one in service until later in the year.According to Allsopp Helikites, the maker of the kite-balloons, hoisting a 4G base station aloft can increase its range from 3 kilometers to between 30 km and 80 km.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARM buys Mistbase and NextG-Com to extend its reach in IoT

Chip designer ARM has a new strategy for the internet of things: to offer complete solutions "from application software to antenna."ARM has typically left it to licensees of its microprocessor designs to add their own wide-area radio modems and other circuitry essential for the chips at the heart of smartphones and other connected devices. That's the case with Qualcomm, for example, which packages ARM's processor core with its own LTE modems to deliver the chips at the heart of Apple's iPhones.But now ARM wants to deliver the whole stack itself, at least for low-power, low-bandwidth devices, ARM wireless business general manager Paul Williamson said in a blog post Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Changes to Windows 10’s data-gathering not enough to satisfy EU privacy watchdog

European Union privacy watchdogs are still not happy with Windows 10's gathering of data about its users, over a year after they first wrote to Microsoft to complain.While the company has developed ways to give users more control over what data is collected, their consent to its collection cannot be valid without further explanation, according to the Article 29 Working Party, an umbrella body for the EU's national privacy regulators.The working party welcomed Microsoft's introduction of five new options in Windows 10 to limit or switch off certain kinds of data processing, but said they provided insufficient information about their operation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Changes to Windows 10’s data-gathering not enough to satisfy EU privacy watchdogs

European Union privacy watchdogs are still not happy with Windows 10's gathering of data about its users, over a year after they first wrote to Microsoft to complain. While the company has developed ways to give users more control over what data is collected, their consent to its collection cannot be valid without further explanation, according to the Article 29 Working Party, an umbrella body for the EU's national privacy regulators. The working party welcomed Microsoft's introduction of five new options in Windows 10 to limit or switch off certain kinds of data processing, but said they provided insufficient information about their operation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple, Microsoft and Amazon offer fairer deal on cloud storage

Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to give cloud storage subscribers fairer contracts after intervention by the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority.Such cloud storage services are typically used to store photos, videos, music or digital copies of important documents.If the services shut down or vary their capacity or prices without notice, customers can lose their data, or be held hostage.The CMA asked the storage service providers to give adequate notice before closing, suspending or changing services, and to allow customers to cancel their contracts and receive a pro-rata refund if they didn't accept service changes.The regulator last year obtained similar undertakings from Google, Dropbox and five other cloud storage providers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SAP license fees are due even for indirect users, court says

SAP's named-user licensing fees apply even to related applications that only offer users indirect visibility of SAP data, a U.K. judge ruled Thursday in a case pitting SAP against Diageo, the alcoholic beverage giant behind Smirnoff vodka and Guinness beer.The consequences could be far-reaching for businesses that have integrated their customer-facing systems with an SAP database, potentially leaving them liable for license fees for every customer that accesses their online store."If any SAP systems are being indirectly triggered, even if incidentally, and from anywhere in the world, then there are uncategorized and unpriced costs stacking up in the background," warned Robin Fry, a director at software licensing consultancy Cerno Professional Services, who has been following the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple smartphones outsold Samsung’s in Q4

Apple has overtaken Samsung Electronics in smartphone sales for the first time in two years -- but don't count on it staying ahead for long.Samsung sold 76.8 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, giving it a market share of 17.8 percent, but it was just beaten by Apple, which sold 77 million iPhones for a 17.9 percent share, according to figures from Gartner.The fourth quarter is usually a strong one for Apple, boosted by holiday sales of the new generation of iPhones it releases each September, said Anshul Gupta, a research director at Gartner.For Samsung, though, 2016 ended particularly badly, dominated by the fiasco around the recall of its incendiary Galaxy Note7.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Toshiba’s in chaos, but not quitting PCs — yet

Toshiba is more than a laptop maker, but the vast Japanese conglomerate shrunk on Tuesday under a wave of bad news.In one day, the company lost its chairman, said it will stop building nuclear power plants, wrote off about US$6.2 billion relating to that business, and postponed its fourth-quarter earnings report for a month.Its financial problems were no secret: Two weeks ago, it revealed plans to sell stakes in its memory chip and SSD businesses to cover the nuclear write-offs.Last June, it sold an 80 percent stake in its domestic appliances business, Toshiba Lifestyle, for $450 million. Before that sale, it had been planning to develop a series of smart appliances that could link up with its TVs and PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple joins Wireless Power Consortium, charging up iPhone 8 rumor

