AT&T wants to keep order in drone-filled skies

When it comes to drones, AT&T wants to be in the driver’s seat.The massive U.S. carrier is already using drones to inspect its cell towers and may someday put cells on drones to boost service at big events. But it’s also eyeing a major role in the way others use drones.At the heart of it all is AT&T’s network, technology executives from the company said Friday at AT&T’s Shape conference in San Francisco. They see the network as a future backbone for command and control of drones or even a drone traffic management system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

During coup attempt, Turkish president appears via Facetime on live TV

In what may be another first for our connected world, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan placed what appeared to be a Facetime call to a national news broadcast early on Saturday while the world tried to figure out if a military coup against him had succeeded. Erdogan appeared on a journalist's iPhone, held up to the camera so viewers could see and hear what he had to say. He claimed that he remained in control and urged the public to take to the streets to oppose the coup attempt. Erdogan's use of modern technology to speak to the nation comes with a heap of irony. He has been keen to shut off access to the Internet during sensitive times and go after those who try to get around such bans and those who insult him. Reporters Without Borders says Erdogan has "systematically" censored the Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: What we lose when we photograph life instead of experiencing it

Increasingly, images have become a crucial part of communicating with others, receiving affirmation and documenting new experiences. And though it may seem that a barrage of colors and pixels and faces and scenery could only enrich our imaginations and enhance our engagement with the world, the opposite seems to be taking place. —Intellectual Takeout

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Democratizing Capacity (or How to Interpret Cisco math)

Mid-December, Cisco held its Financial Analysts Conference. Shortly thereafter, I was fielding questions that summed up to “What is this all about? Cisco is cheaper than bare-metal? Really?”; check out slide 4 in this presentation.

Let me begin by clarifying that Cisco is not more affordable. Period. We’ll get to that analysis a bit later… the bigger point is that bare-metal networking is more than being affordable; it’s about giving customers degrees of freedom, transparency, and choice that they deserve in a mature industry.

In the dark ages of computing (aka 1983), a customer running IBM DB2 had to buy an IBM mainframe (complete with cables, disks, power distribution, memory, and IO) to go with the application. The compute industry has matured to a point where DB2 runs on hardware ranging from mainframes through p-series down into non-IBM x86 platforms hosted on operating systems including z/OS, Unix, Linux, and Windows. Application independent from OS independent from hardware; degrees of freedom and choice.

Circling back to networking, a significant number of products today, including Cisco’s Nexus 3000 and Nexus 9000 platforms, are based on industry prevalent networking silicon from companies like Broadcom. Optics and cables branded by networking incumbents are Continue reading

Use Tor? Riffle promises to protect your privacy even better

Privacy-minded people have long relied on Tor for anonymity online, but a new system from MIT promises better protection and faster performance.Dubbed Riffle, the new system taps the same onion encryption technique after which Tor is named, but it adds two others as well. First is what's called a mixnet, a series of servers that each permute the order in which messages are received before passing them on to the next server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Use Tor? Riffle promises to protect your privacy even better

Privacy-minded people have long relied on Tor for anonymity online, but a new system from MIT promises better protection and faster performance.Dubbed Riffle, the new system taps the same onion encryption technique after which Tor is named, but it adds two others as well. First is what's called a mixnet, a series of servers that each permute the order in which messages are received before passing them on to the next server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft will miss its one billion Windows 10 device target

Last year, Microsoft announced that it planned to have a billion devices running Windows 10 by the middle of 2018. Now, the company is saying that was too ambitious."We’re pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer" to reach the goal, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Yusuf Mehdi said in an emailed statement. "In the year ahead, we are excited about usage growth coming from commercial deployments and new devices.”The missed target is rough news for the company, which has relied on that promise to attract developers to build apps for Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T deploys drones for cell tower inspections, network expansion

AT&T is now using drones to conduct aerial inspections of its cellular towers and foresees them as a way to beef up its wireless LTE network.Down the road, the carrier said it might use a drone as a Flying Cell on Wings (COW) to enhance LTE coverage at a large concert or sporting event where thousands of fans can clog the network. Or a drone could be used in rapid disaster response, offering wireless coverage when a vehicle is unable to drive to an area hit by a storm or other catastrophe. AT&T Future possible applications include turning a drone into a Flying Cell on Wings to beef up LTE coverage at a concert or to quickly set up LTE service in a disaster-ridden area.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Internet router using merchant silicon

SDN router using merchant silicon top of rack switch and Dell OS10 SDN router demo discuss how an inexpensive white box switch running Linux can be used to replace a much costlier Internet router. The key to this solution is the observation that, while the full Internet routing table of over 600,000 routes is too large to fit in white box switch hardware, only a small fraction of the routes carry most of the traffic. Traffic analytics allows the active routes to be identified and installed in the hardware.

