Gilat Satcom offers connectivity package for rural Africa for just $1 per month

Gilat Satcom has launched a portfolio of satellite services for rural Africa that will require subscribers to pay as little as US$1.00 per month.The Village Island portfolio of services will allow rural dwellers in Africa to access voice-over-IP (VoIP), cellular, video over IP and Wi-Fi connections via private satellite networks.Gilat said Village Island is being supported by governments, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), network operators, churches and major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and is aimed at specified groups in rural areas.The initiative comes as the high cost of communications and Internet connectivity in the region prevent many rural Africans from using telecom and Web services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

East Africa expands One Network Area to include data, mobile money

East Africa’s One Area Network initiative is being expanded to include data and mobile money services, a move expected to result in lower costs for subscribers.The One Area Network initiative, launched in January, has led to a decline in mobile phone communication rates across borders in East Africa.The East African Community (EAC) last year agreed that all calls between member countries should be billed as though they were local. The agreement led to a pact between Safaricom, MTN and Airtel Uganda that enables subscribers to receive calls for free while in Uganda and pay a flat rate of $0.11 for calls to other East African countries including Tanzania and Burundi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PQ Show 46 – SaiSei & Network Performance Enhancement

Saisei does Network Performance Enhancement that delivers visibility and control of the network traffic in a different way. In this show, we examine how software and algorithms provide visibility and control of network traffic. Traffic management for the next decade.

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

TwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedIn

The post PQ Show 46 – SaiSei & Network Performance Enhancement appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

IDG Contributor Network: Low-power chip will last decades on a battery

For years we've been obsessed with increasing chip processing power. Intel's i386, launched in 1985, followed by the i486 in 1989, introduced economical multitasking and number crunching to the enterprise.In the following years, the chips got more powerful still, culminating with today's hundred-dollar smartphone threatening the PC.It could be argued that we've reached an acceptable level of multitasking and personal computing power for cost. We've found it in small-form-factor smartphones, and it may be all we really need now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Low-power chip will last decades on a battery

For years we've been obsessed with increasing chip processing power. Intel's i386, launched in 1985, followed by the i486 in 1989, introduced economical multitasking and number crunching to the enterprise.In the following years, the chips got more powerful still, culminating with today's hundred-dollar smartphone threatening the PC.It could be argued that we've reached an acceptable level of multitasking and personal computing power for cost. We've found it in small-form-factor smartphones, and it may be all we really need now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Confusion but hope as US faces payment revolution

In just under six months, a behind-the-scenes switch in the payments industry will change the way U.S. consumers shop and could bring wider acceptance for Apple Pay and its competitors.Beginning in October, liability for transactions with fraudulent credit and debit cards will shift from the card companies to retailers, if the retailers haven’t invested in terminals that don’t accept chip-based cards. The chip cards are already being sent from banks to customers, and some stores have them in place, but much is still up in the air.At this week’s Transact 15 expo in San Francisco, a gathering of companies in the electronic payments industry, everyone has questions and there are few answers. Could the shift be delayed, will banks mandate PIN numbers instead of signatures for purchases with the new cards, and will cybercriminals just shift their attention online?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung starts shipping new 4K TVs with Tizen OS

Streaming movies from mobile devices onto TVs isn’t as easy as it seems. Samsung hopes to make that easier with its new line of 4K Smart TVs, which have the brand-new Tizen operating system.Samsung has started shipping some of its new curved and flat-panel Smart TVs, and announced prices for other models that will ship in the coming months. The TVs, which start $949.99, come in ultra-high definition [3840 by 2160] resolutions.The user interface in the new Smart TVs will look different from TVs released in previous years. Samsung’s entire Smart TV line-up in 2015 is based on Tizen, which brings TVs closer to mobile devices and Internet-based streaming content, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Snapchat tallies government data requests for the first time

Snapchat’s service featuring disappearing messages is known for its popularity among teens. Now it’s becoming popular with law enforcement.Snapchat, for the first time, has disclosed the number of requests for user information it has received from governments in the U.S. and in other countries. These requests may come in the form of subpoenas, court orders, search warrants or other legal processes, seeking a variety of user information like usernames, email addresses and phone numbers.Authorities may also seek the content of messages. They have a tight window, though—Snapchat says it deletes people’s messages from its servers after all recipients have viewed them, or 30 days after an unopened message is sent. Governments can also seek logs containing the metadata of messages, which Snapchat retains.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Snapchat tallies government data requests for the first time

