Reports of Google building a phone are preposterous

In January 2014, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. Imagine Google CEO Sundar Pichai now telling the Alphabet board that after buying and making Motorola into one of the best mobile device makers in the world, selling it was a mistake and the company should invest billions to recreate it. It would be like GE starting a TV network after it sold NBC to Comcast or HPE starting a PC division after it spun off its PC business.So, what is Google doing? The Motorola turnaround is a good place to start explaining what Google is doing.Google recruited Regina Dugan, former chief of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), into Motorola during the turnaround. The 50-year-old government agency is charged with preventing strategic surprises from—and creating strategic surprises for—America’s adversaries. DARPA earned a reputation for producing high-impact results quickly. A few of DARPA’s many innovations include the internet, global positioning satellites (GPS), drones and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 reinstallation tip: How to reset your PC and keep your files

Sometimes Windows needs a fresh start—maybe a program’s gone awry or a file’s been corrupted. Luckily, Windows 10 lets you do this with a few clicks.Windows 10 has an option where you can reinstall Windows and wipe your programs, but it keeps your files intact. Note that this won’t get rid of any “bonus” bloatware programs your PC vendor put on your computer before you bought it—you’ll have to do that manually—but it will get rid of any software you or someone else installed afterward.Even though Windows says it’ll keep your files intact, it always pays to back up your PC or at least the important files before you do anything like this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top 10 emerging technologies from the World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum has put together a list of the top 10 emerging technologies that will change our lives. The list includes nanosensors that will circulate through the human body, a battery that will be able to power an entire town and socially aware artificial intelligence that will track our finances and health.These are not far-flung visions, according to the forum. They are technologies that are on the cusp of having a meaningful impact.“Horizon scanning for emerging technologies is crucial to staying abreast of developments that can radically transform our world, enabling timely expert analysis in preparation for these disruptors,” said Bernard Meyerson, chairman of the World Economic Forum council that compiled the list of the top 10 emerging technologies in 2016. “The global community needs to come together and agree on common principles if our society is to reap the benefits and hedge the risks of these technologies," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft launches its cross-platform .Net Core

Microsoft used a Linux conference of all places to announce the release of .NET Core 1.0 and ASP.NET Core 1.0, the open source, cross-platform version of its .NET Framework for building apps that can run on Mac and Linux. With the help of its recently acquired Xamarin, iOS and Android can also be supported.The announcement was made simultaneously at the Red Hat DevNation summit in San Francisco and on the MSDN blog. The release includes the .Net Core runtime, libraries and tools and the ASP.NET Core libraries. Microsoft also released Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions to create .NET Core projects, as well as Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Resold hard drives on eBay, Craigslist are often still ripe with leftover data

Before you throw away that old hard drive, make sure you purge the memory clean.  A new study has found that most users are accidentally giving up photos, social security numbers and financial data, by failing to properly delete the files on their recycled hard drives. Blancco Technology Group, which specializes in data erasure, conducted the study by randomly buying 200 secondhand PC storage drives from eBay and Craigslist. Their goal was to see if the company could recover any of the old data saved inside. In most cases, it could. 78 percent of the drives contained residual data that could be recovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Resold hard drives on eBay, Craigslist are often still ripe with leftover data

Before you throw away that old hard drive, make sure you purge the memory clean.  A new study has found that most users are accidentally giving up photos, social security numbers and financial data, by failing to properly delete the files on their recycled hard drives. Blancco Technology Group, which specializes in data erasure, conducted the study by randomly buying 200 secondhand PC storage drives from eBay and Craigslist. Their goal was to see if the company could recover any of the old data saved inside. In most cases, it could. 78 percent of the drives contained residual data that could be recovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Aggregation pixies

What if we could magically fix de-aggregation in IPv4 address space that was handed out in needs-based chunks? You can visualise the magic fix for this being “prefix pixies”, that, every night, when we’re asleep and the Inter-tubes only carry trickles of IP packets, they go around every BGP speaker on the global Internet, and they swap addresses. -APNIC

The post Worth Reading: Aggregation pixies appeared first on 'net work.

Lenovo HPC Bounces Back After IBM Spinoff

When IBM sold off its System x division to Lenovo Group in the fall of 2014, some big supercomputing centers in the United States and Europe that were long-time customers of Big Blue had to stop and think about what their future systems would look like and who would supply them. It was not a foregone conclusion that the Xeon-based portion of IBM’s HPC business would just move over to Lenovo as part of the sale.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Many believed that Lenovo could not hold onto its HPC business, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell were quick …

Lenovo HPC Bounces Back After IBM Spinoff was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cisco’s LoRaWAN combines LoRa, WiFi, and Cellular for IoT

Hamburg Port Authority is using LoRaWAN.

