Tag: newstrack

Intel fined for illegal wi-fi use

intel_log_reversedChipmaker Intel has written a $144,000 cheque to make the US Federal Communications Commission watchdog stop snapping at its heels.

An FCC investigation found the chip maker operated prototype wireless devices without FCC clearance.

It can’t have been much of an investigation given that Intel itself reported its non-compliance to the regulator.

Apparently Intel was worried in 2012 that it might have violated the agency’s rules when it tested prototype digital device models in residential areas without the FCC’s blessing.

The company also showed off  a prototype device at a trade show without proper labelling.

An Intel spokesman characterised the incident as a terrible mistake and not something it would do normally.

He said that the company had created a programme that gives the FCC confidence that it is doing its best to help ensure future compliance with the rules.

AMD releases A series APU

AMD_lassAMD has added the AMD A10-7800 Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) to its A-Series 4th generation APU lineup.

The new chip has 12 compute cores (4CPU + 8 GPU) which AMD claims will unlock the designs full APU potential and Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) features.

The AMD A10-7800 is based around AMD Radeon R7 Series graphics and AMD’s Mantle API.
It can enable accelerated performance across select AMD Gaming Evolved partner titles.

Bernd Lienhard, corporate vice president and general manager, Client Business Unit, AMD said that the 2014 AMD A-Series APUs were the most advanced and developer friendly performance APUs from AMD to date.

The AMD A10-7800 APU supports UltraHD (4K) resolutions and new video post processing enhancements that will make 1080p videos look better when upscaled on an UltraHD-enabled monitor or TV.

The chip comes with a configurable thermal design power option (cTDP) to allow the overclocker crowd to tinker with it.

Sales will start in Japan today with worldwide availability at the end of July.

In addition, AMD announced the introduction of the AMD A6-7400K and AMD A4-7300 APUs, for the home and office market.

With the unifying FM2+ infrastructure for AMD APUs, users are enabled to build smaller lower power form factors for gaming and home theatre PCs.

ISPs sue the spooks over network spying

snowdenISPs from the US, UK, Netherlands and South Korea with campaigners Privacy International are to sue UK spooks GCHQ for attacking their networks.

According to the BBC, it is the first time that GCHQ has faced such action and is based on allegations about government snooping made by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

What appears to have got the ISP’s goat is attacks which were outlined in a series of articles in Der Spiegel.  They claim that the Intercept, were illegal and “undermine the goodwill the organisations rely on”.

They say that Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom was targeted by GCHQ and infected with malware to gain access to network infrastructure

GCHQ and the US National Security Agency, where Snowden worked, had a range of network exploitation and intrusion capabilities, including technique that injected data into existing data streams to create connections that will enable the targeted infection of users,

The ISPs claim that the intelligence agencies used an automated system, codenamed Turbine, that allowed them to scale up network implants

German internet exchange points were targeted, allowing agencies to spy on all internet traffic coming through those nodes.

Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, said that the widespread attacks on providers and collectives undermine the trust everyone put on the internet and greatly endangers the world’s most powerful tool for democracy and free expression.

The ISPs involved in the action are UK-based GreenNet, Riseup (US), Greenhost (Netherlands), Mango (Zimbabwe), Jinbonet (South Korea), May First/People Link (US)and the Chaos Computer Club (Germany).

GCHQ insists that all its work was conducted in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that its activities were “authorised, necessary and proportionate.”

Google on track to predict world cup winner

gooGoogle’s Cloud Platform has been crunching large datasets and statistics to predict the outcome of each game in the World Cup and has managed to do far better than any octopus or horse, writes Nick Farrell..

Using the numbers generated by live sports data firm Opta, Google engineers have used Google Cloud Dataflow to ingest data, BigQuery to build features, iPython and Pandas to conduct modelling, and finally the Compute Engine to crunch the data.

This has created a logistic regression approach and predicted the winners.  Google said that this is better than the “poisson regression method” which we thought meant asking chickens when they turn their heads in the opposite direction.

And so far, it seems to be working as the Google Cloud Platform has boasted a perfect record and predicts that there would not be “any major upsets” this last round either.

Google Cloud Platform’s predictions for the quarterfinals were Brazil vs. Colombia: Brazil (71%), France vs. Germany: France (69%), The Netherlands vs. Costa Rica: Netherlands (68%) and Argentina vs. Belgium: Argentina (81%).

