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Samsung and HTC have a lot to prove with Sunday smartphone launches

Samsung Electronics and HTC are going head to head on Sunday with almost simultaneous launches of new flagship smartphones. Both companies have a lot to prove, but for different reasons.“Samsung is fighting for its credibility and HTC for its survival,” said Neil Mawston , executive director at market research company Strategy Analytics, speaking of the duelling events ahead of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.Mawston thinks Samsung’s critics have been a bit too harsh on the company. Despite the shortcomings of the Galaxy S5, it was the second-best-selling phone last year, beaten only by the iPhone 5S. However, the S5 wasn’t able to live up to expectations, and Samsung is now under pressure to launch something special.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Fresh from $532.9M win, Smartflash sues Apple again

Shortly after a jury in Texas awarded it US$532.9 million in damages in a patent dispute with Apple, patent company Smartflash has sued the iPhone maker again, this time to focus on newer Apple products."Apple has released new products that came out too late for inclusion in Smartflash's previous action against Apple," Smartflash's attorney Bradley W. Caldwell said in an email Thursday.The company sued Apple and others in May 2013 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler division, alleging that iTunes software infringed on six of its patents related to serving and managing access to data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Survey: iPhone 6 powers an increase in enterprise adoption of iOS

Apple's iOS mobile platform gained user share in security-conscious businesses late in 2014, taking it away from Google's Android platform, thanks to the introduction of the iPhone 6 smartphone, according to a survey of its enterprise customers by mobile security vendor Good Technology.Good's customers increased their activation of iOS devices -- meaning enrollment in the Good movie management server -- to 73 percent; iOS devices accounted for 69 percent of activations in the previous quarter. Over the same period, Android activations declined from 29 percent to to 25 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IBM to pump $4 billion into cloud, mobile and analytics

IBM will dedicate $4 billion in spending this year to the cloud, analytics and mobile technologies, as it struggles with seismic shifts that are changing the computing landscape it once dominated, In return, by 2018 IBM expects to reap a combined $40 billion in annual revenue from the areas in which it's investing, which also include social and security, the company said at an annual meeting on Thursday. It could use the growth. IBM's sales declined to about $93 billion last year, from just over $98 billion in 2013, thanks to declines in some of its traditional businesses and the sale of two big hardware divisions to Lenovo and GlobalFoundries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Ericsson seeks to block sales of Apple products in US, stepping up patent dispute

Some Apple products may be banned from sale in the U.S. if Ericsson gets its way after filing a barrage of patent lawsuits.The Swedish telecommunications equipment vendor filed nine lawsuits against Apple on Thursday, seven in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas and two in the U.S. International Trade Commission, alleging infringement of a total of 41 of its patents, it said Friday.Apple is no stranger to the courts when it comes to patent disputes. Previous cases have often focused on the “look and feel” of its products, turning on the curvature of a phone’s corners, or how it indicates that it can’t perform an action when someone swipes the screen. Many of the patents Ericsson says Apple is infringing, though, cut right to the heart of smartphone and tablet functionality: their ability to connect to 2G, 3G or 4G mobile networks to make calls or exchange data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Network Break 29

Over-opinionated analysis on data network and IT Infrastructure.

Author information

The post Network Break 29 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

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Do We Need QoS in the Data Center?

Whenever I get asked about QoS in the data center, my stock reply is “bandwidth is cheaper than QoS-induced complexity.” This is definitely true in most cases, and ideally the elephant problems should be solved higher up in the application stack, not with network-layer kludges, but are there situations where you actually need data center QoS?

