The state of mobile payments in 2015

Mobile payments in 2015Image by ShutterstockApple, Starbucks and Disney are all strong brands with loyal followings, but they also have something else in common: They're early leaders in the ever-evolving mobile payments market.Some analysts predict 2015 will be the first year all the pieces — including a larger base of NFC-enabled devices and terminals, and growing consumer acceptance — come together to take mobile currency mainstream. A number of additional companies are also entering the world of mobile payments, such as American Express, which you might expect to see, and Jawbone, which might seem surprising.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Crypto gurus: The government’s key escrow plan won’t work

Cryptography experts at the RSA security conference on Tuesday picked holes in U.S. plans to require that law enforcers be given a way to break encryption to exercise lawful intercept rights.U.S. government officials have been increasingly hostile over the past year to the widespread use of encryption on mobile phones and online communications, arguing that a way needs to be found to provide law enforcement and intelligence agencies with lawful interception capabilities.In response, security experts warned that building “back doors” into cryptographic systems in order to provide governments with access to data would be dangerous because it would create vulnerabilities that could later be exploited by hackers too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is a non-blocking switch?

How does Internet work - We know what is networking

It is fairly common to hear about switch being non-blocking. It’s because almost all switches today are non-blocking. But what that means? When I asked people around me on what exactly non-blocking switch means, they were unable to get to the same conclusion. I was going through a lot of different internet places and vendor documents before I wrote this here, but, do not hesitate to add something in comments if you have different view on the subject. Line-rate switch means the same as if you would said wire-speed switch. It basically means that this switch has the forwarding capacity that supports concurrently

What is a non-blocking switch?

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, April 22

US warns airlines about onboard Wi-Fi hackingHere’s one more thing for nervous flyers to worry about: Two U.S. federal agencies are advising airlines to look out for signs that passengers may be trying to hack into planes’ navigation systems via Wi-Fi or onboard entertainment systems, Wired reports. The FBI and TSA apparently don’t have evidence that this is happening, but are taking seriously claims that it can be done, and issued a list of things to be on the lookout for.Drone lands on Japanese Prime Minister’s roofTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, April 22

US warns airlines about onboard Wi-Fi hackingHere’s one more thing for nervous flyers to worry about: Two U.S. federal agencies are advising airlines to look out for signs that passengers may be trying to hack into planes’ navigation systems via Wi-Fi or onboard entertainment systems, Wired reports. The FBI and TSA apparently don’t have evidence that this is happening, but are taking seriously claims that it can be done, and issued a list of things to be on the lookout for.Drone lands on Japanese Prime Minister’s roofTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chipmakers lay groudwork for faster and smarter data center switches

Broadcom and Freescale Semiconductor have announced switching platforms that promise to improve the performance of network virtualization and make the underlying technologies more widely available.Just like other parts of enterprise IT infrastructures, the network is going through some major changes thanks to the growing importance of cloud services and virtualization. Two offerings launched by chipmakers Broadcom and Freescale highlight how switches will evolve going forward.The next-generation of Broadcom’s StrataXGS Trident ethernet switch portfolio, the Trident-II+ SoC (system-on-a-chip) is designed for virtualized data centers running on 10 Gigabit ethernet. The total switching capacity is 1.28Tbps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Huawei to expand retail presence, as it finds success selling higher-end phones

Huawei Technologies is seeking to double its retail presence around the world, amid a growing a pushing to sell more mid-range and high-end smartphones.The Chinese handset maker aims to establish 70,000 retail spaces by the end of 2017, up from the 30,000 locations it already has, including Huawei stores, product counters and “display zones” where its smartphones were shown for sale last year.More than half of those locations are in China, the company’s home market, said Glory Zhang, chief marketing officer for Huawei’s consumer business group. The balance will start to change by year end, when Huawei brings more high-end products to international markets, she added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MtGox creditors can finally file claims for lost bitcoins

Former customers of MtGox, once the world’s largest trading place for bitcoin, can finally file claims for lost assets.The filings are starting over a year after the exchange collapsed with bitcoin worth hundreds of millions of dollars missing. Claims will be accepted until May 29, bankruptcy trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi announced Wednesday at a MtGox creditors’ meeting.The claims will be submitted online at claims.mtgox.com and users have the option of sending them via Kraken, the bitcoin exchange operated by Payward, which has been helping Kobayashi in investigating the lost coins and setting up the claims system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Great News: My Workshops Are Available from NIL Data Communications

In the last few months I ran into a sweet problem: dozens of organizations would like to have on-site SDN, SDDC or IPv6 workshop. Obviously I had to turn many of them down, and my calendar is almost full till early November.

A week ago I also found a solution: my friends at NIL Data Communications will start offering the same workshops with their instructors.

App opens up smartphone use for people with arm paralysis

South Korean researchers have developed an app that helps people with arm paralysis use smartphones.Dubbed Dowell, the app is designed to assist people who can’t use their hands well, and is targeted at users with muscular dystrophy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), stroke and other ailments that restrict movement.The app has a user interface that works with a variety of input methods for disabled people, which are known as computer assistive devices. It can receive information from a trackball mouse, head-tracking camera and mouth stick, which is a tool for manipulating a cursor with the mouth.The project is being presented at the 2015 Computer-Human Interaction Conference (CHI) in Seoul this week as part of an industry-university collaboration involving Samsung Electronics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP leaves Apple Beats behind with new X360 hybrids

