Microsoft to end its paid Wi-Fi service for Skype

Microsoft is pulling the plug on its Wi-Fi service for Skype users, which let users buy Wi-Fi access in paid public hotspots for a reduced fee over what the hotspot owner would charge. The company has sent notice to its subscribers that the service will be discontinued at the end of this month and they should use up whatever credits they have.Originally called Skype WiFi and later rebranded as Microsoft WiFi, the service dates back to 2009 when Skype was still an independent company. Following the purchase by Microsoft, the service was restructured and rebranded several times before being integrated into Windows 10. However, a promised integration with Office 365 never happened. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 killer Raspberry Pi projects (Collection 1)

Pi-ning for more air timeImage by NASA / Mark GibbsOne of the most remarkable things about the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers (other than the devices themselves) is the incredible creativity they’ve stimulated. School kids, makers, scientists, engineers, you name it, are building the most amazing digital machines and in this first round up I’ve collected some of notable and exciting examples of what people are making. If you know of a project that should be included in my next round up, drop me a line, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Facebook and sign up for my newsletter!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 reasons why YouTube beat Apple to a skinny TV bundle deal with the networks

Yesterday, Google debuted YouTube TV, giving wannabe cord-cutters a reason to finally do so.The obstacle for over-the-top television (OTT) has been the lack of news, sports and live TV.  Now, with YouTube TV, subscribers get live TV streaming of 44 channels, including ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, plus two add-on channels.YouTube beat Apple to the streaming TV punch, delivering a cable TV-like skinny bundle at a lower price of  $35 per month. Apple has long been rumored to be interested in the disrupting the TV market, though it was reported that Apple walked away from negations about a year ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Award program: Searching for Enterprise All Stars

Network World is proud to announce the 2017 Enterprise All Star Awards, a competition that will celebrate five companies that have used technology to radically improve their competitive standing or the efficiency of their operations. Entry requirements: Enterprise shops only (no vendor submissions) Employees: 500+ Open to all vertical markets, including industry, government and education sectors The technology in question has to be operational and has to have been implemented after Jan 1, 2016 Entries due by April 17, 2017 Judging will be done in two rounds:  A panel of Network World editors and contributors will evaluate qualified entries based on three criteria:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Award program: Searching for Enterprise All Stars

Network World is proud to announce the 2017 Enterprise All Star Awards, a competition that will celebrate five companies that have used technology to radically improve their competitive standing or the efficiency of their operations.Entry requirements: Enterprise shops only (no vendor submissions) Employees: 500+ Open to all vertical markets, including industry, government and education sectors The technology in question has to be operational and has to have been implemented after Jan 1, 2016 Entries due by April 17, 2017 Judging will be done in two rounds:  A panel of Network World editors and contributors will evaluate qualified entries based on three criteria:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Telefónica Works on Private LTE Using MEC Technology

Local breakout is an early use case for mobile edge computing.

Windows 7 share decline stalls, hinting at tough transition to 10

Windows 7's decline in user share, driven for a year by desertions to Windows 10, has stalled for the last eight months, data published today showed.According to analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of Windows 7 -- an estimate of the proportion of the world's personal computer owners who ran that operating system -- climbed by 1.2 percentage points last month to 48.4%, the highest mark since June 2016.And Windows 7 ran more Windows machines than any other edition, accounting for 52.8% of the personal computers powered by Microsoft's OS. The difference between the user share of all PCs and only those running Windows stemmed from the fact that Windows ran on 91.8% of all personal computers, not 100%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Palo Alto Networks Acquires LightCyber for $105M

Palo Alto will sell LightCyber products until its tech is integrated into its security platform.

Why no YANG??

I was at Cisco Live in Berlin last week, and I came away with a question: why no YANG?

Here is a YANG model represented in YIN—this one describes an interface in Quagga, and is easy to read:

YANG can be expressed in many ways, such as YIN, or in a model format (which is still easy to read), or in json format. This is an example of HTML, taken from the Vimeo site:

The YIN representation of YANG is XML, and XML is also a superset of HTML.

The post Why no YANG?? appeared first on 'net work.

Microsoft’s budget Windows VR headsets roll out to developers soon

A lucky few developers will be able to get their hands on a low-cost Windows virtual reality headset starting this month. Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset will start rolling out to a handpicked batch of software makers starting the end of March, with more coming later.This marks the first release of a Windows Mixed Reality headset, which Microsoft first previewed last year. The headsets are supposed to stand out from the crowd because of a lower price and their support for "inside-out" tracking that uses sensors on the device to determine a user's position, rather than relying on external trackers to gather that information. That's why Microsoft is calling them mixed reality headsets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Acer’s Windows VR headset shows promise, needs polish

Microsoft unveiled the first Windows Mixed Reality headset Wednesday, and an early look at a prototype version of the hardware shows promise, along with room for improvement.The Acer Mixed Reality Development Edition headset will start rolling out to developers later this month, but Microsoft offered a demo of a pre-release prototype during the Game Developers Conference this week.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows VR headset shows promise, needs polish

The first Windows Mixed Reality headsets will start shipping to developers later this month, as Microsoft works to distribute the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset to a handpicked group of software makers.Microsoft offered me an early look at one of its internal prototypes, which shared a number of similarities with Acer’s hardware in terms of design and overall feature set. It wasn’t identical to the final hardware, but was built to roughly illustrate some of the capabilities users should expect. Here are my first impressions.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Response: IETF RFC 8033 Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE)

Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE) is another active queue management algorithm for dropping packets.

