Yahoo, still reliant on PCs, posts earnings that disappoint

Mobile is a crucial element in CEO Marissa Mayer’s turnaround plan for Yahoo, but the company is still heavily dependant on PCs for its money.That was evident Tuesday when Yahoo reported its financial results for the last quarter. Revenue from ads displayed on PCs brought in $873 million—more than three-quarters of the total. Mobile revenue climbed 61 percent from last year, but still reached only $234 million.This could be one reason Yahoo continues to struggle. Overall sales at the company rose by 8 percent to $1.23 billion. But excluding payments made to partners, sales were down 4 percent to $1.04 billion, missing the analyst estimate of $1.06 billion, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft moves to address customers’ concerns about cloud control and transparency

Microsoft is working on new features for its Office 365 cloud service designed to give customers more control over their data and more visibility into how it’s being accessed.The company will expand Office 365’s logging capabilities to include user, administrator and policy related actions for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. This will give cloud companies better insight into how their employees interact with content hosted on those services and whether those actions pose security or regulatory compliance concerns.The logs will be available through a new Office 365 Management Activity API (application programming interface) that can be tapped by monitoring, analysis and data visualization products. The API has been available to a select number of Microsoft partners already—security vendor Rapid7 announced today that its UserInsight intruder analytics product integrates with the new feature—and will be made available more broadly this summer as part of a private preview program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lack of broadband in some areas still limiting telemedicine

A lack of broadband service is limiting the deployment of telemedicine services in some places of the U.S., and not just remote rural areas, some experts say.Panasonic of North America, while providing Internet-based heart monitoring services for elderly residents of the New York City area, found several places were there were no wired broadband, Wi-Fi or strong mobile signals available, Todd Rytting, CTO for the company, told a U.S. Senate committee Tuesday.The SmartCare monitoring service significantly reduced the numbers of heart patients who had to return to the hospital, but “the biggest problem we faced was the lack of broadband to some of our citizens,” Rytting said. Some potential users of the service couldn’t get a broadband connection in “downtown New York City,” he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enough with the IT journeys already!!!

If there was an over/under line in Vegas on how many times the word "journey" will be mentioned next week in keynote addresses and other sessions at the big Interop network industry conference, I'd go with the over -- pretty much no matter what number the oddsmakers set the line at.If the badly behaved at next week's conference decided to make a drinking game of knocking back a shot every time an industry executive referred to a customer journey or a vendor's journey or a technology's journey, the trade show would be littered with passed out attendees (I beg you, don't try this.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Running Photon on Fusion via Vagrant

Most of you have probably picked up on the news of VMware’s new container-optimized Linux distribution, code-named “Photon”. (More details here.) In this post, I’m going to provide a very quick walkthrough on running Photon on VMware Fusion via Vagrant. This walkthrough will leverage a Vagrant box for Photon that has already been created.

To make things easier, I’ve added a photon directory to my GitHub “learning-tools” repository. Feel free to pull those files down to make it easier to follow along.

I assume that you’ve already installed Vagrant, VMware Fusion, and the Vagrant plugin for VMware. If you haven’t, you’ll want to complete those tasks—and verify that everything is working as expected—before proceeding.

  1. Install an additional Vagrant plugin that enables Vagrant to better detect and interact with Photon using this command:

     vagrant plugin install vagrant-guests-photon

    If you don’t install this plugin, you’ll likely get a non-fatal error about Vagrant being unable to perform the networking configuration. (Review the GitHub repository for this plugin if you want/need more details. Also, note that a PR against Vagrant to eliminate the need for this plugin was opened and merged; this fix should show up in a future release of Vagrant.)

