Microsoft writes off $7.6B, admits failure of Nokia acquisition

Microsoft today wrote off billions of dollars related to its Nokia acquisition, saying it's taking an "impairment charge" of $7.6 billion, or nearly the full amount it paid for the Finnish firm's smartphone business and patents last year.The announcement slapped the failure sticker on the last major move made by former CEO Steve Ballmer, who pushed for the Nokia deal in his final months in office against objections by, among others, Satya Nadella before he was elevated to the chief executive's chair.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 10 (FREE!) Microsoft tools to make admins happier "It was a mistake to begin with," said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. "A monumental mistake. Microsoft had no business being in the cut-throat, low-margin phone business. Who's making money in phones besides Apple?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud Provider DigitalOcean Lands an $83M Series B

The indie cloud proivder is growing up.

Hacker group that hit Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft intensifies attacks

The hackers that targeted Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft developers two years ago have escalated their economic espionage efforts as they seek confidential business information and intellectual property they can profit from.The group, which security researchers from Kaspersky Lab and Symantec call Wild Neutron or Morpho, has broken into the networks of over 45 large companies since 2012.After the 2013 attacks against Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft were highly publicized, the group went underground and temporarily halted its activity. However, its attacks resumed in 2014 and have since intensified, according to separate reports released Wednesday by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA’s $4M cyber-threat clash down to seven challengers

When it began a year ago, there were 104 teams competing for $4 million in prize money in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s ambitious tournament -- known as the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) -- to see who can build the best fully automatic network defense system.+More on Network World: NASA’s cool, radical and visionary concepts+This week DARPA said that after a couple dry runs and a significant qualifying event the field of CGC teams is down to seven who will now compete in the final battle slated to take place at DEFCON in Las Vegas in August 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mirantis Enters OpenStack Hardware Game With New Appliance

OpenStack appliances are proliferating.

Sign Up Now! Cisco DemoFriday: Improve Network Programmability with Cisco Open NX-OS

Now is the time to sign up for the Cisco DemoFriday! Learn how your organization can maximize network programmability & automation with Cisco Open NX-OS.

Featured White Paper: Wind River’s Best Practices for High-Availability Telecom

Read the best-practices for telecom solutions for high-availability service that meets the demands of today’s SLA-driven markets.

Apple Watch’s nose-dive predictions suggest Apple needs a new way to innovate

Slice Intelligence's Apple Watch estimates confirm that Apple needs a different narrative for innovation in new product categories. The company's Wizard of Oz –like assertion that it knows everything that consumers might ever want hamstrings its ability to introduce an Apple version of an evolving product category that's not perfect.Business Insider and MarketWatch have both announced the death of the Apple Watch, with data from Slice Intelligence pointing to a 90% decline in Apple Watch sales since the device's opening week on the market. It might just be a bad case of schadenfreude due to the ingestion of bad data. Literally translated from German, schadenfreude means damaging joy, but often is interpreted to mean evil glee. Apple, the most valuable brand, is under a microscope because of its success compounded by persuasive marketing. Now that a marketing survey may indicate a drop in Apple Watch sales, many observers are rejoicing with evil glee that the hugely successful company might fail. But the shipment data hasn't been verified by Apple, and no one knows the company's expectations for Apple Watch sales over the entirety of its debut year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please Continue reading

United Airlines flights grounded by ‘network connectivity’ issues

United Airlines passengers were facing major travel delays on Wednesday after the carrier suspended all U.S. flights due to computer problems.In an emailed statement, United said it had a “network connectivity issue” and is working to resolve the situation. The airline didn’t elaborate on the exact nature of the connectivity issue nor did it provide a timeline for when the problem would be fixed.Separately, the Federal Aviation Administration said United flights were grounded because of ”automation issues.” The FAA didn’t immediately reply to a request for more information on the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fighting Cancer: The Unexpected Benefit Of Open Sourcing Our Code

Recently I was contacted by Dr. Igor Kozin from The Institute of Cancer Research in London. He asked about the optimal way to compile CloudFlare's open source fork of zlib. It turns out that zlib is widely used to compress the SAM/BAM files that are used for DNA sequencing. And it turns out our zlib fork is the best open source solution for that file format.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Shaury Nash

The files used for this kind of research reach hundreds of gigabytes and every time they are compressed and decompressed with our library many important seconds are saved, bringing the cure for cancer that much closer. At least that's what I am going to tell myself when I go to bed.

This made me realize that the benefits of open source go much farther than one can imagine, and you never know where a piece of code may end up. Open sourcing makes sophisticated algorithms and software accessible to individuals and organizations that would not have the resources to develop them on their own, or the money pay for a proprietary solution.

