Tech companies call on US to end bulk collection of metadata

A slew of tech companies have joined privacy groups in calling for the U.S. government to reform its surveillance practices.An open letter from the tech industry and privacy organizations urges the government to not renew the provision in the Patriot Act that allows for the bulk collection of metadata. That provision, called Section 215, expires in June.“There must be a clear, strong, and effective end to bulk collection practices,” reads the letter, which was signed by the industry group Reform Government Surveillance, whose members include including Apple, Facebook, Google, Evernote, Twitter and Microsoft. Any data collection efforts need to protect user rights and privacy, the letter said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gold Apple Watch buyers will receive special treatment

When the upcoming Apple Watch goes on sale on April 24, it will be the most complex and downright confusing product Apple has ever released, by far. With an assortment of styles, bands, and materials, there will be a seemingly never-ending selection of options for users to choose from.At the same time, the Apple Watch will be the most expensive product Apple has ever released. While the Sport models will start at just $349 (for the 38mm version), the Edition models will start at $10,000 and range all the way up to $17,000. Naturally, not every Apple Store will carry the expensive gold Edition models. During Apple's most recent Apple Watch event, Tim Cook noted that only select stores will carry the device, and in limited quantities at that. What's more, it's been reported that the Edition Apple Watch models will be safely stowed away in secure safes in-store, much in the same way that boutique watch stores protect their most valued merchandise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ZTE’s Nubia Z9 Max phablet packs a powerful camera

Not to be outdone by the iPhone 6 Plus, Chinese vendor ZTE has come out with its own high-end phablet, the Nubia Z9 Max—an aluminum smartphone with a feature-packed camera.The Android phone, unveiled Thursday, is slated to come to China first, but the company plans to bring it to North America, Europe and emerging markets later.I tested the device and found it impressive. Chinese vendors are releasing more top-notch handsets, and ZTE’s Nubia team has added to the trend with the Z9 Max.The phone delivers what you would expect from premium handsets, some of which already feature metal frames, the latest Qualcomm chipsets, and 1080p displays.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge lead the Android pack

Samsung's new flagship Android smartphones, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, go on sale tomorrow at AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon Wireless and ship on April 10. Fortunately, we managed to get our hands on the shipping hardware in advance. The results of our evaluation: Both devices are major steps up for the Android ecosystem, marrying enhanced hardware capabilities, better security, and a cleaner user interface with a strong design derived from both Apple's iPhone 6 and HTC's One. But as good as they are, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge come with a few quirks and one apparent bug.[ iOS vs. Android vs. BlackBerry vs. Windows Phone -- find out which platform provides the security you need. | Considering Samsung's Knox security? Discover how Knox compares to Google's Android for Work. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobile Computing newsletter. ] Galen Gruman / InfoWorld The Samsung Galaxy S6 (left) takes numerous design cues from the Apple iPhone 6 (right).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber’s Amsterdam office raided by Dutch authorities

Uber keeps crashing into laws and regulations in Europe, but it’s keeping the foot on the accelerator.Following raids in Belgium and France, Dutch authorities raided Uber’s Amsterdam office on Thursday as part of an investigation into the ride-hailing service UberPop, which a court ruled illegal in the Netherlands.The raid’s main goal is to obtain records that show the size of the UberPop operation, a spokeswoman for the DutchHuman Environment and Transport Inspectorate said, adding that the authority, for instance, wants to find out the number of UberPop drivers. The raid is still ongoing and is being conducted by the inspectorate in cooperation with the police.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco patches autonomic networking flaws in IOS routers and switches

Cisco Systems released firmware updates for several routers and switches that run its IOS and IOS XE software in order to fix flaws in their autonomic networking infrastructure (ANI) feature.ANI is an automatic device management feature that allows Cisco IOS devices to securely join a domain and be configured without prestaging—setting up the necessary accounts in advance.Cisco’s new patches, released Wednesday, address three vulnerabilities in the way Cisco IOS and IOS XE devices handle autonomic networking (AN) messages.One vulnerability could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to force a vulnerable device to join a rogue autonomic domain by sending it specially crafted AN messages. This would give the attacker limited control over the device and would prevent it from joining the legitimate domain, Cisco said in a security advisory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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).

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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

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