Survey finds most US residents want changes to Patriot Act surveillance

U.S. residents have major problems with government surveillance, and six in 10 want to see the records collection provisions of the Patriot Act modified before Congress extends it, according to a survey commissioned by a civil rights group.Just 34 percent of survey respondents said they’d like to see the Patriot Act preserved as a way to keep the U.S. safe from terrorists, according to the survey commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union. Sixty percent either strongly or somewhat agreed with a statement saying Congress should modify the Patriot Act to “limit government surveillance and protect Americans’ privacy.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Appeals court rules Samsung won’t have to pay $930M in Apple patent case

Samsung will not have to pay all of the US$930 million in damages that Apple was awarded in 2012, a U.S. appeals court ruled Monday.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., agreed with a California federal jury that Samsung violated Apple design and utility patents related to the iPhone. However, the appeals court reversed the jury’s finding that Samsung infringed on Apple’s trade dress, or the overall look and packaging of a product.Thus, the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, where the case was originally tried, must recalculate the portion of the settlement dealing with trade dress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What Do Spinal Tap and OpenStack Have in Common?

They both go to 11!

 

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Kilo is the eleventh major OpenStack release, with enhancements across the board and new features like Ironic for bare metal service provisioning. SMB to large-scale clouds with OpenStack are being deployed in droves with a self-service portal to spin up virtual and now bare metal workloads while automatically provisioning all the requisite compute, storage and networking resources.  Yet, network service provisioning remains to be cumbersome, brittle and closed.

OpenStack and Cumulus Linux share a common philosophy, design and operational framework. Compute and storage (with Cinder and Swift) leverage standard infrastructure, so why use black boxes from Cisco and Arista, especially when the systems are merchant silicon reference designs. Cumulus Linux is unencumbered Linux without proprietary APIs and protocols, with the flexibility to run on your platform of choice.  Build and runtime operations are identical from bootstrapping infrastructure with PXE or ONIE to lifecycle management with config management and patching. Clouds have become the new frontier not only for orchestration platforms like OpenStack but for tools, processes and organizations. Converged administration with battle-tested automation platforms (such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible) or monitoring (with Nagios or collectd) enable admins to rise to critical tasks such Continue reading

It’s Google and Facebook’s web, we just surf in it

It's not exactly news that Facebook and (especially) Google dominate a large portion of what happens online. Add in a few other major players—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft maybe, you know them all—and the supposedly wide-open internet increasingly seems like the private playground and captive market.Google's "buy" button? Two unrelated events last week brought that reality home for me. First, and most importantly, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google is planning to add a "buy" button to its ubiquitous search results pages. Google hasn't confirmed the report, and the Journal says the buttons will appear only on a small percentage of mobile devices (not desktop Web browsers), at least at first. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple’s Tim Cook tells GW grads: Ignore the cynics, change the world like Steve Jobs did

Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered the commencement address to the George Washington University Class of 2015 on Sunday, May 17. He reflected on negative and positive influences in his life, from Gov. George Wallace to President Jimmy Carter to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, urged students to find their direction and to make a difference in the world. Here's the transcript from his talk as well as the video, which is below. Hello GW.Thank you very much President Knapp for that kind intro. Alex, trustees, faculty and deans of the university, my fellow honorees, and especially you the class of 2015. Yes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple buys GPS startup Coherent to beef up mapping technology

Apple, which has been working hard to bolster its mapping technology since ditching Google Maps in 2012, has acquired Coherent Navigation, a startup offering a high-accuracy GPS navigation service.Coherent’s navigation system is used in the Iridium satellite network, according to the LinkedIn profile of Paul Lego, who was CEO of the company before going to work for Apple. Coherent, which was founded in 2008 and is based in the San Francisco area, counts the U.S. government as a customer and had been aiming its technology at the mining, construction, energy and agriculture industries. Coherent had fewer than 10 employees, according to its LinkedIn page, which states that the company “has ceased operations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple buys GPS startup Coherent to beef up mapping technology

Apple, which has been working hard to bolster its mapping technology since ditching Google Maps in 2012, has acquired Coherent Navigation, a startup offering a high-accuracy GPS navigation service.Coherent’s navigation system is used in the Iridium satellite network, according to the LinkedIn profile of Paul Lego, who was CEO of the company before going to work for Apple. Coherent, which was founded in 2008 and is based in the San Francisco area, counts the U.S. government as a customer and had been aiming its technology at the mining, construction, energy and agriculture industries. Coherent had fewer than 10 employees, according to its LinkedIn page, which states that the company “has ceased operations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In desperation, many ransomware victims plead with attackers

The shamelessness of ransomware pushers knows no bounds. After encrypting people’s files and then holding them to ransom, they portray themselves as service providers offering technical support and discounts to their “customers.”Researchers from FireEye recently collected messages from a Web site set up by the creators of a ransomware program called TeslaCrypt to interact with their victims. The messages offer a rare glimpse into the mindset of these cybercriminals and the distress they cause.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The LG G4: Three things right, three things wrong