Of course it still can’t predict the lottery numbers or tell us why footballers get paid such a ridiculous amount of money.

Facebook falls foul of ICO

George OrwellYesterday Facebook announced the results of a psychological experiment into human behaviour to find if Facebook could alter the emotional state of its users and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content.

It was all fairly tame stuff, but it did raise the eyebrows of the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

It is concerned that Facebook might have broken data protection laws when it allowed researchers to conduct a psychological experiment on 700,000 unwitting users in 2012 users of the social network.

The ICO monitors how personal data is used and has the power to force organizations to change their policies and levy fines of up to £500,000 pounds ($839,500).

Facebook said that it could do what it liked with the 700,000 because they had signed an terms of use agreement when they joined.  Of course they had not read it, but they had signed it.
It is not clear what part of UK data protection laws Facebook might have broken, but it does seem that if there is not a clause which says you cannot submit the personal data of your customers to scientific experimentation, there should be.

Woz says smartwatches have a way to go

Steve WozniakGadget king and dancing queen Steve Wozniak thinks smartwatches have got a long way to go before being useful.

Woz, who was the co-founder of Apple, was a well-known early adopter of shiny new toys.  He owns a Segway and has a Tesla Motors’ electric-powered car.  He also has an interest in getting a smartwatch that is useful.

Wozniak told xconomy that smartwatches will not be useful until the screens get bigger. He thinks foldable, plastic displays could be the answer to that problem.

He also thinks they will be useless until you can get the whole smartphone on your wrist and not a Bluetooth connection to the smartphone in your pocket.

Samsung, Pebble, and Qualcomm are among the companies that have come out with smartwatches, but thus far, Wozniak’s favorite is one made by Martian. It doesn’t have a touch screen, but a tiny display below the watch hands indicates who is calling, and the watch has a good speaker, Wozniak said.

The worst smartwatch that Woz was the Samsung Galaxy Gear which he sold on eBay because it was so worthless and did so little that was convenient.

The interview did not reveal anything about what Woz thought of the coming Apple iWatch and whether it would tick any of his boxes.  Our guess is that it didn’t.

A third of US people don’t trust the internet

pressieA study has revealed that while 85 percent of Americans use the internet, a third of the nation were hopeless at it.

The study was conducted by John Horrigan, an independent researcher suggests that the digital divide has been replaced by a gap in digital readiness.

More than a third of Americans were not digitally literate or don’t trust the internet. That subgroup tended to be less educated, poorer, and older than the average American. It’s the unternet, then.

It appears that those with essential Web skills “tend to be the more privileged” and it is only these who are getting any mileage from the digital revolution.

The study of 1,600 adults measured their grasp of terms like “cookie” and “Wi-Fi.” It asked them to rate how confident they were about using a desktop or laptop or a smart phone to find information, as well as how comfortable they felt about using a computer. Of those who scored low in these areas, about half were not internet users.

Horrigan said that politicians have ignored the problem of digital readiness while concentrating on providing people with access to the internet.

There has been little effort paid to teaching people the necessary skills to take advantage of online classes and job searches.

The tech industry has also been bad at working out that not all users possess the same digital skill levels and that they need to make accommodations for those with less knowledge.

Microsoft allowed to execute Bladabindi and Jenxcus

GuillotineSoftware giant Microsoft has been given permission to disrupt malware by known as Bladabindi and Jenxcus, writes Nick Farrell.

Although Vole has worked with the FBI and others to disrupt communications channels between hackers and infected PCs, it is rare to act on its own. This is also the first high-profile case involving malware written by developers outside of Eastern Europe.

The operation, which began on Monday under an order issued by a federal court in Nevada, Microsoft said the two malwares operated in similar ways and were written and distributed by developers in Kuwait and Algeria.

Microsoft said that it would take days to determine how many machines were infected. Voles’ own, anti-virus software alone has detected some 7.4 million infections over the past year and is installed on less than 30 percent of the world’s PCs.

The developers marketed their malware over social media, including videos on YouTube and a Facebook page. They posted videos with techniques for infecting PCs.

The court order allowed Microsoft to disrupt communications between infected machines and Reno, Nevada-based Vitalwerks Internet Solutions.

Boscovich said about 94 percent of all machines infected with the two viruses communicate with hackers through Vitalwerks servers.

