Stephen Lawson
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The CEOs of Google and Oracle met for 6 hours Friday but failed to settle their lawsuit
The CEOs of Oracle and Google met for six hours on Friday but failed to reach a deal to end their massive copyright lawsuit over Google's use of Java in Android."After an earlier run at settling this case failed, the court observed that some cases just need to be tried. This case apparently needs to be tried twice," Magistrate Judge Paul Singh Grewal, who mediated the talks, noted on the court's docket.Oracle accuses Google of illegally copying a key part of the Java platform into its Android operating system, making billions in profit for Google and, according to Oracle, crushing Java’s chance of success in smartphones, tablets and other products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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On many IoT projects, IT shops get left behind
IT departments are playing second fiddle to operations people as enterprises tune up for the Internet of Things. That’s one of the surprising findings from a survey of people involved in business IoT projects in the U.S. The survey, conducted last month by Technalysis Research, also revealed that monitoring employees is the No. 1 thing companies want to do with the widely hyped technology. IoT straddles IT and operational technology, two disciplines that for decades have lived side by side without much interaction. Operations people handle things like lights, locks, and machine tools, while IT folks buy the computers and run them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The battle between LTE and Wi-Fi may have left LTE-U out in the cold
After more than a year of rancor over whether it would hurt Wi-Fi, a technology that lets LTE networks use unlicensed spectrum may have already missed its window of opportunity.LTE-Unlicensed is designed to improve cellular service by tapping into some of the frequencies used by Wi-Fi and other unlicensed technologies. But almost as soon as LTE-U was proposed in late 2014, Wi-Fi supporters pounced. They charged that it would drown out Wi-Fi signals because LTE didn’t know how to make room for other users.+ PRIMER: LTE-U: A quick explainer +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google buildings evacuated after threat
Buildings were evacuated at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, on Friday afternoon after a threat was made against the company.No one was injured and there was no damage to buildings, Mountain View police spokeswoman Katie Nelson said. The incident involved a few buildings, beginning around 3:30 p.m. and concluded shortly before 5 p.m. Both police and Google security responded.Google didn't immediately have more information to provide. Police didn't comment on the nature of the threat and said they responded out of caution.While the campuses of Silicon Valley companies aren’t normally considered terrorist targets on the scale of federal buildings or major sporting events, major companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook are prominent symbols of U.S. economic and cultural power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google buildings evacuated after threat
Buildings were evacuated at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, on Friday afternoon after a threat was made against the company.No one was injured and there was no damage to buildings, Mountain View police spokeswoman Katie Nelson said. The incident involved a few buildings, beginning around 3:30 p.m. and concluded shortly before 5 p.m. Both police and Google security responded.Google didn't immediately have more information to provide. Police didn't comment on the nature of the threat and said they responded out of caution.While the campuses of Silicon Valley companies aren’t normally considered terrorist targets on the scale of federal buildings or major sporting events, major companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook are prominent symbols of U.S. economic and cultural power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Korea’s working on a cool combination: 5G and the Winter Olympics
If you want to be one of the first to experience 5G mobile performance, get ready to bundle up.South Korean carrier KT has said it wants to launch the first 5G network at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. On Thursday, KT announced a successful trial of one potential 5G technology in the mountain resort region.The carrier tested a system from NEC that uses super-high frequencies to transmit data at speeds as high as 3.2Gbps (bits per second). Though the companies didn't mention the Olympic Games, and there's no guarantee the technology will be part of the 5G standard, it's no coincidence the trial took place high in the Taebaek Mountains.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Sigfox’s slow but thrifty IoT network is going Down Under
The Sigfox low-power IoT network is due for an expansion that may not be game-changing in practical terms but will certainly look good on a map.Sigfox announced a deal on Tuesday with a partner that will build a network across Australia and New Zealand using the French company's technology. That's a visible win for a vendor competing to connect small Internet of Things devices like sensors and meters around the world.Several vendors and industry groups are pushing technologies for networking small, far-flung objects that may need to run on a single battery for years. These LPWANs (low-power wide-area networks) don't push a lot of data through the air but are more efficient than the cellular infrastructure that talks to smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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This startup uses math to show whether your network is safe