It also made me wonder exactly what we did to zlib that makes it Continue reading

Microsoft pulls back from phone business, announces 7,800 layoffs

Microsoft is scaling down its mobile phone activities, writing off the entire value of the former Nokia smartphone business it bought last year and laying off almost one-third of that business’ staff. The company will no longer try to build a standalone phone business, but instead plans to build a Windows ecosystem that includes its own devices, CEO Satya Nadella told staff in an email announcing the changes. Up to 7,800 jobs will be cut, most of them in the phone business. The cuts come in addition to 18,000 layoffs announced last year: Those cuts included around half of the 25,000 staff who joined Microsoft from Nokia. + A LOOK BACK: Bloodiest tech industry layoffs of 2014, so far +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft pulls back from phone business, announces 7,800 layoffs

Microsoft is scaling down its mobile phone activities, writing off the entire value of the former Nokia smartphone business it bought last year and laying off almost one-third of that business’ staff. The company will no longer try to build a standalone phone business, but instead plans to build a Windows ecosystem that includes its own devices, CEO Satya Nadella told staff in an email announcing the changes. Up to 7,800 jobs will be cut, most of them in the phone business. The cuts come in addition to 18,000 layoffs announced last year: Those cuts included around half of the 25,000 staff who joined Microsoft from Nokia. + A LOOK BACK: Bloodiest tech industry layoffs of 2014, so far +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to prepare for and respond to a cyber attack

SDN: The emerging reality

Change is still afoot in Software Defined Networking, but it is now at least clear that SDN is here to stay, that SDN will be the way we build networks going forward. In this Network World Spotlight special report, pulled together by the editors of Network World, we analyze key developments and gauge where organizations stand today in their SDN planning.Inside you’ll find:* Controller Market Consolidation. There are still many types controllers available, but the market is rallying around OpenDaylight and the Open Network Operating System.* Crossroads for OpenFlow? Once conflated with SDN, OpenFlow progress seems to have stalled. Does OpenFlow still have a significant role to play?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: QoE and RAN Networks

To improve overall QoE, a holistic approach to network architecture is vital – one that takes into consider-ation conditions in both radio and transport domains, and that results in the creation of proactive measures for preventing congestion.

The post Worth Reading: QoE and RAN Networks appeared first on 'net work.

Router IP Traffic Export

Router IP Traffic Export (RITE), or simply IP Traffic Export, is a method of copying traffic directly from a router to an external device, such as a Protocol Analyzer or an Intrusion Detection System (IDS). This feature can be used to replace SPAN/RSPAN configurations deployed on L2 ports/VLANs. Two main benefits of RITE is, first, the ability to duplicate the traffic received on a WAN interface, such as Serial port, and second, granularity of our configuration – we can be very selective in what traffic will finally get copied from the network.

Before we discuss the configuration of RITE, just few words about limitations of this feature :

1. The device receiving the exported traffic must be in the same L2 network as the router’s interface (e.g. must be directly connected). This interface is known as “outgoing” in the RITE’s terminology
2. This (outgoing) interface must be an Ethernet port. Incoming interface(s) (where the traffic is received and optionally sent through) can be anything (e.g. WAN/LAN)
3. Traffic generated by the router configured for RITE cannot be exported

A sample topology for RITE may look like one below. Our monitoring station (PC) is directly connected to R2’s RITE outgoing interface, Gig0/0 Continue reading

NASA’s cool, radical and visionary concepts

Phase IIImage by NASANASA this month announced a variety of technology concept program for continued study under Phase II of the space agency's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program. NIAC funds programs NASA says are “visionary ideas that could transform future NASA missions with the creation of breakthroughs - radically better or entirely new aerospace concepts…” The projects include plans for metallic lithium combustion, submarines that explore the oceans of icy moons of the outer planets, and a swarm of tiny satellites that map gravity fields and characterize the properties of small moons and asteroids. Take a look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybercriminals start using Flash zero-day exploit leaked from Hacking Team

It took just a day for cybercriminals to start using a new and yet-to-be-patched Flash Player exploit that was leaked from a surveillance software developer.The exploit was found by security researchers yesterday among the 400GB worth of files stolen recently from Hacking Team, an Italian company that develops and sells intrusion and surveillance software to government agencies.Adobe Systems confirmed the vulnerability, which received the identifier CVE-2015-5119, and is planning to release a patch for it later today. However, cybercriminals have already jumped on the opportunity to use it to infect computers with malware on a large scale.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, July 8

Road trip! Google’s self-driving cars test out the streets of Austin, TexasGoogle has picked Austin, Texas, as the second location to test its self-driving vehicles, expanding the trials beyond Mountain View, California. One of Google’s self-driving Lexus sport utility vehicles is already on Austin’s streets, the company said Tuesday. Until now, public road tests of Google’s self-driving technology took place only around Mountain View, where the search company has its headquarters. Expanding the trial area will allow Google to test its software in a location with different road conditions, traffic patterns and driving situations, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CEF

The post CEF appeared first on 'net work.