Apple has joined the consortium behind the Qi wireless charging system, supercharging rumors that owners of future an iPhone could live tangle-free.Last week, a financial analyst claimed Apple will release three new iPhones with wireless charging capabilities this year, reviving an on-again, off-again rumor about the next-generation iPhone's capabilities.The appearance of Apple's name on the membership list of the Wireless Power Consortium, Qi's creator, over the last week adds credence to that rumor. Its name was not on the list cached by Google's search engine last Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US chipmaker plans new factory in China

GlobalFoundries will open a new factory to make cheap wireless chips in Chengdu, China, next year.The chipmaker, once part of microprocessor designer AMD, also plans to expand production at existing fabrication plants in the U.S., Germany, and Singapore, it said Friday. It makes chips for AMD, IBM, Qualcomm, and Mediatek, among others.Beginning next year, the new fab in China, a joint venture with the municipality of Chengdu, will produce chips on 300-millimeter wafers using standard manufacturing techniques, the company said.Sometime in 2019, it will switch to a different manufacturing process, FD-SOI (fully depleted silicon on insulator), which GlobalFoundries calls 22FDX. That process is particularly suitable for the low-cost manufacture of the radio-frequency chips used in smartphones, cars, and the internet of things, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia makes bid for Comptel to boost its software business

Network equipment vendor Nokia wants to buy a software company that helps customers make do with less hardware.The Finnish networking giant competes with the likes of Ericsson, Huawei Technologies, and Cisco Systems to sell networking equipment, software, and services to telecommunications operators and large enterprises.On Thursday, it offered to buy Finnish neighbor Comptel, which develops software to help network operators manage their networks and deliver additional services.Nokia said the deal, valuing Comptel at around €347 million (US$370 million) would help it toward its goal of building a standalone software business.The bid is a logical move, said Sylvain Fabre, a research director at Gartner: "The days of proprietary infrastructure from network equipment providers are numbered. Virtualized infrastructure will increasingly be procurable from alternative vendors, so focusing on software and applications for telecommunications functions is the way forward for any large vendor that seeks longevity."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia makes bid for Comptel to boost its software business

Accenture wants to help businesses secure their blockchains

Accenture wants to help businesses use blockchain technologies more securely by locking away the encryption keys they use to sign transactions.It's built a system that blockchain developers can use to store credentials in specialized cryptoprocessors called hardware security modules (HSMs).HSMs are typically used by banks to store the PINs associated with payment cards or the credentials used to make interbank payments over the SWIFT network, and are much more secure than storing the credentials, even in encrypted form, on network-connected servers from where attackers could steal them.The PINs or credentials never leave the HSMs, and their use within them is strictly controlled.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Accenture wants to help businesses secure their blockchains

Irish court hears case challenging transatlantic data transfers

Max Schrems' 2013 complaint to the Irish data protection commissioner over Facebook's handling of his personal information put him in an unusual position on Tuesday: He's a co-defendant, alongside Facebook, in a case before the High Court of Ireland.The case concerns the standard contract clauses that Facebook and other companies relied on to legalize their export of European Union citizens' personal information to the U.S. for processing in the months after the Safe Harbor agreement was overturned.The three-week hearing began Tuesday with representations from the data protection commissioner, which brought the case; Schrems and Facebook will get their turn next week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stratoscale buys Tesora to bolster hybrid cloud database capability

Cloud service provider Stratoscale has snapped up database-as-a-service vendor Tesora to beef up its hybrid cloud offering.Stratoscale's key product, Symphony, is built on OpenStack and allows businesses to set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) "region" in their own data center, so they can easily move workloads between private and public cloud servers or scale up capacity without having to migrate to a different service.Tesora's database as a service, also built on OpenStack, runs in public, private or hybrid clouds. Stratoscale plans to use it to expand its existing managed database support, which includes AWS Relational Database Service and the AWS NoSQL database, DynamoDB. Tesora will bring Stratoscale self-service provisioning capabilities for Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgresSQL, Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis, DataStax Enterprise, Persona and DB2 Express databases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stratoscale buys Tesora to bolster hybrid cloud database capability

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