Microsoft starts selling 6 more years of Windows Server support

Microsoft yesterday started selling extended support for its Windows Server software, letting corporate customers add up to six years to the lifespan of Windows Server 2008 and later, and SQL Server 2008 and later.The company had announced this "Premium Assurance" in December, saying then that the extended support would be available for purchase this month.[ Further reading: SharePoint 2013 cheat sheet ] Under Premium Assurance, only vulnerabilities graded as "Critical" and "Important" will be patched. The extended support costs between 5% and 12% of the current licensing cost for each year of coverage, depending on when a customer commits. The sooner a plan is bought, the lower the price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Classic smartphone brands get a spring in their step at MWC (+video)

BARCELONA -- Venerable smartphone brands Motorola, Nokia and BlackBerry got new life at Mobile World Congress 2017, but that was primarily due to the influence of Chinese and Finnish manufacturers that have licensed the names.One new Android smartphone, the BlackBerry KEYone, was launched by TCL Communication, based in Huizhou, China. The phone has both a touchscreen and a physical keyboard, with 52 keys that can be used as shortcuts to find apps and functions. It goes on sale in April for $549.HMD Global of Espoo, Finland, launched three budget Android phones under the Nokia brand — the Nokia 3, 5 and 6, starting at $147 with screens ranging from 5 inches to 5.5 inches in size. A 2000 classic handset was revised — the Nokia 3310 — but with a slimmer size and a color screen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hottest iPad & Surface alternatives from Mobile World Congress 2017

While the traditional tablet market has had a tough go of it lately, some industry watchers do see growth ahead particularly in the 2-in-1 detachables sector, and the batch of new devices shown at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week could play a big role in any such revival.While most of the new smartphones demoed at MWC were of the Android variety, tablet makers gave Windows some love as well with possible Microsoft Surface alternatives. (Apple, as usual, didn’t display at MWC, but is said to have new iPads in the works.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The data deletion landscape

Delete is a word built into the vocabulary of users from the beginning of personal computing. When commanded to “del,” an operating system appeared to erase a file completely. However, right from the start, a users’ commonsense understanding of the command to “delete” differed from companies’ practices; rather than erasing a file, “delete” meant “put in the recycle bin.” “Deleted” files were not really gone but rather out of sight, available to be recovered if necessary. The rise of cloud computing, where files live remotely from their owners’ devices and are frequently accessible from multiple devices, has further muddied the concept of deletion by saving all of a user’s files in an ambiguous location until called upon. While this change may seem trivial, it represents a larger truth about our digital files: they are almost never really “deleted.” —CDT

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AWS says a typo caused the massive S3 failure this week

Everyone makes mistakes. But working at Amazon Web Services means an incorrectly entered input can lead to a massive outage that cripples popular websites and services. That's apparently what happened earlier this week, when the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) in the provider's Northern Virginia region experienced an 11-hour system failure.Other Amazon services in the US-EAST-1 region that rely on S3, like Elastic Block Store, Lambda, and the new instance launch for the Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service offering were all impacted by the outage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slack bug paved the way for a hack that can steal user access

One bug in Slack, the popular work chat application, was enough for a security researcher to design a hack that could trick users into handing over access to their accounts.Bug bounty hunter Frans Rosen noticed he could steal Slack access tokens to user accounts due to a flaw in the way the application communicates data in an internet browser.“Slack missed an important step when using a technology called postMessage,” Rosen said on Wednesday in an email.  PostMessage is a kind of command that can let separate browser windows communicate with each other. In Slack, it’s used whenever the chat application opens a new window to enable a voice call.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slack bug paved the way for a hack that can steal user access

One bug in Slack, the popular work chat application, was enough for a security researcher to design a hack that could trick users into handing over access to their accounts.Bug bounty hunter Frans Rosen noticed he could steal Slack access tokens to user accounts due to a flaw in the way the application communicates data in an internet browser.“Slack missed an important step when using a technology called postMessage,” Rosen said on Wednesday in an email.  PostMessage is a kind of command that can let separate browser windows communicate with each other. In Slack, it’s used whenever the chat application opens a new window to enable a voice call.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Free decryption tools now available for Dharma ransomware

Computer users who have been affected by the Dharma ransomware and have held onto their encrypted files can now restore them for free. Researchers have created decryption tools for this ransomware strain after someone recently leaked the decryption keys.Dharma first appeared in November and is based on an older ransomware program known as Crysis. It's easy to recognize files affected by it because they will have the extension: .[email_address].dharma, where the email address is the one used by the attacker as a point of contact.On Wednesday, a user named gektar published a link to a Pastebin post on the BleepingComputer.com technical support forum. The post, he claimed, contained the decryption keys for all Dharma variants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Free decryption tools now available for Dharma ransomware

Computer users who have been affected by the Dharma ransomware and have held onto their encrypted files can now restore them for free. Researchers have created decryption tools for this ransomware strain after someone recently leaked the decryption keys.Dharma first appeared in November and is based on an older ransomware program known as Crysis. It's easy to recognize files affected by it because they will have the extension: .[email_address].dharma, where the email address is the one used by the attacker as a point of contact.On Wednesday, a user named gektar published a link to a Pastebin post on the BleepingComputer.com technical support forum. The post, he claimed, contained the decryption keys for all Dharma variants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

These IoT devices shown at MWC mean business

IoT goes to workImage by Stephen LawsonAlong with all the hype about phones and 5G networks, Mobile World Congress 2017 was also a showcase for the internet of things, including IoT gear for enterprise and government use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft, Stanford Researchers Tweak Cloud Economics Framework

Cloud computing makes a lot of sense for a rapidly growing number of larger enterprises and other organizations, and for any number of reasons. The increased application flexibility and agility engendered by creating a pool of shared infrastructure resources, the scalability and the cost efficiencies, are all key drivers in an era of ever-embiggening data.