Registries will direct suspected malicious traffic to Microsoft servers in Redmond, Washington, instead of to Vitalwerks.

Vole will then filter out communications from PCs infected with another 194 types of malware also being filtered through Vitalwerks.

Vitalwerks and its operational subsidiary No-IP claim to have a very strict abuse policy. To be fair Microsoft has not accused Vitalwerks of involvement in any cybercrime, though it alleges the company failed to take proper steps to prevent its system from being abused.

Obama appoints troll defender to run Patent Office

Obama BarackThe US government has continued to its policy of turning over its watchdogs over to the corporates they are supposed to police, this time giving the US Patent office to a former troll, writes Nick Farrell.

The administration looks set to appoint Phil Johnson, a pharmaceutical industry executive, as the next Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Johnson has so far spent his life attempting to block legislation aimed at reining in patent trolls.  Which makes you wonder what the Obama administration has been smoking.

The top job at the Patent Office has been vacant for around 18-months since the departure of previous director David Kappos in early 2013. Currently, the office is being managed by former Googler Michelle Lee, who was appointed deputy director in December.

Obama was under pressure to replace Lee, although he had done a good job and the White House’s choice of Phil Johnson, who is a long-time lawyer for Johnson & Johnson.

This will effectively mean that anyone hoping for patent reform and tech companies can kiss goodbye to that dream.

In December, Johnson testified before the Senate on behalf of the 21st Century Patent Coalition, a group of companies who opposed a bill that would have made it easier for defendants to challenge low-quality patents, and to recover legal costs in the face of frivolous patent lawsuits. Johnson’s group was probably behind killing the bill.

Johnson has also opposed previous patent reform initiatives, describing them as “almost everything an infringer could ever want.”

To be fair, Johnson’s positionis more that of the pharmaceutical sector, which relies heavily on patents to recoup research spending. But its approach is the antithesis of the problems which face fast-moving sectors like technology.

Still, with someone like him with his hands on the reins, it looks like Obama will be unable to reform the patent system in any meaningful way.

All’s not fair in love and war

romanceThe maker of a dating app is being sued by a former marketing executing in another case where technology companies are being hauled over the coals over their treatment of female employees, writes Nick Farrell.

Former Tinder marketing Vice President Whitney Wolfe is suing the popular dating-app company for sexual harassment and discrimination.

Her lawsuit lists a series of alleged incidents of harassment over roughly 18 months starting in late 2012 and targets Chief Executive Officer Sean Rad and the company’s chief marketing officer, Justin Mateen.

Wolfe said that the pair removed her title as co-founder because she was a woman, and that Mateen insulted her, including calling her a whore at a company party. Rad ignored her complaints.
The company has suspended Mateen pending an ongoing internal investigation, however it does appear that he sent Wolfe “inappropriate” messages.

The company condemns these messages, but believes that Wolfe’s allegations with respect to Tinder and its management are unfounded.”

Wolfe claims it was her who came up with the name “Tinder” for the service in mid-2012, shortly after its creation, because there were worries that its original name, Matchbox, was too similar to Match.com.

Wolfe became romantically involved with Mateen, her boss, who joined the company in late 2012.
In November 2012 she was designated a co-founder but Mateen told her that having a “girl founder” devalued the company, according to the lawsuit and in November 2013, Mateen and Rad removed her co-founder title.

Needless to say the romance broke down and Mateen called her “a desperate loser” in a marketing meeting and told Rad and others she was an alcoholic. He also sent her a series of harassing texts, it states. Wolfe complained to Rad, who would ignore her “or call her a dramatic or emotional girl,” the suit says, adding that in one meeting, Rad told her it was her job to “keep Justin calm.”
The last straw was when Mateen called her a whore at a company party in April and she quit.

Future HP servers will learn from smartphones

HPHere in sunny Barcelona @ the ETSS conference, Mark Potter – HP’s CTO for its Enterprise Group was expounding his company’s vision for how the future will look for file servers.

Basically, the IT industry appears to have woken up to a technology which smartphones have been using for ages – the SoC (System on a Chip). Not revolutionary concept for the fact that Potter suggested that HP would use ARM cores in addition to Intel based processors. Given that Intel and AMD were major sponsors of this show, we’re sure he couldn’t elaborate more. Anyway, Potter was keen to pump up what HP is calling The Machine as a new era in server technology.