Similar to RED, PIE randomly drops an
incoming packet at the onset of congestion. Congestion detection,
however, is based on the queuing latency instead of the queue length
(as with RED). Furthermore, PIE also uses the derivative (rate of
change) of the queuing latency to help determine congestion levels
and an appropriate response. The design parameters of PIE are chosen
via control theory stability analysis. While these parameters can be
fixed to work in various traffic conditions, they could be made
self-tuning to optimize system performance.

We know that Bufferbloat is problem, and there are many algorithms proposed. PIE might be suitable for existing network hardware since its approximates Random Early Discard. BBR Congestion Control has been suggested and implemented by Google (related to QUIC/HTTP2) and possibly has the momentum, so I’m not sure if PIE

Link:https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8033.txt

Link: BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control – ACM Queue – http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184

The post Response: IETF RFC 8033 Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE) appeared first on EtherealMind.

5 lessons from Amazon’s S3 cloud blunder – and how to prepare for the next one

According to internet monitoring platform Catchpoint, Amazon Web Service’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced a three hour and 39 minute disruption on Tuesday that had cascading effects across other Amazon cloud services and many internet sites that rely on the popular cloud platform.“S3 is like air in the cloud,” says Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti; when it goes down many websites can’t breathe. But disruptions, errors and outages are a fact of life in the cloud. Bartoletti says there’s no reason to panic: “This is not a trend,” he notes. “S3 has been so reliable, so secure, it’s been the sort of crown jewel of Amazon’s cloud.“To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meet the newest member of the RPi family: The Raspberry Pi Zero W

The Raspberry Pi Zero, priced at $5, has been, to say the least, a hit. Launched in November 2015, the Zero is a tiny (65mm by 30mm by 5mm) stripped-down but well-featured single board computer with a 1GHz ARM11 core, 512MB of RAM, mini-HDMI with 1080p60 output, and a 40-pin GPIO header that's pin compatible with the A+, B+, and 2B models. The problem with the Zero was connectivity; with only a single micro USB port you had to add a USB hub to connect keyboad, mouse, Wi-Fi dongle, and so on making the total cost far less attractive.To answer this issue, the Raspberry Pi Foundation just released the latest member of the RPi family: The Raspberry Pi Zero W which adds 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support. It also includes the CSI camera connector that was added to the revised Raspberry Pi Zero board. All this for just $10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon’s AWS S3 outage impacted Apple’s services

Yesterday afternoon, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant and prolonged outage that brought a number of popular websites and services down. While Amazon is more readily known for its online retail business, the company's cloud services division has quickly become a huge money maker for the Jeff Bezos-led company. What's more, AWS provides the backbone for many well-known sites, including Netflix and Quora."We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said yesterday amidst a flurry of confusion and frustration.The problem was eventually resolved, but not before a number of services from Apple were affected. For a brief while yesterday, iOS users experienced difficulties accessing the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud backups, iWork and other cloud-based services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon’s AWS S3 outage yesterday impacted Apple’s services

Yesterday afternoon, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant and prolonged outage that brought a number of popular websites and services down. While Amazon is more readily known for its online retail business, the company's cloud services division has quickly become a huge money maker for the Jeff Bezos led company. What's more, AWS provides the backbone for many well known sites, including Netflix and Quora."We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said yesterday amidst a flurry of confusion and frustration.The problem was eventually resolved, but not before a number of services from Apple were affected. For a brief while yesterday, iOS users experienced difficulties accessing the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud backups, iWork and other cloud-based services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition For Xbox One – Deal Alert

The Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition has everything fans need to live out their Star Wars battle fantasies, including Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Battlefront Season Pass. Rebels and Imperials alike will be able to expand their galaxy, with 4 epic expansion packs, including Star Wars Rogue One: Scarif. In addition, players can enjoy 30+ maps, 14 heroes and 14 game modes. The list price on the game has just dropped sharply down to just $19.99 on Amazon.  See the discounted Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition for Xbox One now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google slams the brakes on Pixel Chromebooks

Google is pressing pause on its efforts to build Pixel laptops, leaving the in-house premium brand to tablets and phones.The company’s hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, recently told reporters during Mobile World Congress in Spain that Google had “no plans” to create a new Chromebook Pixel, according to TechCrunch. For now, Google is leaving it up to third-party Chromebook makers like Asus, Acer, HP, and Samsung to fill in the gaps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

February 2017: The month in hacks and breaches

On February 5, an anonymous hacker kicked off February’s breaches, taking down a dark web hosting service that the hacker claimed was hosting child pornography sites. In the process, the hacker showed just how easily the dark web can be compromised.Then, on February 10, as many as 20 hackers (or groups of hackers) exploited a recently patched REST API vulnerability to deface over 1.5 million web pages across about 40,000 WordPress websites. “The flaw was fixed in WordPress 4.7.2, released on Jan. 26, but the WordPress team did not publicly disclose the vulnerability's existence until a week later,” Lucian Constantin reported.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)