Rapid GPU Evolution at Chinese Web Giant Tencent

Like other major hyperscale web companies, China’s Tencent, which operates a massive network of ad, social, business, and media platforms, is increasingly reliant on two trends to keep pace.

The first is not surprising—efficient, scalable cloud computing to serve internal and user demand. The second is more recent and includes a wide breadth of deep learning applications, including the company’s own internally developed Mariana platform, which powers many user-facing services.

When the company introduced its deep learning platform back in 2014 (at a time when companies like Baidu, Google, and others were expanding their GPU counts for speech and …

Rapid GPU Evolution at Chinese Web Giant Tencent was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

It’s Personal

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One of the odd things about my job is that I often get to meet people I or someone in my company has written or podcasted about. That might be via a direct mention or an indirect one. For example, my company might cover a product and offer some commentary on it–indirect. We might mention a specific company in a positive or negative light, depending on our opinion–indirect. We might mention specific people if there is a good reason to do so–direct.

Meeting people we’ve talked about, directly or not, brings a poignant perspective to creating content for a wide audience. It’s personal. Somebody made a decision to create the product that way. Some group of humans worked on that standard. Real people decided on that process.

Is it appropriate to cast those people in a negative light and share that opinion with an audience? Sometimes…yes, at times even crucially necessary, if unfortunate. Sometimes…maybe not. Sometimes it’s okay to shut up. To show restraint. To chain the snark monster.

Stirring the pot can be fun. Yelling into a righteous megaphone about where the nasty thing hurt you feels empowering. But it’s only half of the equation. It’s the half that you see. You had a bad experience. You Continue reading

RingCentral aims to unify ‘unified communications’

I started my career as an analyst in 2001, and one of the first reports I wrote was on the topic of “unified communications,” or UC as it’s more commonly called today. The concept is pretty simple: Workers use lots of communications tools, so why not bring them together into a single, easy-to-use tool? Makes sense, doesn’t it? However, a funny thing has happened over the past 15 years. In an effort to give workers more functionality, many specialty UC vendors popped up. I understand the term “specialty UC” is somewhat of an oxymoron, but this is the state of the industry because we now have UC vendors for video, web conferencing, chat, audio conferencing, VoIP, document sharing, file storage and the list goes on. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Do Network Professionals Need To Be Programmers?

With the advent of software defined networking (SDN) and the move to incorporate automation, orchestration, and extensive programmability into modern network design, it could easily be argued that programming is a must-have skill. Many networking professionals are asking themselves if it’s time to pick up Python, Ruby or some other language to create programs in the network. But is it a necessity?

Interfaces In Your Faces

The move toward using API interfaces is one of the more striking aspects of SDN that has been picked up quickly. Instead of forcing information to be input via CLI or information to be collected from the network via scraping the same CLI, APIs have unlocked more power than we ever imagined. RESTful APIs have giving nascent programmers the ability to query devices and push configurations without the need to learn cumbersome syntax. The ability to grab this information and feed it to a network management system and analytics platform has extended the capabilites of the systems that support these architectures.

The syntaxes that power these new APIs aren’t the copyrighted CLIs that networking professionals spend their waking hours memorizing in excruciating detail. JUNOS and Cisco’s “standard” CLI are as much relics of the Continue reading

Review: Canary Flex security camera lives up to its name

Canary’s initial foray into the networked home security camera space was very impressive – my colleague David Newman touted its high security settings in the wake of revelations about the general insecurity of these types of devices. The Canary camera was also somewhat large – a cylindrical tower that took up some significant space on your desk, cabinet or shelf.The latest camera the company sent me is the Canary Flex, a much smaller unit meant to be more flexible (hence the name) in terms of placement, but also in power options. Like the Arlo Pro camera, the Canary Flex is powered by an internal battery (it’s charged via USB cable and power adapter). This means you can move the Flex to a location inside or outside your home where there’s no power outlet. The Flex comes with wall mounting screws and a 360-degree magnetic stand so you can position the camera in different spots. Additional accessories, such as a plant mount or twist mount (pictured below), offer even more location choices.To read this article in full, please click here