HP seems a bit ambivalent in its approach to The Machine because Dr Tom Bradicich, vp for Moonshot Engineering with HP servers suggested that Moonshot was the first step towards The Machine model. Except it isn’t The Machine.

Curiously, HP appears to have announced the Moonshot last month at an event hosted by our old friends – Citrix.

Well, the Moonshot is now a reality and shipping but for some reason Bradicich revealed that initially this product would only be made available through his company’s “US partners”.

Which is a bit strange because most resellers that ChannelEye was speaking to here claimed to have a US presence. So they should all be able to source the product.

Besides SoCs, the other technology which Potter was bigging up was photonics.

We’ve all heard of it before but HP seems to be suggesting that you’ll see products actually utilising photonicsavailable from HP before Q1 2015.

Which will be great because photonics are a key part to HP’s dream of The Machine.

Thanks to photonics, a server won’t have to write information to anywhere – It will simply reside in shared memory.

Sounds impressive but the major advantage to photonics is the energy saving, Potter quoted somebody else as saying that “copper is an energy sucking devil”.

But he’s got a point. Potter revealed that if cloud computing was a country it would be the fifth largest electricity consumer above the UK and just below Japan.

If The Machine really can return such massive energy savings through the use of photonics which HP is suggesting, then the ROI for customers of its channel partners will be significant.

As Potter hinted, a great way of getting enteprises – which have recently been low spenders, to update their data centres.

HP’s channel vision hits Catalan capital

HPWhereas it used to be that every conference & exhibition for North America had to be held in Lost Vagueness [Las Vegas], these days every European major event worth its salt has to be held in Barcelona. So this ChannelEye hack found himself in the Catalan capital listening to HP wax lyrical about the importance of the channel for its future business. And given that today sees the start of its ETSS (ExpertOne Technology & Solutions Summit) conference, there were some heavy duty HP personnel in attendance. They’re all keen to stress how the channel can not only grow HP’s own revenues but its own revenues as well in the process.

One of the key speakers at the Press event was Alessandra Brambilla, HP’s vp for EMEA Enterprise Group channels, she was keen to explain the benefits of HP Unison.

What came across very clearly from all of the presentations was HP’s firm belief that the IT landscape has changed beyound recognition.

We are now in an era of ‘SmartIT’. But no cause for panic because the four key customer demands with SmartIT are built on modules which the channel already knows throughly, namely: – Client/Server; Legacy systems; and Pcs.

Today, however, clients are asking for solutions based on mobility; social networking; cloud storage; and Big Data. But not to worry because HP is keen to share its knowledge with its channel partners.

In fact, it will achieve this objective by sharing the same kind of training it gives its own internal pre-sales workforce with employees of selected partners.

But HP promises more. Brambilla listed the key engagement points with Unison today: –

  • Partner portal
  • Ease of use and quick access to customized information
  • Faster, more competitive quotes
  • The right support to empower partners to win more deals
  • Demand generation
  • Automated and personalised co-marketing asset
  • Market development funds (MDF)

Thhis will apparently lead to an Increase in marketing ROI with a simpler, more-efficient MDF process. Ok?

One thing was blantantly obvious – behind the hype and marketing speak, HP is keen not to lose the advantage it presently enjoys thanks to a broad channel partnership programme. SmartIT or no SmartIT.

HP_barceloan

Left to right: – Matt Latter, Logicalls; Alesandra Brambilla; Andres Miramontes Miras, Taisa Syvalue

 

Dell engages in channel love in

dellbudaTen years ago, the very word Dell was enough to send VARs, VADs and, let’s face it, the rest of the channel into streams of invective, punctuated by words you wouldn’t want your nan to hear you speak. Like the expletive “direct sales”, for example.

But, it seems, everything has changed and now Dell loves the channel and, incredibly, the channel seems to love Dell too.  Channel Eye took time out from our incredibly stressful schedule to spend a day at a security partner reseller conference in Budapest and got to chat to several senior executives and resellers too, for that matter, who spelled out the sea changes that have happened at the Round Rock company.

While Dell is still seen by many as the PC tin maker that put the wind up conventional and indirect players like HP and the rest, it’s made a number of acquisitions in the last few years that mean the barque is now being steered in an entirely different direction. Those include SonicWALL, Quest and others.