This article describes a simple self contained solution that uses standard APIs and should be able to run on a variety of Linux based network operating systems, including: Cumulus Linux, Dell OS10, Arista EOS, and Cisco NX-OS. The distinguishing feature of this solution is its real-time response, where previous solutions respond to changes in traffic within minutes or hours, this solution updates hardware routes within seconds.

The diagram shows the elements of the solution. Standard sFlow instrumentation embedded in the merchant silicon ASIC data plane in the white box switch provides real-time information on traffic flowing through the switch. The sFlow agent is configured to send the sFlow to an instance Continue reading

This fake Pokemon Go game will secretly drive porn ad clicks

A newly discovered fake Pokemon Go game will actually lock your phone and then secretly run in the background, clicking on porn ads.Security firm ESET found it on Google Play and its called Pokemon Go Ultimate. However, once downloaded, the app itself doesn’t even pretend to offer anything remotely like the hit game.Instead, it simply appears as an app called “PI Network.” Once it runs, the app will then freeze the phone with a screen lock of a Pokemon Go image, forcing the user to restart the device, ESET said on a blog post on Friday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This fake Pokemon Go game will secretly drive porn ad clicks

A newly discovered fake Pokemon Go game will actually lock your phone and then secretly run in the background, clicking on porn ads. Security firm ESET found it on Google Play and its called Pokemon Go Ultimate. However, once downloaded, the app itself doesn’t even pretend to offer anything remotely like the hit game. Instead, it simply appears as an app called “PI Network.” Once it runs, the app will then freeze the phone with a screen lock of a Pokemon Go image, forcing the user to restart the device, ESET said on a blog post on Friday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

My big intro to BI & analytics vendor MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy, a veteran of the business intelligence and analytics market that is currently littered with so many startups, has plenty to boast about and isn’t shy about doing it.Its revenue comes in at more than half a billion dollars, the company is profitable, and it serves giant customers like eBay and the U.S. Postal Service. A competitor of vendors such as SAP and Tableau, MicroStrategy gushes over how Gartner analysts rate it. And according to globetrotting CEO and Co-Founder Michael Saylor, Version 10 of MicroStrategy's flagship product is “the most powerful software ever released” -- so much so that a customer could feel secure including "a nuclear order of battle into an [encrypted and geolocked] application, put it on an iPad and hand it to the President of the United States."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

My big intro to BI & analytics vendor MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy, a veteran of the business intelligence and analytics market that is currently littered with so many startups, has plenty to boast about and isn’t shy about doing it.Its revenue comes in at more than half a billion dollars, the company is profitable, and it serves giant customers like eBay and the U.S. Postal Service. A competitor of vendors such as SAP and Tableau, MicroStrategy gushes over how Gartner analysts rate it. And according to globetrotting CEO and Co-Founder Michael Saylor, Version 10 of MicroStrategy's flagship product is “the most powerful software ever released” -- so much so that a customer could feel secure including "a nuclear order of battle into an [encrypted and geolocked] application, put it on an iPad and hand it to the President of the United States."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Digital transformation pushes big banks into application outsourcing

Large application outsourcing transactions in the banking sector hit a record five-year high last year, according to a recent report by outsourcing consultancy Everest Group. There were 54 new big application outsourcing projects in the sector with a total contract value of $5.9 billion in 2015—an increase in volume of 45 percent and in value of 25 percent over the previous year.[ Related: How to turbocharge digital transformation ]Financial institutions tend to outsource applications around three different dimensions, says Jimit Arora, partner at Everest Group There are systems to run the business which are outsourced for cost reduction and efficiency reasons. There are systems to manage the business, which may involve issues of regulatory compliance or cybersecurity and are driven by cost or penalty avoidance. And there are systems to change the business, which are efforts to drive revenue growth by introducing new products and services more quickly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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