Kenya abandons school laptop project, moves to computer labs

The Kenyan government has abandoned its school laptop program, valued at more than US$600 million, following a controversy over the manner in which the contract for the project was awarded to India’s Olive Telecommunications.Kenya’s Public Procurement Administrative Review Board (PPARB) revoked the bid award last year, prompting Olive to take the matter to court.PPARB ruled after a review of the bidding that the project was wrongly awarded to Olive because the Indian company is not an original equipment manufacturer, as required by the Kenyan project requirement.Olive reportedly uses Chinese subcontractors to manufacture Olive-branded devices, and allegedly added computers to its list of products only after it was shortlisted by the Kenyan government.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DOJ offers $3 million reward for Gameover Zeus botnet suspect

Two U.S. government agencies are offering a US$3 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of a Russian man suspected of having served as an administrator for the destructive Gameover Zeus botnet.The U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of State’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program announced the reward for information about suspect Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev on Tuesday. Bogachev is charged in the U.S. with several crimes related to Gameover Zeus, which targeted banking credentials and other personal information over a two-year period.Gameover Zeus was responsible for more than 1 million computer infections, resulting in financial losses of more than $100 million, the DOJ said in a press release. The DOJ, working with law enforcement agencies from other countries, disrupted the botnet in mid-2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DHS to allow H-1B spouses to work in US

Spouses of U.S. immigrants holding high-skill H-1B visas will be able to work in the country later this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced.The DHS decision will benefit holders of H-4 visas, which allow spouses of H-1B and other employment visa holders to legally live in the U.S. Until now, H-4 visa holders could not work in the U.S. until they received a green card, granting them permanent residency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can anyone catch Apple and Google in the smartphone market?

IDC's recent report on smartphone operating system market share points to Apple and Google squeezing out Windows Phone and BlackBerry again, making the smartphone market a two-horse race. Melissa Chau, IDC Senior Research Manager, said: "Instead of a battle for the third ecosystem after Android and iOS, 2014 instead yielded skirmishes, with Windows Phone edging out BlackBerry, Firefox, Sailfish and the rest, but without any of these platforms making the kind of gains needed to challenge the top two." With just Apple and Google as serious contenders, Apple has to maintain its iPhone 6 momentum from the fourth calendar quarter of 2014, when the company boosted unit shipments to 74.5 million, compared to just 51 million units during the same quarter of 2013.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reddit bans nude photos, sex videos posted without consent

Reddit, the online message board known for its users’ unrestrained posts, is going against its laissez-faire philosophy and moving to restrict an abusive form of sexual content.Under a revised privacy policy going into effect on March 10, it will be officially prohibited for Reddit users to post naked photos and sex videos if they lack permission from the people depicted.Affected people should email the company at [email protected] to expedite the removal of the offending photos or videos “as quickly as possible,” Reddit said in the policy.Reddit, which bills itself as “the front page of the Internet,” has built its following of nearly 160 million users by letting them express themselves with various degrees of anonymity to communicate about any topic. The site’s “Ask Me Anything” discussions are popular threads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM brings location awareness to MobileFirst apps

Enterprise apps built with IBM’s MobileFirst management and development platform can now be made more aware of their surroundings.The new capabilities, included in an upcoming MobileFirst update, could give app users more information about their location and let enterprises more granularly tailor their apps to user needs, said Mike Gilfix, vice president of IBM’s MobileFirst platform.MobileFirst is IBM’s package to build enterprise mobile applications that tie directly into the data and business logic of backend IT systems.The software is targeted at those organizations that don’t have sufficient in-house IT or development staff to fully build and support apps. About 75 percent of organizations have a backlog of up to 20 mobile apps that they plan to build, but haven’t yet, according to a survey commissioned by IBM and conducted by OutSystems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Universal SSL: Encryption all the way to the origin, for free

Last September, CloudFlare unveiled Universal SSL, enabling HTTPS support for all sites by default. All sites using CloudFlare now support strong cryptography from the browser to CloudFlare’s servers. One of the most popular requests for Universal SSL was to make it easier to encrypt the other half of the connection: from CloudFlare to the origin server.