How do you know your network is safe from attacks and failures? Veriflow, a startup with backing from the U.S. Defense Department, says it can make sure.Veriflow applies a practice called formal verification, used in preparing Mars missions and military gear, to figure out ahead of time what could go wrong on a network. Using that information, it helps enterprises apply policies to prevent problems from starting or spreading.If this sounds more at home in a lab than in a data center, it may be because that's where it came from. Veriflow's CTO, CSO and principal engineer are all longtime academics who worked on the problem together at the University of Illinois, and the National Science Foundation is a funder.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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This startup uses math to show whether your network is safe
How do you know your network is safe from attacks and failures? Veriflow, a startup with backing from the U.S. Defense Department, says it can make sure.Veriflow applies a practice called formal verification, used in preparing Mars missions and military gear, to figure out ahead of time what could go wrong on a network. Using that information, it helps enterprises apply policies to prevent problems from starting or spreading.If this sounds more at home in a lab than in a data center, it may be because that's where it came from. Veriflow's CTO, CSO and principal engineer are all longtime academics who worked on the problem together at the University of Illinois, and the National Science Foundation is a funder.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Verizon’s breach experts missed one right under their noses
Verizon Enterprise, a bulwark against cyberattacks at many large organizations, has suffered a security breach itself.A flaw in the company's systems allowed an attacker to steal contact information on Verizon Enterprise customers, the company acknowledged Thursday. Verizon said it has fixed the flaw and is notifying those users, but it hasn't disclosed how many were affected. The intruder couldn't get to any customer proprietary network information, Verizon said, referring to data such as call records and billing information.The breach came to light Thursday in a post on the blog Krebs on Security. Krebs reported the hacker stole contact information for about 1.5 million Verizon Enterprise customers and offered it for sale for US$100,000 on a cybercrime forum. Because the data was offered for sale in the MongoDB format, among others it's likely the attacker forced a MongoDB database at Verizon to dump its contents, the blog said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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AT&T wants the world to see its software for spinning up services
AT&T has revealed details of a software platform that makes it easier for customers to order new services, and the company may release the code as open source for other service providers to use.The massive U.S. carrier has been on a full-tilt push to put its network under software control for the past several years, aiming to slash the time and effort required to deliver new services and change settings like the speed of a customer's connections. It's starting to offer subscribers a way to set up or modify services instantly through a Web portal. The effort is also helping AT&T save money, partly by using generic "white box" hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook’s open network gear hits the big time at Equinix
Facebook's open networking technology is making inroads into the data center establishment, with global giant Equinix adopting the company's Wedge switch design and an open-source architecture in some of its facilities.The collaboration is the latest sign that network and server designs coming out of the Open Compute Project, which Facebook launched in 2011, are entering the IT mainstream. It was announced at the OCP Summit in San Jose, California. OCP promotes open-source hardware that any manufacturer can make, bringing some of the efficiencies of Web-scale infrastructure built in-house at places like Facebook to general enterprises. Lower costs and greater flexibility are the key advantages that fans ascribe to this approach.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple and the FBI will need to compromise, Cisco’s CEO says
Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins gave up a chance to strongly support enterprise mobility partner Apple in its fight with the FBI over iPhone encryption.Asked about the controversy during a press briefing at Mobile World Congress, Robbins said he doesn't think vendors should put back doors in products. But when it comes to personal privacy versus national security, "There needs to be a balance," he said. Ultimately, the two sides will need to compromise, Robbins said.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Tim Cook refuses order to help unlock terrorist's iPhone 5c +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple and the FBI will need to compromise, Cisco’s CEO says
Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins gave up a chance to strongly support enterprise mobility partner Apple in its fight with the FBI over iPhone encryption.Asked about the controversy during a press briefing at Mobile World Congress, Robbins said he doesn't think vendors should put back doors in products. But when it comes to personal privacy versus national security, "There needs to be a balance," he said. Ultimately, the two sides will need to compromise, Robbins said.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Tim Cook refuses order to help unlock terrorist's iPhone 5c +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Stock-market jitters have rocked network spending, Cisco says
