Apple smartphones outsold Samsung’s in Q4

Apple has overtaken Samsung Electronics in smartphone sales for the first time in two years -- but don't count on it staying ahead for long.Samsung sold 76.8 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, giving it a market share of 17.8 percent, but it was just beaten by Apple, which sold 77 million iPhones for a 17.9 percent share, according to figures from Gartner.The fourth quarter is usually a strong one for Apple, boosted by holiday sales of the new generation of iPhones it releases each September, said Anshul Gupta, a research director at Gartner.For Samsung, though, 2016 ended particularly badly, dominated by the fiasco around the recall of its incendiary Galaxy Note7.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Doubts abound over US action on cybersecurity

How should the U.S. respond to cyber attacks? That’s been a major question at this year’s RSA security conference, following Russia’s suspected attempt to influence last year’s election. Clearly, the government should be doing more on cybersecurity, said U.S. lawmakers and officials at the show, but they admit that politics and policy conflicts have hampered the government's approach.  “I wish the federal government could do this, but it’s very hard, unfortunately, due to partisan politics,” said Virginia State Governor Terry McAuliffe, during a speech at the show. “They haven’t been able to take the lead on this issue as they should have.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Doubts abound over US action on cybersecurity

How should the U.S. respond to cyber attacks? That’s been a major question at this year’s RSA security conference, following Russia’s suspected attempt to influence last year’s election. Clearly, the government should be doing more on cybersecurity, said U.S. lawmakers and officials at the show, but they admit that politics and policy conflicts have hampered the government's approach.  “I wish the federal government could do this, but it’s very hard, unfortunately, due to partisan politics,” said Virginia State Governor Terry McAuliffe, during a speech at the show. “They haven’t been able to take the lead on this issue as they should have.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T plans a national IoT network with LTE-M by midyear

AT&T is accelerating its rollout of LTE-M, an IoT network that’s already being used to track shipping containers and pallets, monitor water use and connect fleets to the internet.The carrier said Tuesday it will have nationwide LTE-M coverage in the U.S. by the middle of this year, six months ahead of schedule. Previously, AT&T had said LTE-M would cover the U.S. by year’s end.That means everywhere in the country that AT&T has an LTE network, it will also offer LTE-M. By the end of the year, it will have LTE-M across Mexico too, creating a broad coverage area for businesses that operate on both sides of the border.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook’s chassis, Disaggregate & a webinar you don’t want to miss

Several weeks ago, we let out some big news about Backpack, Facebook’s chassis, running Cumulus Linux. If you missed the news, check it out here.

As part of our launch, we attended Facebook’s exclusive event, Disaggregate, to talk about all things open networking. Our CTO and cofounder, JR Rivers, gave a stellar presentation covering a short history of open networking (“I watched the Googles of the world grow up”), how ONIE was born and why Cumulus Linux was created to help an industry evolve, scale and build better networks. You can watch the full presentation here.

We also manned our station at the event, answering questions about our integration with Backpack and even demoing Cumulus Linux on the product. Some of our takeaways from the event included:

  • There was a nice mix of customers. From hyper-scale to SaaS, traditional organizations to state and local governments — all types of organizations were represented. Some were there to learn about the benefits of open networking while others were looking for ways to scale their footprint.
  • Most discussions with customers were about their ability to build and/or use their custom applications that traditional lock-in vendors don’t support, which gave them freedom and choice. Continue reading

iPhone 8 will feature wireless charging and may cost $1000

It's been quite some time since we've seen a brand new iPhone design. In fact, Apple has essentially relied upon the same iPhone design since the iPhone 6 was first introduced all the way back in 2014. Now there's certainly nothing wrong with the current design -- which is rather sleek and svelte -- but products that don't evolve in the fast moving world of technology are easy to categorize as stale.Of course, the iPhone 7 is hardly stale underneath the hood, but a strong case can be made that iPhone owners are desperately hoping for a brand new redesign. Not to worry, the upcoming iPhone 8 will reportedly heed the call.According to a variety of sources, Apple's iPhone 8 will introduce a cutting edge new design with an edge to edge OLED display. What's more, the display itself is said to occupy the entire front face of the device, which is to say that Apple will completely eliminate both the top and bottom bezels.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NCC Group’s Cryptography Services audits our Go TLS 1.3 stack

The Cloudflare TLS 1.3 beta is run by a Go implementation of the protocol based on the Go standard library, crypto/tls. Starting from that excellent Go codebase allowed us to quickly start experimenting, to be the first wide server deployment of the protocol, and to effectively track the changes to the specification draft.

Of course, the security of a TLS implementation is critical, so we engaged NCC Group's Cryptography Services to perform an audit at the end of 2016.

You can find the codebase on the Cloudflare GitHub. It's a drop-in replacement for crypto/tls and comes with a go wrapper to patch the standard library as needed.

