Waterproof phones are exciting. Instead of dropping your phone in a bowl of rice when you accidentally knock it off the counter and into the sink, you can just dry it off and keep on truckin’. And many of today’s waterproof phones are as waterproof as they can possibly get—they’ve got an IPX8 rating, where 8 is the highest (barring extreme products that aren’t made for consumers) “waterproofness” a consumer device can possibly qualify for.Right?Well…maybe not. The Samsung Galaxy S7 has an IP68 rating—the highest rating a consumer device can get on the IP scale—but that still doesn’t mean you should take it surfing or white-water rafting. Here’s what those IP ratings really mean.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Now that the big three cloud vendors—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—have released their financial results for the fourth quarter of 2016, it’s time once again to take stock of how fast the cloud is growing. The short answer remains: very, very fast. That conclusion comes in spite of some carping from analysts about the latest numbers from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but I don’t think those complaints add up to much when comes to the health of the cloud computing industry. But let’s take a closer look, and you can decide for yourself. AWS posted strong growth
AWS revenue grew 47 percent in the quarter to $3.5 billion. The business earned $926 million in the quarter, up from $540 million in Q4 2015. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft´s Azure Marketplace is to Azure what the Windows Store is to the client operating system: an online software marketplace, only the Azure version is for buying and selling cloud apps and services from independent software vendors (ISVs) that have been certified by Microsoft to run on Azure. Over the years, the Marketplac has grown along with the popularity of Azure, and customers got frustrated with its interface due to an increasing number of categories, app types and providers. Finding the apps they wanted became a chore.So, Microsoft introduced a whole new Azure Marketplace interface designed to make things easier. For starters, the search form now provides search suggestions as you type, just like a search engine would. Results are sorted by relevance and popularity. You can do searches on basic terms and then narrow it down to more specific categories, applications and functions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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
Digital transformation is making a significant impact on the enterprise. Organizations in all industries are realizing the need to enhance the customer experience through IoT, social media, big data, and mobility. Not only are each of these opportunities transforming IT’s role within the enterprise, they are ultimately changing how organizations operate.To keep pace, numerous organizations are integrating flash storage into their infrastructure for many of their newest applications. But while flash is easy to deploy in satellite applications, integrating this valuable data back into the legacy storage infrastructure can be harder than expected. Aggressive deployment can be problematic, and enterprise networks often struggle to keep up with the higher performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, PayPal and the Wikimedia Foundation were among 97 companies which filed an amicus brief late Sunday opposing President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration on the grounds that it harms competitiveness and is discriminatory.The brief was filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals late last night, a bump up in the timetable as Bloomberg reported the companies had originally planned to file later this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The trend is clear: The percentage of IT infrastructure and application workloads residing in enterprise data centers is expected to shrink from 59% today to 47% in two years, primarily the result of companies shifting resources to the public cloud, according to a survey recently released by data center provider Datalink.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
With the annual RSA security conference just around the corner, we decided to touch base with the 10 companies selected as finalists in last year’s Innovation Sandbox competition and see how they’re making out.5. PREVOTYTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
With the annual RSA security conference just around the corner, we decided to touch base with the 10 companies selected as finalists in last year’s Innovation Sandbox competition and see how they’re making out.5. PREVOTYTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Google has been ordered by a federal court in Pennsylvania to comply with search warrants and produce customer emails stored abroad, in a decision that is in sharp contrast to that of an appeals court in a similar case involving Microsoft.Magistrate Judge Thomas J. Rueter of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled Friday that the two warrants under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) for emails required by the government in two criminal investigations constituted neither a seizure nor a search of the targets' data in a foreign country.Transferring data electronically from a server in a foreign country to Google's data center in California does not amount to a seizure because “there is no meaningful interference with the account holder's possessory interest in the user data,” and Google’s algorithm in any case regularly transfers user data from one data center to another without the customer's knowledge, Judge Rueter wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekImage by FortinetOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Red Armor NSE7000Image by corsaTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nvidia's Quadro GP100 shares many features with the company's most advanced Tesla P100 GPU, but it also brings the superfast NVLink to Windows PCs and workstations.The Quadro GP100 isn't targeted at gaming -- it's aimed more at virtual reality content creation, simulation, and engineering applications. The GPU is based on the Pascal architecture and is capable of supporting up to 5K displays at 60Hz.The new GPU is the fastest Quadro yet, with 32-bit floating point performance of about 12 teraflops via 3,584 CUDA cores. That outpaces the Quadro P6000, which delivers 10 teraflops of performance.The GP100 also delivers 64-bit floating point performance of 5 teraflops via 1,792 cores for more precise calculations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
iHome's iPL23 is compatible with iPhones 5, 6 and 7 (including Plus models), features premium speakers, a Lightning charging dock, FM radio, and alarm clock in one compact device. This handy radio clock charges Lightning-capable iPhone and iPod devices, while letting you wake or sleep to your favorite songs, podcasts, audio books or FM radio station. Gradual wake/sleep function slowly increases or decreases volume as you drift off, or come to. A USB port allows for simultaneous charging of your iPad or Apple Watch as well. The iPL23 in white has been discounted 25% from $79.95 to $59.95.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It takes a brave company to attempt to gain a serious foothold in the U.S. smartphone market given that the dominant players are so massive and entrenched but that apparently wasn't a concern of LeEco when the company launched its products at the end of 2016. And rather than just selling smartphones, LeEco’s market approach is to become a lifestyle brand and claims that:
LeEco seamlessly blends devices, content, applications and distribution in a first-of-its kind ecosystem. This innovative approach puts extraordinary experiences in the hands of millions of people all over the world.
