Should Microsoft release a successor to Surface 3?

Microsoft will stop manufacturing Surface 3 by the end of the year, which raises a big question: Will there be a Surface 4?The company has declined to say whether a Surface 4 will ever be released. But Microsoft says it saw strong demand for the Surface 3 tablet PC, so releasing a successor seems like a no-brainer.But the PC market is challenged. Upgrades have slowed down to every five or six years, and tablet shipments -- with the exception of 2-in-1s -- are declining. PC makers are already releasing innovative products that could be viable options to a Surface 3 successor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Net Neutrality set in stone

Nothing is forever and beyond change. That said, it is beginning look as if net neutrality will be with us for a while. Certainly, it is embedded in our laws more firmly than it ever has been. In a 2-to-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that the rules promulgated early last year by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are legal. The challenge had been brought by a group of telecommunications companies and associations. The Washington Post reports that the ruling has the narrow impact of prohibiting unequal treatment of content providers. That, however, is just one example of the impact of a regulatory structure that enables telecommunications to be managed as a utility… -IT Business Edge

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Researchers steal data from a PC by controllng the noise from the fans

Even the noise from your PC’s fans could be used to steal the data inside. Researchers in Israel have found a way to do just by hijacking the fans inside and manipulating the sounds they create.The research from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev shows how data could be stolen from “air-gapped” computers, which are not connected to the Internet.These air-gapped computers are isolated and typically contain the most sensitive information. To hack them, attackers typically need to gain physical access and install malware, possibly through a USB stick. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers steal data from a PC by controllng the noise from the fans

Even the noise from your PC’s fans could be used to steal the data inside. Researchers in Israel have found a way to do just by hijacking the fans inside and manipulating the sounds they create.The research from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev shows how data could be stolen from “air-gapped” computers, which are not connected to the Internet.These air-gapped computers are isolated and typically contain the most sensitive information. To hack them, attackers typically need to gain physical access and install malware, possibly through a USB stick. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The ‘summer of AI’ is here, this startup chief says

Artificial intelligence is still surrounded by an aura of mystery, and it would be tough to find a better illustration than the story in the news last week about a British grandmother who includes "please" and "thank you" in all her Google searches."Please translate these roman numerals mcmxcviii thank you," read the search request from May Ashworth that ultimately went viral when her grandson tweeted it on Twitter."I thought, well somebody's put it in, so you're thanking them," Ashworth reportedly explained. "I don't know how it works, to be honest. It's all a mystery to me."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nuage Networks Security Report Webinar Q&A: SDN & Security Policy Automation

Check out the post-event Q&A from Nuage on SDN, Security & Policy!

Arista Takes a Blow in Patent Infringement Case

Judge bans Arista from importing infringing products.

IoT pioneer announces big contracts with the Department of State, energy leader ENGIE

Internet of Things platform supplier C3 IoT this week announced two sweeping contracts, one with ENGIE, a huge energy company in Europe, the other with the U.S. Department of State, adding to the eight-year-old company’s roster of big IoT wins. The Department of State is said to have signed a multi-year deal valued up to $25 million to use C3 IoT’s enterprise application development platform for a global energy management initiative.  C3 IoT will enable the Department of State to “gain dynamic, real-time operational insights and efficiencies by analyzing … data from enterprise and extra-prise systems and sensors across 22,000+ Department facilities in 190+ countries,” C3 IoT says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: D.C. Circuit decision in ‘net neutrality case

In a resounding victory for net neutrality advocates and consumers alike, the D.C. Circuit issued its decision in US Telecom v. FCC, a landmark ruling ensuring that government regulators maintain the authority necessary for preserving an open internet. -Center for Democracy and Technology

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A Raspberry Pi 3 competitor will boast an SSD storage slot

You can't put SSDs on the Raspberry Pi 3, but a competitive board coming soon will have that option.The new MinnowMax Turbot Dual-E board will have an m.2 slot in which SSDs can be inserted. It's being made by ADI Engineering and will be released in the third quarter, according to a message on Twitter.The board's price wasn't immediately available.High-capacity SSD chips up to 512GB can be found on sites like NewEgg. But the MinnowMax board's SSD storage capacity will ultimately depend on the device's hardware specifications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Packet Blast: Top Tech Blogs, June 24

Economical With The Truth: Making DNSSEC Answers Cheap

We launched DNSSEC late last year and are already signing 56.9 billion DNS record sets per day. At this scale, we care a great deal about compute cost. One of the ways we save CPU cycles is our unique implementation of negative answers in DNSSEC.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Chris Short

I will briefly explain a few concepts you need to know about DNSSEC and negative answers, and then we will dive into how CloudFlare saves on compute when asked for names that don’t exist.

