Skype updates its Windows 10 app beta on desktop and mobile

Skype is bringing a new app to smartphones, computers, and tablets running Windows 10 on Monday, ahead of Microsoft's Windows 10 Anniversary Update launch.People who are beta testing Windows 10 through the Windows Insider Program now get a new version of the Skype Preview App, which will allow them to call mobile and landline phones from their computers, leave and receive voicemails, and put calls on hold.The new Skype app will replace the existing Skype desktop app, along with calling and messaging apps that were bundled with the original release of Windows 10. It's unclear when the app will be released to all Windows 10 users, but this announcement brings that closer to reality.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Fronthaul and backhaul: Look out, a fusion is coming!

Backhaul and fronthaul have come a long way through the generations. When I started out, fronthaul was literally the length of industrial coax cable that you could easily observe running from the bottom of a cell phone tower to the top. Backhaul was always where the excitement was—in all the signal processing smarts surrounding transcoding. This technology existed to condense almighty 64k bit/sec. pipes down to a 16k bit/sec. ones and vice versa. Today, the story has moved on and converged quite a bit, but the uncoordinated shaping of these spaces in those early days has resulted in two worlds or two heterogeneous technology silos, one each for fronthaul and backhaul. This is not going to fly in 5G, and a fusion is coming that will bring these two worlds together.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NYC Wi-Fi project set to move forward as city beats payphone lawsuit

A U.S. district court judge last week effectively ended a payphone company’s lawsuit against the City of New York, opening the door for an ambitious public Wi-Fi hotspot program to proceed.The payphone company, Telebeam, had sued the city in 2014, arguing that the city shouldn’t have been allowed to force Telebeam to cede up 1,300 public payphone sites when it awarded the contract to rival CityBridge.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft disavows 1B-or-bust goal for Windows 10 + Hackers claim to have launched DDoS attack that crashed Pokémon Go serversTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NYC Wi-Fi project set to move forward as city beats payphone lawsuit

A U.S. district court judge last week effectively ended a payphone company’s lawsuit against the City of New York, opening the door for an ambitious public Wi-Fi hotspot program to proceed.The payphone company, Telebeam, had sued the city in 2014, arguing that the city shouldn’t have been allowed to force Telebeam to cede up 1,300 public payphone sites when it awarded the contract to rival CityBridge.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft disavows 1B-or-bust goal for Windows 10 + Hackers claim to have launched DDoS attack that crashed Pokémon Go serversTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Attackers could steal millions through online phone verification systems

In the latest attack that shows how hard it is for users to identify phone numbers with premium call charges, a researcher has found that he could have earned millions by abusing the online phone verification systems used by Google, Microsoft, and Instagram.Many websites and mobile apps allow users to associate a phone number with their account. This can be used for two-factor authentication or as an account recovery and verification option. Many of these systems rely on codes sent via text messages, but also offer the option to call the user and dictate such codes.Last year, a Belgian IT security consultant named Arne Swinnen started wondering if such systems test if the numbers entered by users have premium charges attached to them and set out to test several popular services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Attackers could steal millions through online phone verification systems

In the latest attack that shows how hard it is for users to identify phone numbers with premium call charges, a researcher has found that he could have earned millions by abusing the online phone verification systems used by Google, Microsoft, and Instagram.Many websites and mobile apps allow users to associate a phone number with their account. This can be used for two-factor authentication or as an account recovery and verification option. Many of these systems rely on codes sent via text messages, but also offer the option to call the user and dictate such codes.Last year, a Belgian IT security consultant named Arne Swinnen started wondering if such systems test if the numbers entered by users have premium charges attached to them and set out to test several popular services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review roundup: Two Lenovo Windows 10 systems and the latest Kangaroo Desktop

Even though gadgets like virtual reality and augmented reality are the “it things” in the technology space, there are still systems coming out that let you do normal things like computing, web browsing and movie watching / book reading.Here’s a quick roundup of three notebook and desktop systems (using those terms loosely) that offer some unique features and usage scenarios aimed at the business and consumer markets.  Kangaroo.cc The Kangaroo Mobile Desktop Pro (with cover removed to show inside of system)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3 things to know about Softbank’s plan to acquire ARM

Since the release of the iPhone, ARM's chip designs have driven a mobile revolution. The small chip company has brought giants like Intel to their knees in the realm of mobile phones and tablets, and now it's on the verge of being acquired by Softbank for a stunning US$32 billion. You may not know it, but outside of PCs ARM is in almost every device we use, from smartphones to TVs to home appliances. It licenses chip designs to manufacturers, and over the last 25 years, over 90 billion ARM-designed chips have gone into devices. ARM will continue designing processors for various segments of the computing industry after the acquisition, but investments will go up and product development will be faster, said Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, in a video. Here are three immediate things you need to know about the deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Container Management Simplifies SDN Application Deployment

Complex applications means complex rules.

BGP Code Dive (4): Starting a Peer

In the last three episodes of this series, we discussed getting a copy of SnapRoute’s BGP code using Git, we looked at the basic structure of the project, and then we did some general housekeeping. At this point, I’m going to assume you have the tools you need installed, and you’re ready to follow along as we ask the code questions about how BGP actually works.

Now, let’s start with a simple question: how does BGP bring a new peer up?

It seems like we should be able to look for some file that’s named something with peering in it, but, looking at the files in the project, there doesn’t seem to be any such thing (click to show a larger version of the image below if you can’t read it).

