Worried about China, the US pushes for homegrown chip development

The world's fastest computer runs a Chinese chip, and that fact hasn't escaped notice by the U.S. government.So how does the U.S. government bludgeon the Chinese chip threat? A new U.S. government working group aims to encourage domestic companies to use homegrown chip technology and resist the urge to buy inexpensive Chinese semiconductors.The White House this week established the Semiconductor Working Group, a private-public advisory group that will create policy and research guidelines for semiconductor development. The ultimate goal is to retain U.S. leadership in semiconductor technology.Nations are waging a battle to build the world's fastest computers, and homegrown chips are at the center of that race. Supercomputers help with economic projections, weapons development, scientific simulations, and scenarios critical to national security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco pits modular storage servers against public clouds

Cisco Systems is finding its way into storage through its successful server business. On Tuesday, it’s introducing modular systems that can be deployed with many different combinations of computing and storage capacity.Though it’s not Cisco’s first foray into storage, the UCS S3260 Storage Server offers a density and a freedom of configuration that stands out against other systems, even competing on cost with public cloud services, the company says.The server was announced at the Cisco Partner Summit in San Francisco. It’s the first entry in Cisco’s S-Series, a line of systems designed to serve both enterprises and companies that provide cloud services to others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco pits modular storage servers against public clouds

Cisco Systems is finding its way into storage through its successful server business. On Tuesday, it’s introducing modular systems that can be deployed with many different combinations of computing and storage capacity.Though it’s not Cisco’s first foray into storage, the UCS S3260 Storage Server offers a density and a freedom of configuration that stands out against other systems, even competing on cost with public cloud services, the company says.The server was announced at the Cisco Partner Summit in San Francisco. It’s the first entry in Cisco’s S-Series, a line of systems designed to serve both enterprises and companies that provide cloud services to others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft stops sales of Windows 7 Professional to OEMs

Microsoft today quietly put an end to sales of Windows 7 licenses to computer makers, marking a major milestone for the seven-year-old OS.According to Microsoft's rules, the Redmond, Wash. company stopped selling Windows 7 Professional or any version of Windows 8.1 to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) as of Oct. 31.The end of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 left only Windows 10 as a long-term choice for OEMs that pre-load Windows on their wares.The original end-of-sales deadline for Windows 7 Professional was to be Oct. 31, 2014 -- two years after the launch of Windows 8 -- but early that year Microsoft broke with practice and only called for an end to consumer systems. It left open the cut-off for Windows 7 Professional, saying it would give a one-year warning before it demanded that OEMs stop selling PCs with that edition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mobile is now mission critical for e-business

Web traffic from smartphones will make up 43% of all web traffic next year and will reach 52% globally in 2019, according to research firm Forrester.The implications of such mobile web growth are profound, especially for e-businesses trying to effectively reach their customers and partners.Such widespread reliance on mobile devices instead of desktops means that enterprises next year should begin a dramatic shift to in-house mobile developer teams, Forrester said in a new report, Mobile is the face of digital.Beginning next year, there will also be a robust focus on other ways, besides apps, for mobile users to connect to businesses. Already, some consumer transactions and communications to companies via mobile are done through third-party software, such as Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa, and Apple's iMessage or Siri, Forrester said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

11 cool high-tech aerial headquarters photos

High aboveImage by Reuters/Noah BergerApple’s “Spaceship” headquarters building, which is under construction but will soon be completed, gets a lot of attention but there are other high-tech headquarters that look good – especially from above. Here we take a look at just a few of them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

11 cool high-tech aerial headquarters photos

High aboveImage by Reuters/Noah BergerApple’s “Spaceship” headquarters building, which is under construction but will soon be completed, gets a lot of attention but there are other high-tech headquarters that look good – especially from above. Here we take a look at just a few of them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Energy Efficiency and Data Centers

With October marking Energy Awareness Month and with World Energy Day having taken place on October 22, energy efficiency is at the forefront of many data center managers’ minds. Although it’s an important consideration for professionals across many industries, it really hits home in the data center market today—especially for cloud-computing vendors, hosting companies and other IT-service providers who are opening multitenant data centers (MTDCs) at a rapid pace. —Data Center Journal

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A peek inside Microsoft Azure’s open source server and rack designs

Microsoft this week has open sourced the design specifications of servers and racks that make up its hyperscale Azure cloud data centers, contributing the information to the Open Compute Project (OCP).OCP was founded in 2011 and now includes member companies such as Facebook, Intel, Google, Apple, Dell, Rackspace, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity and Bank of America, who share design specifications for hardware used in their data centers. OCP is meant to be an open source community where member companies share how they buy and configure components used to make data center equipment.Microsoft joined OCP in 2014 and has contributed server and data center designs for its Azure cloud. This week the company announced that it will contribute Project Olympus, which are a series of hardware design specifications for “next-generation hyperscale hardware design,” the company said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A peek inside Microsoft Azure’s open source server and rack designs