What You Need To Know: DNSSEC Edition

Here’s a quick summary of DNSSEC:

This is an unsigned DNS answer (unsigned == no DNSSEC):

cloudflare.com.        299 IN  A   198.41.214.162
cloudflare.com.        299 IN  A   198.41.215.162

This is an answer with DNSSEC:

cloudflare.com.        299 IN  A   198.41.214.162
cloudflare.com.        299 IN  A   198.41.215.162
cloudflare.com.        299 IN  RRSIG   A 13 2 300 20160311145051 20160309125051 35273     cloudflare.com. RqRna0qkih8cuki++YbFOkJi0DGeNpCMYDzlBuG88LWqx+Aaq8x3kQZX TzMTpFRs6K0na9NCUg412bOD4LH3EQ==

Answers with DNSSEC contain a signature for every record type that is returned. (In this example, only A records are returned so there is only one signature.) The signatures allow Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For June 24th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• 79: podcasts for developers; 100 million: daily voice calls made on WhatsApp; 2,000; cars Tesla builds each week; 2078 lbs: weight it takes to burst an exercise ball; 500 million: Instagram users; > 100M: hours watched per day on Netflix; 400 PPM: Antarctica’s CO2 Level; 2.5 PB: New Relic SSD storage; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Alan Kay: The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
  • @jaykreps: Actually, yes: distributed systems are hard, but getting 100+ engineers to work productively on one app is harder.
  • @adrianco: All in 2016: Serverless Architecture: AWS Lambda, Codeless Architecture: Mendix, Architectureless Architecture: SaaS
  • @AhmetAlpBalkan: "That's MS SQL Server running on Ubuntu on Docker Swarm on Docker Datacenter on @Azure" @markrussinovich #dockercon
  • Erik Continue reading

Worth Reading: The last bastion of proprietary software

Open source software has done a lot to transform the IT industry, but perhaps more than anything else it has reminded those who architect complex systems that all elements of a datacenter have to be equally open and programmable for them to make the customizations that are necessary to run specific workloads efficiently and therefore cost effectively. -The Next Platform

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The EU and US reportedly reach data-transfer deal

The U.S. and the European Union have reportedly reached an agreement on the language of a key data transfer pact, including limits on U.S. surveillance.The revamped EU-U.S. Privacy Shield was sent to EU member states overnight, according to a report from Reuters. Privacy Shield would govern how multinational companies handle the private data of EU residents.Member states are expected to vote on the proposal in July, unnamed sources told Reuters. Representatives of the EU and the U.S. Department of Commerce didn't immediately respond to requests for comments on the reported deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The EU and US reportedly reach data-transfer deal

The U.S. and the European Union have reportedly reached an agreement on the language of a key data transfer pact, including limits on U.S. surveillance.The revamped EU-U.S. Privacy Shield was sent to EU member states overnight, according to a report from Reuters. Privacy Shield would govern how multinational companies handle the private data of EU residents.Member states are expected to vote on the proposal in July, unnamed sources told Reuters. Representatives of the EU and the U.S. Department of Commerce didn't immediately respond to requests for comments on the reported deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

30 days in a terminal: Day 8 — The slow descent into madness

On June 16, just a hair over one week, I started using the Linux terminal. Exclusively. Up until that point, I'd been a lover of all things command line—my fondness for text based interfaces, and unreasonably old technology, bordering on the legendary. Despite that, I've relied on graphical interfaces for the better part of the last three decades. I've always told myself that I could, if I wanted to, do all of my computing entirely within a text-based shell—and never leave. With the number of times I've suggested this to myself, you'd almost think I was trying to goad myself into it. Throwing down some serious nerd peer pressure—on myself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is 2016 Optimism About SDN and NFV Justified?

SDN and NFV is expected to surge in 2016

Alchemy Can’t Save Moore’s Law

We don’t have a Moore’s Law problem so much as we have a materials science or alchemy problem. If you believe in materials science, what seems abundantly clear in listening to so many discussions about the end of scale for chip manufacturing processes is that, for whatever reason, the industry as a whole has not done enough investing to discover the new materials that will allow us to enhance or move beyond CMOS chip technology.

The only logical conclusion is that people must actually believe in alchemy, that some kind of magic is going to save the day and allow …

Alchemy Can’t Save Moore’s Law was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Demisto accelerates security investigations through automation and collaboration  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  When it comes to network and endpoint security incidents, there's no shortage of products that can detect suspicious activities and send up alerts. However, what there is a shortage of is skilled incident response experts and time to investigate all the alerts. Security operations (SecOps) professionals need better tools and more efficient processes to become more effective.Demisto Inc. is a new company that launched in May to address these challenges. Demisto says it can help Security Operations Centers (SOCs) scale the capabilities of their human resources, improve incident response times, and capture evidence while working to solve problems collaboratively. The Demisto Enterprise platform is an innovative approach that includes enabling collaboration among analysts and intelligent automation using bots and playbooks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here