Author: Nick Farrell

EMC nearly married HP

Posted on September 23, 2014 by - News

weddingIn a merger that would have ranked alongside that of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, EMC was seriously considering tying the knot with the maker of expensive printer ink, HP.

A Wall Street Journal report suggested that EMC and HP have investigated a potential merger deal that would have created a super-vendor worth close to $130 billion.

The deal was approached as a “merger of equals” and was in discussion over the past year. HP CEO Meg Whitman would have become CEO of the combined company, while EMC’s Joe Tucci would have been President.

Fortunately, the deal fell apart because both companies had concerns over whether their respective shareholders would have approved it.

That is not to say it was completely bad.  HP would have gained EMC’s storage expertise and domination over the mid-range storage sector. HP’s forays into cloud computing have shown the strategy of a chicken with its head cut off.

EMC has some good technology in cloud computing, commodity hardware and modular approaches to IT, but these are successful at the expense of its highly lucrative core businesses.Its VMware subsidiary is doing well, but it is not making enough for the outfit to be a truly happy bunny.

What the pair clearly forgot was that they compete for business; integrating the two operations would have been a nightmare for managers, but great for accountants.

Fortunately, the idea died a death before anyone heard about it.

Phone 4U shafted by suppliers claims founder

Posted on September 23, 2014 by - News

Finding-Nemo-Shark-Wallpaper-HDPhone 4U’s founder, John Caudwell, blamed the outfit’s demise on its mobile network suppliers and private equity owners, BC Partners.

Caudwell, who started the chain of phone shops in the 1980s and sold it for £1.5bn in 2006, said Vodafone, EE and other networks had refused to supply the retailer, in a strategy to reduce competition and fatten their margins.

Phones 4u’s private equity owners had left the company financially weakened so that it could not defend itself, he said.

BC had acquired the chain in 2011 in a £610m deal, only to allow it to be saddled with debts of £635m.

“It’s astonishingly ruthless. Vodafone have had millions upon millions from Phones 4u over 25 years,” he said.

“It’s dreadful for British business. It gives us a terrible reputation, it destroys jobs and it is a terribly unhealthy environment to do business… The private equity houses left the business laden with debt and that weakened their ability to defend themselves and fight.”

Judging by the way that EE and Vodafone jumped and bought a portion of Phones 4u’s old stores, Caudwell might have a point.

Vodafone will take over 140 Phones 4u stores while EE will take over 58 shops. The deal will see the jobs of more than one thousand people saved as staff are to remain working at their current locations.

Phones 4u went into administration on September 15 after failing to retain EE and and Vodafone as carrier partners.

The Vodafone deal will preserve 887 jobs. The deal with EE, announced Monday, saves a further 359 jobs. In addition, Dixons has offered jobs to those working at Phones 4u confessionals in its stores.

The Vodafone and EE-owned stores will be rebranded by their new owners, though it’s not clear how long that will take. Dixons Carphone plans to make an offer to acquire as many as 100 stores and will invite the staff at those stores to apply for available positions.

Vodafone and EE have claimed that Caudwell is off-base with his remarks.  Phones 4u management told them that they could not stock the phones because of the company’s large debts.

Vodafone said: “Phones 4u was offered repeated opportunities to propose competitive distribution terms to enable us to conclude a new agreement, but was unable to do so on terms which were commercially viable.

Administrator PWC said that 362 of the retailer’s stores will close, immediately costing 1,697 staff their jobs. Another 720 people have been retained in the short term to assist with the closure programme, the accountants added, but will then be made redundant.

 

Murdered whistleblowers can still share documents

Posted on September 23, 2014 by - News

dead moleA whistleblower, who is murdered by the men in black, can now make sure that all their secrets are broadcast all over the internet.

A new dark web service called ‘Dead Man Zero’  claims to offer potential whistleblowers a bit more peace of mind by providing a system that will automatically publish and distribute their secrets should they die, get jailed, or get injured.

It is the ultimate revenge site against a government which arrests or kills you.

“So what if something happens to you?…Especially if you’re trying to do something good like blow the whistle on something evil or wrong in society or government. There should be consequences if you are hurt, jailed, or even killed for trying to render a genuine and risky service to our free society.”

“Now you have some protection. If ‘something happens’ to you, then your disclosures can be made public regardless,” the site promises.

