If you hate PC bloatware, here are the vendors to avoid

Lenovo may have publicly buried bloatware, but it’s anything but dead. After the company’s Superfish scandal, we shopped Best Buy and found it alive and well on major vendors’ PC offerings. A little research should save you from the worst of it, though. Here’s what we learned. Bloatware is as bloatware does We call it bloatware, but PC executives make clear that they install software on PCs to benefit consumers and pad tiny profit margins. The vast majority is harmless (if obnoxious), and some, such as a year’s subscription to Microsoft’s Office 365, arguably increase a PC’s value without increasing the price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How does Apple Pay work on the Apple Watch?

So, it's April 25, 2015 and the delivery man has just delivered your new Apple Watch. Your first instinct: Spend more hard-earned cash trying out Apple's mobile payment system, Apple Pay.The question is, how?Although Apple Pay has been available for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users since October, it works differently with Apple Watch, which arrives in retail on April 24. (Pre-orders for the Watch, which start at $349 and rise into the thousands of dollars from there, begin April 10.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fujitsu’s thin heat pipe could let smartphone chips run cooler

If parts of your phone are sometimes too hot to handle, Fujitsu may have the answer: a thin heat pipe that can spread heat around mobile devices, reducing extremes of temperature.Fujitsu Laboratories created a heat pipe in the form of a loop that’s less than 1mm thick. The device can transfer about 20W, about five times more heat than current thin heat pipes or thermal materials, the company said.The technology could improve smartphones’ performance by helping cool their CPUs and other heat-producing components, spreading that heat more evenly across other parts of the phone.Overheating has been an issue with some Samsung Galaxy smartphones, and the Korean manufacturer apparently dropped Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor from the Galaxy S6 due to excessive heat concerns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC girds for legal attacks on net neutrality order

The Federal Communication Commission's 400-page official order on net neutrality, released Thursday, will undoubtedly elicit lawsuits on various fronts once it is officially published in the Federal Register.Attacks are expected to range from whether current law allows the agency to legally act as it has to whether carriers feel they can be treated fairly in setting up services in the future. One of the biggest areas of dispute will likely revolve around the FCC's new authority to oversee interconnection deals struck between broadband providers like Comcast and content providers like Netflix.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Friday, March 13

Intel blames Windows XP loyalists, Europe, as it slashes its Q1 revenue targetIn another sign that Intel’s business remains heavily tied to the PC market despite its efforts to push into mobile devices, the chipmaker cut its revenue forecast for the first quarter by almost $1 billion, blaming the expected shortfall on a weak PC market and on “challenging” macroeconomic and currency conditions. In particular, Intel singled out small businesses, saying they haven’t been replacing their Windows XP computers as quickly as previously expected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon acquires IoT platform developer 2lemetry

Amazon.com has acquired 2lemetry, a startup that has developed a platform for the integration of connected devices across enterprises, as it expands on its Internet of Things strategy.“We can confirm that Amazon has acquired 2lemetry, and we look forward to continuing to support 2lemetry customers,” a spokeswoman for Amazon wrote in an email Friday.2lemetry said on its website that its existing service had not changed and it would offer the same customer support after the acquisition by Amazon. It would retain its existing name and branding, it added.The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.Founded in 2011, the company describes its core technology as an IoT version of Enterprise Application Integration middleware solutions, “providing device connectivity at scale, cross-communication, data brokering and storage.” It also offers companies the ability to manage and analyze the captured data through predictive computational models and a configurable rules engine, according to its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

TCP Optimization with Juho Snellman on Software Gone Wild

Achieving 40 Gbps of forwarding performance on an Intel server is no longer a big deal - Juniper got to 160 Gbps with finely tuned architecture - but can you do real-time optimization of a million concurrent TCP sessions on that same box at 20 Gbps?

Juho Snellman from Teclo Networks explained how they got there in Episode 25 of Software Gone Wild… and you’ll learn a ton of things about radio networks on the way.

Enjoy the show!

PC sales may be worse than expected this year

PC shipments are forecast to drop by 4.9 percent this year, more than the 3.3 percent fall earlier predicted, IDC said Thursday.Earlier in the day, Intel, the key chipmaker for the PC business, said its first quarter revenue would be around US$12.8 billion, down from the about $13.7 billion it had earlier expected, citing weaker than anticipated demand for business desktop PCs and lower than expected inventory levels in the PC supply chain.About 293 million PCs are expected to be shipped this year, according to IDC. The PC market dropped in value by 0.8 percent to $201 billion in 2014, and is expected to drop by another 6.9 percent in 2015, IDC said. Smaller declines in subsequent years are expected to take the total market to $175 billion by 2019.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google error leaks website owners’ personal information

