FCC to AT&T: “Unlimited means unlimited”

AT&T Mobility, in common with many other service providers of all kinds, uses the word “unlimited” to describe their consumer wireless data offerings. Unfortunately, for consumers, AT&T is using a totally different definition of the word because to the company, “unlimited” has meant “until you reach a threshold of service usage after which we’ll throttle back your performance.”The FCC, in their usual slow and lumbering way, has finally got around to doing something about this blatant and devious redefinition of “unlimited” (it’s taken them four, count ‘em, four years) and proposes to fine AT&T … wait for it … a record $100 million for misleading customers on the grounds that the company violated the 2010 Open Internet Transparency Rule that required ISPs to clearly and transparently inform their customers about their network management practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Message Queues: RabbitMQ in Go and Python

I’ve been playing around with various message queue implementations for a few projects, and wanted to write a quick post on some basics.

Message Queues

Before we get into the detail of RabbitMQ, it’s worth briefly defining exactly what a message queue is, of which RabbitMQ is just one implementation.

You may have heard message queues described as a “Publish/Subscribe” system, or “Pub/Sub” for short. This is a style of communication between software elements, where some components publish messages onto a queue, and others subscribe to that queue and listen for messages published on to it.

We’ll use Twitter as an illustrative analogy. I sent a link to this blog article within a tweet this morning. I did not address this tweet to anyone in particular, I just put it out there, assuming it was useful to at least somebody. Those that follow me saw this tweet, and made a decision to do something with this information or not. In this scenario, I was the publisher, and my followers were subscribers. Message Queues work very much the same way, but they also provide a much greater level of granularity for how to publish messages and subscribe to them.

Application developers Continue reading

Message Queues: RabbitMQ in Go and Python

I’ve been playing around with various message queue implementations for a few projects, and wanted to write a quick post on some basics.

Message Queues

Before we get into the detail of RabbitMQ, it’s worth briefly defining exactly what a message queue is, of which RabbitMQ is just one implementation.

You may have heard message queues described as a “Publish/Subscribe” system, or “Pub/Sub” for short. This is a style of communication between software elements, where some components publish messages onto a queue, and others subscribe to that queue and listen for messages published on to it.

We’ll use Twitter as an illustrative analogy. I sent a link to this blog article within a tweet this morning. I did not address this tweet to anyone in particular, I just put it out there, assuming it was useful to at least somebody. Those that follow me saw this tweet, and made a decision to do something with this information or not. In this scenario, I was the publisher, and my followers were subscribers. Message Queues work very much the same way, but they also provide a much greater level of granularity for how to publish messages and subscribe to them.

Application developers Continue reading

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

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.

Author information

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

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