Chromebook shipments surge by 38 percent, cutting into Windows 10 PCs

In a slowing PC market, Chromebooks siphoned market share away from Windows PCs in 2016 as their popularity grew outside the education market.Chromebook shipments grew by a stunning 38 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. Gartner estimated 9.4 million Chromebooks shipped, compared to 6.8 million units in 2015.The number is just a fraction of overall PC shipments, but growth came in an otherwise down PC market. Overall PC shipments in 2016 were about 270 million units, a decline of about 6.2 percent, according to Gartner.Looking forward, 2016 may go down as the best year ever for Chromebook shipment growth. Gartner is estimating shipments to continue growing in the coming years but at a slower pace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fatboy ransomware adjusts demands based on local price of a Big Mac

A new ransomware-for-hire scheme called Fatboy adjusts the ransom it charges based on international exchange rates so it’s more likely the victims get hit for the largest amount they can reasonably pay.Posted on Exploit, a Russian-language online forum, Fatboy automatically adjusts ransom demands according to where the victim is located, according to the Recorded Future blog.That adjustment is based on the Big Mac Index, which was created by The Economist as a way to show whether official international monetary exchange rates line up with the price charged for a certain product – the Big Mac burger sold by McDonald’s – from country to country. The index tells whether currencies are overvalued or undervalued based on what McDonald’s charges in each country.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fatboy ransomware adjusts demands based on local price of a Big Mac

A new ransomware-for-hire scheme called Fatboy adjusts the ransom it charges based on international exchange rates so it’s more likely the victims get hit for the largest amount they can reasonably pay.Posted on Exploit, a Russian-language online forum, Fatboy automatically adjusts ransom demands according to where the victim is located, according to the Recorded Future blog.That adjustment is based on the Big Mac Index, which was created by The Economist as a way to show whether official international monetary exchange rates line up with the price charged for a certain product – the Big Mac burger sold by McDonald’s – from country to country. The index tells whether currencies are overvalued or undervalued based on what McDonald’s charges in each country.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘Found a leaky ethernet port’

As a regular reader of Reddit’s section devoted to system administration, I have come to understand that subject lines such as “Found a leaky ethernet port” do no always mean what one might assume they mean. Today’s example: “This is going to be a fun couple of days,” bemoans the Redditor who discovered this leak. “It's been raining for two days straight and it's expected to continue for another two.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘Found a leaky ethernet port’

As a regular reader of Reddit’s section devoted to system administration, I have come to understand that subject lines such as “Found a leaky ethernet port” do no always mean what one might assume they mean. Today’s example: “This is going to be a fun couple of days,” bemoans the Redditor who discovered this leak. “It's been raining for two days straight and it's expected to continue for another two.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘Found a leaky ethernet port’

As a regular reader of Reddit’s section devoted to system administration, I have come to understand that subject lines such as “Found a leaky ethernet port” do no always mean what one might assume they mean. Today’s example: “This is going to be a fun couple of days,” bemoans the Redditor who discovered this leak. “It's been raining for two days straight and it's expected to continue for another two.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bird Reef

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Burnout isn’t budging in the U.S. workforce

Feeling exhausted, uninspired, cranky, unmotivated and burned out? You're not alone.According to a new study from professional service automation company Kimble Applications, which focused on professionals that track billable hours, the majority underreport the number of hours they work. This has broad implications for professions like IT consultants and contract software engineers, as well as attorneys and accountants, says Rob Bruce, vice president of strategy at Kimble Applications.[ Related story: Shattering remote worker stereotypes ] To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Net neutrality defenders gear up for new fight

Advocates for strong net neutrality rules enforced by a powerful federal regulator may be on the ropes, but they are striking a defiant tone as they look to whip up grassroots opposition ahead of the effort to dismantle the FCC's open internet order.Later this month, the FCC is planning to hold a vote at its May 18 meeting that would begin consideration of an order reclassifying broadband service under communications law such that the commission would significantly limit its authority to police ISPs.The distinction in service classification is arcane, but in a practical sense the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to undo the legal underpinning of his predecessor's 2015 open internet order, which expanded the commission's oversight authority over the broadband sector, and established net neutrality rules that have been upheld in federal court.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Net neutrality defenders gear up for new fight

Advocates for strong net neutrality rules enforced by a powerful federal regulator may be on the ropes, but they are striking a defiant tone as they look to whip up grassroots opposition ahead of the effort to dismantle the FCC's open internet order.Later this month, the FCC is planning to hold a vote at its May 18 meeting that would begin consideration of an order reclassifying broadband service under communications law such that the commission would significantly limit its authority to police ISPs.The distinction in service classification is arcane, but in a practical sense the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to undo the legal underpinning of his predecessor's 2015 open internet order, which expanded the commission's oversight authority over the broadband sector, and established net neutrality rules that have been upheld in federal court.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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

SDxCentral Weekly News Roundup — May 5, 2017

Cisco acquires analytics team and technology; Netscout enters a multiyear agreement with Vodafone Group.