A Google software problem inadvertently exposed the names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers used to register websites after people had chosen to keep the information private.The privacy breach involves whois, a database that contains contact information for people who’ve bought domain names. For privacy reasons, people can elect to make information private, often by paying an extra fee.Craig Williams, senior technical leader for Cisco’s Talos research group who discovered the issue, said the data will make it easier for cybercriminals to draft phishing emails that try to trick victims into divulging information or clicking on malicious links.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google error leaks website owners’ personal information

A Google software problem inadvertently exposed the names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers used to register websites after people had chosen to keep the information private.The privacy breach involves whois, a database that contains contact information for people who’ve bought domain names. For privacy reasons, people can elect to make information private, often by paying an extra fee.Craig Williams, senior technical leader for Cisco’s Talos research group who discovered the issue, said the data will make it easier for cybercriminals to draft phishing emails that try to trick victims into divulging information or clicking on malicious links.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google error leaks website owners’ personal information

A Google software problem inadvertently exposed the names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers used to register websites after people had chosen to keep the information private.The privacy breach involves whois, a database that contains contact information for people who’ve bought domain names. For privacy reasons, people can elect to make information private, often by paying an extra fee.Craig Williams, senior technical leader for Cisco’s Talos research group who discovered the issue, said the data will make it easier for cybercriminals to draft phishing emails that try to trick victims into divulging information or clicking on malicious links.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google error leaks website owners’ personal information

A Google software problem inadvertently exposed the names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers used to register websites after people had chosen to keep the information private.The privacy breach involves whois, a database that contains contact information for people who’ve bought domain names. For privacy reasons, people can elect to make information private, often by paying an extra fee.Craig Williams, senior technical leader for Cisco’s Talos research group who discovered the issue, said the data will make it easier for cybercriminals to draft phishing emails that try to trick victims into divulging information or clicking on malicious links.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GitHub won because it’s social-media

Today Google shut down Google Code, because GitHub has taken over that market. GitHub won not because Git is a better version-control system, but because it became a social-media website like Facebook and Twitter. Geeks like me express ourselves through our code. My GitHub account contains my projects just like Blogger contains my blogs or Twitter contains my tweets.

To be sure, Git's features are important. The idea of forking a repo fundamentally changed who was in control. Previously, projects were run with tight control. Those in power either accepted or rejected changes made by others. If your changes were rejected, you could just fork the project, making it your own version, with your own changes. That's the beauty of open-source: by making their source open, the original writers lost the ability to stop you from making changes.

However, forking was discouraged by the community. That's because it split efforts. When forks became popular, some people would contribute to one fork, while others would contribute to the other. Drama was a constant factor in popular open-source projects over the evil people who "hurt" projects by forking them.

But with Git, forking is now encouraged. Indeed, that's now the first step Continue reading

Senate panel secretly approves cyberthreat sharing bill

A U.S. Senate committee has voted in secret to approve a controversial bill that seeks to encourage businesses to share information about cyberthreats with each other and with government agencies.The Senate Intelligence Committee, meeting behind closed doors, voted 14-1 late Thursday to approve the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act [CISA], even though Senator Ron Wyden, who cast the lone vote against the legislation, said it doesn’t adequately protect privacy.“If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections, then that’s not a cybersecurity bill—it’s a surveillance bill by another name,” Wyden said in a statement. The bill would have a “limited impact” on U.S. cybersecurity, he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google services disrupted by routing error

Google’s services were disrupted briefly on Thursday after a broadband provider in India made a network routing error.The provider, Hathway, made a technical change that caused traffic to more than 300 network prefixes belonging to Google to be directed to its own network, wrote Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn, which studies global traffic patterns.This type of error is seen daily across the internet. It involves BGP (border gateway protocol), which is used by networking equipment to direct traffic between different providers. Changes in the network are “announced” by providers using BGP, and propagate across the internet to other providers over time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google services disrupted by routing error

Google’s services were disrupted briefly on Thursday after a broadband provider in India made a network routing error.The provider, Hathway, made a technical change that caused traffic to more than 300 network prefixes belonging to Google to be directed to its own network, wrote Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn, which studies global traffic patterns.This type of error is seen daily across the internet. It involves BGP (border gateway protocol), which is used by networking equipment to direct traffic between different providers. Changes in the network are “announced” by providers using BGP, and propagate across the internet to other providers over time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Role Based Access Control in IOS

I don't believe this is well known: Cisco IOS has Role Based Access Control (RBAC) which can be used to create and assign different levels of privileged access to the device. Without RBAC there are two access levels in IOS: a read-only mode with limited access to commands and no ability to modify the running config (also called privilege level 1) and enable mode with full administrative access. There is no middle ground; it's all or nothing. RBAC allows creation of access levels somewhere between nothing and everything. A common use case is creating a role for the first line NOC analyst which might allow them to view the running config, configure interfaces, and configure named access-lists.

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