Will embedded OS and middleware help save Blackberry?

The financial news for Blackberry is potentially bad this week, as it has been for most of the past few years. Some analysts are predicting that the Canadian company will post losses of as much as 7 cents per share, though the consensus seems to be closer to 3 cents. If that happens, it’ll be Blackberry’s fourth quarter out of the last five to show a decline. Blackberry, as most know, has been suffering through an ongoing and painful fall from grace for quite a while now. In part, that’s because it’s had an awfully long way to fall – at its apex, Research in Motion was one of the most important technology companies on the planet, taking the business world by storm with its Blackberry handsets and doing at least as much as Apple – which gets the lion’s share of the credit these days – to popularize the idea of a phone that did much more than make calls and send texts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT could help give your local area its own power grid

The Internet of Things is mostly about achieving greater scale, but in the case of an upcoming demonstration project, it will show how electrical grids can work at a smaller scale.The testbed announced Thursday by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) will bring together software and other components for microgrids, which link together local, alternative sources of power and energy storage. Those sources, including rooftop solar panels and wind turbines, can keep providing power even if the main grid goes down.Most power grids were built for producing energy in one place and distributing it to users over a wide area. They’re not all equipped to manage or take advantage of small power sources out at the edge of the grid. The IIC, which is trying to get big industries and tech vendors on the same page about the Internet of Things, formed the testbed to promote work on IoT components for microgrids.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VCDX-NV Interview: Greg Stemberger

Greg Stemberger is an IT professional who started working in networking in 2000. Working in network operations at Sprint, he managed some of the Greg-Stemberger-Force3largest enterprise networks in the world as the Managed Services Operations Engineer focused primarily on routing and switching. He managed more than 20,000 Cisco devices in his initial role at Sprint. Greg has three CCIEs: in route/switch, security, and service provider. He’s also a member of the first group of VCDX-NV certified professionals.

What excites you about network virtualization?

Virtualization is actually nothing new to me, to be honest, because I’ve been dealing with multi-tenancy, which really in my mind, started on the WAN side where VPNs were really one of the first early versions of introducing multi-tenancy and segmentation of the network, and leveraging virtualization-type technology on hardware. It’s just fascinating to see how much that’s evolved and taken off in the compute world. Now, we’re coming back together full circle with SDN. The network is now playing catch-up with how much agility and flexibility virtualization has provided to the compute world. I believe I have been doing virtual networking for a number of years now, but obviously it’s morphed into something much more powerful Continue reading

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, March 16

Facebook lawsuit says it stole data center designFacebook is being sued by a British engineering company that claims the social network stole its technique for building data centers and is encouraging others to do the same through the Open Compute Project. BladeRoom Group says it contacted Facebook in 2011 about using its method for constructing data centers in a modular fashion from pre-fabricated parts. It claims Facebook stole its ideas and used them to build part of a data center in Sweden, and is also sharing them via its OCP initiative.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MLD Considered Harmful

Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) protocol is well hidden deep in the bowels of IPv6 protocol stack and most of us tend to gloss over it when we discuss IPv6 neighbor discovery process… until MLD raises its ugly head to bite an unsuspecting network administrator.

The problems with MLD are not new (and I wrote exhaustively about them a while ago), but it’s always nice to see other people raise awareness of broken IPv6 features like Enno Rey and his security team did during the IPv6 Security Summit (part of Troopers 15 conference).

Read more ...

