A ‘black market’ for wireless cell service has popped up in Canada

Two articles at iPhoneInCanada.ca and AlphaBeatic.com tell the story of one enterprising Canadian who takes advantage of a loophole to provide substantially cheaper wireless cell service for a one-time $100 payment.How exactly he does it appears to be unclear, but it involves pricing discrepancies in Canada, where lower-populated provinces like Manitoba and Saskatchewan see much cheaper cell service. Basically, the scheme involves signing up for an account in one of these regions, where Canadian wireless service provider Koodo offers a 5GB monthly data plan for $48, then selling the account to people who live in more populated regions of the country, where the same plan typically costs at least $90, according to the reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft shrinks smartphone ambitions with mobile restructuring

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just unveiled the latest of the “tough choices” Microsoft is making to streamline its business, and it’s a doozy: the company is significantly cutting back its smartphone ambitions almost two years after announcing it would acquire Nokia’s Devices and Services business in an attempt to play a greater role in this market. In an email to employees, Nadella said that the company was moving away from being a phone manufacturer and towards creating a “vibrant Windows ecosystem” that includes a group of first-party devices. As a result, the company will be dismissing around 7,800 employees, with the majority of job cuts impacting people in Microsoft’s phone hardware business. The restructuring also included another aftershock from the Nokia acquisition: Microsoft will take a massive $7.6 billion write-down on the acquisition itself along with a restructuring charge of between $750 and $850 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft shrinks smartphone ambitions with mobile restructuring

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just unveiled the latest of the “tough choices” Microsoft is making to streamline its business, and it’s a doozy: the company is significantly cutting back its smartphone ambitions almost two years after announcing it would acquire Nokia’s Devices and Services business in an attempt to play a greater role in this market. In an email to employees, Nadella said that the company was moving away from being a phone manufacturer and towards creating a “vibrant Windows ecosystem” that includes a group of first-party devices. As a result, the company will be dismissing around 7,800 employees, with the majority of job cuts impacting people in Microsoft’s phone hardware business. The restructuring also included another aftershock from the Nokia acquisition: Microsoft will take a massive $7.6 billion write-down on the acquisition itself along with a restructuring charge of between $750 and $850 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft writes off $7.6B, admits failure of Nokia acquisition

Microsoft today wrote off billions of dollars related to its Nokia acquisition, saying it's taking an "impairment charge" of $7.6 billion, or nearly the full amount it paid for the Finnish firm's smartphone business and patents last year.The announcement slapped the failure sticker on the last major move made by former CEO Steve Ballmer, who pushed for the Nokia deal in his final months in office against objections by, among others, Satya Nadella before he was elevated to the chief executive's chair.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 10 (FREE!) Microsoft tools to make admins happier "It was a mistake to begin with," said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. "A monumental mistake. Microsoft had no business being in the cut-throat, low-margin phone business. Who's making money in phones besides Apple?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hacker group that hit Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft intensifies attacks

The hackers that targeted Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft developers two years ago have escalated their economic espionage efforts as they seek confidential business information and intellectual property they can profit from.The group, which security researchers from Kaspersky Lab and Symantec call Wild Neutron or Morpho, has broken into the networks of over 45 large companies since 2012.After the 2013 attacks against Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft were highly publicized, the group went underground and temporarily halted its activity. However, its attacks resumed in 2014 and have since intensified, according to separate reports released Wednesday by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA’s $4M cyber-threat clash down to seven challengers

When it began a year ago, there were 104 teams competing for $4 million in prize money in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s ambitious tournament -- known as the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) -- to see who can build the best fully automatic network defense system.+More on Network World: NASA’s cool, radical and visionary concepts+This week DARPA said that after a couple dry runs and a significant qualifying event the field of CGC teams is down to seven who will now compete in the final battle slated to take place at DEFCON in Las Vegas in August 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple Watch’s nose-dive predictions suggest Apple needs a new way to innovate

Slice Intelligence's Apple Watch estimates confirm that Apple needs a different narrative for innovation in new product categories. The company's Wizard of Oz –like assertion that it knows everything that consumers might ever want hamstrings its ability to introduce an Apple version of an evolving product category that's not perfect.Business Insider and MarketWatch have both announced the death of the Apple Watch, with data from Slice Intelligence pointing to a 90% decline in Apple Watch sales since the device's opening week on the market. It might just be a bad case of schadenfreude due to the ingestion of bad data. Literally translated from German, schadenfreude means damaging joy, but often is interpreted to mean evil glee. Apple, the most valuable brand, is under a microscope because of its success compounded by persuasive marketing. Now that a marketing survey may indicate a drop in Apple Watch sales, many observers are rejoicing with evil glee that the hugely successful company might fail. But the shipment data hasn't been verified by Apple, and no one knows the company's expectations for Apple Watch sales over the entirety of its debut year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please Continue reading

Ansible/AWS/Red Hat Webinar with DLT

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The Federal Cloud First policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. But how can you safely and reliably begin to deploy and manage your Red Hat instances at cloud scale? With IT automation, you can more easily deploy and manage your Red Hat instances in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

In this webinar, we’ll demonstrate how to:

  • Automate the creation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based AWS instances
  • Apply a security baseline to the instances
  • Deploy and manage an application

Who Should Attend: Those in the public sector who are working to move to the cloud

Why Attend: Regardless of where you are in the cloud adoption process, leveraging IT automation can help smooth the transition to the cloud.