Hewlett-Packard has closed the door on its partnership with Beats Audio, now owned by Apple, by introducing its first hybrid PCs to feature Bang and Olufsen audio technology.The Envy X360 and Pavilion X360 are intended to be primarily laptops, but can be used as tablets with screens that rotate 360 degrees. The hybrids can also deliver booming sound.HP has relied on Beats for years for its PCs and tablets, but that was before Apple acquired it. HP’s new X360 hybrids are the first of many PCs, tablets and accessories that will carry audio from B&O, said Mike Nash, a vice president with HP’s Personal Systems Group.The hybrids don’t have striking designs or the thinness of Lenovo’s Yoga PC, but they are less expensive and come with the latest Intel Pentium Core M and Core i processors. Another selling point is their ability to fit up to 1TB of hard-drive storage, which is a rarity in hybrids.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCIE RS – it’s the payload, not the header

There is some actual content here, but first – a few drips of sap. The title is a nerdy rendering of the adage ‘its the journey, not the destination’. The decision to take time from study and blog had to do with this very thing – reserving time for reflection along the way. While taking […]

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Quentin Demmon

Network Engineer at Healthcare Specialty Benefits Management company

Quentin Demmon is a network engineer, hobbyist weightlifter (Olympic style), and wannabe philosopher. He is excited to be blogging about his CCIE journey in gory, melodramatic detail. Follow him on twitter, facebook, and instagram.

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The post CCIE RS – it’s the payload, not the header appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Quentin Demmon.

Google may launch wireless service as soon as Wednesday

Google could take the wraps off of its wireless service as soon as Wednesday, sparking new competition by charging customers only for the amount of data they use.The service will be offered in the U.S. through a partnership with Sprint and T-Mobile, who have agreed to carry traffic, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the plans. It will be available initially only to users of Google’s latest Nexus 6 phones, the report said.Currently, most mobile operators charge users for a fixed amount of data that lapses if they don’t use it up each month, so the Google service could put pressure on that type of plan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP partners with FireEye for cyberattack investigation and response

Hewlett-Packard is partnering with computer security company FireEye to give it a technological edge in detecting and investigating cyberattacks.FireEye’s threat detection and incident response capabilities will be incorporated into HP’s Enterprise Services. The companies are planning to offer an “industry standard reference architecture” centered around advanced threat protection and incident response, according to a news release Tuesday from the RSA security conference in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP partners with FireEye for cyberattack investigation and response

Hewlett-Packard is partnering with computer security company FireEye to give it a technological edge in detecting and investigating cyberattacks.FireEye’s threat detection and incident response capabilities will be incorporated into HP’s Enterprise Services. The companies are planning to offer an “industry standard reference architecture” centered around advanced threat protection and incident response, according to a news release Tuesday from the RSA security conference in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Contributing back to the security community

This Friday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, along with Marc Rogers, Principal Security Researcher at CloudFlare, I'm speaking about a version of The Grugq's PORTAL, an open source network security device designed to make life easier and safer for anyone traveling, especially internationally, with phones, tablets, laptops, and other network-connected devices.

Portal uses open-source software and services to take inexpensive, commodity travel routers and turn them into powerful security devices. Since this is pretty far from CloudFlare's core business, it warrants a brief digression into why we support projects like this.

Computer security was for a very long time only of interest to hobbyists, academics, and obscure government agencies. Cryptography was an interesting offshoot of number theory, a foundational but very abstract part of mathematics, and many of the early infrastructure components of the Internet didn't include security at all -- there was an assumption that anyone who could gain access would be responsible and well-intentioned, a consequence of the academic origins; after all, why would they want to break or steal things which were freely available.

Before the "cambrian explosion" of commercial computer security, there was still a lot of great security research -- it Continue reading

VMware Touts Q1 Growth but Doesn’t Give NSX Numbers

An upbeat earnings report overall, featuring NSX, AirWatch, and vCloud Air.

Nigerian gov’t hands over Nitel, Mtel assets to NATCOM

The Nigerian government has officially handed over the assets of Nigerian Telecommunications (Nitel) and its mobile arm, Mtel, to the NATCOM consortium, but there is general pessimism about the ultimate fate of the telecom company.NATCOM last week paid the $252 million acquisition price for Nitel and Mtel. Over the years, the government has tried multiple times to sell the former national carrier. Several groups including Omen International, Investor International London and the New Generation Consortium led by China Unicom all ended up failing to pay their bid prices for Nitel and Mtel.As in many African countries, the Nigerian government failed to recapitalize its national carrier.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google, Apple, Amazon spend record amounts on lobbying

Google, Apple and Amazon.com spent record amounts in the first quarter attempting to influence U.S. politicians and policy.Google, which was already the biggest tech lobbyist in Washington, D.C., spent $5.47 million in the first three months of the year, according to a report filed with the Senate Office of Public Records.That made it the fifth biggest federal lobbyist across all industries during the quarter, according to an analysis by Maplight.Google has been steadily increasing the amount it spends to influence the course of policy and law on a range of issues. Since mid-2011, it has spent on average at least a million dollars each month in areas both central to its business, such as online advertising and security, and tangential to it, such as international tax reform and drone technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google, Apple, Amazon spend record amounts on lobbying

Google, Apple and Amazon.com spent record amounts in the first quarter attempting to influence U.S. politicians and policy.Google, which was already the biggest tech lobbyist in Washington, D.C., spent $5.47 million in the first three months of the year, according to a report filed with the Senate Office of Public Records.That made it the fifth biggest federal lobbyist across all industries during the quarter, according to an analysis by Maplight.Google has been steadily increasing the amount it spends to influence the course of policy and law on a range of issues. Since mid-2011, it has spent on average at least a million dollars each month in areas both central to its business, such as online advertising and security, and tangential to it, such as international tax reform and drone technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here