Pretty ambitious stuff but perhaps not surprising as LeEco is notable for being aggressively innovative and their product lines include televisions (the company acquired U.S. television manufacturer Vizio last year), headphones, speakers, chargers, phone covers, and there’s the LeEco Super Bike (with built-in fingerprint sensor ID and a waterproof touchscreen Android display). But wait! There’s more! They’ve even showcased a high-tech, self-driving concept car. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla confirmed that it is shuttering a group tasked with creating an operating system for connected devices, the category pegged as the "Internet of things," or IoT.It was the second defeat in 14 months for Mozilla projects aimed at producing commercial hardware products."We have shifted our internal approach to the IoT opportunity to step back from a focus on launching and scaling commercial products to one focused on research and advanced development," a Mozilla spokesman said in an email reply to questions. The open-source developer will dissolve its connected devices project, and will instead "incorporate our IoT explorations into an increased focus on emerging technologies."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Did Apple purposefully break iOS 6, rendering old iPhones unusable before their time? That’s the question at the heart of a new class-action lawsuit against the Cupertino company, which claims that Apple killed FaceTime in iOS 6 to avoid paying hefty licensing fees.The basis of the lawsuit, first reported by AppleInsider, comes from details that emerged last year in VirnetX’s patent infringement suit against the company. VirnetX licenses patents to technology companies, and one of those patents covers peer-to-peer audio and video transfer; Apple used peer-to-peer transfer to power FaceTime. When VirnetX, which has been described as a “patent troll,” came after Apple, the company switched to another relay method for FaceTime, using the third-party server Akami. That’s where things get tricky. Apple had to pay Akamai for that server usage to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. Faced with VirnetX’s patent infringement court win and mounting Akamai bills, Apple created a new peer-to-peer protocol for FaceTime in iOS 7.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The blazing fast speed and low latency of 5G could suffer from the same obstacle that Gig-internet access does: a scarcity of apps that demonstrate its capabilities. Case in point: The Chattanooga municipal power company EPB slashed the price of Gig-internet to $69.95 per month because many customers opted for slower 100MB service at $59.95 because typical mobile and PC apps do not showcase the benefits of the top speed offering.It is a chicken and egg problem, or more aptly the chicken and the app problem. Without high-speed infrastructure, apps cannot be built that demonstrate the capabilities of 5G. And without apps, infrastructure will not reach cost effectiveness and be deployed at scale. 5G will not scale without distributing the cloud platforms into the network infrastructure running on software-defined networking (SDN) commodity hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.K.’s defense secretary is accusing Russia of using cyber attacks to “disable” democratic processes across the West, and he's demanding that NATO fight back.“NATO must defend itself as effectively in the cyber sphere as it does in the air, on land, and at sea,” Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said. “So adversaries know there is a price to pay if they use cyber weapons.”Fallon made the comments in a Thursday speech about the threat of “Russia’s military resurgence.”He pointed to the Kremlin’s suspected role in influencing last year’s presidential election in the U.S., as part of growing number of alleged cyber attacks that have targeted Western governments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Like clockwork, the week leading up to the Super Bowl has seen the federal government tear into the counterfeit sports gear element – this time seizing some $20 million worth of fake jerseys, hats, cell-phone accessories and thousands of other bogus items prepared to be sold to unsuspecting consumers.+More on Network World: 10 of the latest craziest and scariest things the TSA found on your fellow travelers+ ICE/DHS
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) teams nabbed 260,000 counterfeit sports-related items during its annual, year-long Operation Team Player sting. Last year ICE seized nearly 450,000 phony items worth an estimated $39 million. In 2014 it grabbed 326,147 phony items worth more than $19.5 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enterprises have made it clear that when it comes to cloud computing, one size does not fit all. What we’re hearing from the market is the need for consistency with choice, otherwise known as a balanced cloud platform. Unique business needs, along with security, geography and regulatory considerations, dictate a mixing and matching of both public and private cloud solutions—thus the rise of hybrid.Case in point, Forrester surveyed 1,000-plus North American and European enterprise decision makers and found that in the next 12 months 38 percent are building private clouds, 32 percent are building public clouds, and 59 percent are adopting a hybrid model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here