What you do is upload your files, encrypted with a password, to a cloud storage service. Then you include the link, along with the password and an optional description of your material. The site will then add its own layer of encryption, too. You are then given your own unique URL to log in from, accessible only using the Tor browser.

If you don’t log back into it once a day, week or month (those are the options), your documents and respective password will be published on the site, and sent to a list of email addresses that you provide in advance.

Ideally these would be hacks you trust to do the story justice, rather than your tin foil hat mate who runs a site which claims that the world is run by lizards.

The site can also be accessed via a smart phone, assuming you can browse hidden services on it.

For a user to upload their archive, they are required to pay 0.30 Bitcoin (around £70 or $120 at today’s rate). More than 399 sets of documents have been uploaded, and 17 will be released if their owner doesn’t log in within the next 24 hours.

Of course, there is a certain amount of trust required here. It could be a site set up by the men in black to get your documents and lull you into a false sense of security.

It will also protect any blackmailers of the rich and famous, or ex-boyfriends looking for post-mortem revenge.

Nvidia wrestles with ARM connections

Posted on September 23, 2014 by - News

arm-wrestlingARM Holdings Chief Executive Officer Simon Segars defended his smartphone graphics technology which Nvidia claims it invented.

Nvidia is currently taking Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm to court for using the technology in its phones and accusing both companies of infringing its property patents on graphics chip technology.

Nvidia said Samsung devices made with graphics technology from ARM, Qualcomm and Imagination Technologies illegally use its intellectual property, or IP.

Segars said that the company stood behind its IP and will work with its partners when something like this happened.

Nvidia is not suing ARM or Imagination yet but it did say it would ask the US International Trade Commission to prevent shipments of Samsung devices containing ARM’s Mali or Imagination’s PowerVR graphics architectures, as well as Qualcomm’s graphics technology.

Nvidia has to play this carefully. Nvidia depends on ARM’s technology to make its Tegra chips for tablets and cars.

Segars said that it did “create a bit of a curious situation… But we do a lot of business with a lot of people.”

Microsoft no longer Trustworthy

Posted on September 22, 2014 by - News

bad-dogSoftware King of the World, Microsoft thinks that it is Trustworthy Computing Group is surplus to requirements and is shutting the whole lot down.

Its role will be taken over either by the company’s Cloud and Enterprise Division or its Legal & Corporate Affairs group. The move will mean the death of the Microsoft Security Response Centre and the related functions – as well as the cybercrime unit.

So far Vole has not announced the move publically but it has been leaked to several blogs and, given that Microsoft is trying to save cash, is every likely to be true.

The idea is to integrate the Trustworthy Computing work into Microsoft’s engineering teams. Microsoft has confirmed that an unspecified number of jobs from the group will be cut.

Trustworthy Computing will be missed, at least by outsiders. For years, the TwC group at Microsoft played an important role in the security industry.

It was started in 2002, and appeared to make huge improvements to Volish security. It dealt with some hard security topics, and seemed to get security into Microsoft’s thought.

It did those things, however it was more PR and spin for outsiders. Microsoft insiders said that the unit was there to create the perception that Microsoft had a handle on security, while at the same time getting the experience it needed within its own divisions.

Microsoft walking away from it is part of the mind-set where enterprise desktops give way to cloud and mobile and ‘things’.

 

Amazon can’t read Germany

Posted on September 22, 2014 by - News

german strikeUS online bookseller Amazon is continuing its war against the German unions despite multiple strikes shutting down its business.

American companies generally do not understand trade unions, which they see as a communistic method by which workers get things like decent wages and conditions which prevent the shareholders and management becoming as wealthy as they should. In the US, trade unions are identified as being in the pockets of organised crime.

In the EU, where things are a little more balanced, unions have a little more respect and power.  But not, in Amazon with appears to be going through the sort of battles that Margaret Thatcher had with the coal miners in the 1980s.

Workers at German warehouses of online retailer Amazon.com took strike action again on Monday as labour union Verdi pressed its demands in a long-running dispute over pay and conditions.

Verdi said in a statement it had called out workers to strike at distribution centers in Bad Hersfeld, Leipzig, Graben and Rheinberg. Verdi had in June staged walkouts at three of those sites.

Amazon hires 9,000 warehouse staff at nine distribution centers in Germany, its second-biggest market behind the United States, plus 14,000 seasonal workers.

Verdi wants Amazon to raise pay for workers at its distribution centres in accordance with collective bargaining agreements across the mail order and retail industry in Germany and has organised several stoppages over the past year.

