Kaspersky: Windows bundled Defender is anti-competitive, Russia opens antitrust probe

After Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Kaspersky Lab, ripped into Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior in Windows 10, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) opened a case against Microsoft for “abusing dominance.”Microsoft claimed to have a “long history of cooperation” with Kaspersky and that it is “committed to work in full compliance with Russian law.”Yet, Russia has already decided to block Microsoft-owned LinkedIn since the law requires Russian citizens’ personal data to be stored on servers within its country. In the past, Microsoft made LinkedIn censorship changes to cater to China, as opposed to being blocked like Google and Facebook. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will localize Russian users’ data as the country’s law demands. The New York Times added that it was unclear why LinkedIn was targeted, “rather than any other major social networking site,” but that is a “sign of growing tensions for American tech companies operating” in Russia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kaspersky: Windows bundled Defender is anti-competitive, Russia opens antitrust probe

After Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Kaspersky Lab, ripped into Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior in Windows 10, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) opened a case against Microsoft for “abusing dominance.”Microsoft claimed to have a “long history of cooperation” with Kaspersky and that it is “committed to work in full compliance with Russian law.”Yet, Russia has already decided to block Microsoft-owned LinkedIn since the law requires Russian citizens’ personal data to be stored on servers within its country. In the past, Microsoft made LinkedIn censorship changes to cater to China, as opposed to being blocked like Google and Facebook. It remains to be seen if Microsoft will localize Russian users’ data as the country’s law demands. The New York Times added that it was unclear why LinkedIn was targeted, “rather than any other major social networking site,” but that is a “sign of growing tensions for American tech companies operating” in Russia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cloud traffic set to quadruple: Looks like those pipes are going to run hot

Every year Cisco produces a Global Cloud Index, a report that was developed to estimate (and it is just an estimate) global data center traffic growth and general trends. The report is a complementary resource to Cisco’s more general IP network studies, but it provides more meat for which cloud-specific pundits can chew on.+ Also on Network World: Enterprise IT pros see most workloads in cloud by 2018 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cloud traffic set to quadruple: Looks like those pipes are going to run hot

Every year Cisco produces a Global Cloud Index, a report that was developed to estimate (and it is just an estimate) global data center traffic growth and general trends. The report is a complementary resource to Cisco’s more general IP network studies, but it provides more meat for which cloud-specific pundits can chew on.+ Also on Network World: Enterprise IT pros see most workloads in cloud by 2018 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Forward Networks helps search, protect and predict network behavior

A team founded by PhD researchers who studied some of the first instantiations of software defined networking at Stanford University have a new startup named Forward Networks that help users understand network behavior while protecting and predicting how changes will impact the system.The key to Forward Networks' technology is an algorithm developed at Stanford that allows a software copy of a network to be created. Using this copy, users can run tests on it before implementing changes into production and identify the cause of a problem when something is wrong, says CEO David Erickson.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What you need to know about Microservices +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Forward Networks helps search, protect and predict network behavior

A team founded by PhD researchers who studied some of the first instantiations of software defined networking at Stanford University have a new startup named Forward Networks that help users understand network behavior while protecting and predicting how changes will impact the system.The key to Forward Networks' technology is an algorithm developed at Stanford that allows a software copy of a network to be created. Using this copy, users can run tests on it before implementing changes into production and identify the cause of a problem when something is wrong, says CEO David Erickson.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What you need to know about Microservices +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK approves extradition of British hacker to the US

A U.K. official has ordered the extradition of a British man to the U.S. on charges of hacking government computers belonging to NASA and the Department of Defense. Lauri Love, a 31-year-old hacktivist, has been fighting his extradition, but on Monday, U.K. Home Secretary Amber Rudd signed the order. "Mr. Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting U.S. military and federal government agencies," the U.K. Home Office said in a statement. The U.S. originally charged Love in 2013 for allegedly stealing confidential data from thousands of government employees, including Social Security numbers and credit card details. U.S. investigators accuse Love and his accomplices of causing millions of dollars in damages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK approves extradition of British hacker to the US

A U.K. official has ordered the extradition of a British man to the U.S. on charges of hacking government computers belonging to NASA and the Department of Defense. Lauri Love, a 31-year-old hacktivist, has been fighting his extradition, but on Monday, U.K. Home Secretary Amber Rudd signed the order. "Mr. Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting U.S. military and federal government agencies," the U.K. Home Office said in a statement. The U.S. originally charged Love in 2013 for allegedly stealing confidential data from thousands of government employees, including Social Security numbers and credit card details. U.S. investigators accuse Love and his accomplices of causing millions of dollars in damages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Small businesses now get CRM tool with their Office subscription