Snapchat’s service featuring disappearing messages is known for its popularity among teens. Now it’s becoming popular with law enforcement.Snapchat, for the first time, has disclosed the number of requests for user information it has received from governments in the U.S. and in other countries. These requests may come in the form of subpoenas, court orders, search warrants or other legal processes, seeking a variety of user information like usernames, email addresses and phone numbers.Authorities may also seek the content of messages. They have a tight window, though—Snapchat says it deletes people’s messages from its servers after all recipients have viewed them, or 30 days after an unopened message is sent. Governments can also seek logs containing the metadata of messages, which Snapchat retains.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Smush your photos to boost Samsung Galaxy face recognition, researchers say

You can improve facial recognition security on Samsung Galaxy phones by morphing multiple photos of yourself to unlock the device, researchers at the University of York's FaceVar Lab say. This improves upon storing a single target image, according to the team led by David Robertson, of the Department of Psychology's FaceVar lab. Their paper, "Face averages enhance user recognition for smartphone security," has been published in the journal PLOS ONE. MORE: 6 things Galaxy 6 does that iPhone 6 can't | Biometric security is on the riseTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ansible and Containers: Why and How

Everyone loves the promise of containers.  

More specifically: everyone loves the promise of a world where they can build an application on their laptop, and have that application run exactly the same way in every environment -- from their laptop all the way to production, and at every step in between.

That's still a holy grail, though.  In the meantime, people seem to be looking for practical ways to get all of the advantages of containers -- consistency, lightweight environments, application segregation, and so on -- while still maintaining the flexibility required to work with the many environments that are not amenable to containerization.

Which may explain why so many people... wow, just a lot of people... seem to be talking about Ansible and containers together:

* Ansible playbooks are portable. If you build a container with a pure Dockerfile, it means that the only way you can reproduce that application is in a Docker container. If you build a container with an Ansible playbook, you can then reproduce a very similar environment in Vagrant, or in a cloud instance of your choice, Continue reading

Mirantis Joins Cloud Foundry but Keeps Focus on OpenStack

The not-so-thin line between IaaS and PaaS.

Announcing Webhook Respository Subscriptions

Intel releases the 750 Series SSD, its fastest consumer flash

Intel today unveiled its first consumer-class solid-state drive (SSD) with a PCI Express 3.0 bus and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) high-speed host controller interface.The new 750 Series SSD's performance tops out with sequential read/write speeds of up to 2,400MBps and 1,200MBps, respectively.Unlike previous Intel consumer flash products that used a serial-ATA (SATA) computer bus interface, the new SSDs will be directly attached to a motherboard via NVMe or through PCIe interconnect. Intel The 750 Series SSD in a 2.5-in (15mm z-height) form factor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Three new Official Images added in March

Interop LasVegas 2015: My Schedule

First INTEROP – ever!  I’ve been feeling like a kid in a candy store trying to figure out what sessions I want to go to. The selection is vast… and the decision making has really been rough.

I’ve gotten a majority of my schedule figured out.  But still lots of hard decision making ahead.  It’s hard to not be able to be in multiple places at the same time. Truth be told some of those slots are just going to end up being what is “calling” to me the most on that day.

Where will I for sure be? I will absolutely and for sure be attending the following sessions!

Obama cyberattacker sanctions raise due process, attribution concerns

New U.S. government sanctions targeting the bank accounts of suspected cyberattackers raise questions about due process for people who feel they’re wrongly accused and about how agencies will identify the source of attacks.The new sanctions, announced by President Barack Obama’s administration Wednesday, would allow the U.S. Department of the Treasury to freeze the funds held in U.S. banks of people and organizations suspected of engaging in malicious cyberattacks that pose a “significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, economic health, or financial stability” of the U.S., according to information released by the White House.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple details secret history behind the Apple Watch

The Apple Watch is unquestionably Apple's biggest gamble in years. Not only does the device represent a new product for Apple, it represents an entirely new product category altogether. With the device slated to launch in just about three weeks, all eyes will be watching closely to see if Apple has truly delivered yet another revolutionary product.Ahead of the highly anticipated Apple Watch launch, Wired today posted an exhaustive recap of the Apple Watch development process, which began in earnest shortly after Steve Jobs' passing. Apple decided to make a watch and only then set out to discover what it might be good for (besides, you know, displaying the time). "There was a sense that technology was going to move onto the body," says Alan Dye, who runs Apple's human interface group. "We felt like the natural place, the place that had historical relevance and significance, was the wrist."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Featured Interview: Nuage Networks CEO on Secrets of their Successful 2-Year Ramp – Policy, Branch Networking, Containers

Nuage Networks CEO Sunil Khandekar shares secrets of their successful ramp on their 2nd anniversary: easy-to-deploy policy, scalable branch-networking, support for containers and continued customer wins.

Arista’s New CFO Is Some Kid Named Andy Bechtolsheim

Don't worry. He's done this before.