Amazon insists that its warehouse staff are logistics workers and says they receive above-average pay by the standards of that industry.

Putin wants Obama’s internet kill switch

Posted on September 22, 2014 by - News

Putin + gunTsar Vladimir Putin of Russia is envious of the fact that President Barak Obama can flick a switch and turn off the internet.

Apparently the Kremlin is to discuss taking control of the .ru domain and measures to disconnect Russians from the web in the event of a serious military confrontation or big anti-government protests at home.

Putin will discuss what steps Moscow might take to disconnect Russian citizens from the web “in an emergency”, the Vedomosti newspaper reported.

It means that it would strengthen Russia’s sovereignty in cyberspace, but also bring the domain .ru under state control.

Putin controls the TV and the country’s newspapers, but has left the internet as an open place for discussion. At the moment it is policed by state-sponsored bloggers and Putin fans.

The move seems to come as Putin is squaring off against Western media which it thinks is unfair in  its coverage of the invasion of the Ukraine.  Apparently Putin is furious that the Western media does not agree with his decision to arm Russian nationalists so that they can shoot down passenger jets or refuse to print his claim that the Ukraine government are really Nazis.

Of course the fact that the Russians beat up a BBC team that went to investigate reports of Russian servicemen killed in Ukraine does not really endear him to the Western hacks.

According to Vedomosti, Russia plans to introduce the new measures early next year.  Russia has mooted building a “national internet”, which would in effect be a domestic intranet. These proposals go further, expanding the government’s control over ordinary Russian internet users and their digital habits.

It would be technically possible for Moscow to shut off the internet because Russia has “surprisingly few” international exchange points. All of them are under the control of national long-distance operations, like Rostelecom, which is onside with Putin.

Putin is popular but the economy, which is already teetering on the verge of recession, is reeling from ever more stringent Western sanctions over Moscow’s alleged support for separatists in eastern-Ukraine.

AMD ready to bang bang Maxwell’s silver hammer

Posted on September 22, 2014 by - News

maxwellMystery surrounds the launch of a new AMD product this week, with pundits suggesting that it might be a new GPU.

AMD released a GPU related teaser comes a day after NVIDIA showed off its new  Maxwell graphics card which include the GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970. The launch was important because it is supposed to be a new era of powerful and highly efficient graphics cards. AMD might have an answer to that.

It released a tweet connected to its matrix pills campaign to market the new GPUs — one is blue and one is red. A similar marketing campaign was used during the launch of the HD 7770 GHz graphics card.

The Verdetrol pills were used as a teaser for the launch of the first GHz edition graphic card from AMD but they did another teaser with the Radeon R9 295X2 where they used two packs of chips and a water bottle to indicate their water-cooled dual GPU solution.

Since the marketing is similar there’s a blue pill which might indicate a water cooling solution such as the one that was leaked a while ago and the red pill may indicate the Radeon chip which will be used to power the graphics card based on the GCN architecture.

Smart money is that it is the launch of the new Radeon R9 285X sometime in late September.

AMD is not just messing around with the pills either. AMD has a teaser for a FirePro product where they ask “Can you name our first product that processed graphics independently of the CPU”.

This could be related to either a Radeon or a FirePro product.  It will be a year since AMD has introduced most of their lineup next month and will probably be the best time for AMD to offer new replacements.

Nevertheless, AMD has to do something to tackle Nvidia’s Maxwell and if has new high-end chips ready then it will need to play them fast.

Larry Ellison quits

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

Larry EllisonMuch feared Oracle founder Larry Ellison has surprised everyone by stepping down as CEO and replacing himself with a two headed monster made from the bodies of Safra Catz and Mark Hurd.

Ellison will still be the executive chairman of Oracle’s board, as well as the company’s chief technology officer.

Catz has been at Oracle for 15 years, serving as an executive in a variety of roles. She has been a president since 2004. From 2005 to 2008, she was CFO. While Ellison has chewed up and spat out many executives, that has been fairly cool for Catz, who has not only survived but thrived.

Soft porn star fancier Mark Hurd has been at Oracle since 2010 and was previously CEO of HP. He was ousted after fudging his expense accounts while trying to pick up a b-movie starlet named Jodie Fisher.

Adam Lashinsky at Fortune revealed that Hurd was thrown out because he did not want to disclose publicly that Fisher, and her attorney Gloria Allred, were accusing him of sexual harassment. The board wanted Hurd to disclose the charge, because they knew it would eventually get out.