The changes have been engineered at the highest level – that is to say by Michael Dell himself – with the assistance of senior exec Cheryl Cook. Unbelievably for an old channel hack like me, 32 percent of Dell’s business now goes the indirect route, worth an estimated $20 billion of revenue, under the umbrella of Partner Direct.

Channel Eye interviewed senior members of the EMEA channel team, including Andy Zollo and Marvin Blough – executive director of Dell’s worldwide channels and alliances. We also had the opportunity to talk to Patrick Sweeney, executive director of product management at the corporation.

Sweeney said: “Dell is in the process of becoming an end to end supplier of scalable systems. Dell continues to build PCs, but relies on value added resellers (VARs) to be trusted advisors [to customers].” He said that Dell is now a serious player in software and security and offers products that he claimed favourably compete with the likes of Cisco, Fortinet and others.  The company, he said, invests heavily in R&D, has a wide breadth of products and the idea of Dell as a major player in security and software is promoted by Michael Dell himself when he makes major announcements.

In fact, Dell has something like 124 VARs in the EMEA region. The trend is that larger companies have started to rely on VARs to help them through the IT maze, whether that be in the cloud, in big data, or in security.  Florian Malecki, who is the international product marketing director at Dell, said his company also relies on value added distributors (VADs) to generate events and training schemes.

How does it all work? Under the Dell umbrella of Partner Direct, the company operates certification for its channel partners at different levels, said Zollo. The tiers are premier partners, preferred partners and registered partners, but, he said, Dell is about to introduce a fourth category – managed service providers (MSPs).  Dell continues to roll out partnership initiatives and concedes that while it still has direct customers, the trend is to move towards an indirect model to allow it to penetrate different markets.  It’s impossible to operate a direct model in the many markets it now plays in.

Zollo says that the company has a “direct touch” sales team that cross sells all the products it has – and this umbrella model means that Dell GCC is able to operate across a wide area of customers and partners.

Who would have thought it? Dell was once a company that wouldn’t even talk to channel publications like ours. But it looks as if it will be talking to us more and more in the future. It relies on its VARs and its VADs for deep levels of specialisation, training and support.

We guess that HP must be gazing at all of this with quite some alarm. And Lenovo, for that matter.

Get yourself a firewall or get stung

Dell logoPatrick Sweeney, executive director of network security at Dell, talked about next generation firewalls and how the world+dog needs them because of increased security threats.

He said Dell processed 50,000 pieces of malware a day and that means 50,000 new counter measures a day too – with updates to its firewalls pushed out between eight and twelve times a day. Mobility is changing and is being compromised – it’s not just the enterprise. Security from little to large companies all face the same problems and threats.

There’s an increase in criminal to criminal activities, with exploit auction houses, and people offering a distribution service as well as Botnet rental.  The biggest companies in the world and many governments have been badly compromised.

Encryption is used offensively by malware designers which makes it hard to defend networks. Algorithms to defend against these threats must be able to cope with encrypted malware too. Defence has to be at multiple levels, including deep packet inspection to filter content, offer anti-spam, SSL inspection, intrusion protection and others.

Dell has introduced several new features to its SonicWALL offerings including new content filtering policies that are downloaded when people are on the road – an enforced client deployment mode for CFS and AV. Application control is important too, so that highly threatening applications are prevented from being runnable on the network.

Dell to extend its channel model

dellchannDespite the BBC World Service this morning claiming that Dell will carry on making desktops, notebooks and servers in perpetuity, there’s another string  to the hardware giant’s bow.

And here in Budapest there’s a three day security conference which is exclusively about software. And, of course, security.

This all follows Dell’s acquisitions of Force 10 and SonicWALL – it hopes that will help it build its data centre business.

Andy Zollo, VP of Dell EMEA, opened up by asking how long the Brits stayed up last night. Apparently until 3AM, it seems. Growth areas include the cloud, big data, and mobile. Mobile he said generates 592MB per month for each device. And 50 percent of mobile device traffic is video. He said by the end of this year there will be more mobile devices than people on the planet.

Dell’s revenues from security in EMEA accounts for 51 percent of revenues. Its products it is positioning include security and data protection.  It has formed a security named account team covering different sectors with around 2,000 customers across Europe. It intends to build its channel presence in the future. There was a lot of direct business while SonicWALL was largely indirect.  Zollo says Dell EMEA is placing its best on the indirect model.