Microsoft this week has open sourced the design specifications of servers and racks that make up its hyperscale Azure cloud data centers, contributing the information to the Open Compute Project (OCP).OCP was founded in 2011 and now includes member companies such as Facebook, Intel, Google, Apple, Dell, Rackspace, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity and Bank of America, who share design specifications for hardware used in their data centers. OCP is meant to be an open source community where member companies share how they buy and configure components used to make data center equipment.Microsoft joined OCP in 2014 and has contributed server and data center designs for its Azure cloud. This week the company announced that it will contribute Project Olympus, which are a series of hardware design specifications for “next-generation hyperscale hardware design,” the company said in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Technology would speed Clinton email investigation

If you don’t run an order of magnitude test on your thoughts before they come out of your mouth, I am going to have to fire you. So ended an otherwise fantastic review with my boss who had earned a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. What she really meant was I should apply mathematical common sense to my ideas to check the feasibility before I discussed them. I immediately applied her criticism because I enjoyed working for someone as gifted as her and the world was amidst a recession. I never forgot her comment.The order of magnitude of the 650,000 Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin emails reported by The Wall Street Journal is not a big number. It is what 20-30 office workers deal with in a year. If someone made up the number 650,000 to make it appear an obstacle to quickly completing the investigation, they should have combed through it with an order-of-magnitude test.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers build undetectable rootkit for programmable logic controllers

Researchers have devised a new malware attack against industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that takes advantage of architectural shortcomings in microprocessors and bypasses current detection mechanisms.The attack changes the configuration of the input/output pins that make up the interface used by PLCs to communicate with other devices such as sensors, valves, and motors. PLCs are specialized embedded computers used to control and monitor physical processes in factories, power stations, gas refineries, public utilities, and other industrial installations.The attack, which will be presented at the Black Hat Europe security conference in London on Thursday, was developed by Ali Abbasi, a doctoral candidate in the distributed and embedded system security group at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and Majid Hashemi, a research and development engineer at Quarkslab, a Paris-based cybersecurity company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers build undetectable rootkit for programmable logic controllers

Researchers have devised a new malware attack against industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that takes advantage of architectural shortcomings in microprocessors and bypasses current detection mechanisms.The attack changes the configuration of the input/output pins that make up the interface used by PLCs to communicate with other devices such as sensors, valves, and motors. PLCs are specialized embedded computers used to control and monitor physical processes in factories, power stations, gas refineries, public utilities, and other industrial installations.The attack, which will be presented at the Black Hat Europe security conference in London on Thursday, was developed by Ali Abbasi, a doctoral candidate in the distributed and embedded system security group at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and Majid Hashemi, a research and development engineer at Quarkslab, a Paris-based cybersecurity company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flying Dragon Eye: Uyghur Themed Threat Activity

DOWNLOAD FULL REPORT HERE DOWNLOAD INDICATORS OF COMPROMISE (IOCs) HERE This paper documents attempted exploitation activity aimed at Uyghur interests outside of China. Exploitation is being attempted via the usual tactic of spear phishing containing malicious attachments to targets. The exploit code attached used for dropping the malware is older – CVE-2012-0158 – and from […]

Former Cisco exec rejoins networking giant to head data center initiative

Cisco today said Roland Acra has rejoined the company as a senior vice-president/general manager for its data center business. If the name sounds familiar to Cisco watchers anyway, that’s because this will be Acra’s third stint with the company since 1991.“As a long-standing industry expert in Internet routing, software engineering and communication protocol development, Roland fits right in – once again. He is a Cisco veteran having held several general management and executive leadership positions from 1991 – 2003. In 2010, he came back to Cisco as Vice President in our Smart Grid Business Unit, following the acquisition of Arch Rock, a developer of IPv6-based wireless sensor networks where he served as President and CEO. Prior to Arch Rock, he was the President and CEO of Procket Networks,” wrote David Goeckeler senior VP/GM for Cisco’s networking and security business in a blog about Acra’s return.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Former Cisco exec rejoins networking giant to head data center initiative

Cisco today said Roland Acra has rejoined the company as a senior vice-president/general manager for its data center business. If the name sounds familiar to Cisco watchers anyway, that’s because this will be Acra’s third stint with the company since 1991.“As a long-standing industry expert in Internet routing, software engineering and communication protocol development, Roland fits right in – once again. He is a Cisco veteran having held several general management and executive leadership positions from 1991 – 2003. In 2010, he came back to Cisco as Vice President in our Smart Grid Business Unit, following the acquisition of Arch Rock, a developer of IPv6-based wireless sensor networks where he served as President and CEO. Prior to Arch Rock, he was the President and CEO of Procket Networks,” wrote David Goeckeler senior VP/GM for Cisco’s networking and security business in a blog about Acra’s return.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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