  2. Continue reading

In case you aren’t suitably impressed by the scale of Amazon Web Services

Although the video has been up for awhile, if you haven’t had the chance to watch Amazon Web Service’s VP & Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton spell out AWS facts at the re:Invent conference last November, do yourself a favor and pull up a chair. Fascinating stuff that gives you some insight into the rapidly evolving world of cloud computing.The video is embedded below (or you can watch it on YouTube here, but here are some facts to whet your appetite: AWS has more than 1 million users AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) usage is growing 132% year over year AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is growing 99% year over year Every day AWS adds as much new server capacity as Amazon used to support its $7 billion business back in 2004 Networking only represents 8% of monthly AWS operating costs, Hamilton says, but the “cost of networking is escalating relative to the cost of all the other equipment.” That is very “anti-Moore,” he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Linux in the Air: Drone systems go open-source

Look up in the sky, it is LinuxImage by PixabayNot only is spring in the air, so is Linux. But this wasn’t always the case. Early drones relied on either proprietary OSes or simple Arduino-based controllers such as the ArduPilot. While both of these approaches to drone control have been successful, they implicitly limit innovation -- the former because they are closed systems, and the latter because of limited computing power. The recent introduction of Linux-based drones will stimulate the UAV (Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle) market by creating more flexible, open platforms. Here’s how Linux takes off … literally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raytheon forms defense-grade security unit with $1.9 billion Websense buy

Ever since its acquisition of Q1 Labs back in 2011, IBM has been selling its QRadar security event management software in the traditional way, whereby customers pay a price and download the version they want.On Tuesday, however, the company launched two new services that make the technology available through a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model instead.IBM Security Intelligence on Cloud, for instance, is designed to help organizations determine whether security-related events are simple anomalies or potential threats. Built as a cloud service using IBM QRadar, the tool lets enterprises correlate security-event data with threat information from more than 500 supported data sources for devices, systems and applications. More than 1,500 predefined reports are also available for a variety of use cases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raytheon forms defense-grade security unit with $1.9 billion Websense buy

Defense contractor Raytheon is purchasing Websense, which it plans to combine  with its own security unit to create a new, separately operated business to  battle criminal networks and state-funded espionage.Today's Internet attacks "are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and are  being perpetuated by state sponsored groups, criminal organizations,  hacktivists and insiders," said David Wajsgras, president of Raytheon  intelligence, information and services business, in a conference call Monday  announcing the acquisition. "Our goal is to provide defense-grade solutions  that allow our customers defend against [attacks], detect them early, decide  how to counter and defeat such attacks in real-time."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Poor WordPress documentation trips developers, yields plug-ins with XSS flaw

Ambiguous WordPress documentation led many plug-in and theme developers to make an error that exposed websites to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.Such attacks involve tricking a site’s users into clicking on specially crafted URLs that execute rogue JavaScript code in their browsers in the context of that website.The impact depends on the user’s role on the website. For example, if victims have administrative privileges, attackers could trigger rogue administrative actions. If victims are regular users, attackers could steal their authentication cookies and hijack their accounts.The vulnerability stems from insecure use of two WordPress functions called add_query_arg and remove_query_arg and was discovered recently by researchers from code auditing company Scrutinizer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Centrify adds extra protection for sensitive accounts with new cloud service

For CIOs worried about access to shared resources in the cloud and the data center, Centrify has launched an identity-management service that aims to improve protection for IT management accountsAs enterprises embrace cloud-based apps, access to privileged accounts used to manage the most sensitive parts of the supporting infrastructure increasingly lie outside the corporate perimeter. In addition, the accounts are frequently shared by both internal IT and third parties such as contractors. The entire scenario makes important accounts more vulnerable to attacks, according to Centrify.To address this issue the company on Tuesday launched CPS (Centrify Privilege Service), a cloud-based identity management offering that can be used to manage access to cloud and on-site systems by remote employees and third parties. It can be used to protect access to shared servers in the data center or in the cloud, along with routers, switches and social media accounts, for example.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alcatel-Lucent grows switching and virtual networking portfolio

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise this week rolled out a new switch and software enhancements designed to simplify network operations through automation and design flexibility.Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise became independent from Alcatel-Lucent last fall. Alcatel-Lucent is being acquired by Nokia for over $16 billion, but Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is not part of the deal.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Eyes turn to Ericsson, Juniper+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alcatel-Lucent grows switching and virtual networking portfolio

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise this week rolled out a new switch and software enhancements designed to simplify network operations through automation and design flexibility.Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise became independent from Alcatel-Lucent last fall. Alcatel-Lucent is being acquired by Nokia for over $16 billion, but Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is not part of the deal.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Eyes turn to Ericsson, Juniper+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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