Review: Canary Flex security camera lives up to its name

Canary’s initial foray into the networked home security camera space was very impressive – my colleague David Newman touted its high security settings in the wake of revelations about the general insecurity of these types of devices. The Canary camera was also somewhat large – a cylindrical tower that took up some significant space on your desk, cabinet or shelf.The latest camera the company sent me is the Canary Flex, a much smaller unit meant to be more flexible (hence the name) in terms of placement, but also in power options. Like the Arlo Pro camera, the Canary Flex is powered by an internal battery (it’s charged via USB cable and power adapter). This means you can move the Flex to a location inside or outside your home where there’s no power outlet. The Flex comes with wall mounting screws and a 360-degree magnetic stand so you can position the camera in different spots. Additional accessories, such as a plant mount or twist mount (pictured below), offer even more location choices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Canary Flex security camera lives up to its name

Canary’s initial foray into the networked home security camera space was very impressive – my colleague David Newman touted its high security settings in the wake of revelations about the general insecurity of these types of devices. The Canary camera was also somewhat large – a cylindrical tower that took up some significant space on your desk, cabinet or shelf.The latest camera the company sent me is the Canary Flex, a much smaller unit meant to be more flexible (hence the name) in terms of placement, but also in power options. Like the Arlo Pro camera, the Canary Flex is powered by an internal battery (it’s charged via USB cable and power adapter). This means you can move the Flex to a location inside or outside your home where there’s no power outlet. The Flex comes with wall mounting screws and a 360-degree magnetic stand so you can position the camera in different spots. Additional accessories, such as a plant mount or twist mount (pictured below), offer even more location choices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Canary Flex security camera lives up to its name

Canary’s initial foray into the networked home security camera space was very impressive – my colleague David Newman touted its high security settings in the wake of revelations about the general insecurity of these types of devices. The Canary camera was also somewhat large – a cylindrical tower that took up some significant space on your desk, cabinet or shelf.The latest camera the company sent me is the Canary Flex, a much smaller unit meant to be more flexible (hence the name) in terms of placement, but also in power options. Like the Arlo Pro camera, the Canary Flex is powered by an internal battery (it’s charged via USB cable and power adapter). This means you can move the Flex to a location inside or outside your home where there’s no power outlet. The Flex comes with wall mounting screws and a 360-degree magnetic stand so you can position the camera in different spots. Additional accessories, such as a plant mount or twist mount (pictured below), offer even more location choices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rough Guide to IETF 98: Encryption

IETF 98 in Chicago next week seems to be relatively quiet from an encryption perspective compared to some past meetings. However, this could be viewed as an indication of the progress that has been made in recent years as the IETF community has focused heavily on enabling encryption across protocols and updating the cryptographic algorithms being used in those protocols. There is not a great deal of activity specific to encryption in Chicago, and the work represented here this week is quite mature.

Karen O'Donoghue

H-1B lottery’s game of chance is legal, judge rules

A lawsuit that challenged the fairness and legality of the H-1B lottery system, describing it as a "never ending game of chance," has been thrown out by a federal judge.The case was heard by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon in Oregon; in a 31-page opinion, Simon said that the government's random visa distribution method does not violate the law.The judge's ruling means that there will no changes to the H-1B distribution system this year.On April 1, the U.S. will receive visa petitions, or applications, for the 2018 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The U.S. holds a lottery if the petitions exceed the 85,000 cap -- an almost certain outcome.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Most Android devices lack latest security patches

Nearly three-quarters of Android devices on the five biggest U.S. carriers are running on security patches that are at least two months old, putting them at greater risk of being hacked.That finding was made in an analysis released Thursday by Skycure, a mobile threat defense vendor. The report also found that the city of Boston has had the biggest recent increase in smartphone and other wireless device threats — including malicious attacks — among 11 major U.S. cities. Incidents in Boston climbed by 960% in the fourth quarter of 2016. The analysis is based on millions of readings from network sensors that Skycure monitors globally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Augmented reality gets a second life in manufacturing