As Hurd fought over disclosure, the board gradually lost faith in Hurd. Hurd was not exactly popular at HP – he fired people and killed the company’s R&D budget.  This made him loved by Wall Street but unloved by HP.

It is not clear why Ellison wants out of Oracle which he founded in the late ’70s. The company’s software has become a key backbone for the internet and is widely used by the government and banking sectors.

Through aggressive sales methods, Ellison turned Oracle into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Its market cap is about $183 billion. It’s expected to do $40.2 billion in sales this year.

Ellison is the seventh richest man in the world, with a net worth of $46 billion.

But Ellison was, how do you say, a little aggressive. His motto for life comes from Genghis Khan: “It’s not sufficient I succeed. Everyone else must fail”. While Gates was spending his cash trying to save Africans from the mosquito,  Ellison was buying his own Hawaiian island, and many homes, yachts, and cars.  He was also investing huge wodges of cash to beat New Zealand in the America Cup.

All this makes his exit seem very strange indeed. In fact, we would not be surprised if he has to fend off rumours that he has some illness which prevents him from working.  It would have to be a nasty illness that stops Larry doing anything Larry does not want to do.  Of course his quitting could simply because he wants to build an iron man suit and save the world.

But Oracle Board’s Presiding Director, Michael Boskin said that Ellison had made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy.

 

SAP agrees to Concur

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeSAP, the maker of expensive business software, which no one understands,  has written a cheque for expense management software maker Concur Technologies.

The all-stock deal is valued at $7.3 billion and will help SAP expand its esoteric presence in cloud computing.

SAP said in a statement it would offer $129 per share for the outfit and, while  this is 20 percent more than the September 17 closing price, it is lower than the $130.36 high Concur had at the beginning of the year.

SAP’s offer is rather generous. Concur is valued at $7.3 billion. Including debt, the offer represents an enterprise value of about $8.3 billion. However it will give SAP 12 million more cloud users.

In a statement SAP Chief Executive Bill McDermott said that buying Concur was consistent with SAPs focus on the business network.

Concur has 23,000 clients that include companies, governments and universities, with more than 25 million users of its business expense and travel management software and services.

More than a third of Concur users run SAP software and the southern-Germany based company expects to add Concur customers.

The Concur acquisition gives SAP deeper access to an area of corporate finance where it is not dominant. “SAP now has a business network that is 75 percent bigger than Amazon, eBay and Alibaba combined,” said CEO McDermott.

The company entered the cloud business quite late in 2012 after spending $7.7 billion on buying internet-based computing companies Ariba and SuccessFactors.

It wants to get 3 billion-3.5 billion euros in sales from cloud computing by 2017 out of a total of at least 22 billion. McDermott said that SAP will raise the outlook after completion of the Concur acquisition.

 

 

Mozilla closes its labs

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

scilence-will-fall-doctor-who-21732985-1152-792Open Sauce Mozilla Labs has been closed and the shutdown was either kept under wraps for months, or just forgotten about.

When Google Labs closed there was much fuming – after all it meant that the search engine outfit had also closed many projects.  But Google announced it, while Mozilla, which is supposed to be open saucy and transparent didn’t.

In fact the organisation even left the Mozilla Labs Website still accessible, even if the last post was December 2013. Justin Scott, who wrote the last blog post left Mozilla in March 2014.

For those who came in late, March 2014 was the month in which Brendan Eich become CEO of Mozilla, only to resign within a couple of weeks on account of his views on gay marriage which was seen as counter to Mozilla’s ethos of inclusiveness.

Ian Elliot thinks that the removal of Mozilla Labs had obviously happened before this furore.

David Ascher, who was Head of Mozilla Labs, is now VP of Product at Mozilla Foundation,  Aaron Druck, a designer at Mozilla Labs is now with Google.

 

There’s a billion websites on the internet

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

sir timThe number of websites has gone above one billion for the first time and is still growing.

According to figures updated in real time by online tracker Internet Live Stats and tweeted by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the World Wide Web, more than a billion companies and individuals have their own page.

The news comes as the agency responsible for managing addresses on the internet expands choices far beyond “.com” and “.net” to provide more online real estate for the booming ranks of websites.

That sort of growth is not back for a technology which turned 25 in April this year.  The WWW was born from a technical paper from Sir Tim, then an obscure, young computer scientist at a CERN lab in Switzerland. Sir Tim outlined a way to easily access files on linked computers.

