Smartphone market inches back to growth with Samsung holding lead

The smartphone market is showing signs of growth again, but barely, with shipments up nearly 1 percent year-on-year in the second quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. The research firm, which had reported a 3 percent drop in the market in the last quarter, said Wednesday that there are indications that the market had bottomed out in the first half of this year. Multiple new product launches from vendors including Samsung Electronics and Apple could see an improving  growth outlook for the second half of the year. Another research firm Canalys reported Tuesday that smartphone shipments had returned to modest growth in the second quarter after a disappointing first quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First, Kill All The Servers

Cannibalize your own products or someone else will do it for you, as the old adage goes.

And so it is that Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of infrastructure services available on the public cloud, has been methodically building up a set of data and processing services that will allow customers to run functions against streams or lakes of data without ever setting up a server as we know it.

Just saying the words makes us a little woozy, with systems being the very foundation of the computing platforms that everyone deploys today to do the data processing that …

First, Kill All The Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Making Networking Great Again: Leveraging ifupdown2 in the Data Center

I love election season, mainly for all the great slogans. Every candidate is trying to find a way to catch the attention of the electorate in order to get their ideas across. If people don’t know the benefits of a new solution, they’ll be hard pressed to understand how much better life can be.

The same can be said for Linux networking when ifupdown2 came along. This article describes the improvements made to ifupdown2, but it doesn’t describe the excruciating pain of having to run the classic ifupdown. I feel obliged to join this campaign cycle to wholeheartedly endorse ifupdown2 and tell you about how it’s making networking great again.

I was recently simulating a data center environment with Vagrant to test scalable architectures. I was trying to leverage ECMP via the new Routing on the Host feature on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS server over a Cumulus Linux spine/leaf Clos network. One requirement for this feature to work is peering BGP between the Ubuntu server and the first-hop leaf. Sounds simple, right? I had already peered BGP throughout my entire Cumulus Linux switch network, and since Ubuntu is also a Debian-based distribution, it should have been a trivial task.

Leveraging-ifupdown2-in-the-Datacenter-to-Make-Networking-Great-Again

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50% off Prime Membership After Free 6 Month Trial, For Students – Deal Alert

If you know somebody headed off to college soon, or maybe you'll be attending yourself, you should know that Amazon is giving away 6 free months of Amazon Prime, followed by a 50% discount on a Prime Membership ($49 vs. $99). Just sign up, or have them sign up with an .edu email address and start accessing free two-day shipping, exclusive deals and promotions, unlimited photo storage, and unlimited TV & movie streaming through Prime Video. And students get $5 Amazon credit for every friend they get to sign up. Click through to take advantage of this deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft makes Windows 10 hardware change for PC security

Microsoft is rolling out a change in minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 PCs and mobile devices, and expects hardware makers to comply in order to make their devices more secure.Starting Thursday, PC makers should include a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 in Windows 10 PCs, smartphones and tablets.The TPM 2.0 feature will be beneficial for users as it will do a better job of protecting sensitive information on a PC. A TPM 2.0 security layer -- which can be in the form of a chip or firmware -- can safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft makes Windows 10 hardware change for PC security

Microsoft is rolling out a change in minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 PCs and mobile devices, and expects hardware makers to comply in order to make their devices more secure.Starting Thursday, PC makers should include a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 in Windows 10 PCs, smartphones and tablets.The TPM 2.0 feature will be beneficial for users as it will do a better job of protecting sensitive information on a PC. A TPM 2.0 security layer -- which can be in the form of a chip or firmware -- can safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix & LogMeIn complete complicated, tax-free sort-of merger

LogMeIn, the makers of the popular remote desktop software as well as IT security and conferencing offerings, will become part of a Citrix subsidiary in the wake of a complicated, $1.8 billion transaction announced Tuesday by the two companies.The transaction is what’s called a Reverse Morris Trust, which apparently allows the untaxed transfer of a subsidiary to new ownership by spinning off a new company and completing a merger. In this case, Citrix has created a wholly-owned subsidiary called GetGo, which owns its GoToMeeting products.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dropbox aims for enterprise with new team and IT admin features | Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix & LogMeIn complete complicated, tax-free sort-of merger

LogMeIn, the makers of the popular remote desktop software as well as IT security and conferencing offerings, will become part of a Citrix subsidiary in the wake of a complicated, $1.8 billion transaction announced Tuesday by the two companies.The transaction is what’s called a Reverse Morris Trust, which apparently allows the untaxed transfer of a subsidiary to new ownership by spinning off a new company and completing a merger. In this case, Citrix has created a wholly-owned subsidiary called GetGo, which owns its GoToMeeting products.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dropbox aims for enterprise with new team and IT admin features | Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wondering where common actions got moved in Modern Document Libraries? Use this handy guide!