About 25 US states oppose sale of RadioShack’s customer data

Several state consumer protection agencies in the U.S. have joined the state of Texas in objecting in bankruptcy court to the proposed sale by RadioShack of personal information of its customers.In a filing Wednesday, the state of Texas said it had received support from 21 governmental consumer protection entities to its objection last week to the planned sale of personally identifiable information (PII) of 117 million RadioShack customers.The state of Texas had earlier objected to the sale citing both the in-store and online privacy policies of the consumer electronics retailer. “All versions of the privacy policy contain an unequivocal provision that consumer PII will not be sold,” state officials said in a filing to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

About 25 US states oppose sale of RadioShack’s customer data

Several state consumer protection agencies in the U.S. have joined the state of Texas in objecting in bankruptcy court to the proposed sale by RadioShack of personal information of its customers.In a filing Wednesday, the state of Texas said it had received support from 21 governmental consumer protection entities to its objection last week to the planned sale of personally identifiable information (PII) of 117 million RadioShack customers.The state of Texas had earlier objected to the sale citing both the in-store and online privacy policies of the consumer electronics retailer. “All versions of the privacy policy contain an unequivocal provision that consumer PII will not be sold,” state officials said in a filing to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Foxconn to enter information security realm with joint venture

Foxconn Technology Group isn’t satisfied with just making iPhones, and plans to break into the information security market through an upcoming joint venture.On Thursday, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant announced it would set up in May a joint venture with Korea’s SK C&C, an IT services provider, to develop information security systems for the Chinese market.The venture will be based at one of Foxconn’s factories in China, where it has hired over a million workers to assemble electronics for vendors that include Apple, Microsoft and Sony.Electronics manufacturing has long been the core business of the company. Business from Apple is estimated to contribute 40 to 50 percent of Foxconn’s revenue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook’s Like button can still easily be gamed

Facebook’s Like button is a pervasive feature of the Web, a way to gauge the popularity of a website or piece of content. But researchers have found it’s easy to inflate the numbers, undermining its value as an accurate measure of popularity.The problem of bogus Likes has been around for some time, and Facebook has released updates to its software over the last couple of years to cut down on fraudulent ones generated by spammers.But researchers with McGill University’s School of Computer Science in Montreal say the social networking company still hasn’t fixed several major problems with the feature. This week, they released a research paper outlining the problems, which they first told Facebook about in early 2013.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FTC says it did not go easy on Google in search probe

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said its decision not to prosecute Google over its search practices was in line with the recommendations of its staff.The statement issued Wednesday by FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez and Commissioners Julie Brill and Maureen Ohlhausen was in response to the leak of an internal document, which suggested that the agency’s staff had concluded that Google’s business tactics had caused “real harm to consumers and to innovation,” and had recommended a lawsuit against the company.The FTC’s decision on the search allegations was in accord with the recommendations of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Economics, and Office of General Counsel, the three commissioners wrote, claiming that the document, which was inadvertently provided to The Wall Street Journal as part of a public records request, was only “a fraction” of the voluminous record and extensive internal analysis that was reviewed at the time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WhatsApp not as open as Messenger to outside developers

Facebook-owned WhatsApp, the popular mobile messaging and calling service, has no immediate plans to offer tools to outside developers to let them build services on top of it.Doing so could potentially introduce unwanted content into the app, slow it down, and disrupt the flow of one-to-one messages and interactions between its users, WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton said Wednesday during a panel talk at Facebook’s F8 conference in San Francisco.Acton delivered his remarks after two developers from the audience asked when, if at all, WhatsApp would offer application programming interfaces or APIs to them.Acton was adamant. For the year, the company is focused on its voice calling service—which is available for Android now and coming to iOS soon—as well as its recently launched Web software, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Egyptian company says rogue Google SSL certificates were a mistake

An Egyptian company that created unauthorized digital certificates for several Google domains said Wednesday it made a mistake and acted quickly when the error became known.The SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layers/Transport Layer Security) certificates would have allowed MCS Holdings of Cairo to decrypt traffic sent by users on its network to Google, a major privacy concern. Google said it doesn’t believe the certificates were misused.But MCS shouldn’t have been able to create digital certificates for Google properties in the first place. It appears MCS and a Certificate Authority (CA) in China both made mistakes, which highlight ongoing problems in the way digital certificates are issued.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to Upgrade IOS on Cisco 4500X Switch