This week the G4 smartphone from LG Electronics starts shipping outside its home country, with arrivals in the U.S. and Europe expected in a couple of weeks. While the smartphone has a great screen and camera, it doesn’t get everything right.What works:Screen: Even though the G4’s screen has the same size and resolution as the one on the G3 (at 5.5 inches and 1440 by 2560 pixels) it’s noticeably better. LG has improved its performance in several regards, including brightness and color reproduction, making it one of the best screens ever. All those pixels put higher demands on the processor, GPU and battery, but it’s nonetheless worth it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The LG G4: Three things right, three things wrong

This week the G4 smartphone from LG Electronics starts shipping outside its home country, with arrivals in the U.S. and Europe expected in a couple of weeks. While the smartphone has a great screen and camera, it doesn’t get everything right. What works: Screen: Even though the G4’s screen has the same size and resolution as the one on the G3 (at 5.5 inches and 1440 by 2560 pixels) it’s noticeably better. LG has improved its performance in several regards, including brightness and color reproduction, making it one of the best screens ever. All those pixels put higher demands on the processor, GPU and battery, but it’s nonetheless worth it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft study claims technology shortens our attention span

In a report that may not surprise anyone, a new study from Microsoft reveals that our attention spans are at an all-time low, and the culprit, not surprisingly, is the ubiquity of technology which now touches every corner of our lives 24/7.Indeed, you can thank the iPhone for ushering in the smartphone era and creating a world where most of us remain tethered to our devices, lest we miss a text message or the latest sports scores.According to Microsoft's study, which was conducted via EEG scans, the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. To put that data into context, the average attention span of a goldfish is about 9 seconds, according to the study.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Solar power road surface actually works

Remember that road surface being tested in the Netherlands that acted as a giant solar panel converting solar energy into electricity? Well, guess what? It actually worked.Six months into the test, the engineers say they've generated 3,000kwH of power from the 70-meter bike path test track. That's enough power to run a one-person household for a year, and more than expected of the project, according to SolaRoad, the company behind the experiment.Energy-neutral mobility Data centers are heavy users of electricity, and SolaRoad's better-than-expected electricity generation will be interesting news for those designing data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VeloCloud’s SD-WAN puts packet steering on steroids to optimize performance

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Many vendors are racing to compete in the burgeoning software-defined WAN space. Each competitor has its own strategy of how to implement the network overlay that makes the network connections, provides virtualized services and steers applications. It all comes down to what the SD-WAN vendor wants to help its customers achieve.VeloCloud has an entry in this race, and the company has two goals: to simplify the way companies set up their branches within their wide area network, and to improve the performance of the WAN. There are several specific problem areas VeloCloud is setting out to address.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why you shouldn’t beat yourself up when troubleshooting

I’ve made a decent to large part of my living for more than 20 years learning about how to fix problems and then trying to tell others how to follow suit. And this last week has been among my highest in terms of frustration in using computers in my entire life. But, per my modus operandi, I have truth born from a bloody fight to share with you.A few weeks ago, I tried to deal with the mystery of my 2011 Mac mini taking forever to start up and be ready to use by switching to an external SSD drive with both FireWire 800 and USB 3.0 built in. I documented that here, and people have a lot of good opinions about my choice. Some thought I should have cracked open the Mac mini and put in a new drive; others thought that I should’ve used Thunderbolt; and others that I should have bought a new computer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A New Home: Looking Back

I have moved to a new blogging platform! The timing was interesting, since the wordpress installation on which Keeping It Classless has operated for so long is about 5 years old (I operated on an older domain before Keeping It Classless was born).

WOW. Five years is a long time in blog years. I could not have possibly predicted back then what this blog would do for me. In going over these old posts, I saw a very interesting progression of my own skillsets and mentality, and I figured I’d share. Call it a thank you for helping me grow the past 5 years. Please forgive the length of this post, but I wanted to make sure to call out everything of significance.

It’s also been crazy to witness the change in writing style. Early on I was not shy about using idioms, memes, and Borat references in blog posts, and now - while I am still humorous from time to time - I am a little more formal and succinct. Another way of looking at it is that early on, there was very little difference between the way that I wrote and the way that I spoke. Today, there Continue reading

Eschew Obfuscation (Communicate Clearly)

Many years ago, I worked for a manager who had two signs on his desk. The first was a pencil with the words, “Pencil 2.0″ printed above them. The rest of the sign went on to explain how the pencil had undo (the eraser), was renewable (it can be sharpened), etc. The second sign was simpler, just two black words printed across a white background.

Eschew Obfuscation

Being just out of the US Air Force, and not having quite the vocabulary I should have (have I ever told you that reading is the key to having a great vocabulary?), I didn’t really understand the point. Now I do. Okay, to make it more obvious, from the Collins English Dictionary, 8th edition:

eschew: tr to keep clear of or abstain from (something disliked, injurious, etc.); shun; avoid
obfuscation: the act or an instance of making something obscure, dark, or difficult to understand

Now do you see? Avoid using language people can’t understand. Far too often, in the technical world, we use abbreviations, acronyms, and all sorts of cute nonsense to say things. We pepper our language with shorthands and inside jokes (squirrel!). While this sometimes helps communication, Continue reading

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