Verizon and AT&T Exit From Cloud Business Applauded by Analysts

Enterprises want carrier-agnostic solutions.

Show 338: Tales From The Trenches With Connection (Sponsored)

Todays Weekly Show brings you tales from the trenches with our sponsor Connection. As a national solutions provider, Connection sees all sorts of things at all sorts of sites, and thus has interesting stories to tell. The post Show 338: Tales From The Trenches With Connection (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

PC makers will ship Windows 10 mixed reality headsets in Q4

Microsoft's hardware partners will flood the market with Windows Mixed Reality headsets by the holiday season this year, offering up a new way to enjoy Windows 10.A Windows Mixed Reality headset from Acer is already being seeded to select developers by Microsoft, but isn't available to consumers yet.So far three PC makers -- Lenovo and HP as well as Acer -- said they would ship headsets later this year. Dell is still mulling a release date. The headsets will start at $299, the rough minimum price suggested by Microsoft.The headsets need to be wired to Windows 10 PCs. Once on, they will transport you to a virtual world where you can, for example, roam, Skype-chat and play Xbox games. It's like computing in a 3D world, without the use of a mouse or keyboard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s RailTel Project Uses Cloud-Native NFV to Deliver WiFi to Millions

"When you transform the control plane architecture, you alter the capex structure."

Ultimate geek dream? NASA challenges you to jump on the FORTRAN bandwagon!

NASA is looking to bolster the speed – from ten to 10,000 times -- of the software on its Pleiades supercomputer and is issuing a public challenge to get the job done.The catch is that the software the space agency is looking to squeeze all of that performance out of is based on Fortran – a program that has roots back to 1954.“This is the ultimate ‘geek’ dream assignment,” said Doug Rohn, director of NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP) in a statement.According to IBM: “From its creation in 1954, and its commercial release in 1957 as the progenitor of software, Fortran (FORMula TRANslator) became the first computer language standard, ‘helped open the door to modern computing,’ and may well be the most influential software product in history. Fortran liberated computers from the exclusive realm of programmers and opened them to nearly everybody else. It is still in use more than 50 years after its creation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Hackers use drones and lasers to bypass air gap

When hackers infect computers with malware, they generally communicate with their code over the internet via a command-and-control server. But firewalls and intrusion detection systems can block communication going to and from suspicious domains and IP addresses. To bypass these normal detection methods, researchers in Israel have devised a novel way to communicate covertly with malware. The technique uses a flatbed scanner as the gateway through which an attacker can send commands to their malware on a victim’s network. —Motherboard

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User-guided caching in Docker for Mac

Recent Docker releases (17.04 CE Edge onwards) bring significant performance improvements to bind-mounted directories on macOS. (Docker users on the stable channel will see the improvements in the forthcoming 17.06 release.) Commands for bind-mounting directories have new options to selectively enable caching.

Containers that perform large numbers of read operations in mounted directories are the main beneficiaries. Here’s an illustration of the improvements in a few tools and applications in common use among Docker for Mac users: go list is 2.5× faster; symfony is 2.7× faster, and rake is 3.5× faster, as illustrated by the following graphs:

go list (2.5× speedup)

go list ./... in the moby/moby repository

symfony (2.7× speedup)

curl of the main page of the Symfony demo app

rake (3.5× speedup)

rake -T in @hirowatari’s benchmark

For more details about how and when to enable caching, and what’s going on under the hood, read on.

Basics of bind-mounting

A defining characteristic of containers is isolation: by default, many parts of the execution environment of a container are isolated both from other containers and from the host system. In the filesystem, isolation shows up as layering: the filesystem Continue reading

Keeping Up with Storage Demands by Pairing vNAS and vSAN

This combined approach will give enterprises the flexibility and scalability they need.