The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, March 5

China defends surveillance plan by pointing to U.S.The Chinese government is calling out U.S. opposition to its new anti-terror law, saying that it’s similar to what other countries are doing as they ask tech companies to hand over information that they need to fight terrorism. On Wednesday, China’s parliamentary spokeswoman tried to play down the impact the proposed legislation might have on foreign tech businesses, who have complained about having to turn over encryption keys and create “back doors” to enable government surveillance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China aims to help local Internet firms cross into the global market

China seeks to help the country’s Internet firms gain a bigger foothold in the international market, and is preparing to pour more state funds into its emerging tech sector, according to one of its top leaders.Chinese Premier Li Keqiang made the statement in his opening address to the country’s annual parliamentary session on Thursday. He added that China is establishing an “Internet Plus” plan to promote its mobile Internet, cloud computing, and e-commerce sectors, as part of a push to support the country’s emerging industries.“The country has already established a 40 billion yuan (US$6.5 billion) emerging industry innovation investment fund, and more capital will be brought in and integrated,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco ACI – a Stretched Fabric That Actually Works

In mid-February a blog post on Cisco’s web site announced stretched ACI fabric (bonus points for not using marketing grammar but talking about a shipping product). Will it work better than other PowerPoint-based fabrics? You bet!

What’s the Big Deal?

Cisco’s ACI fabric uses distributed (per-switch) control plane with APIC controllers providing fabric configuration and management functionality. In that respect, the ACI fabric is no different from any other routed network, and we know that those work well in distributed environments.

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Five things we learned about Etsy from its IPO filing

Etsy, the online marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods and crafts, disclosed some interesting tidbits about the company’s business when it filed to go public Wednesday.Did you know that 86 percent of Etsy’s U.S. sellers at the end of last year were women? Or that three-quarters of its sellers consider their online store a business rather than a hobby?Etsy is hoping to raise US$100 million from the offering to help expand its business. Here are five other things we learned from combing through its S-1 filing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hello, I’m 47321

And now the big reveal. The reason I haven't been blogging or doing much of anything for some time now is because I've had a teeny tiny side project going on: And this week I passed the lab exam! I am CCIE 47321 (Routing and Switching).

Cisco might ONIE up

Cisco is preparing to open up its Nexus 9000 switches for further programmability, perhaps even supporting a popular open source tool for booting them up.A Cisco white paper posted on the company’s website and then withdrawn last week stated that the company’s Nexus 9000 switches, in standalone NX-OS mode, can now support the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE). ONIE is a network boot loader to install software, including operating systems from multiple vendors, on bare metal Ethernet network switches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook wants to get better at detecting fake profiles

Facebook is taking steps to improve how it detects fake profiles, particularly those created by people claiming to be someone else.Fake profiles are a real challenge for Facebook, especially in developing markets. For example, in India there is a significant problem with men creating profiles that impersonate real women, a violation of Facebook’s rules. This makes some women afraid of creating profiles.It’s part of a larger problem in India, where more men are on the Internet than women in comparison to other parts of the world, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday.Facebook, Zuckerberg said, is tackling this problem and trying to become faster at flagging fake profiles, in part by getting better feedback from its users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon’s next cloud conference set for October in Las Vegas

IT professionals with skills in Amazon Web Services will once again swarm Las Vegas come October.Amazon will hold its next annual cloud services conference, re:Invent, from October 6 to October 9.As has been the case since the event’s debut in 2012, the venue will be the Venetian, a spacious hotel and conference facility.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon’s next cloud conference set for October in Las Vegas

IT professionals with skills in Amazon Web Services will once again swarm Las Vegas come October.Amazon will hold its next annual cloud services conference, re:Invent, from October 6 to October 9.As has been the case since the event’s debut in 2012, the venue will be the Venetian, a spacious hotel and conference facility.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s Skylake chips to appear in tablets, PCs, servers

Intel has revealed more details about its next-generation chip code-named Skylake, indicating it will go into a broad range of tablets, PCs and servers. Intel has hailed Skylake as its most important chip architecture in a decade and now says that it will be used in mainstream Core i3, i5 and i7 PC processors as well as Xeon server chips.+ See our full coverage of MWC 2015 + The first Skylake chip is expected to be Core M, designed to be used in Windows as well as Android tablets and hybrids.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Against the odds, Canonical and Jolla trot out iOS, Android alternatives