Too many IoT networks? Cisco just bet on this one

Cisco Systems just cast a vote of confidence in one of the many technologies that might get your next IoT device online.On Tuesday, the company announced gateways between LoRaWAN low-power wireless networks and fatter pipes like Ethernet cables. The gateways can take in data from sensors and other small Internet of Things devices and send it back to an enterprise or cloud.This is Cisco’s first commercial foray into LPWANs (low power, wide area networks), a new generation of infrastructure designed for devices that are too small and power-constrained to use cellular.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘How to get an A/C budget approved’

According to one IT professional posting on Reddit’s section for systems administrators, the best way to get an air-conditioning budget approved is to turn up the heat – literally -- on the right company executives. He writes:   After adding a second rack to our server room the portable A/C unit just couldn't hack it anymore. Ambient temperatures were regularly spiking above 30C (86F). I had to come in on weekends to open doors, move fans, etc.Since this is just the beginning of summer I know it's only going to get worse. We need a commercial A/C unit. The portable A/C we have exhausts above the drop ceiling, which just creates a blanket of hot air and compounds the issue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘How to get an A/C budget approved’

According to one IT professional posting on Reddit’s section for systems administrators, the best way to get an air-conditioning budget approved is to turn up the heat – literally -- on the right company executives. He writes:   After adding a second rack to our server room the portable A/C unit just couldn't hack it anymore. Ambient temperatures were regularly spiking above 30C (86F). I had to come in on weekends to open doors, move fans, etc.Since this is just the beginning of summer I know it's only going to get worse. We need a commercial A/C unit. The portable A/C we have exhausts above the drop ceiling, which just creates a blanket of hot air and compounds the issue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senator stalls intelligence funding bill over surveillance concerns

A U.S. senator has stalled an intelligence budget bill over concerns that it would expand surveillance while limiting oversight of it.Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has placed a hold on the 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act, saying the bill would allow the FBI, without a court order, to demand U.S. residents' email and Internet records from ISPs and other communications providers.The bill would allow the FBI to obtain new records through the controversial National Security Letter program, which allows the FBI to collect phone and financial records through administrative subpoenas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senator stalls intelligence funding bill over surveillance concerns

A U.S. senator has stalled an intelligence budget bill over concerns that it would expand surveillance while limiting oversight of it.Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has placed a hold on the 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act, saying the bill would allow the FBI, without a court order, to demand U.S. residents' email and Internet records from ISPs and other communications providers.The bill would allow the FBI to obtain new records through the controversial National Security Letter program, which allows the FBI to collect phone and financial records through administrative subpoenas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top 5 storage vendors shows massive shift to the cloud

There’s a changing of the guard afoot in the storage industry, and it’s getting cloudy.Each quarter 451 Research Group surveys it members in its Voice of the Enterprise series. Late last year, the company’s research revealed a dramatic reshaping of the storage market both in terms of which vendors enterprises consider strategic storage partners and where their future storage will be housed.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Gartner says cloud will be the “default” application deployment option by 2020 | Deutsche Bank says one-third of finance apps will be in the cloud within 3 years +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Canonical, Snappy and the marketing value of collaboration

Collaboration is an important thing in the free and open source software world. Individual contributors (often employed by or involved with competing companies or organizations) working together for the benefit of all.It’s a core principle. Without collaboration, none of the free software world works.And it’s not just essential from the practical point of view—of people working together to get concrete things accomplished. It’s also become a bit of a marketing buzz word. And something happened two weeks ago that I found rather annoying.Wait. Before I go any further, I should make something clear. I am a huge fan of the collaborative efforts of many companies in the Linux and greater open source world. Even competitors such as SUSE and Red Hat come together on a regular basis to work hand in hand to find ways to benefit their own companies, while at the same time helping their rival and the broader community. And they do so happily. Heck, I’ve even seen SUSE and Red Hat employees give presentations together at Linux conferences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Brexit could cause data privacy headaches for US companies

The impact of the United Kingdom vote to withdraw from the European Union could have far-reaching consequences for international companies, which may need to rethink their data management policies.“As a part of the European Union, there is a general directive that all nations abide by a guide,” says Geeman Yip, CEO of cloud consultancy BitTitan. “Now that the UK is not a part of the EU, the previous baseline directives that were adopted will change.”Said another way: When the UK is part of the EU it has the same data sovereignty laws as other countries in the EU. When the UK breaks away, those laws could change. Companies operating in Europe may have to manage one set of data privacy laws for the UK and another for EU-member countries. The issue will impact both cloud and managed service providers who may need to offer additional options for customers to host data across Europe, and enterprise end users who may need to reconsider where their data is stored in Europe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Pays $293M for CloudLock, a Cloud Security Firm

CloudLock uses an API-based technology.

Efficiency in the SGi/Gi-LAN

With higher traffic demands on the SGi/Gi-LAN in mobile networks, the move towards converged platforms enables increased efficiency in processing IP traffic.

Overvaluing Experience

“Sure, great candidate—so long as you just look at the paper. They don’t have any experience.”

I wonder how many times I’ve heard this in my networking career—I wonder how many times this has been said about me, in fact, after I’ve walked out of an interview room. We all know the tale of the paper tigers. And we all know how hard it is to land a position without experience, and how hard it is to get experience without landing a job (I have a friend in just this position right now, in fact). But let me tell you a story…

I don’t fish any longer, but I used to fish quite a bit—with my Grandfather. Now, like most Grandfathers, mine was not ordinary. He was, in fact, a County Agent, working for the US Forestry Service. This meant he spent his time blasting ponds, helping farmers figure out how to increase yield on their fields, and growing all sort of odd new types of things on his small plot of land. He also had mules (I’ll tell you about the mules some time later, I’m certain), and an old Forestry Green pickup truck.

Anyway, to return to Continue reading