Amazon buys ClusterK, a firm that helps users buy cloud capacity cheap

Amazon has acquired ClusterK, a developer of software that helps companies run mission-critical applications on spare cloud compute capacity sold by Amazon Web Services.A spokeswoman for AWS confirmed the acquisition, but did not provide further details.Spot instances are spare Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances for which users name their price. The price for the spot instances can vary in real-time depending on demand and supply. The instance will run until the spot price exceeds the bid or the user terminates it.This is in contrast with AWS On-Demand instances that let users pay for compute capacity by the hour without long-term commitments, or Reserved instances, which provide capacity reservation. AWS has positioned spot instances as the option to use when customers have flexibility in when their applications can run.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple says EC probe could lead to back tax payments

Apple has warned that an European probe into its tax payments in Ireland could lead to the company having to pay disputed past taxes covering up to 10 years.The company said the impact could be “material,” but did not provide an estimate.The European Commission began a probe last year into a tax deal between Ireland and Apple to ascertain whether the taxes the company paid complied with European Union rules on state aid.The investigation would address rulings by Irish tax authorities on the calculation of the taxable profit allocated to the Irish branches of Apple Sales International and of Apple Operations Europe, to find out if the rulings involved state aid that benefited the company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper still challenged in switching

Obscured by Juniper’s solid first quarter results were underwhelming results in its enterprise and switching businesses. Switching was off 13% from the first quarter of 2014, while the company’s enterprise business slumped about 10%.Sequentially, switching was off close to 5% and enterprise was down 2% from the fourth quarter of 2014.Still, Juniper posted a quarter that beat estimates and its own revenue and earnings guidance. The results were due to slightly better demand from cloud, cable and European service providers, and demand for routers among large enterprises, particularly those in the government vertical.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google develops new defense against phishing

Google has developed a new extension for its Chrome browser that aims to stop people from falling prey to phishing sites.The free Password Alert extension stores an encrypted version of a person’s password and warns if it is typed into a site that isn’t a Google sign-in page, according to a blog post on Wednesday. It will then prompt a person to change their password.Although security companies collaborate to detect and blacklist phishing sites, such attacks are commonly used by hackers to capture valuable sign-in details. Phishing sites may only be active for a short time before they’re blacklisted, but it’s still a window of risk.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Xiaomi phones still hot in China, but Apple catching up

Xiaomi led China’s smartphone market as its biggest vendor for the third straight quarter. But Apple is closing in, thanks to demand for its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and may even overtake Xiaomi this year.In this year’s first quarter, Xiaomi claimed a 13 percent share, while Apple captured 12 percent, research firm Strategy Analytics said Wednesday. In the first quarter of last year, Apple’s share was 8 percent compared to Xiaomi’s 11 percent.Xiaomi, a maker of inexpensive Android phones, is riding on the success of its Redmi models, which can start at 599 yuan (US$98) when bought without carrier subsidies.But the company’s smartphone shipments have been declining over the past two quarters, Strategy Analytics said. Apple, on the other hand, witnessed booming sales. In the quarter, Apple shipped 13.5 million smartphones to the country, up from 7.8 million units a year ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China’s a fast-growing gold mine for Apple

Designed by Apple in California—that nod to its home state has appeared on Apple products for years, but increasingly, Apple’s gadgets are being sold far from its Cupertino headquarters.In the first three months of this year, iPhone sales in China surpassed those in the U.S. for the first time. Also for the first time, China jumped ahead of Europe as Apple’s biggest overall market after the Americas.Can the day be far off when Apple sells more in China than it does at home? The idea isn’t as far fetched as you might think.Thanks to the dominant role the iPhone plays in Apple’s revenue and the considerable untapped demand among China’s burgeoning middle class, sales aren’t showing any signs of stopping.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China’s a fast-growing gold mine for Apple

