AT&T, WhatsApp get low marks from EFF for data disclosure policies

The Electronic Frontier Foundation released the latest version of its annual “Who Has Your Back” report on tech companies’ data disclosure policies Wednesday afternoon, giving perfect five-star ratings to companies including Apple, Adobe, Dropbox and Yahoo.This year’s publication is the fifth edition of the EFF’s reporting on tech companies’ policies around disclosing information to governments in response to data requests, and it brings major changes to the organization’s framework.“The criteria we used to judge companies in 2011 were ambitious for the time, but theyve been almost universally adopted in the years since then,” the EFF said in its report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft needs SDN for Azure cloud

SANTA CLARA – Microsoft’s Azure couldn’t scale without SDN.The Microsoft cloud, through which the company’s software products are delivered, has 22 hyper-scale regions around the world. Azure storage and compute usage is doubling every six months, and Azure lines up 90,000 new subscribers a month.Fifty-seven percent of the Fortune 500 use Azure and the number of hosts quickly grew from 100,000 to millions, said CTO Mark Russinovich during his Open Network Summit keynote address here this week. Azure needs a virtualized, partitioned and scale-out design, delivered through software, in order to keep up with that kind of growth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Radar: Menlo Security Taps Containers To Stop Malware

Startup Menlo Security tackles endpoint malware prevention using containers to proxy Web and email sessions.

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Drew Conry-Murray

I'm a tech journalist, editor, and content director with 17 years' experience covering the IT industry. I'm author of the book "The Symantec Guide To Home Internet Security" and co-author of the post-apocalyptic novel "Wasteland Blues," available at Amazon.
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The post Startup Radar: Menlo Security Taps Containers To Stop Malware appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Drew Conry-Murray.

Google-owned Nest unveils a smart camera for the home

Nest Labs, Google’s home sensing unit, made its long-awaited move into the home security market on Wednesday when it unveiled Nest Cam.Nest Cam is based on technology acquired last year when Nest purchased Dropcam. In fact, think of Nest Cam as a very much improved and souped up version of the first generation Dropcam.It will shoot video at full 1080p high definition—higher than Dropcam’s 720p—and is said to be able to better distinguish between different forms of movement in videos and send more relevant alerts to users when something happens inside their home. It’s slimmer than the Dropcam, has better night vision, and a tripod mount.It costs US$199 and is available in seven countries including the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe like Germany and the U.K.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twitter acquires machine learning startup Whetlab

To boost its in-house machine learning efforts, Twitter has acquired Whetlab, a startup that makes it easier for companies to use machine learning tools.As part of the acquisition, announced Wednesday, Twitter will shut down Whetlab’s beta service on July 15, and will no longer accept sign-ups for the product. Current users will be able to export their data from Whetlabs’s website in either tab-separated format or JSON.It’s not exactly clear how Twitter plans to use Whetlab’s technology to enhance its existing machine learning plans. However, the startup’s tool seems useful for any company implementing machine learning techniques. The technology, which was developed by researchers at Harvard, Toronto and Sherbrooke universities, takes in information about the problem a user wants to solve with machine learning. It then gives the user a series of suggestions to help them optimize a machine learning model to solve the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to rollout a successful new product or service

So you are about to launch a new product or service, or are thinking about it. Congratulations. Unfortunately, having the best idea (or product or service) in the world may not get you buzz, or sales, if the right people don’t know about it. Here are nine steps you can take to increase the odds of your rollout being successful.1. Make sure the product or service works – before you start selling it. Whether your product or service is digital in nature, or you plan on selling it online, first “make sure the app or website is bug-free,” says Mark Tuchscherer, cofounder & president, Geeks Chicago, a Web development company. “We see products launch all the time that companies didn't test thoroughly, and this is the best way to lose potential customers,” he explains. “People have short attention spans and want stuff to work fast. If your application crashes in the first few seconds, you are going to lose a lot of new users.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘Scroogled’ architect Mark Penn to leave Microsoft