Hmmm… Given it’s not obvious where to start, what do we do? There are a number of options, of course, but three options stand out as the easiest.

First, you can just poke around the code for a bit to see if you find anything that looks like it might be what you’re looking for. This is not, generally, for the faint of heart. Over time, as you become Continue reading

Chinese $1.2B deal for Opera crumples

The planned sale of Opera Software to a group of Chinese companies for $1.2 billion has foundered, the Norwegian browser maker announced today.Instead, an alternate deal has been struck to sell the Opera desktop and mobile browsers, and other small pieces, to a Chinese private equity firm for $600 million.The original transaction folded after it failed to win regulatory approval from the U.S. and People's Republic of China (PRC) by a July 15 deadline. Opera did not specify whether approval was lacking from both countries, or just one. "The Offeror and Opera have used their best efforts to obtain the regulatory approvals required for the consummation of the Offer, but the condition...was not satisfied," Opera said in a Monday statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Algorithm to predict at birth if a person will be a criminal?

Technology is not a bad thing; it’s not inherently scary. Sometimes new technology gets misused or tainted with mission creep. Most of the time, tech actually makes our lives easier and better. Here are two tales about “new” tech that could potentially predict the future. One seems scarier than the other.Algorithm to predict at birth if a person will be a criminal Algorithms control aspects of your life whether you are aware of it or not. They are used to come up with risk scores and even predict the future. But how would you feel about an algorithm that seems to be ripped straight from Minority Report? It would identify criminals far before they could commit a crime, since it would “predict at the time of someone’s birth how likely she is to commit a crime by the time she turns 18.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Algorithm to predict at birth if a person will be a criminal?

Technology is not a bad thing; it’s not inherently scary. Sometimes new technology gets misused or tainted with mission creep. Most of the time, tech actually makes our lives easier and better. Here are two tales about “new” tech that could potentially predict the future. One seems scarier than the other.Algorithm to predict at birth if a person will be a criminalAlgorithms control aspects of your life whether you are aware of it or not. They are used to come up with risk scores and even predict the future. But how would you feel about an algorithm that seems to be ripped straight from Minority Report? It would identify criminals far before they could commit a crime since it would “predict at the time of someone’s birth how likely she is to commit a crime by the time she turns 18.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SoftBank Offers $32B for ARM as Megamerger Season Continues

ARM gets a buyer; SoftBank gets ... more debt?

How Does Google do Planet-Scale Engineering for a Planet-Scale Infrastructure?

How does Google keep all its services up and running? They almost never seem to fail. If you've ever wondered we get a wonderful peek behind the curtain in a talk given at GCP NEXT 2016 by Melissa Binde, Director, Storage SRE at Google: How Google Does Planet-Scale Engineering for Planet-Scale Infrastructure.

Melissa's talk is short, but it's packed with wisdom and delivered in a no nonsense style that makes you think if your service is down Melissa is definitely the kind of person you want on the case. 

Oh, just what is SRE? It stands for Site Reliability Engineering, but a definition is more elusive. It's like the kind of answers you get when you ask for a definition of the Tao. It's more a process than a thing, as is made clear by Ben Sloss 24x7 VP, Google, who defines SRE as:

what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations.

Let that bounce around your head for awhile.

Above and beyond all else one thing is clear: SREs are the custodian of production. SREs are the custodian of customer experience, for both google.com and GCP.

Some Continue reading

PS Core Network Concepts

Most of the educational documents related to PS Core Network start with Call Flows. Attach Call Flow, PDP Context, Paging, etc. So, Basically that was my problem when I started working in PS Core because the Call Flows include a lot of messages that in turn include a lot of parameters and Information Elements so […]

The post PS Core Network Concepts appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Microsoft’s new service is like YouTube for the enterprise

It's called Stream, and it's supposed to let people easily work together with one another on videos, and then share that content both inside and outside their company.In the realm of consumer web services, video is ascending. Facebook has been emphasizing video posts on its popular social network, while YouTube is still going strong. Microsoft is trying to take some of that mojo and bring it to the business world with the launch of an open beta for Stream on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mainstream VR for sports still 2-5 years off, says Warriors’ digital chief

Professional sports teams around the world—including the NBA’s Golden State Warriors—are working furiously to leverage all kinds of technology, from mobile connectivity and social media to player analytics and augmented reality. But according the Warrior’s vice president of marketing and digital, Kenny Lauer, it will be at least two to five years before virtual reality (VR), perhaps the most exciting new development, will achieve widespread adoption.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare sites protected from httpoxy

CC BY 2.0 image by Joe Seggiola

We have rolled out automatic protection for all customers for the the newly announced vulnerability called httpoxy.

This vulnerability affects applications that use “classic” CGI execution models, and could lead to API token disclosure of the services that your application may talk to.

By default httpoxy requests are modified to be harmless and then request is allowed through, however customers who want to outright block those requests can also use the Web Application Firewall rule 100050 in CloudFlare Specials to block requests that could lead to the httpoxy vulnerability.

Worth Reading: Digital intoxication

The time has come to speak of digital intoxication: an excessive use of the most common digital tools, such as a computer, tablet or smartphone, to the point of dependency. A frantic and imbalanced use of these new media can result in more or less serious consequences, be it on the physical or psychological levels, with symptoms and disorders that mirror those of the classic drunkard. —Connecting

The post Worth Reading: Digital intoxication appeared first on 'net work.