Old Windows Server machines can still fend off hacks. Here’s how

If you're running a Windows Server 2003 machine, you have a problem. Your already-vulnerable computer is now at severe risk of being hacked.That's due to the internet release earlier this month of a batch of updates that paint a bulls-eye on computers running Windows Server 2003, according to security researchers.“I can teach my mom how to use some of these exploits,” said Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec, a security provider. “They are not very complicated at all.”Experts are urging affected businesses to upgrade to the latest Windows OSes, which offer security patches that can address the threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Huawei, Google supercharge Android with new Raspberry Pi-like board

Prepare to run Android at blazing fast speeds on a new Raspberry Pi-like computer developed by Huawei.Huawei's HiKey 960 computer board is priced at US$239 but has some of the latest CPU and GPU technologies. Google, ARM, Huawei, Archermind, and LeMaker all played roles in developing the board.The HiKey 960 is meant to be a go-to PC for Android or a tool to develop software and drivers for the OS. The board development was backed by Linaro, an organization that develops software packages for the Android OS and  ARM architecture.Linaro CEO George Grey recently said it was sad that Android developers had to write code on x86 chips. He encouraged the organization's members to build a superfast computer so developers could build ARM software on ARM architecture. Intel has scaled back Android support on x86 PCs and isn't making smartphone chips.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Discounted CleanMyMac 3 with Gemini 2 Space Saving Bundle – Deal Alert

CleanMyMac 3 with Gemini 2 in tow is like a professional cleaning team for your Mac. The all-new CleanMyMac 3 will clean, optimize, and maintain your Mac. It scans every inch of your system, removes gigabytes of junk in just two clicks, and monitors the health of your Mac. Gemini 2 finds duplicate files and wipes them away. It's smart, laser accurate, and recovers tons of space on your Mac. Right now, when purchased together, the bundle will be discounted 10%. See this deal now on MacPaw (see under "Space Saving Bundle"). Alternatively, if you're looking to purchase just one, you can access CleanMyMac 3 here, and Gemini 2 right here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Jasper package manages everything enterprise mobile

Cisco today announced an enterprise management package designed to help users monitor and control the data usage operation of the tons of mobile devices in their networks.Cisco Jasper’s Control Center for Mobile Enterprise is an extension of Jasper’s overarching Control Center IoT service platform, now directed at letting enterprise customers turn up services more quickly, and since it ultimately will be integrated directly into service provider networks will allow for real-time usage data, automated cost control and what Jasper calls “enterprise-grade self-serve management of mobile services and assets.”Like Control Center for IoT, Cisco Jasper’s Mobile Enterprise features are delivered through a service provider and in for now only Canadian telco Telus offers the plan. Cisco Jasper says others will soon follow, but a timetable remains open. The company has 50 service providers offering Control Center services worldwide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Specs of Microsoft’s purported CloudBook leaked

Over the past few weeks there have been rumors of a new version of Windows 10, called Windows 10 Cloud, that sounded like a reimagined Windows RT and would only load apps from the Windows Store and do everything online. Along with the new OS have been rumors of a new piece of hardware, dubbed the CloudBook, which would be targeted at the popular Chromebooks created by Google and its OEM partners. Chromebooks are basically modern-day netbooks, in that they are aimed at internet use, have very long battery life and are below cost. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This is the closest thing Intel has built to a discrete GPU

Intel doesn't make its own discrete GPU but has built something that specializes in processing 4K graphics. But that product isn't powerful enough to run Crysis, if you were wondering.The chipmaker showed off its Intel Visual Compute Accelerator 2 at the NAB show in Las Vegas this week. It has the build of a GPU but is designed for server applications and not for PCs.The VCA 2 is aimed at cloud streaming 4K video, graphics, and virtual reality content. Servers with the graphics accelerator installed could be used to stream video or broadcast content.The VCA 2 uses the 4K-capable Iris Pro Graphics P580 graphics chip and three Intel Xeon E3-1500 v5 processors. The P580 is also used in Intel's mini-PC called Skull Canyon, which is designed for gaming.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This is the closest thing Intel has built to a discrete GPU

Intel doesn't make its own discrete GPU but has built something that specializes in processing 4K graphics. But that product isn't powerful enough to run Crysis, if you were wondering.The chipmaker showed off its Intel Visual Compute Accelerator 2 at the NAB show in Las Vegas this week. It has the build of a GPU but is designed for server applications and not for PCs.The VCA 2 is aimed at cloud streaming 4K video, graphics, and virtual reality content. Servers with the graphics accelerator installed could be used to stream video or broadcast content.The VCA 2 uses the 4K-capable Iris Pro Graphics P580 graphics chip and three Intel Xeon E3-1500 v5 processors. The P580 is also used in Intel's mini-PC called Skull Canyon, which is designed for gaming.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Password and security recommendations

Rather than just regurgitate the usual unworkable advice (make each password 14 different random characters, change them every week, and never write them down) we tried to look at the real threats on the current Internet and offer advice that makes sense today. The password advice does recommend strong passwords or pass phrases, but then mostly talks about operational issues: do encrypt channels where passwords are sent via HTTPS or the like, do use multiple factors where possible, do use federated authentication to minimize the number of passwords people have to use, do make users change default passwords before using a new account, and don’t do hard account lockouts after password failures (an easy way to harass your enemies.) While it does say to make it easy for users to change passwords when they want, it doesn’t recommend required password changes, since that is counterproductive–people use a pattern like password1, password2, password3, write them down, or most likely both. —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Password and security recommendations appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Ixia goes native to build its cloud visibility solution