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
The post describes the process of how to upgrade the IOS / Software on a Cisco 4500X switch. I will not be covering how to do a hitless upgrade using ISSU with 2 switches in a VSS pair. This process is performed on two switches which are not in production. So to perform the upgrade... [Read More]

Other pages of interest:

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post How to Upgrade IOS on Cisco 4500X Switch

How Messenger chats factor into what you see in Facebook news feed

Havent seen many posts from some friends lately on Facebook? Perhaps you need to reach out directly to them.How often you chat with someone using Facebooks Messenger app is a signal the company uses to determine how to place posts in your feed. If you havent chatted with someone in a while on Messenger, and then you start chatting again, posts from that person might appear higher in your news feed.That was one piece of information shared by Facebook engineers during a session Wednesday during the companys F8 conference in San Francisco.The algorithm Facebook uses to rank posts in peoples news feeds is a complicated one, and it’s always in flux, but the session, titled “How News Feed Works,” shed light on it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding 802.11 Medium Contention

In this post, I dive deep into 802.11 medium contention to understand how it works as a precursor to the final blog post in this series where I’ll detail the two main sources of medium contention, identify Wi-Fi's breaking point (that'll be fun, stay tuned) and how this affects proper WLAN design in order to optimize wireless networks to prevent medium contention from killing your WLAN performance.

Read the full blog post over on the Aruba Networks Tech Blog...

 

This is the third blog post in a series about WLAN capacity planning. Be sure to read the first and second posts.

Cheers,
Andrew

Akamai: Most Internet attacks in Q4 originated in China

A majority of the Internet attack traffic in 2014’s fourth quarter originated in China, followed by the U.S., according to cloud service provider Akamai.China and the U.S. were the only countries where more than 10 percent of attack traffic originated, Akamai said in its quarterly state of the Internet report. The other top 10 nations each had less than 5 percent of the world’s attack traffic. Taiwan, for instance, came in third with 4.4 percent of the traffic.Still, the attack traffic coming from China was down compared to the third quarter, falling to 49 percent from 41 percent. Attack traffic coming from the U.S. also fell, decreasing to 13 percent from 17 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

USB 3.1 set to reach desktops

The emerging USB 3.1 standard is set to reach desktops as hardware companies release motherboards with ports that can transfer data two times faster than the previous USB technology.MSI on Wednesday announced a 970A SLI Krait motherboard that will support the AMD processors and the USB 3.1 protocol. Motherboards with USB 3.1 ports have also been released by Gigabyte, ASRock and Asus, but those boards support Intel chips.USB 3.1 can shuffle data between a host device and peripheral at 10Gbps (bits per second), which is two times faster than USB 3.0. USB 3.1 is also generating excitement for the reversible Type-C cable, which is the same on both ends so users don’t have to worry about plug orientation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco programs the cloud

Cisco recently unveiled three enhancements to its core and edge platforms for service providers to increase programmability for cloud and IP traffic growth. The new offerings include Application Engineered Routing, the IOS XRv 9000 Virtual Router and 100G Ethernet line cards for the ASR 9000 series edge router.The new and enhanced products are intended to allow service providers to scale their networks and to uncover new revenue opportunities. Cisco says global IP traffic will increase three-fold from 2013 to 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 21%, due to more Internet users and devices, faster broadband speeds and more video viewing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook extends Parse to build IoT apps

Facebook is extending Parse, its suite of back-end software development tools, to create Internet of Things apps for items like smart home appliances and activity trackers.By opening Parse to IoT, Facebook hopes to strengthen its ties to a wider group of developers in a growing industry via three new software development kits aimed specifically at IoT, unveiled Wednesday at the company’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco.The tools are aimed at making it easier for outside developers to build apps that interface with Internet-connected devices. Garage door manufacturer Chamberlain, for example, has already used Parse for its app to let people open and lock their garage door from their smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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