Designed by Apple in California—that nod to its home state has appeared on Apple products for years, but increasingly, Apple’s gadgets are being sold far from its Cupertino headquarters.In the first three months of this year, iPhone sales in China surpassed those in the U.S. for the first time. Also for the first time, China jumped ahead of Europe as Apple’s biggest overall market after the Americas.Can the day be far off when Apple sells more in China than it does at home? The idea isn’t as far fetched as you might think.Thanks to the dominant role the iPhone plays in Apple’s revenue and the considerable untapped demand among China’s burgeoning middle class, sales aren’t showing any signs of stopping.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s Nadella sets lofty cloud goals

Less than a week after reporting that Microsoft’s enterprise cloud business is currently on an annual run rate of US$6.3 billion, CEO Satya Nadella says the company’s goal is to increase that figure to $20 billion by fiscal year 2018.“That’s the cloud that we want to build,” he said Wednesday at the company’s briefing for financial analysts during its Build conference in San Francisco. “It’s leading with some of our SaaS applications and having the IaaS, PaaS capability and our servers, which are the edge of our cloud. That’s our vision. That’s why we believe that we get to participate in future growth.”Run rate is simply quarterly revenue presented on an annualized basis. Microsoft’s cloud business includes its Azure platform and cloud versions of Office 365 and Dynamics CRM.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Techniques of a Network Detective

This is “Techniques of a Network Detective,” led by Denise “Fish” Fishburne (@DeniseFishburne on Twitter). Denise starts the session with a quick introduction, in which she discloses that she is a “troubleshooting junkie.” She follows up with a short description of what life looks like in her role in the customer proof-of-concept lab at Cisco.

Denise kicks off the main content of the session by drawing an analogy between solving crimes and solving network performance/behavior problems. The key is technique and methodology, which may sound boring but really have a huge payoff in the end.

When a network error occurs, the network is the crime scene. This crime scene is filled with facts, clues, evidence, and potential witnesses—or even potential suspects. How does one get from receiving notification of the problem, to asking the right questions, to solving the problem? Basically it boils down to these major areas:

  • First, identify the suspects (even if the problem seems immediately obvious). This involves gathering facts, collecting clues, following the evidence, and interviewing witnesses.
  • Next, question the suspects. Although you may not be an SME (subject matter expert), you can still work logically through gathering facts from the suspects.
  • After you Continue reading

Why the Apple Watch is in short supply

The Apple Watch launch has been somewhat peculiar insofar as Apple has limited purchases to online orders only. What's more, many consumers who were able to get their orders in won't be receiving their devices until mid-May, with some unlucky folks having to wait until June and July.So what's going on here? Isn't Apple supposed to have the best and most efficient supply chain in the business? Couldn't Apple have foreseen pent up demand for the Apple Watch and adjust supply accordingly?For weeks, there has been rampant speculation as to why the Apple Watch rollout has been so staggered. Now, thanks to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, we finally have some insight into what went down behind the scenes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RSA president questions government’s role in cybersecurity

The president of one of the world’s biggest computer security vendors says he is skeptical that a stronger government role in cyberdefense will abate the growing number of attacks.In an interview with IDG News Service, Amit Yoran, president of RSA, also rejected calls by U.S. intelligence chiefs for industry to tread carefully in deploying more encryption in case it cuts off their ability to eavesdrop on communications by suspected criminals.“The government is not the answer here,” he said, when asked about White House proposals for sharing of cybersecurity information. Despite the growing severity of attacks and a feeling that the government should “do something,” the issue is best left to private companies, because they are the ones developing networks and the technology that defends them, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who’s courting Salesforce? IBM, Oracle among top guesses

A report that Salesforce.com is entertaining takeover offers whipped up a storm of speculation Wednesday, as analysts and other observers mulled the possibility and what it could mean for the enterprise software market.“It would require a massive deal for that to happen,” noted Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst with Constellation Research. “Salesforce still has a lot of growth ahead.”Spurred by the approach of a potential acquirer, Salesforce has hired financial advisers to help it field such offers, according to the Bloomberg To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who’s courting Salesforce? IBM, Oracle among top guesses