Small businesses that need a tool to track their relationships with customers now have a new weapon from Microsoft in their arsenal.On Monday, the company launched Outlook Customer Manager, a lightweight customer relationship management (CRM) system. It allows users to track their customers, manage deals in progress, track tasks and more, all from their Outlook email client.The launch builds on Microsoft's ongoing push to capture the small business market. Earlier this year, the company launched Bookings, a service designed to help service-focused businesses manage customer appointments.It's a move by Microsoft to further compete with Salesforce and other players in the cloud CRM space. Companies that already have an Office 365 Business Premium subscription may not want to choose one of the competing CRM systems, if they can get OCM for free.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Urban Airship Scaled to 2.5 Billion Notifications During the U.S. Election

This is a guest post by Urban Airship. Contributors: Adam Lowry, Sean Moran, Mike Herrick, Lisa Orr, Todd Johnson, Christine Ciandrini, Ashish Warty, Nick Adlard, Mele Sax-Barnett, Niall Kelly, Graham Forest, and Gavin McQuillan

Urban Airship is trusted by thousands of businesses looking to grow with mobile. Urban Airship is a seven year old SaaS company and has a freemium business model so you can try it for free. For more information, visit www.urbanairship.com. Urban Airship now averages more than one billion push notifications delivered daily. This post highlights Urban Airship notification usage for the 2016 U.S. election, exploring the architecture of the system--the Core Delivery Pipeline--that delivers billions of real-time notifications for news publishers.

2016 U.S. Election

In the 24 hours surrounding Election Day, Urban Airship delivered 2.5 billion notifications—its highest daily volume ever. This is equivalent to 8 notification per person in the United States or 1 notification for every active smartphone in the world. While Urban Airship powers more than 45,000 apps across every industry vertical, analysis of the election usage data shows that more than 400 media apps were responsible for 60% of this record volume, sending 1.5 billion notifications Continue reading

Visual Studio for Mac: Microsoft publishes details a little early

Premature publication of news is a common mistake on both our end and that of vendors. Today was Microsoft's turn to suffer an oops with the premature announcement that it is bringing its flagship development tool to the Mac. Microsoft will be hosting its Connect(); 2016 developer conference in New York City later this week, which will be the launch grounds for Visual Studio for Mac, but for whatever reason, the news was published early to an MSDN blog. Several sites, including TechCrunch and Neowin, got the news before the blog post was taken down, although a cached version is available from Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Nvidia’s Own Saturn V DGX-1 Cluster Stacks Up

Not all of the new and interesting high performance computing systems are always in the upper echelons of the Top 500 supercomputing list, which was announced at the opening of the SC16 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City this week. Sometimes, an intriguing system breaks into the list outside of the top ten or twenty most powerful machines in the bi-annual rankings of number-crunching performance, and such is the case with the new “Saturn V” supercomputer built by Nvidia using its latest GPUs and interconnects.

The Saturn V system, nick-named of course for the NASA launch vehicle that eventually

How Nvidia’s Own Saturn V DGX-1 Cluster Stacks Up was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Vonage partners with IBM Watson to enable cognitive communications

Since Alan Masarek joined Vonage as its CEO, the company has been on a mission to redefine how businesses communicate with workers and customers. The term unified communications has been somewhat of a fallacy, as collaboration tools are disjointed and require a high amount of manual integration. Sure, there has been some advancements with respect to bringing voice, video and content sharing together, but the tools are primarily limited to users communicating with other workers with basic collaboration tools. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Closer Look at 2016 Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings

The bi-annual rankings of the Top 500 supercomputers for the November 2016 systems are now live. While the top of the list is static with the same two Chinese supercomputers dominating, there are several new machines that have cropped up to replace decommissioned systems throughout, the momentum at the very top shows some telling architectural trends, particularly among the newcomers in the top 20.

We already described the status of the major Chinese and Japanese systems in our analysis of the June 2016 list and thought it might be more useful to look at some of the broader

A Closer Look at 2016 Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

37% of IT pros to look for new jobs in 2017

If your IT department isn’t already worried about staff retention, some new stats might change that. A new poll finds 37% of IT pros plan to begin searching for a new employer in 2017, and 26% plan to accept a new job.Many factors are driving people’s desire for a job change, according to Spiceworks’ 2017 Tech Career Outlook. The most frequently cited reasons are: to advance my IT skills (cited by 69%); to get a more competitive salary (64%); to work at a company that makes IT more of a priority (40%); I’m burnt out at my current job (40%); to find a better work-life balance (38%); to get better benefits (401k, healthcare) (33%); to work with a more talented IT team (26%); to get better work-from-home options (24%); to get a better job title (22%).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here