Windows 10 growth comes to screeching stop

Microsoft's Windows 10 beat a retreat last month, losing user share for the first time since its debut more than a year ago.According to U.S. metrics vendor Net Applications, Windows 10 lost half a percentage point in user share during September, ending the month on 22.5% of all personal computers.Windows 10 powered 24.8% of all machines running Windows: The difference between the user share of all PCs and only those running Windows originated with the fact that Windows powered 91% of all personal computers, not 100%.September's decline was the first since Microsoft officially launched Windows 10 in July 2015, and the only since January 2015, months before when Microsoft offered only a preview to beta testers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ITC probes Apple memory supplier for patent infringement

The International Trade Commission (ITC) has opened a patent infringement investigation on SK hynix, the world's second largest memory chip manufacturer, based on claims that it infringed on six U.S. patents.Second only to Samsung in global market share for DRAM shipments, Hynix is also the world's fifth-largest semiconductor company. SK hynix memory is used by Apple in some MacBook and MacBook Pro computers and in its iPhones. The memory is also in Asus' Nexus 7 tablet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5G will need small cells, so Nokia is sending in the drones

If you want 5G, there’s a good chance you'll need a small cell nearby to deliver it. Putting up that cell may be hard because of a host of problems, but Nokia Bell Labs thinks it can solve some of them with drones and tiny solar panels.Nokia's F-Cell is an experimental LTE small cell that doesn't need any wires. It gets power from solar panels on its surface and communicates with the carrier's core network over a high-speed wireless connection. No one even needs to climb up on a roof to install it: The company recently delivered an F-Cell to the roof of one of its buildings in Sunnyvale, California, using a drone.F-Cells won’t start showing up everywhere tomorrow, but anything to speed up small-cell deployment could make a big difference when 5G starts going live in 2020. The next generation of cellular will probably require dense networks of small cells to deliver the gigabit speeds being promised, and carriers will face both legal and technical hurdles when they try to put them up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New insulin pump flaws highlights security risks from medical devices

Medical device manufacturer Animas, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, is warning diabetic patients who use its OneTouch Ping insulin pumps about security issues that could allow hackers to deliver unauthorized doses of insulin.The vulnerabilities were discovered by Jay Radcliffe, a security researcher at Rapid7 who is a Type I diabetic and user of the pump. The flaws primarily stem from a lack of encryption in the communication between the device's two parts: the insulin pump itself and the meter-remote that monitors blood sugar levels and remotely tells the pump how much insulin to administer.The pump and the meter use a proprietary wireless management protocol through radio frequency communications that are not encrypted. This exposes the system to several attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New insulin pump flaws highlights security risks from medical devices

Medical device manufacturer Animas, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, is warning diabetic patients who use its OneTouch Ping insulin pumps about security issues that could allow hackers to deliver unauthorized doses of insulin.The vulnerabilities were discovered by Jay Radcliffe, a security researcher at Rapid7 who is a Type I diabetic and user of the pump. The flaws primarily stem from a lack of encryption in the communication between the device's two parts: the insulin pump itself and the meter-remote that monitors blood sugar levels and remotely tells the pump how much insulin to administer.The pump and the meter use a proprietary wireless management protocol through radio frequency communications that are not encrypted. This exposes the system to several attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel looks beyond x86, puts 64-bit ARM processor in new FPGA chip

It seems like the chip war between Intel and ARM is slowly winding down, at least for the time being.Intel for decades has doggedly sworn by chips based on its homegrown x86 architecture, but the company is putting a 64-bit ARM processor in its new Stratix 10 FPGA (field-programmable gate array), which was announced on Tuesday.The FPGA -- based on Altera technology -- can be reprogrammed to do a wide variety of server or network tasks. It can also run algorithms for machine learning.In a larger context, the chip points to a long-term strategy of Intel thinking beyond x86 and warming up to other architectures as it looks to shed its reliance on PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel looks beyond x86, puts 64-bit ARM processor in new FPGA chip

It seems like the chip war between Intel and ARM is slowly winding down, at least for the time being.Intel for decades has doggedly sworn by chips based on its homegrown x86 architecture, but the company is putting a 64-bit ARM processor in its new Stratix 10 FPGA (field-programmable gate array), which was announced on Tuesday.The FPGA -- based on Altera technology -- can be reprogrammed to do a wide variety of server or network tasks. It can also run algorithms for machine learning.In a larger context, the chip points to a long-term strategy of Intel thinking beyond x86 and warming up to other architectures as it looks to shed its reliance on PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

These IT jobs offer a good work-life balance

Achieving balance between work and home life is an ongoing challenge for professionals across industries, but it turns out the IT world is doing pretty well in helping to make it happen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Worth Reading: The telco quality transformation