Earlier this month Ixia announced an update to its CloudLens product where it could now provide visibility into public clouds. Ixia wasn’t the first packet broker vendors to roll out a solution that extends the visibility infrastructure to the cloud. That honor goes to Gigamon, which announced the general availability of its visibility platform for Amazon Web Services.Over the past few years, the packet broker space has heated up, as customers are feeling the pain of running distributed environments and have brought in more network management and security tools. Packet brokers effectively create a middleware layer that sits between the network and tools and makes it significantly easier to deploy best-of-breed tools. Now that IT departments are aggressively expanding to the cloud, it makes sense that the visibility tier would need to as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security certificates gone wrong

Security certificates are designed to authenticate hosts. Browsers have become pretty good about understanding chains of authorities, and making users accept the risk when websites can’t prove the chain of authorities needed to verify they are who they say they are.Sites masquerading as legitimate sites, however, employ sad little tricks, such as “punycode”—URL links embedded in otherwise official-looking phishing emails. These tricks are malicious. There are also sites that should be well-administrated but are not.Then there are sites, important sites, that botch their own security with certificates ostensibly granted by places such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security certificates gone wrong

Security certificates are designed to authenticate hosts. Browsers have become pretty good about understanding chains of authorities, and making users accept the risk when websites can’t prove the chain of authorities needed to verify they are who they say they are.Sites masquerading as legitimate sites, however, employ sad little tricks, such as “punycode”—URL links embedded in otherwise official-looking phishing emails. These tricks are malicious. There are also sites that should be well-administrated but are not.Then there are sites, important sites, that botch their own security with certificates ostensibly granted by places such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Escher Erases Batching Lines for Efficient FPGA Deep Learning

Aside from the massive parallelism available in modern FPGAs, there are other two other key reasons why reconfigurable hardware is finding a fit in neural network processing in both training and inference.

First is the energy efficiency of these devices relative to performance, and second is the flexibility of an architecture that can be recast to the framework at hand. In the past we’ve described how FPGAs can fit over GPUs as well as custom ASICs in some cases, and what the future might hold for novel architectures based on reconfigurable hardware for these workloads. But there is still …

Escher Erases Batching Lines for Efficient FPGA Deep Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Box revises platform pricing to ease developer adoption

Box is trying to give developers who want to use its platform more pricing consistency with a new  announced Tuesday.Customers will now pay on the basis of how much active use they're getting out of the Box Platform, which offers cloud storage and content management capabilities for third-party applications. Companies can purchase packages from Box that include a set number of active users, API calls, bandwidth, and storage use.The first package costs US$500 per month and includes 100 monthly active users, 175,000 Box API calls, 125GB of bandwidth, and 125GB of storage in Box's cloud. The more packages companies purchase, the less they have to pay per package. For developers just getting started with the platform, there's a free tier that allows 10 monthly active users, 15,000 API calls, 10GB of bandwidth, and 10GB of storage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

9 Easy Ways to Break a Cisco Network

Every day operation of a Cisco router is likely to cause failure.

The post 9 Easy Ways to Break a Cisco Network appeared first on EtherealMind.

Geeks In Vegas: 12 Things To Do

Response: Why a new routing stack? – Russ White

Some background on the Free Range Routing project.

The post Response: Why a new routing stack? – Russ White appeared first on EtherealMind.

Pluribus recharges, expands software-defined network platform

Looking to simplify what it calls the complexity associated with current Software Defined Networking controllers and proprietary protocols that require significant changes to customer network architecture and operations, Pluribus has refreshed and expanded its own SDN offering to address those challenges.+More on Network World: Cisco talks 2017 SD-WAN predictions+Customers looking to SDN to change and improve legacy network constraints have found many times that the SDN implementation has been nothing short of complex, and includes its own hardware-bound problems, said Steven Shalita, vice president of marketing and business development at Pluribus Networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pluribus recharges, expands software-defined network platform

Looking to simplify what it calls the complexity associated with current Software Defined Networking controllers and proprietary protocols that require significant changes to customer network architecture and operations, Pluribus has refreshed and expanded its own SDN offering to address those challenges.+More on Network World: Cisco talks 2017 SD-WAN predictions+Customers looking to SDN to change and improve legacy network constraints have found many times that the SDN implementation has been nothing short of complex, and includes its own hardware-bound problems, said Steven Shalita, vice president of marketing and business development at Pluribus Networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson’s 1Q Revenue Plummets 11%, Company Faces More Cuts

The company's cost reduction plan didn't go far enough.

MegaSwitch: an interesting new data center fabric

Data center fabrics are built today using spine and leaf fabrics, lots of fiber, and a lot of routers. There has been a lot of research in all-optical solutions to replace current designs with something different; MegaSwitch is a recent paper that illustrates the research, and potentially a future trend, in data center design. The basic idea is this: give every host its own fiber in a ring that reaches to every other host. Then use optical multiplexers to pull off the signal from each ring any particular host needs in order to provide a switchable set of connections in near real time. The figure below will be used to explain.

In the illustration, there are four hosts, each of which is connected to an electrical switch (EWS). The EWS, in turn, connects to an optical switch (OWS). The OWS channels the outbound (transmitted) traffic from each host onto a single ring, where it is carried to every other OWS in the network. The optical signal is terminated at the hop before the transmitter to prevent any loops from forming (so A’s optical signal is terminated at D, for instance, assuming the ring runs clockwise in the diagram).

The receive Continue reading