A report that Salesforce.com is entertaining takeover offers whipped up a storm of speculation Wednesday, as analysts and other observers mulled the possibility and what it could mean for the enterprise software market. “It would require a massive deal for that to happen,” noted Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst with Constellation Research. “Salesforce still has a lot of growth ahead.” Spurred by the approach of a potential acquirer, Salesforce has hired financial advisers to help it field such offers, according to the Bloomberg report, which was based on anonymous sources. The company’s stock closed up 11.6 percent on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, giving it a market capitalization just north of US$47 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some notes on why crypto backdoors are unreasonable

Today, a congressional committee held hearings about 'crypto backdoors' that would allow the FBI to decrypt text messages, phone calls, and data on phones. The thing to note about this topic is that it's not anywhere close to reasonable public policy. The technical and international problems are unsolvable with anything close to the proposed policy. Even if the policy were reasonable, it's unreasonable that law enforcement should be lobbying for it.


Crypto is end-to-end


The debate hinges on a huge fallacy, that it's about regulating industry, forcing companies like Apple to include backdoors. This makes it seem like it's a small law. The truth is that crypto is end-to-end. Apple sells a generic computer we hold in our hand. As a user, I can install any software I want on it -- including software that completely defeats any backdoor that Apple would install. Examples of such software would be Signal and Silent Circle.

It seems reasonable that you could extend the law so that it covers any software provider. But that doesn't work, because software is often open-source, meaning that anybody can build their own app from it. Starting from scratch, it would take me about six-months to write my Continue reading

Interop Liveblog: IPv6 Microsegmentation

This session was titled “IPv6 Microsegmentation,” and the speaker was Ivan Pepelnjak. Ivan is, of course, a well-known figure in the networking space, and publishes content at http://ipspace.net.

The session starts with a discussion of the problems found in Layer 2 IPv6 networks. Some of the problems include spoofing RA (Router Advertisement) messages, NA (Neighbor Advertisement) messages, DHCPv6 spoofing, DAD (Duplicate Address Detection) DoS attacks, and ND (Neighbor Discovery) DoS attacks. All of these messages derive from the assumption that one subnet = one security zone, and therefore intra-subnet communications are not secured.

Note that some of these attacks are also common to IPv4 and are not necessarily unique to IPv6. The difference is that these problems are well understood in IPv4 and therefore many vendors have implemented solutions to mitigate the risks.

According to Ivan, the root cause of all these problems originates with the fact that all LAN infrastructure today emulates 40 year old thick coax cable.

The traditional fix is to add kludges….er, new features—like RA guard (prevents non-routers from sending RA messages), DHCPv6 guard (same sort of functionality), IPv6 ND inspection (same idea), and SAVI (Source Address Verification Inspection; complex idea where all these Continue reading

Lawmakers criticize FBI’s request for encryption back doors

U.S. lawmakers are skeptical of an FBI request for Congress to mandate encryption workarounds in smartphones, with critics saying Wednesday that back doors would create new vulnerabilities that bad guys can exploit.It’s currently impossible for smartphone makers to build in back doors that allow law enforcement agencies access to encrypted communications but also keep out cybercriminals, witnesses and lawmakers said during a hearing before the IT subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Oversight and Government Reform Committee.Law enforcement representatives called on lawmakers to find a way to allow access to encrypted data as a way to prevent serious crime. Late last year, FBI Director James Comey called for a public debate on encryption after Apple and Google announced they would offer new encryption tools on their smartphone OSes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lawmakers criticize FBI’s request for encryption back doors

U.S. lawmakers are skeptical of an FBI request for Congress to mandate encryption workarounds in smartphones, with critics saying Wednesday that back doors would create new vulnerabilities that bad guys can exploit.It’s currently impossible for smartphone makers to build in back doors that allow law enforcement agencies access to encrypted communications but also keep out cybercriminals, witnesses and lawmakers said during a hearing before the IT subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Oversight and Government Reform Committee.Law enforcement representatives called on lawmakers to find a way to allow access to encrypted data as a way to prevent serious crime. Late last year, FBI Director James Comey called for a public debate on encryption after Apple and Google announced they would offer new encryption tools on their smartphone OSes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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