Presenter: Justin Nemmers, director public sector at Ansible

Date & Time: Thursday, July 23, at 2PM Eastern

REGISTER HERE 

United Airlines flights grounded by ‘network connectivity’ issues

United Airlines passengers were facing major travel delays on Wednesday after the carrier suspended all U.S. flights due to computer problems.In an emailed statement, United said it had a “network connectivity issue” and is working to resolve the situation. The airline didn’t elaborate on the exact nature of the connectivity issue nor did it provide a timeline for when the problem would be fixed.Separately, the Federal Aviation Administration said United flights were grounded because of ”automation issues.” The FAA didn’t immediately reply to a request for more information on the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fighting Cancer: The Unexpected Benefit Of Open Sourcing Our Code

Recently I was contacted by Dr. Igor Kozin from The Institute of Cancer Research in London. He asked about the optimal way to compile CloudFlare's open source fork of zlib. It turns out that zlib is widely used to compress the SAM/BAM files that are used for DNA sequencing. And it turns out our zlib fork is the best open source solution for that file format.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Shaury Nash

The files used for this kind of research reach hundreds of gigabytes and every time they are compressed and decompressed with our library many important seconds are saved, bringing the cure for cancer that much closer. At least that's what I am going to tell myself when I go to bed.

This made me realize that the benefits of open source go much farther than one can imagine, and you never know where a piece of code may end up. Open sourcing makes sophisticated algorithms and software accessible to individuals and organizations that would not have the resources to develop them on their own, or the money pay for a proprietary solution.

It also made me wonder exactly what we did to zlib that makes it Continue reading

Microsoft pulls back from phone business, announces 7,800 layoffs

Microsoft is scaling down its mobile phone activities, writing off the entire value of the former Nokia smartphone business it bought last year and laying off almost one-third of that business’ staff. The company will no longer try to build a standalone phone business, but instead plans to build a Windows ecosystem that includes its own devices, CEO Satya Nadella told staff in an email announcing the changes. Up to 7,800 jobs will be cut, most of them in the phone business. The cuts come in addition to 18,000 layoffs announced last year: Those cuts included around half of the 25,000 staff who joined Microsoft from Nokia. + A LOOK BACK: Bloodiest tech industry layoffs of 2014, so far +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft pulls back from phone business, announces 7,800 layoffs

Microsoft is scaling down its mobile phone activities, writing off the entire value of the former Nokia smartphone business it bought last year and laying off almost one-third of that business’ staff. The company will no longer try to build a standalone phone business, but instead plans to build a Windows ecosystem that includes its own devices, CEO Satya Nadella told staff in an email announcing the changes. Up to 7,800 jobs will be cut, most of them in the phone business. The cuts come in addition to 18,000 layoffs announced last year: Those cuts included around half of the 25,000 staff who joined Microsoft from Nokia. + A LOOK BACK: Bloodiest tech industry layoffs of 2014, so far +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to prepare for and respond to a cyber attack

Cybercriminals are constantly looking for new ways to bypass security measures. In a survey conducted by the SANS Institute on the behalf of Guidance Software, 56% of respondents assumed they have been breached or will be soon, compared with 47% last year.

Assistant United States Attorney and Cybercrime Coordinator with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Delaware Ed McAndrew, and Guidance Software Director of Security Anthony Di Bello, have compiled best practices for preparing and responding to a cyber attack and working with law enforcement:

* Have an incident response plan – Creating established and actionable plans and procedures for managing and responding to a cyber intrusion can help organizations limit the damage to their computer networks and minimize work stoppage. It also helps law enforcement locate and apprehend the perpetrators.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN: The emerging reality

Change is still afoot in Software Defined Networking, but it is now at least clear that SDN is here to stay, that SDN will be the way we build networks going forward. In this Network World Spotlight special report, pulled together by the editors of Network World, we analyze key developments and gauge where organizations stand today in their SDN planning.Inside you’ll find:* Controller Market Consolidation. There are still many types controllers available, but the market is rallying around OpenDaylight and the Open Network Operating System.* Crossroads for OpenFlow? Once conflated with SDN, OpenFlow progress seems to have stalled. Does OpenFlow still have a significant role to play?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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