Mark Penn, Microsoft’s executive vice president of advertising and strategy, will leave the company in September to open a private equity firm.Called the Stagwell Group, Penn’s new firm raised $250 million in capital from investors including former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and could make up to $750 million in acquisitions using leverage. With that money, Stagwell will focus on investing in advertising, research, data analytics, public relations, and digital marketing services, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco to make $10 billion investment in China

Cisco plans to invest US$10 billion in China, although its sales in the country are slumping due in part to persistent security concerns surrounding U.S. technology.The investment marks a “new chapter” for the company, and it includes agreements with the Chinese government to expand in areas including research, and job creation, Cisco said on Wednesday.The $10 billion investment will be made over several years, and will help spur technology innovation in the country, Cisco said, without further elaborating. It called the move a “renewed commitment” suggesting that the investment would be added on top of its existing operational expenses in China. Cisco could not be immediately reached for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce Marketing Cloud aims to blur the lines between marketing, sales and service

Marketers have long struggled with the challenge of engaging customers across channels, but an updated version of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud could help.Unveiled on Wednesday, the new software offers several enhancements designed to give companies a single place for planning customer “journeys,” or managing their interactions with a brand across sales, service, marketing and more. It also aims to make it easier for marketers to orchestrate ad targeting across the digital advertising ecosystem.First, Marketing Cloud’s updated Journey Builder tool promises to give marketers the ability to guide customers on journeys across channels and devices and ensure that those customers always get the right message in the right place at the right time. Essentially, it does that by enabling companies to connect every interaction customers have with their brand across every department, making it easier to see and manage the overall picture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How would you use Lua scripting in a DNS server?

I'm currently putting Lua into a DNS server, and I'm trying to figure out how people would use it.

A typical application would be load-balancing. How I would do this is to create a background Lua thread that frequently (many times a second) queried an external resource to discover current server utilitzation, then rewrote the RRset for that server to put the least utilized server first. This would technically change the zone, but wouldn't be handled as such (i.e. wouldn't trigger serial number changes, wouldn't trigger notification of slave zones).

Such a thread could be used for zone backends. Right now, DNS servers support complex backends like SQL servers and LDAP servers. Instead of making the server code complex, this could easily be done with a Lua thread, that regularly scans an SQL/LDAP server for changes and updates the zone in memory with the changes.

Both these examples are updating static information. One possible alternative is to execute a Lua script on each and every DNS query, such as adding a resource record to a zone that would look like this:

*.foo.example.com. TXT $LUA:my_script

Every query would cause the script to be executed. There are some Continue reading

FCC to smack AT&T with $100M fine for choking “unlimited” data plan speeds

The Federal Communications Commission said it plans to fine AT&T Mobility $100M – the agency’s largest fine ever -- for severely slowing down data speeds for customers with unlimited data plans. The FCC’s investigation revealed that millions of AT&T customers were slowed for an average of 12 days per billing cycle, significantly impeding their ability to use common data applications such as GPS mapping or streaming video. And the company failed to adequately notify its customers that they could receive speeds slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised, the FCC stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC to smack AT&T with $100M fine for choking “unlimited” data plan speeds

The Federal Communications Commission said it plans to fine AT&T Mobility $100M – the agency’s largest fine ever -- for severely slowing down data speeds for customers with unlimited data plans. The FCC’s investigation revealed that millions of AT&T customers were slowed for an average of 12 days per billing cycle, significantly impeding their ability to use common data applications such as GPS mapping or streaming video. And the company failed to adequately notify its customers that they could receive speeds slower than the normal network speeds AT&T advertised, the FCC stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC plans to fine AT&T $100 million over ‘unlimited’ data plans

The Federal Communications Commission plans to fine AT&T $100 million for misleading customers by throttling speeds on the lines of millions of customers who had "unlimited" data plans.The FCC alleges that AT&T did not adequately disclose to its customers on "unlimited" data plans that their speed would slow drastically after they had reached a monthly data allowance of 5GBs. The policy began in 2011.Data speeds were significantly slowed to 512kbps from the advertised 5Gbps to 12Gbps under something AT&T called its maximum bit rate policy. That very name is clearly at odds with an unlimited plan, a senior FCC official told reporters on a conference call.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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