The world's financial markets got off to such a rough start this year that some enterprises froze plans to upgrade their campus networks.After oil prices and stock markets around the globe plunged during the first trading days of the year, there was a slowdown in spending that hurt Cisco Systems results and colored its forecast for the current quarter, CEO Chuck Robbins said Wednesday."You see customers say, 'I want to just wait, see what's going on,'" Robbins said on a conference call about Cisco's fiscal second quarter, which ended Jan. 23.The report was a reminder that what happens in financial markets can echo in IT departments if business management fears shrinking sales or a falling stock price ahead. Cisco has a different financial calendar than most other IT companies and is one of the first to report on a quarter that spilled over into this calendar year. It's the world's dominant supplier of networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco-Jasper deal should make enterprise IoT safer
Cisco Systems' planned US$1.4 billion acquisition of Jasper Technologies could make it easier for enterprises to build businesses around services instead of products. While the Internet of Things includes sensors and devices that enterprises can use to better run their operations and cut costs, it can also give them whole new business models. Much of Jasper's business is connecting the products companies make to mobile networks. It sits between enterprises and mobile operators, doing the complicated work of tying IoT applications to network connections. Cisco builds a lot of the gear on the network side of that equation, plus higher-level smarts like analytics on the other end that can make IoT more effective and profitable. Bringing their capabilities together will simplify deployments that currently involve lots of different companies and pieces of software, the companies say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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As 5G approaches, 3G and 4G are still getting faster
Most of the excitement at Mobile World Congress this month will be about 5G, which won't officially exist until 2020. But vendors will also be showing off new ways to speed up the networks people are using now.That means more than 4G, because while LTE gets a lot of press, older services are more common than you might think. Just over half of the world's mobile subscriptions (51 percent) are for 2G service only, according to Tolaga Research analyst Phil Marshall. Almost one-third are limited to 3G, while only 15 percent are 4G. Even in 2020, only 48 percent of subscriptions will be for 4G.Some users are stuck on a slower network because they haven't upgraded to a faster phone, and some of those 2G-only subscriptions are for connected machines that don't need any more speed. But there are a lot of mobile users who could use a performance bump even before 5G comes along.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Arista just lost a patent round against Cisco and could face an import ban
Cisco Systems has won the latest round against Arista Networks at a U.S. trade agency that could block importation of Arista products. Arista violated three Cisco patents on networking technologies, Administrative Law Judge David Shaw of the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled on Tuesday. If the full Commission confirms that finding, the ruling could be bad news for Arista, a growing player in data-center networking.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 15 more useful Cisco sites Cisco sued Arista in December 2014, alleging the Silicon Valley startup violated 14 patents in its Arista EOS operating system. The legal battle continues, heading toward two possible trials in federal court as well as continuing activity at the ITC. In a blog post Tuesday, Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler said a ruling in a second ITC investigation is expected in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Forget about LTE hurting Wi-Fi and think about using it in your business
Controversial technology that lets LTE networks use unlicensed spectrum could become a trusted part of the enterprise IT toolkit in a few years.So-called unlicensed LTE has come under fire ever since the news about it first broke more than a year ago. The charge: If mobile operators adapt their LTE networks to use frequencies that Wi-Fi depends on, Wi-Fi users will get squeezed out.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD U.S. carriers stay tight-lipped on LTE-U deployments The two sides are now working together on standard tests to tell if a given unlicensed LTE radio unfairly interferes with Wi-Fi. Meanwhile, Qualcomm, the biggest cheerleader for the new technology, just got permission to try it out at Verizon Wireless facilities in Oklahoma City and Raleigh, North Carolina, the Federal Communications Commission said Friday. The industry group Wi-Fi Forward promptly declared the FCC should closely monitor the experiments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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EFF says Cisco shouldn’t get off the hook for torture in China
Cisco Systems built a security system for the Chinese government knowing it would be used to track and persecute members of the Falun Gong religious minority, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation technology rights group.Falun Gong practitioners alleged the same thing in a lawsuit that a federal judge in Northern California dismissed in 2014. That case is being appealed, and on Monday the EFF, Privacy International and free-speech group Article 19 filed a brief that supports the appeal.The case highlights the risks technology companies take by selling software and hardware to customers around the world. Some of those customers may use the technology in ways that raise objections in other countries, creating legal problems or just tarnishing a vendor's reputation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here