GE and Microsoft work together on IoT services in the cloud

GE and Microsoft have teamed up to bring the industrial giant's Predix platform-as-a-service offering to the Azure cloud, the two companies announced Monday. It's a move that helps add to the portfolio of Internet of Things services available through Microsoft's cloud platform, at a time when the company is pushing its service for IoT applications. The announcement came during Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, where GE CEO Jeff Immelt talked with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on stage.Predix is a platform-as-a-service offering that's designed for building applications that have industrial uses. Predix services that developers can tap into include asset management and anomaly detection offerings, among others. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Competition Heats Up In Cluster Interconnects

Any time a ranking of a technology is put together, that ranking is always called into question as to whether or not it is representative of reality. Rankings, such as the Top 500 list of the top supercomputers in the world, has been the subject of such debate with regards to the Linpack Fortran performance benchmark that is used to create the rankings and its relevance to the performance of actual workloads. When it comes to networking, the changes in the list in recent years are likely a better reflection of what is going on in high performance computing in

Competition Heats Up In Cluster Interconnects was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How to marry content, business process management

Alfresco Software was born a decade ago as an open source enterprise content management (ECM) provider and the company has enjoyed growing success with major corporations and government agencies struggling to deal with an explosion of information. More recently, Alfresco jumped into the business process management (BPM) market and its integration of ECM and BPM is gaining from enterprise buyers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Amazon CTO says cloud can help crashing Pokemon Go

As Pokemon Go continues to be a viral craze, the makers of the game have dealt with the service going down – presumably from peak loads on the game.Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has offered a solution: The cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Armed crooks use Pokemon Go to lure and rob victims +In a post on Twitter from over the weekend, Vogels implied that the game’s makers could use Amazon Web Services' public IaaS cloud to help alleviate intermittent service issues. "Dear cool folks at @NianticLabs please let us know if there is anything we can do to help!" Vogels Tweeted.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DC Fabric Segment Routing Use Case (1)

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a special segment routing Networking Field Day. This set me to thinking about how I would actually use segment routing in a live data center. As always, I’m not so concerned about the configuration aspects, but rather with what bits and pieces I would (or could) put together to make something useful out of these particular 0’s and 1’s. The fabric below will be used as our example; we’ll work through this in some detail (which is why there is a “first part” marker in the title).

benes-segment

This is a Benes fabric, a larger variation of which which you might find in any number of large scale data center. In this network, there are many paths between A and E; three of them are marked out with red lines to give you the idea. Normally, the specific path taken by any given flow would be selected on a somewhat random basis, using a hash across various packet headers. What if I wanted to pin a particular flow, or set of flows, to the path outlined in green?

Let’s ask a different question first—why would I want to do such a thing? There are Continue reading

Serious flaw fixed in widely used WordPress plug-in

If you're running a WordPress website and you have the hugely popular All in One SEO Pack plug-in installed, it's a good idea to update it as soon as possible. The latest version released Friday fixes a flaw that could be used to hijack the site's admin account.The vulnerability is in the plug-in's Bot Blocker functionality and can be exploited remotely by sending HTTP requests with specifically crafted headers to the website.The Bot Blocker feature is designed to detect and block spam bots based on their user agent and referer header values, according to security researcher David Vaartjes, who found and reported the issue.If the Track Blocked Bots setting is enabled -- it's not by default -- the plug-in will log all requests that were blocked and will display them on an HTML page inside the site's admin panel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Serious flaw fixed in widely used WordPress plug-in

If you're running a WordPress website and you have the hugely popular All in One SEO Pack plug-in installed, it's a good idea to update it as soon as possible. The latest version released Friday fixes a flaw that could be used to hijack the site's admin account.The vulnerability is in the plug-in's Bot Blocker functionality and can be exploited remotely by sending HTTP requests with specifically crafted headers to the website.The Bot Blocker feature is designed to detect and block spam bots based on their user agent and referer header values, according to security researcher David Vaartjes, who found and reported the issue.If the Track Blocked Bots setting is enabled -- it's not by default -- the plug-in will log all requests that were blocked and will display them on an HTML page inside the site's admin panel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Takes a Risk on RISC-V Custom Silicon

As we are carefully watching here, there is a perfect storm brewing in the semiconductor space, both for manufacturers and system designers.