One of the best things about SharePoint on Office 365 is that you are able to take advantage of all of the great new features that Microsoft is developing as part of the future of SharePoint as they become available. While some updates have only minimal impact on end user experiences, modern document libraries introduce some pretty significant differences that might make users uncomfortable for a little while. After all, all change is disruptive when it’s unfamiliar! To help both me and my clients quickly find where common document library actions have moved, I created a feature comparison table that I’m sharing in this post. This is my “dude, where’s my car?” or “where did my cheese go?” summary.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

94% off the Complete Machine Learning Course Bundle – Deal Alert

Machine learning is hot, and with good reason. For the uninitiated: it’s the use of pattern recognition and prediction that underlies important technologies like self-driving cars and speech recognition.Want to dive into the field? From learning to build financial models and utilizing Big Data, to coding Java and Python--the 10 courses in The Complete Machine Learning Bundle will get you up to speed on all things machine learning.Here are the courses included in your bundle:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaw with password manager LastPass could hand over control to hackers

Even password manager LastPass can be fooled. A Google security researcher has found a way to remotely hijack the software.It works by first luring the user to a malicious site. The site will then exploit a flaw in a LastPass add-on for the Firefox browser, giving it control over the password management software.LastPass wrote about the vulnerability on Wednesday and said that a fix is already out for Firefox users.Google security research Tavis Ormandy first discovered the issue. When examining the password manager, he tweeted on Tuesday, "Are people really using this lastpass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaw with password manager LastPass could hand over control to hackers

Even password manager LastPass can be fooled. A Google security researcher has found a way to remotely hijack the software.It works by first luring the user to a malicious site. The site will then exploit a flaw in a LastPass add-on for the Firefox browser, giving it control over the password management software.LastPass wrote about the vulnerability on Wednesday and said that a fix is already out for Firefox users.Google security research Tavis Ormandy first discovered the issue. When examining the password manager, he tweeted on Tuesday, "Are people really using this lastpass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Get $200 off Samsung KU6600 Curved 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD TV and a $100 Gift Card – Deal Alert

Amazon is currently discounting the UN55KU6600 Curved 55-inch TV from Samsung, taking its typical list price of $1,148 down by 17% to just $947.99. And on top of that, they're giving you a $100 Amazon.com gift card along with it. The UN55KU6600 delivers 4K Ultra HD resolution and High Dynamic Range (HDR) content, with greater depth and clarity and a fuller spectrum of color with PurColor. It lets you access your favorite content quicker and easier with the new Samsung Smart TV platform powered by a Quad-Core Processor. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from 275 people (read reviews). See the discounted Samsung 55-inch 4K Ultra HD TV bundle (TV+$100 gift card) now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AI just co-wrote its first horror movie, and you can help make it real

AI has already been dabbling in the arts for some time, but recently it took a big step further and helped write its first feature-length horror film. Now its co-creators are seeking funding to bring the movie to life.Titled "Impossible Things," the story focuses on a family that moves to a secluded country home following the death of a young daughter. Madeline, the mother, stays home to renovate the house and care for her remaining two children, but she begins to hear voices. She also sees visions of a deranged woman and the ghost of a child remarkably similar to the one she lost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft gives Office 365 a major upgrade

Microsoft has announced a number of features to be added to Office 365 users as part of the July 2016 update that are a group of "cloud-powered intelligent services" designed to save time and improve productivity for users of Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. The news came in an Office blog post by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.New to Word Word is getting two significant new features, called Researcher and Editor. As its name implies, Researcher is designed to help the user find reliable sources of information by using the Bing Knowledge Graph to search for sources, and it will properly cite them in the Word document.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft just launched an iPhone camera app

There's a new iPhone camera application on the block that's supposed to be better at taking pictures than the one Apple ships with its phones ... and it's built by Microsoft. The company's research arm launched Pix, which enhances the photos that users take in a variety of ways, on Wednesday morning. The app is  designed to make photos look better and even improves on Apple's Live Photos ability to capture scenes that have moving elements in them. It's part of Microsoft's continued push to build applications for platforms beyond those that it controls directly, especially iOS and Android. The free app was built by members of Microsoft Research, and released for free on the iOS App Store.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NYTimes vs. DNCleaks

People keep citing this New York Times article by David Sanger that attributes the DNCleaks to Russia. As I've written before, this is propaganda, not journalism. It's against basic journalistic ethics to quote anonymous "federal officials" in a story like this. The Society of Professional Journalists repudiates this [1] [2]. The NYTime's own ombudsman has itself criticized David Sanger for this practice, and written guidelines to specifically ban it.

Quoting anonymous federal officials is great, when they disagree with government, when revealing government malfeasance, when it's something that people will get fired over.

But the opposite is happening here. It's either Obama himself or some faction within the administration that wants us to believe Russia is involved. They want us to believe the propaganda, then hide behind anonymity so we can't question them. This evades obvious questions, like whether all their information comes from the same public sources that already point to Russia, or whether they have their own information from the CIA or NSA that points to Russia.

Everyone knows the Washington press works this way, and that David Sanger in particular is a journalistic whore. The NetFlix series House of Cards portrays this accurately in its Continue reading
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