IDG Contributor Network: How smartphone sensors can make expensive weather-monitoring equipment obsolete

Currently, millions of drivers are traveling around our cities collecting data on road traffic with their smartphones. The objective: crowd-sourced traffic conditions.Drivers simply install an app onto their smartphones. The device collects data, and then the system shares the nuances of traffic jams with other app users for the "common good," as Google's Waze, the app's developer, describes it.Waze and the GPS sensor In that case, speed and location is calculated by the smartphone's GPS sensor. Waze has somewhere between 20 and 50 million users, depending on who you listen to.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU targets Android in competition probe

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AWS Summit London – Come For The IaaS, Stay For the PaaS

I attended the AWS Summit in London yesterday. Here are some observations in no particular order. Come for the IaaS, Stay for the PaaS. AWS made a strong case about their portfolio of software services such as AWS Lambda, Cloudformation, KMS and Cloudtrail. Its no longer just compute, storage and networking its all about the […]

The post AWS Summit London – Come For The IaaS, Stay For the PaaS appeared first on EtherealMind.

Protection against critical Windows vulnerability (CVE-2015-1635)

A few hours ago, more details surfaced about the MS15-034 vulnerability. Simple PoC code has been widely published that will hang a Windows web server if sent a request with an HTTP Range header containing large byte offsets.

We have rolled out a WAF rule that blocks these requests.

Customers on a paid plan and who have the WAF enabled are automatically protected against this problem. It is highly recommended that you upgrade your IIS and your Windows servers as soon as possible; in the meantime any requests coming into CloudFlare that try and exploit this DoS/RCE will be blocked.

VMware helps CIOs tunnel their way to more secure mobile apps

VMware is combining iOS and Android encryption features with its own network virtualization platform to offer more secure access to enterprise applications and resources.Today, organizations typically provide mobile users access through a secure VPN gateway connection into the data center where applications and data reside.But while this perimeter-based approach secures the communication, it doesn’t protect against attacks that hack remote employees and use their secure connections. Once inside, hackers can move between workloads in the data center with few controls to block propagation, according to VMware.VMware contends it can solve this problem in a way that’s easier to manage than VLANs through what the company calls network micro-segmentation in the data center. That means that at the network level users can only access their own resources from a smartphone or tablet, limiting what they as well an enterprising hacker can do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware helps CIOs tunnel their way to more secure mobile apps

VMware is combining iOS and Android encryption features with its own network virtualization platform to offer more secure access to enterprise applications and resources.Today, organizations typically provide mobile users access through a secure VPN gateway connection into the data center where applications and data reside.But while this perimeter-based approach secures the communication, it doesn’t protect against attacks that hack remote employees and use their secure connections. Once inside, hackers can move between workloads in the data center with few controls to block propagation, according to VMware.VMware contends it can solve this problem in a way that’s easier to manage than VLANs through what the company calls network micro-segmentation in the data center. That means that at the network level users can only access their own resources from a smartphone or tablet, limiting what they as well an enterprising hacker can do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia to buy Alcatel-Lucent, may sell Here mapping business

Nokia has said it has entered into a memorandum of understanding to acquire Alcatel-Lucent in a deal that would value the French telecommunications equipment maker at €15.6 billion (US$16.5 billion).The Finnish company is also considering a possible divestment from its Here mapping and navigation business.On Tuesday, Nokia said it was in talks for a merger with Alcatel-Lucent. Under the all-share deal announced Wednesday, Nokia will make an offer for all of the equity securities issued by Alcatel-Lucent, through a public exchange offer in France and the U.S., on the basis of 0.55 of a new Nokia share for every Alcatel-Lucent share.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia to buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.5B in deal that unites fixed, mobile broadband strengths

Nokia has said it has entered into a memorandum of understanding to acquire Alcatel-Lucent in a deal that would value the French telecommunications equipment maker at $16.5 billion.The Finnish company is also considering a possible divestment from its Here mapping and navigation business.On Tuesday, Nokia said it was in talks for a merger with Alcatel-Lucent. Under the all-share deal announced Wednesday, Nokia will make an offer for all of the equity securities issued by Alcatel-Lucent, through a public exchange offer in France and the U.S., on the basis of 0.55 of a new Nokia share for every Alcatel-Lucent share.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia to buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.5B in deal that unites fixed, mobile broadband strengths

Nokia has said it has entered into a memorandum of understanding to acquire Alcatel-Lucent in a deal that would value the French telecommunications equipment maker at $16.5 billion.The Finnish company is also considering a possible divestment from its Here mapping and navigation business.On Tuesday, Nokia said it was in talks for a merger with Alcatel-Lucent. Under the all-share deal announced Wednesday, Nokia will make an offer for all of the equity securities issued by Alcatel-Lucent, through a public exchange offer in France and the U.S., on the basis of 0.55 of a new Nokia share for every Alcatel-Lucent share.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia to Acquire Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 Billion

Well, that was quick. Two days after rumors started, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent announce a $16.6B hookup.