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Apple Watch may be more water resistant than we thought

One of the longstanding questions surrounding the Apple Watch is how water resistant the device is going to be.As a quick aside, "waterproof" denotes a product that can be completely submerged under water for extended periods of time and still function as intended. So while a device filled to the brim with complex electronics, like the Apple Watch, isn't likely to be waterproof, having a degree of water resistance is extremely important.To that end, Apple CEO Tim Cook was recently in Germany where he reportedly spoke to some Apple employees and remarked that he wears his Apple Watch all the time, "even in the shower." The report comes courtesy of iGen.Fr which relayed the news earlier this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Apple Watch may be more water resistant than previously thought

One of the longstanding questions surrounding the Apple Watch is how water resistant the device is going to be.As a quick aside, "waterproof" denotes a product that can be completely submerged under water for extended periods of time and still function as intended. So while a device filled to the brim with complex electronics, like the Apple Watch, isn't likely to be waterproof, having a degree of water resistance is extremely important.To that end, Apple CEO Tim Cook was recently in Germany, where he reportedly spoke to some Apple employees and remarked that he wears his Apple Watch all the time, "even in the shower." The report comes courtesy of iGen.Fr which relayed the news earlier this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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D-Link remote access vulnerabilities remain unpatched

D-Link routers have several unpatched vulnerabilities, the worst of which could allow an attacker to gain total control over a device, according to a systems engineer in Canada.Peter Adkins, who does security research in his free time, released details of the flaws on Thursday. Adkins said in a phone interview that he has been in intermittent contact with D-Link since Jan. 11 on the issues, but the company has not indicated when it might patch.“I believe it’s probably better for the end user to know that these exist than be completely in the dark for months on end while the vendor prepares patches,” he said.D-Link officials did not have an immediate comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Hackers exploit router flaws in unusual pharming attack

An email-based attack spotted in Brazil recently employed an unusual but potent technique to spy on a victim’s Web traffic.The technique exploited security flaws in home routers to gain access to the administrator console. Once there, the hackers changed the routers’ DNS (Domain Name System) settings, a type of attack known as pharming.Pharming is tricky to pull off because it requires access to an ISP’s or an organization’s DNS servers, which translate domain names into the IP addresses of websites. Those DNS systems are typically well-protected, but home routers often are not.Security firm Proofpoint wrote in a blog post Thursday that launching the attack via email was a novel approach since pharming is normally a network-based attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Programmatic Access to CLI Driven Devices with TextFSM

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Thoughts on Network Neutrality, the FCC, and the Future of Internet Governance

Today the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to extend the rules that previously regulated the telephone industry to now regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The Commission did this in order to preserve the principle of network neutrality. Broadly stated, this principle is that networks should not discriminate against content that passes through them.

At CloudFlare, we are strong proponents of network neutrality. My co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn, sat on the FCC's Open Internet Advisory Committee. The work of that committee played a role in guiding today's vote. So there is a large part of us that is celebrating today.

At the same time, I have deep concerns that proponents of a free and open Internet may look back on today not as a great victory, but as the first step in what may turn out to be a devastating loss. The Internet has largely been governed from the bottom up by technologists seeking rough consensus and running code. Today's action by the FCC may mark the beginning of a new era where the Internet is regulated by lawyers from the top down. As a technologist and recovering lawyer, that worries me.

The Threat to the Network

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Twitter adds more reporting tools to curb abuse and improve safety

Twitter has added new reporting tools to help it fight abuse and protect users on its site.The company took some steps in this direction late last year, when it made it easier to report harassment in tweets. Now it’s making it easier to report other behaviors including impersonation, self-harm and the sharing of private or confidential information. The changes will begin rolling out Thursday and should reach all users in the coming weeks.As a result of the changes it made already, Twitter now reviews five times as many user reports as it did previously, the company said, and it has tripled the number of people who handle such reports at the company. It has also reduced its response time to a fraction of what it once was, the company says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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LTE can mooch off of Wi-Fi spectrum with new Qualcomm chipset