Until today, encryption from CloudFlare to the origin required the purchase of a trusted certificate from a third party. The certificate purchasing process can be tedious and sometimes costly. To remedy this, CloudFlare has created a new Origin CA service in which we provide free limited-function certificates to customer origin servers.

Today we are excited to announce the public beta of this service, providing full encryption of all data from the browser to the origin, for free.

Encrypted all the way

CloudFlare offers three modes for HTTPS: Flexible, Full and Strict. In Flexible mode, traffic from browsers to CloudFlare is encrypted, but traffic from CloudFlare to a site's origin server is not. In Full and Strict modes, traffic between CloudFlare and the origin server is encrypted. Strict mode adds validation of the origin server’s certificate. We strongly encourage customers to select Strict mode Continue reading

10 products that take you back to the future

Let's go retroImage by REUTERS/Aaron HarrisWhen BlackBerry released its Passport phone last fall, it married a modern smartphone operating system -- BlackBerry's new QNX-based OS -- with a physical keyboard, which less than a decade ago had been a ubiquitous smartphone feature but now seemed like a relic from another age. Still, the company hoped that enough people pined for the older technology to drive sales.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP Embracing Whitebrand/Bare Metal/Britebox Ethernet Switching

HP is now offering a whitebox Ethernet product range to its customers in a recent announcements. Whether you call this britebox, whitebrand, bare metal or branded whitebox, the final outcome is the same. HP is offering customers another choice to buy the network products that meets their requirements.


The post HP Embracing Whitebrand/Bare Metal/Britebox Ethernet Switching appeared first on EtherealMind.

Apple’s most obvious product placement in movies and TV

Everywhere you lookWhile Apple does not pay for product placement in TV shows and movies, that hasn't prevented Apple products from showing up in all kinds of places in the media. As for how it all happens behind the scenes, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller once explained that Apple has a point person who works closely with Hollywood to get Apple products as much screen time as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme Networks CEO touts open SDN strategy, robust wireless as key assets in changing net market

Extreme Networks Extreme Networks CEO Charles Berger: "The change for Extreme vs. where we were prior to the [Enterasys] acquisition is pretty dramatic." It’s been about 15 months since Extreme Networks completed the acquisition of Enterasys Networks, a move that bolstered not only Extreme’s financial heft, but widened its switching line and beefed up its wireless LAN capabilities. Extreme CEO Charles Berger gave IDG US Media Chief Content Officer John Gallant an update on the progress of integrating Enterasys’s technology and discussed how software-defined networking is reshaping the industry. He also discussed how Extreme’s work on in-venue wireless with NFL teams and others will benefit all customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme Networks CEO touts open SDN strategy, robust wireless as key assets in changing net market

Extreme Networks Extreme Networks CEO Charles Berger: "The change for Extreme vs. where we were prior to the [Enterasys] acquisition is pretty dramatic." It’s been about 15 months since Extreme Networks completed the acquisition of Enterasys Networks, a move that bolstered not only Extreme’s financial heft, but widened its switching line and beefed up its wireless LAN capabilities. Extreme CEO Charles Berger gave IDG US Media Chief Content Officer John Gallant an update on the progress of integrating Enterasys’s technology and discussed how software-defined networking is reshaping the industry. He also discussed how Extreme’s work on in-venue wireless with NFL teams and others will benefit all customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Extreme Networks CEO touts open SDN strategy, robust wireless as key assets in changing net market

Extreme Networks Extreme Networks CEO Charles Berger: "The change for Extreme vs. where we were prior to the [Enterasys] acquisition is pretty dramatic." It’s been about 15 months since Extreme Networks completed the acquisition of Enterasys Networks, a move that bolstered not only Extreme’s financial heft, but widened its switching line and beefed up its wireless LAN capabilities. Extreme CEO Charles Berger gave IDG US Media Chief Content Officer John Gallant an update on the progress of integrating Enterasys’s technology and discussed how software-defined networking is reshaping the industry. He also discussed how Extreme’s work on in-venue wireless with NFL teams and others will benefit all customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Visa Europe security updates may set the stage for Apple Pay expansion