Barcelona

Handy Link For SCP Commands

Putting this here because I’m constantly forgetting it.

Originally from here: http://www.hypexr.org/linux_scp_help.php

Copy the file “foobar.txt” from a remote host to the local host:

$ scp [email protected]:foobar.txt /some/local/directory

Copy the file “foobar.txt” from the local host to a remote host:

$ scp foobar.txt [email protected]:/some/remote/directory

Four new lawsuits challenge FCC’s net neutrality rules

The rush is on to sue the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over its net neutrality rules, with three trade groups and AT&T filing legal challenges Tuesday.The agency now faces six lawsuits related to the regulations.Mobile trade group CTIA, cable trade group the National Cable and Telecommunications Association [NCTA] and the American Cable Association, which represents small cable operators, all filed lawsuits Tuesday, with AT&T announcing its own lawsuit late in the day.The four new lawsuits all challenge the FCC's decision to reclassify broadband as a regulated, common-carrier service, reversing a longstanding agency position that it is a lightly regulated information service. The CTIA lawsuit also focuses on the reclassification of mobile broadband.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Drones in the enterprise: The future of data collection

To hear some tell it, the world will soon be abuzz with small drones that inspect bridges, monitor pipelines, survey crops and help assess damage for insurance claims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Design Challenge: Multiple Data Centers Connected with Slow Links

One of my readers sent me this question:

What is best practice to get a copy of the VM image from DC1 to DC2 for DR when you have subrate (155 Mbps in my case) Metro Ethernet services between DC1 and DC2?

The slow link between the data centers effectively rules out any ideas of live VM migration; to figure out what you should be doing, you have to focus on business needs.

Route Hijacking of Sensitive Network Traffic Highlights BGP Security Issues

Last month web traffic designated for some highly sensitive UK entities – including the nuclear weapons agency that provides and maintains warheads for the Royal Navy – was routed through Ukrainian and Russian telecoms before arriving at its original destination. This route hijacking was the result of a bad route announced by Ukraine's Vega telecom. As Russell Brandom, describing the incident for The Verge, wrote: “It's still likely that the redirection was simply an innocent error, but it underscores the insecure nature of the global routing system.” 

I couldn’t agree more and is why I recently wrote an article for Network Computing describing the security vulnerabilities of BGP. In this piece, I outlined the types of BGP incidents (including route hijacking), described several malicious ones perpetrated in recent years, and explained two efforts by the IETF over the years to fix BGP, with limited success. I also discussed how SDN and route analytics can help.

Check out the article and the thoughtful comments from readers as well. As I state at the end of the article, to stop BGP security Continue reading

Nokia-Alcatel Deal Could Push Ericsson Into M&A Mode

A megamerger could be trouble for Ericsson and even for Juniper.

Intel sales sag under PC slowdown

The PC business enjoyed a bit of a revival last year as companies replaced older systems running Windows XP. Those upgrades are mostly done now, and the slower market has hit Intel’s financial results.The chip maker reported first-quarter revenue of $12.8 billion on Tuesday, flat from the same quarter last year and a bit lower than financial analysts had been expecting, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.Intel blamed lower than expected sales of business PCs but said the decline was offset by strong sales of servers and other data center products. The company had already cut its forecast for the quarter last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Percona expands into NoSQL turf with TokuDB purchase

Expanding from its roots as a MySQL software vendor, Percona has also added the MongoDB to the roster of open source databases it supports, thanks to its acquisition of open source database software specialist Tokutek.With the purchase, “we’re becoming more of a database performance business rather than one focusing on a particular type of technology like MySQL,” said Jim Doherty, Percona chief marketing officer. “We’re broadening the scope of our technologies to better serve our customers and the market.”Tokutek offered a commercially supported distribution of the open source MongoDB NoSQL database, TokuMX. Percona will continue to offer TokuMX alongside its own enterprise-grade edition of the open source MySQL database, called Percona Server, which is a competitor to Oracle’s own MySQL commercial distribution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

We weren’t kidding about Microsoft’s startup shopping spree

As I wrote last week ("What's behind Microsoft's not-to-crazy startup spending spree?"), the Redmond company has been making acquisitions at an historic rate to start the calendar year. And today we hear that Microsoft has consumed yet another firm: Datazen, a Toronto maker of mobile business intelligence and data visualization technology for Windows, iOS and Android devices.  Datazen Datazen analytics for mobile devicesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here