The telecoms industry has two fundamental issues whose resolution is a multi-decade business and technology transformation effort. This re-engineering programme turns the current “quantities with quality” model into a “quantities of quality” one. Those who prosper will have to overcome a powerfully entrenched incumbent “bandwidth” paradigm, whereby incentives are initially strongly against investing in the inevitable and irresistible future.Recently I had the pleasure of meeting the CEO of a fast-growing vendor of software-defined networking (SDN) technology. The usual ambition for SDN is merely internal automation and cost optimisation of network operation. In contrast, their offering enables telcos to develop new “bandwidth on demand” services. The potential for differentiated products that are more responsive to demand makes the investment case for SDN considerably more compelling. —CircleID

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First Look: Pixel, AI, Google Home and more

Pulling consumers inGoogle made a big deal about the confluence of its new hardware designs and its software – particularly AI – on Tuesday at its launch event in San Francisco. And, indeed, many of the new products that Google introduced seem designed to pull consumers further into the Google ecosystem, but there’s no denying that there were some impressive capabilities on show. Have a look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon Echo and its competitors will be a $2.1 billion market by 2020

The Amazon Echo and newly announced Google Home may seem like toys today, but research firm Gartner believes these kinds of wireless speakers enabled with virtual personal assistant (VPA) technology are poised for significant growth.According to Gartner, natural language chat-bot VPA interfaces (including Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri and Microsoft Cortana) will power the market from just $360 million in 2015 (almost entirely dominated by the Echo) to more than $2 billion in 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ETSI Releases Its Open Source MANO Software Stack

Think of it as ETSI NFV's cousin.

Yahoo may have allowed US government to search user emails

Yahoo has reportedly searched through all of its users' incoming emails with a secret software program that's designed to ferret out information for U.S. government agencies.The software program, which was created last year, has scanned hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, according to a Tuesday report from Reuters.Yahoo reportedly created the program to comply with a U.S. classified government directive. It's unclear if the mass email searching program is still in use."Yahoo is a law-abiding company and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Palo Alto Networks Thinks It Can Grow Just Fine Without Acquisitions

30% annual growth is the long-term target.

Reaction: The Power of Unintended Consequences #49687

Warning, some philosophy may have unintentionally slipped into this post…

There are few things in life that ever really change; rather, we are held captive to what appears to be a surprisingly small set of rules that have lasted at least as long as writing seems to have been around, and—if the history of humanity described in writing is any guide—as long as humans have existed (regardless of your thoughts on that particular topic). One of them, for instance, is that there’s nothing truly new; take these few lines, for instance—

A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what Continue reading

Ericsson Slashes 3,000 Jobs in Sweden, Consolidates Manufacturing Sites

About 800 of the job cuts will occur in R&D.

After Mozilla inquiry, Apple untrusts Chinese certificate authority

Following a Mozilla-led investigation that found multiple problems in the SSL certificate issuance process of WoSign, a China-based certificate authority, Apple will make modifications to the iOS and macOS to block future certificates issued by the company.Although there is no WoSign root certificate in Apple's trusted certificate store, a WoSign intermediate CA certificate is cross-signed by two other CAs that Apple trusts: StartCom and Comodo. This means that until now Apple products have automatically trusted certificates issued through the WoSign intermediate CA.Because WoSign experienced multiple control failures in their certificate issuance processes for the WoSign CA Free SSL Certificate G2 intermediate CA, "we are taking action to protect users in an upcoming security update," Apple said in support notes for both iOS and macOS. "Apple products will no longer trust the WoSign CA Free SSL Certificate G2 intermediate CA."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Level 3 acknowledges network outage

Social networks exploded Tuesday morning with customer inquiries and complaints because of a Level 3 Communications network outage across the United States.Though by noon, reports had started spilling out that service was returning in certain spots.MORE: 2016 Technology Industry GraveyardIt appears the outage started around 11AM EST, and according to the outage tracker Downdetector, hot spots on a heat map appear particularly colorful up and down the east coast and in California. Reports also surfaced of outages at Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and other service providers, possibly because of their use of Level 3 infrastructure, a major Internet backbone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Automation: Disrupt or be disrupted

IDG Contributor Network: Compuware says there’s life left in mainframes

I spend a lot of time talking to organizations about disruption and the fact that no matter what industry they’re in, there is an equivalent to Uber breathing down their neck just waiting to destroy them. Normally these conversations end up with defensive legacy IT practitioners finding a million reasons why agile and innovative couldn’t happen in their setting—to much compliance, too many core systems, too much of a “slow and steady” business.Don't get me wrong: While I’m a huge fan of webscale approaches to IT, commodity infrastructure, and moving up the value chain, I’m still well aware that many of the world’s most critical systems—from banking to air travel—run on big old traditional mainframes and that forklifting these applications onto new architectures is hard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here