With public and hybrid cloud environments, companies can offload the integration, deployment and management of the infrastructure to a third party, taking the pressure off their own IT staffs, and in private and hybrid cloud environments, they can keep their most business-critical data securely behind …

Microsoft, Stanford Researchers Tweak Cloud Economics Framework was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: The contact center and CRM collision leads to a new dominant species

Some weeks ago I wrote that CRM and contact center are on a collision course. I argued that as the technologies used in CRM and the contact center will naturally mash up, the vendors of these traditionally distinct technologies will collide.In this post, I will expand upon that idea and talk about the future and a key aspect that will be important to successful synergies: how each domain leverages behaviors.CRM/contact center collision The first post argued that a co-mingling of the technologies used in CRM and the contact center worlds have occurred. This has been more of a lending of functionality. Seldom has true synergy emerged.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Data Center Efficiency Key to Outsourcing Cost

52% off Logitech Bluetooth Multi-Device Keyboard – Deal Alert

Here's a Bluetooth keyboard for your computer that you can also use with your tablet and smartphone -- switch between all three effortlessly by just turning the dial. And unlike other Bluetooth keyboards, Logitech has integrated a cradle so your device stays propped up at just the right angle as you type. Works with Windows or Mac, Android or iOS, and features a key layout you'll be familiar with on any of those platforms. Logitech's multi-device keyboard currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 1,350 people (read reviews) on Amazon, where its typical list price of $49.99 has been recently dropped 52% to just $23.99.  See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Full text of Amazon’s post-mortem from its S3 cloud brownout

As is customary after a major service disruption, Amazon Web Services today released a post-mortem explaining why its Simple Storage Service experienced elevated error rates, causing many sites across the Internet to slow down or stop working on Tuesday.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 5 Lessons from the AWS S3 outage and how to insulate yourself from the next one | Half of the top 100 retail websites had slow load times during the S3 outage, vendor finds +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

On the ‘net: LinkedIn’s DC Design Principles

Operating a large-scale, rapidly growing network requires a philosophical change in how you plan, deploy, and operate your infrastructure. At LinkedIn, as we scaled our data center network, it became evident that we needed to provision and build networks not only as quickly as possible, but also with the most simple and minimalistic approaches possible — something that previously was not quite apparent to us. Adding a new component, a new feature, or a new service without any traffic loss or architectural change is challenging. —Network Computing

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Server Makers Try To Adapt To A Harsher Climate

So, who was the biggest revenue generator, and showing the largest growth in sales, for servers in the final quarter of 2016? Was it Hewlett Packard Enterprise? Was it Dell Technologies? Was it IBM or Cisco Systems or one of the ODMs? Nope. It was the Others category comprised of dozens of vendors that sit outside of the top tier OEMs we know by name and the collective ODMs of the world who some of us know by name.

This is a sign that the server ecosystem is getting more diverse under pressure as the technical and economic climate changes …

Server Makers Try To Adapt To A Harsher Climate was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cisco expands Docker partnership, rolls Contiv open source container networking software

Cisco and Docker today announced an expanded partnership that will see further integration of container management software from Docker with infrastructure equipment.Cisco also released a 1.0 version of an open source container networking project named Contiv.+More on Network World: 5 Lessons from Amazon’s S3 Cloud blunder – and how to protect yourself from the next one +The integration of Cisco hardware with Docker software is codified through new Cisco Validated Designs (CVD). One CVD includes a Cisco UCS deployment pre-integrated to support Docker Datacenter, a container management platform that includes the Docker runtime Engine, a Trusted Registry and a Universal Control Plane. Cisco announced another CVD that includes its FlexPod hyperconverged infrastructure with NetApp storage and support for Docker software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware roundtable: Is this the new spam?

Matt Gangwer, CTO of Rook Security and Ryan O'Leary, VP of Threat Research Center and Tech Support at WhiteHat Security join CSO Online's Steve Ragan to talk about the evolution of ransomware, and what companies need to do to combat it.

Understanding Windows 10’s Unified Update Platform

The Unified Update Platform (UUP) was introduced to the Windows 10 Insider Preview with Build 14986 on December 11, 2016. It changes how Windows Update works in a profound and interesting way. This is explained in some detail in a Windows Insider blog post entitled "Introducing Unified Update Platform (UUP)" that posted on November 3, 2016, so I'll just hit some high points here. The original post is well worth a read, if you're into the nitty-gritty details.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)