On the one hand, the impending demise of Moore’s Law presents a set of challenges—and opportunities—for emerging chip companies to arise and offer alternatives, often with customization cooked into the business model. And for end users, there is a rising tide of options that might lift a lot of boats if ecosystems are rapidly adopted. This is the case in the ARM space, as we’ve seen clearly this year, as well as for other architectures, including efforts from

Startup Takes a Risk on RISC-V Custom Silicon was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Google aims to train 2 million app developers in India

India’s large number of software developers has top smartphone companies like Google and Apple trying to coax them to work on their operating systems.Google on Monday said it will be training, over the next three years, some 2 million developers in the country on its Android operating system.In a similar move, Apple announced in May it will set up a facility in Bangalore by early next year to help developers on best practices and to improve the design, quality, and performance of their apps on the iOS platform. That announcement came during CEO Tim Cook's first visit to India.India will have an estimated 4 million software developers by 2018, by then the largest population of developers in the world. Currently, less than 25 percent of these developers are trained to develop and build for the mobile platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why internet access is a basic human right

Not long ago, I wrote a post about net neutrality, agreeing with the U.S. appeals court ruling that broadband internet access was no mere luxury, but a crucial utility—like running water or electricity—and needed to be regulated as such. It seems now that I didn’t go nearly far enough. The United Nations Human Rights Council recently passed a resolution calling unfettered internet access a basic human right. + Also on Network World: Why internet access is a modern necessity, not a luxury+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pokemon Go no-go: the latest chapter in Intel’s Android drama

As Intel drifts away from smartphones and tablets, users with Android devices are starting to feel the pinch.The hot Pokemon Go app won't work on Android devices with Intel Atom processors, and that's an issue for some users.A petition to make the popular augmented reality game compatible with Atom chips attracted close to 22,000 signers by Monday. The app isn't working on devices like Asus' Zenfone 2, which runs on an Atom CPU. Pokemon Go maker Niantic Labs didn't respond to questions about whether they would release an Atom-compatible version of the game.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This is Microsoft’s vision of a holographic office

Microsoft made the biggest pitch to date for HoloLens as a business computing device on Monday during its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Canada.When Arantxa Lasa Cid, a program director at the company, took the stage for a HoloLens demo, she pulled up a workspace that looked a lot like a massive, multimonitor desktop setup, complete with virtual monitors showing an Outlook calendar, email and two web browsers. It looked a lot like a traditional desktop setup, with one catch: Cid was standing in front of an empty table, wearing one of Microsoft's augmented reality headsets. And then, with the tap of her finger, she pulled up a model of a jet engine. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Throwing our IoT investment in the trash thanks to NetGear

Soon it will be time to say “goodbye” to my family’s VueZone video cameras. Over the past three years, we have made quite an investment in NetGear’s VueZone technology: two hubs, eight regular and night-vision cameras, and even weatherproof outdoor housings. Soon: Poof. Toodles. It was fun, now it’s done.We initially purchased one NetGear VueZone Home Video Monitoring System in August 2013 for $218.48 (including tax), plus additional cameras and housings along the way. A few months later, we bought a second system for another piece of property. In addition, we paid NetGear an annual fee for motion detection and to store video clips in the cloud whenever activity was detected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Victims of terrorist attacks in Israel sue Facebook for $1 billion

The families of victims of five recent attacks in Israel are suing Facebook for more than US$1 billion, saying the social media site helps terrorists plan their violence. The lawsuit, filed in a New York court, accuses Facebook of helping Palestinian group Hamas recruit members, communicate, and plan attacks. The U.S. government designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are family members of five terrorist attacks in Israel in the past two years, the most recent being a March 8 stabbing attack in Tel Aviv that killed 29-year-old U.S. citizen Taylor Force. Four of the people who died in the attacks were U.S. citizens, and another U.S. citizen was injured.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Victims of terrorist attacks in Israel sue Facebook for $1 billion

The families of victims of five recent attacks in Israel are suing Facebook for more than US$1 billion, saying the social media site helps terrorists plan their violence. The lawsuit, filed in a New York court, accuses Facebook of helping Palestinian group Hamas recruit members, communicate, and plan attacks. The U.S. government designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are family members of five terrorist attacks in Israel in the past two years, the most recent being a March 8 stabbing attack in Tel Aviv that killed 29-year-old U.S. citizen Taylor Force. Four of the people who died in the attacks were U.S. citizens, and another U.S. citizen was injured.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung unveils the world’s highest capacity consumer SSD

Samsung today announced what it claims is the highest capacity consumer solid state drive, a 4TB member of its 850 EVO line, which will retail for $1,499 or about 36 cents per gigabyte of capacity.The new 850 EVO SSD uses Samsung's 48-layer high V-NAND technology, which stacks flash memory cells one atop another like microscopic skyscrapers and stores three bits per cell.Samsung then crammed the 4TB of capacity into a 2.5-in. SSD form factor only 7mm thick, which is small enough to fit into ultra-slim notebooks. Previously, Samsung's 2TB EVO SSD was its highest capacity flash drive. Samsung Samsung's new 850 EVO SSD boxed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here