The ungraceful death of the consumer version of Google Glass in 2015 may have had some grieving the early death of augmented reality. But the technology is being resurrected by companies on the manufacturing floor. Take for example Lockheed Martin. Technicians at the aerospace manufacturer use Microsoft's Hololens headset to design and examine models of spacecraft such as the Mars lander ahead of it's 2018 mission.   Lockheed Martin Technicians at Lockheed Martin's Collaborative Human Immersive Lab in Colorado examine a model of the Mars lander using Micorsoft's Hololens augmented reality headsets. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bitcoin rise fuels social media scams

The price of a single Bitcoin passed that of an ounce of gold for the first time this month, and scammers were quick to get in on the action with Ponzi schemes and phishing sites spread via social media.Victims are lured in with fake Bitcoin wallets, fake Bitcoin search services, fake surveys about Bitcoin, too-good-to-be-true money making offers, and classic pyramid scams now dressed up with Bitcoins, according to a report released this week."The same characteristics that make Bitcoin attractive to people who want to make money distributing ransomware make it attractive to scammers," said Philip Tully, senior data scientist at security vendor ZeroFox, which published the report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bitcoin rise fuels social media scams

The price of a single Bitcoin passed that of an ounce of gold for the first time this month, and scammers were quick to get in on the action with Ponzi schemes and phishing sites spread via social media.Victims are lured in with fake Bitcoin wallets, fake Bitcoin search services, fake surveys about Bitcoin, too-good-to-be-true money making offers, and classic pyramid scams now dressed up with Bitcoins, according to a report released this week."The same characteristics that make Bitcoin attractive to people who want to make money distributing ransomware make it attractive to scammers," said Philip Tully, senior data scientist at security vendor ZeroFox, which published the report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Software is Eating the Network: Going Native on Network Virtualization

In 2011 Marc Andreessen made his now famous statement, “Software is Eating the World”; a wild claim at the time, but one that proved to be highly prescient. This declaration has become the underpinning of how VMware delivers solutions that enable our customers to be more agile, efficient and innovative with their IT operations – through software.

When we launched our vision for a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in May of 2012, we said it would enable IT transformation through security, automation, management control, and services choice in a way that translated to greater simplicity, programmability, and consistency across various customer IT environments.  We executed on that vision in partnership with the technology and open source ecosystem so that customers would have the best of breed approach when transitioning to a modern software infrastructure.

The explosion of cloud and container services has driven a significant need for scalable, automated and policy-driven networking across heterogeneous environments in a way that can only be realized through software abstraction.  Foundational to network virtualization, the virtual switch has become a strategic component for delivering fast, agile infrastructure.

In line with how we’ve executed and delivered on our SDDC vision, we are Continue reading

Blockchain can help secure medical devices, improve patient privacy

BOSTON -- Blockchain can help secure medical devices and improve patient privacy, but the key is proper implementation, according to a top security pro at Partners Healthcare.The downsides would include mistrust of the technology because of blockchain’s potential performance problems, and its association with ransomware and use as payment for illegal items on the Dark Web, Partners’ Deputy CISO Esmond Kane told the SecureWorld audience this week in Boston.On the other hand, the decentralized, encrypted public ledger could have a wealth of applications in healthcare, Kane says. These include streamlining the resolution of insurance claims, management of internet of things medical devices and providing granular privacy settings for personal medical data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blockchain can help secure medical devices, improve patient privacy

BOSTON -- Blockchain can help secure medical devices and improve patient privacy, but the key is proper implementation, according to a top security pro at Partners Healthcare.The downsides would include mistrust of the technology because of blockchain’s potential performance problems, and its association with ransomware and use as payment for illegal items on the Dark Web, Partners’ Deputy CISO Esmond Kane told the SecureWorld audience this week in Boston.On the other hand, the decentralized, encrypted public ledger could have a wealth of applications in healthcare, Kane says. These include streamlining the resolution of insurance claims, management of internet of things medical devices and providing granular privacy settings for personal medical data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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