A chipset Qualcomm is introducing at Mobile World Congress next week is likely to make mobile operators happy and some Wi-Fi fans nervous.Amid a scramble for spectrum among cellular carriers, Qualcomm will demonstrate a chipset that lets LTE cells operate in a radio band used by Wi-Fi networks. The new silicon could double the amount of spectrum subscribers can use in certain areas, and it’s just the first in a family of chipsets that may eventually tap into five times as much.The FSM 99xx chipset for small cells, along with a matching transceiver that will go into mobile devices, are among the first products coming for so-called Licensed Assisted Access. LAA, sometimes called LTE-Unlicensed, is one of several emerging techniques to take advantage of the large amount of spectrum available in unlicensed bands used by Wi-Fi. Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA and SK Telecom all have shown interest in using LAA. Combining unlicensed spectrum with traditional carrier frequencies will be a major trend on display at MWC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Republican bill would overturn FCC municipal broadband decision

It didn’t take long for congressional Republicans to attack the Federal Communications Commission’s vote to strike down two state laws that prevent municipal broadband networks from expanding.Seven Republican lawmakers introduced a bill on Thursday, just hours after the FCC vote, that would prohibit the agency from preempting state laws that limit municipal broadband networks. The main sponsors of the bill are Representative Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, and Senator Thom Tillis, of North Carolina.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Broadcom ASIC table utilization metrics, DevOps, and SDN

Figure 1: Two-Level Folded CLOS Network Topology Example

Figure 1 from the Broadcom white paper, Engineered Elephant Flows for Boosting Application Performance in Large-Scale CLOS Networks, shows a data center leaf and spine topology. Leaf and spine networks are seeing rapid adoption since they provide the scaleability needed to cost effectively deliver the low latency, high bandwidth interconnect for cloud, big data, and high performance computing workloads.

Broadcom Trident ASICs are popular in white box, brite-box and branded data center switches from a wide range of vendors, including: Accton, Agema, Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, Cisco, Dell, Edge-Core, Extreme, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Juniper, Penguin Computing, and Quanta.

Figure 2: OF-DPA Programming Pipeline for ECMP

Figure 2 shows the packet processing pipeline of a Broadcom ASIC. The pipeline consists of a number of linked hardware tables providing bridging, routing, access control list (ACL), and ECMP forwarding group functions. Operations teams need to be able to proactively monitor table utilizations in order to avoid performance problems associated with table exhaustion.

Broadcom's recently released sFlow specification, sFlow Broadcom Switch ASIC Table Utilization Structures, leverages the industry standard sFlow protocol to offer scaleable, multi-vendor, network wide visibility into the utilization of these hardware tables.

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CIOs report that spending is on the rise

IT leaders will see bigger technology budgets in the coming year, according to CIO’s most recent Tech Poll, which is conducted regularly to gauge IT spending and stages of implementation in key technology categories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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Apple slates March 9 event, hints at Watch wearable

Apple today invited reporters and analysts to an event scheduled for March 9, when it will probably talk up the Apple Watch and perhaps unveil other hardware. The presentation will be live-streamed. The venue, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, has frequently been used by Apple, most recently for the October 2013 unveiling of the iPad Air. Apple may have chosen Yerba Buena for space reasons, as it seats 755, considerably more than the Cupertino, Calif. company's on-campus theater. As is Apple's practice, the invitation teased the presentation with a coy reference, in this case, "Spring forward." The phrase tipped the Apple Watch; Sunday, March 8, is the day most of the U.S. changes to Daylight Savings Time. The phrase "Spring forward, Fall back" is an oft-called memory aid for which way to move clocks, watches and other time-keepers when changing from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time or vice versa.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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What it means: The FCC’s net neutrality vote

Net neutrality has been debated for a decade, but the Federal Communications Commission's historic vote on Thursday signals only the beginning of further battles and likely lawsuits. At issue is how best to keep the Internet open and neutral to all while still giving Internet service providers sufficient incentive to expand their networks to serve more customers and to support an exploding array of data-hungry applications as futuristic as holographic videoconferencing used for home-based medical exams. The FCC voted 3-to-2 to create a series of sweeping changes, including three open Internet conduct rules that block broadband providers, both wired and wireless, from blocking or throttling Internet traffic. The rules also ban broadband providers from taking payments to prioritize content and services over their networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here