Four smartphone OSes that hope to find room next to Android and iOS were on display at Mobile World Congress, but the most exciting were Ubuntu Phone and Sailfish OS. Apple and Google have further tightened their grip on the smartphone OS market; they had a market share of 96.1 percent last year, up from 94 percent in 2013, according to Gartner. However, that hasn’t deterred Mozilla, Samsung Electronics, Canonical and Finnish start-up Jolla from developing their own OSes.+ See our full coverage of MWC 2015 + At Mobile World Congress they all showed commercial devices for the first time. Mozilla’s Firefox OS and Samsung’s Tizen have user interfaces that are very reminiscent of Android, but Canonical with Ubuntu Phone and Jolla with Sailfish have been either brave or stupid enough to try something different.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 cool tablets from MWC 2015

Tablets, tablets, tablets!Even though the BBC argues that the age of the tablet has essentially ended, manufacturers exhibiting at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year have only begun to fight. Here's a look through some of the coolest tablets on display.RELATED: See a running list of stories from MWC 2015To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM acquires AlchemyAPI to fatten Watson portfolio

IBM has acquired computing services provider AlchemyAPI to broaden its portfolio of Watson-branded cognitive computing services.AlchemyAPI’s set of services could help developers augment their applications with machine-learning capabilities typically too complex to maintain in-house.IBM is banking on a great need for such services. Cognitive computing will generate $50 billion in IT business within the U.S. alone, according to consulting firm Deloitte.AlchemyAPI was founded in 2005 to provide computing services accessed over the Internet by a set of APIs (application programming interfaces). Approximately 40,000 developers have used AlchemyAPI’s services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5G, net neutrality may be headed for a showdown

Net neutrality and 5G may be on a collision course as the mobile industry tries to prepare for a wide range of mobile applications with differing needs.The net neutrality rules passed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission last week have raised some eyebrows at Mobile World Congress this week. The full text of the rules isn’t public yet, but mobile movers and shakers are having their say. The latest questions involve 5G, the next-generation standard that everyone here is trying to plan for.The most common thing they think 5G will have to do is to serve a lot of different purposes. Regulators’ attempts to ban “fast lanes” and other special treatment might make that impossible, people who’ve been thinking about 5G said Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cliché: Safen Up!

RSA Conference is often a mockery of itself. Yesterday, they posted this tweet:



This is similar to the Simpsons episode where Germans buy the power plant. In fear for his job, Homer (the plant's Safety Inspector) starts going around telling people to "Stop being so unsafe!".



Security is not a platitude; insecurity is not a moral weakness. It's a complex set of tradeoffs. Going around telling people to "safen up" will not improve the situation, but will instead breed resentment. Infosec people are widely disliked because of their moralizing.

The only way to be perfectly secure is to cut the cables, turn off the machines, thermite the drives, and drop the remnants in a deep ocean trench. Anything less and you are insecure. Learn to deal with insecurity instead of blaming people for their moral weaknesses.

FTC targets group that made billions of robocalls

Given the amount of time the FTC and others have put into curing the robocall problem, it is disheartening to hear that a group of companies for almost a year have been making billions of illegal robocalls. The Federal Trade Commission and 10 state attorneys general today said they have settled charges against a Florida-based cruise line company and seven other companies that averaged 12 million to 15 million illegal sales calls a day between October 2011 through July 2012, according to the joint complaint filed by the FTC and the states. + More on Network World: FTC: Imposter scams bully into top 3 consumer complaints spot +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU countries agree on watered-down roaming and net neutrality plans

European Union countries have proposed keeping roaming charges around at least until mid-2018, going against proposals from the European Parliament and Commission for their all-out abolition by the end of the year.At the same time, representatives of the countries proposed weakening the net neutrality rules already agreed on by the Parliament and the Commission. The counter-proposal sets the stage for heated discussions as the 28 EU member states, gathered as the Council of the EU, try to reach a compromise with the EU’s other two law-making bodies on a new telecommunications law before the end of June.The Council proposed introducing a basic roaming allowance within which consumers can make and receive calls, send text messages and use data services without paying roaming fees. Once this allowance is used up though, the operator will be allowed to charge a fee, albeit much lower than current charges, the Council said. It proposes reassessing the situation in mid-2018 to see if further regulatory measures are needed to phase out charges altogether.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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