More than 40 percent of the world’s population now has an Internet connection, and the number of Internet users in the world is quickly approaching three billion with almost 50 percent of them coming from Asia.

This means 2,334,479 emails are sent in one second, some of them are not for get rich schemes, or penis enlargement.

More than 75 percent of websites today aren’t active but are “parked domains or similar.” More than 88,670 YouTube videos are viewed in a second. It is not clear how many of these are cat related.

The number of new websites more than doubled between 2011 and 2012, but it decreased by more than 20 million in 2013.

On the downside more than 25,000 websites have been hacked and are probably serving up some of the emails we mentioned earlier.

 

 

Apple’s iPhone6 will be tricky to fix

Posted on September 19, 2014 by - News

maxresdefaultGadget repair firm iFixit has voided the warranty on an iPhone 6 to see what was under the bonnet and found that it would be a major headache to repair.

Apparently to get inside you have to extract two proprietary Pentalobe screws, and then lever the entire front display assembly away from the rest of the body with a suction cup, being careful not to rip the TouchID sensor wire clean off. Apple clearly does not want anyone looking inside or fixing it themselves.

The battery is bigger than previous iPhones — it has a 2915mAh battery, which is nearly double the 1560mAh cell in the iPhone 5S. However, it smaller than most Phablets, which means that it lacks the juice of its rivals. The Galaxy Note 3 has a 3200mAh up its sleeve.

The iPhone 6 also has a disappointing 1GB of RAM. Most high-end Android phones have 2-3GB.

iFixit technicians also discovered a Murata (6981.T) wifi module, a Broadcom touchscreen controller, and chips from Skyworks, Avago and TriQuint.

The phones are Apple’s first to include NFC radio chips used for the new Apple Pay mobile payment platform. The NFC chip in the iPhone 6 Plus comes from NXP Semiconductors (NXPI.O).

NXP also supplies a motion co-processor, key to making the iPhone’s sensors work without draining its battery.

As in other iPhones, Apple has designed its own main processor with technology licensed from ARMand in this device it is the A8 chip.

The iPhone 6 Plus opened by iFixit also included a NAND flash memory chip, used for storing music and photos, made by SK Hynix.  Apple in the past has depended on multiple companies to supply its memory chips.

 

US confirms Chinese government behind hacks

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

1220aA US Senate panel has ruled that hackers associated with the Chinese government have repeatedly infiltrated the computer systems of US airlines, technology companies and other contractors involved in the movement of US troops and military equipment.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s year-long probe found the military’s US Transportation Command, or Transcom, was aware of only two out of at 20 such cyber intrusions within a single year.

It found gaps in reporting requirements and a lack of information sharing among US government bodies which left the US military oblivious to the computer compromises of its contractors.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee’s chairman was keen to focus on the Chinese hackers rather that the big defence industry’s cock-ups.

He said that the peacetime intrusions into the networks of key defence contractors are more evidence of China’s aggressive actions in cyberspace.

But cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer with the security firm Crowdstrike, said that China had for years shown a keen interest in the logistical patterns of the U.S. military.

While its military uses secret or top-secret networks that are not on the Internet, but the US private companies hired by the US do not.

In the year beginning June 1, 2012, there were about 50 intrusions or other cyber events into the computer networks of Transcom contractors, the 52-page report stated.

At least 20 of those were successful intrusions attributed to an “advanced persistent threat,” a term used to designate sophisticated threats commonly associated with attacks against governments. All of those intrusions were attributed to China.

Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the committee’s top Republican, called for a “central clearinghouse” that makes it easy for contractors to report suspicious cyber activity.

 

Apple to release two new iPads

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News

eye-pads

Two new eye pads

Of course Apple itself has not announced it, it has leaked it as an official rumour to its favourite journalists who have lovingly published it.

The company plans to unveil the sixth generation of its iPad and the third edition of the iPad mini, as well as its operating system OS X Yosemite.  It appears that Yosemite is the same as previous versions with some cosmetic changes to excite the punters so they believe they are getting something different.

The iPad is expected to have a 9.7 inch screen, while the new version of the iPad mini will have a 7.9 inch screen.

They will be in the shops as part of Apple’s drive to sell goods during the holiday season.

Apple needs to do a lot better if it is going to keep its high share price. The outfit sold 13.3 million iPads in the quarter ended June, falling short of analysts’ projections for more than 14 million.