Visa Europe is rolling out the security technology that Apple Pay uses to process payments, raising the question of whether the Apple mobile payment system will cross the pond in the coming months.By mid-April, Visa member banks in Europe will be able to process tokens, the company said Tuesday. This technology replaces a person’s credit card information with a random series of numbers called a token, which retailers send to a financial institution when a person uses a smartphone or wearable device to pay for merchandise. The technology is considered better at protecting a person’s financial data since it doesn’t transmit credit card details. Apple uses tokens to complete mobile payments made with the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and its upcoming smartwatch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Correlating Overlay and Underlay SDN Performance

Correlating Overlay and Underlay SDN Performance

by Steve Harriman, VP of Marketing - February 24, 2015

Next month Packet Design CTO Cengiz Alaettinoglu will address the MPLS SDN World Congress in Paris about the need for SDN analytics to monitor and correlate the performance of overlay and underlay networks. Below is a summary of his presentation, which will take place on Thursday, March 19 at 4:45 p.m. at the Marriott Paris Rive Gauche Hotel & Conference Center. (If you are attending the conference, please visit us in booth #401. In addition, Packet Design customers are invited to our first ever Customer Symposium being held on Monday, March 16 at the Rive Gauche Hotel. For more information or to register for this free event, visit http://ssp.packetdesign.com/2-uncategorised/288-paris-customer-symposium). 

The Role of Analytics-Based Orchestration in Overlay and Underlay Networks 

Industry focus on software defined networking (SDN) has been in three segments: the data center, the enterprise-WAN edge, and the WAN itself. Certain services and applications will require orchestration across these segments. For example, when data center compute resources become unavailable, some virtual machines (VMs) will need to be moved to other data centers. External traffic to these VMs, Continue reading

AOL, Apple iTunes connection will soon be history

AOL Apple has alerted AOL subscribers who use their credentials to access iTunes and other Apple services that they will need to switch over to an Apple ID for access as of March 31.And yes, according to AOL's latest financials, there still are more than 2 million domestic subscribers of its services. Subscribers have been able to use their same AOL credentials to access iTunes, the Apple App Store and iBooks store.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Welcome CCNA Collaboration, Goodbye CCNA Voice & CCNA Video!

Well folks, it has finally been announced! Cisco has retired the CCNA Voice and CCNA Video certifications in favor of a new, all-encompassing CCNA Collaboration certification. It will be comprised of two separate exams—one with a focus on Unified Communications solutions and one emphasizing the implementation and troubleshooting of video infrastructures.

The first exam is called “Implementing Cisco Collaboration Devices” and corresponds to exam number 210-060 CICD. Topics to note within this exam will be call signaling and media flows, VoIP quality implications, user account creation and modification, calling privileges, IM and Presence, RTMT and CDR/CMR-based reporting, and typical end user support scenarios. The focus of this exam is now on becoming a well-rounded engineer, with knowledge in more than just CUCM. For more information, visit this link here.

The second exam is called “Implementing Cisco Video Network Devices” and corresponds to exam number 210-065 CIVND. Topics on this exam that should carry great importance will be streaming video, media convergence, desktop and immersive systems, troubleshooting methodologies, media quality, and multi-point control units. With the focus here being solely on video and its integration with voice networks, candidates for the exam will gain a breadth of knowledge during the studying Continue reading

Critical remote code execution flaw patched in Samba

Security researchers are urging users to install new Samba security updates in order to address a critical vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.Samba is an implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol that enables Unix-like systems, including Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X to share files and printers with Windows computers. It also allows such systems to be integrated into Microsoft Active Directory environments and even act as domain controllers.The new vulnerability is located in the smbd file server and was discovered by Richard van Eeden of Microsoft Vulnerability Research.“It can be exploited by a malicious Samba client, by sending specially-crafted packets to the Samba server,” the Red Hat security team said in a blog post. “No authentication is required to exploit this flaw. It can result in remotely controlled execution of arbitrary code as root.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

1 … 3,591 3,592 3,593 3,594 3,595 … 3,818