The code is developed in the open but is currently targeted only at internal use: the repository is frequently rebased and the API is not guaranteed to be stable or fully documented. You can take a sneak peek at the API here.

The final goal is to upstream the patches to the Go project so that all users of the Go standard library benefit from it. You can follow the process here.

Below we republish the article about the audit first appeared on the NCC Group's blog.

NCC Group's Cryptography Services Complete Continue reading

Why I Enthusiastically Switched from Cacti to Zabbix for System Monitoring

Cacti is a “complete network graphing solution” according to their website. It has also been a thorn in my side for a long time.

See what I did there? Thorn… because it's a cactus… never mind.

When Cacti is in a steady state-when I could get it to a steady state-it was good. Not great, because there was a lot of effort to get it into what I consider “steady state”, but good. The rest of the time… thorny.

There are five major things that have driven me up the wall. In no particular order:

IBM’s hub for wearables could have you out of the hospital faster

Researchers at IBM have developed a hub for wearables that can gather information from multiple wearable devices and share it with a doctor, potentially cutting down on the time patients need to spend in a hospital.The gadget, which IBM has dubbed a 'cognitive hypervisor,' funnels data from devices such as smart watches and fitness bands into the IBM Cloud. There, it's analyzed and the results are shared with the user and their doctor.The idea is that patients can be monitored reliably through the device so they can be sent home to recover from illnesses a day or two earlier than they might otherwise have been allowed. It also means that should a problem develop, a doctor can be alerted immediately and an ambulance dispatched if it's serious enough.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SkyBell HD, the best video doorbell so far

Some time ago I wrote about the Ring doorbell and concluded, as I wrote in a subsequent review of the company’s Stick Up Cam, that “While I liked the product conceptually, the startup lag (the time between detecting movement and when recording begins, usually a delay of a few seconds) is long enough that fast moving people like the Fedex guy can come and go before the device starts recording” and I lamented the so-so video quality. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: 12 ideas for advanced DevOps practices

If your organization has adopted a DevOps initiative, you’re likely already seeing improvements in culture and processes. Maybe you’ve automated manual tasks, built a continuous delivery pipeline, and improved collaboration between Dev and Ops. Team morale has gone up, and the number of 3 AM calls has gone down. You’re doing really well compared to many other organizations.Of course, DevOps is not one-and-done; it’s an ongoing journey. There’s always a way to achieve greater control, predictability and flexibility.Continuous Improvement is a new ebook by Puppet for anyone who's already tackled the fundamental DevOps practices and wants to go further. You’ll learn tips on improving cross-departmental collaboration, holding internal events like workshops and hackathons, and building in metrics and transparency to hold everyone accountable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juggling Applications On Intel Knights Landing Xeon Phi Chips

Intel’s many-core “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processor is just a glimpse of what can be expected of supercomputers in the not-so-distant future of high performance computing. As the industry continues its march to exascale computing, systems will become more complex, and evolution that will include processors that not only sport a rapidly increasing number of cores but also a broad array of on-chip resources ranging from memory to I/O. Workloads ranging from simulation and modeling applications to data analytics and deep learning algorithms are all expected to benefit from what these new systems will offer in terms of processing capabilities. …

Juggling Applications On Intel Knights Landing Xeon Phi Chips was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Munich’s great Linux desktop initiative may end

A decade ago, there was much hoopla over the city of Munich discarding Windows desktops in favor of Linux, which were thought to be more secure and cheaper to deploy and maintain. Well, that experiment is coming to an end. TechRepublic reports the city is prepared to shift gears and allow users once again to choose Windows for their work PC instead of Linux after complaints of poorer productivity and compatibility issues. But it's not going to happen overnight; the Windows option won't come until 2021. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft shelves all February security updates

Microsoft today took the unprecedented step of postponing an entire month's slate of security updates for Windows and its other products just hours before the patches were to begin rolling out to customers."We discovered a last-minute issue that could impact some customers and was not resolved in time for our planned updates today," Microsoft said in a post to the MSRC (Microsoft Security Research Center) blog. "After considering all options, we made the decision to delay this month's updates."Today was set as Patch Tuesday, the monthly release of security fixes from Microsoft. Normally, Microsoft issues the updates around 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET). Although Microsoft did not time stamp its blog post, the SAN Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) pointed out the delay at 8:22 a.m. PT (11:22 ET).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft shelves all February security updates

Microsoft today took the unprecedented step of postponing an entire month's slate of security updates for Windows and its other products just hours before the patches were to begin rolling out to customers."We discovered a last-minute issue that could impact some customers and was not resolved in time for our planned updates today," Microsoft said in a post to the MSRC (Microsoft Security Research Center) blog. "After considering all options, we made the decision to delay this month's updates."Today was set as Patch Tuesday, the monthly release of security fixes from Microsoft. Normally, Microsoft issues the updates around 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET). Although Microsoft did not time stamp its blog post, the SAN Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) pointed out the delay at 8:22 a.m. PT (11:22 ET).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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