Hitachi Data Systems buys oXya

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeThe IT division of Hitachi said it is to buy oxYa.

The company is a provider of services for cloud and SAP products. The acquisition will be complete by the end of March and the 500 employees and the company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

HDS did not say how much it paid for the company, which has over 200,000 people using its SAP services.

The company said it will now be able to offer extended portfolio of cloud and managed services for its customers and the acquisition will help HDS to collaborate and deliver and management of large environments.

The reason for the acquisition, according to VP Hicham Abdessamad, was because customers demand “as a service” options that let them keep up with the fast pace of cloud based systems.

He said oxYa offered an expanded set of application-as-a-service offerings for both the hybrid and for public clouds.

 

2015 brings is crunch time for smart watches

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Swiss Watches the BrandApple releases its watches this year and that’s led CCS Insight to propose that this year is make or break time for the relatively new category.

It estimates that shipments of wearables will reach 75 million in 2015, a 158 percent increase compared to last year.

And the Apple watch will account for over a quarter of wearables that ship this year, it believes.

Analysts at the company believe that Apple will sell about 20 million watches by the end of this year. But if Apple is wrong – and the jury is still very much out on the future of such devices, it’s likely to hurt the entire wearables category of technology.

Right now, it’s fitness bands that are driving growth with products from companies like Fitbit and Jawbone.

It thinks that sales of these devices will double in 2015 to 40 million units.

It also says action cameras was the second biggest category in 2014, with six million of them selling in 2014.

 

Internet of things provokes security questions

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsLarge enterprises seeking to get to grips with the internet of things (IoT) will have a whole new series of challenges to meet.

That’s according to Gartner, which said identity and access management (IAM) won’t be able to scale or to manage the complexity that the IOT brings to enterprises.

The problem is that enterprises will need a method to define and manage the identities of entities – by which Gartner means people, services and things, inside one framework.

This Gartner calls the Identity of Things (IDoT) which will have to be able to include all entity identities and also to define relationships between these entities.

It all sounds very complex but it is a problem that chief information officers (CIOs) will have to learn.

Gartner did not say whether such definitions have even been thought of yet, but is holding a conference on March 16-17th in London to hammer out the different problems and approaches.

 

Cisco to invest in French starters

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Cooked_snailsUS network equipment maker Cisco is to invest $100 million in French start-ups according to French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

The investment is part of a partnership between the company and the French state that aims to develop better networks, improve cybersecurity, provide training 200,000 people over three years and finance academic research.

A statement from Valls’ office said that Cisco would assist digital innovation thanks to an  in French startups.

The deal was announced after Valls met Cisco CEO, John Chambers. It is not clear what Cicso’s cunning plan in France is yet, but we suspect it will be part of Chamber’s cloud strategy.

Recently SFR France announced that it was using Cisco products in its upgrade from IPv4 to IPv6.

 

EU furious with Obama’s defence

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Obama BarackThe European Commission is angry at US president’s Barack Obama claims that the EU was  intentionally setting up commercially-driven roadblocks to prevent US technology companies from operating here.

Obama claimed these roadblocks were put in place to stop US tech companies like Google and Facebook from doing business in Europe and competing fairly with homegrown rivals.

Instead, Obama praised the US companies for being “more commercially-driven than anything else” while the EU companies were rubbish because they could not really compete with the glorious US corporations.

Obama said that the US “owned the internet” and it was created by US companies. “And oftentimes what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial interests.”

He said that the Germans “given its history with the Stasi” are very sensitive to [privacy] issues.

All this seems particularly dark when you consider that the roadblock appear to be antitrust investigations held by the European Commission against Google.

That sort of pro-corporate US Imperialism did not go down too well with the Europeans.  After all it was a British person who invented the world wide web.

A European Commission spokesperson told the Financial Times: “This point – that regulations are only there to shelter our companies – is out of line. Regulations should make it easier for non-EU companies to access the single market. It is in [US companies’] interest that things are enforced in a uniform manner.”

However, there is more to it than that. Pressure is mounting on the EU to do something about US companies’ tax avoidance efforts, as well as prevent companies from taking a monopolistic stranglehold of any one market.

Last year, Google was made to comply with Europe’s “right to be forgotten” which allows people to request their personal details are removed from the company’s search engine results.

Catalan MEP Ramon Tremosa told the FT: “President Obama forgets or maybe isn’t aware that among the dozens of complaints in the Google antitrust case, there are several US companies.”

Tremosa added: “Some companies, like [search engine] Yelp, have no problem going public. Others don’t want to attack Google only because they fear retaliation measures, such as demotion/exclusion and penalties supposedly applied by Google to some rival companies.”

FBI captures its most wanted cyber criminal

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

The_UntouchablesThe Untouchables have finally fingered the collar of the world’s most wanted “cybercriminal”.

Noor Aziz Uddin, 52, was wanted for his alleged involvement in an international telecommunications scheme that defrauded victims of amounts in excess of $50 million.

He was found in Pakistan following a two-and-a-half year manhunt. Aziz Uddin’s presumed accomplice, Farhan Arshad, 41, was also arrested in the pre-dawn raid carried out by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency in Karachi.

The FBI had offered separate rewards of up to $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of both Aziz Udin and Arshad, having issued arrest warrants for the men on 29 June, 2012.

“(The telecommunications scheme) defrauded unsuspecting individuals, companies, and government entities, to include large telecom companies, in both the United States and abroad,” the FBI’s Most Wanted files on the pair stated.

“Between November of 2008 and April of 2012, Noor Aziz Uddin is alleged to have compromised computer systems and conducted the scheme which ultimately defrauded victims of amounts in excess of $50 million.”

The international operation extended into Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Spain, Singapore, Italy, and Malaysia, according to the FBI.

Aziz Uddin was arrested by Interpol in Malaysia but let go due to a lack of evidence.

Dotcom denies defence case collapsing

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

budillionaire-kim-dotcomKim Dotcom’s US lawyer has denied that a guilty plea by one of the Megaupload’s former employees could cause his case to collapse.

Andrus Nomm did a deal with prosecutors where he was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement while working for the now defunct file-sharing site.

The US is trying to extradite Mr Dotcom, who founded Megaupload, from New Zealand to stand trial.

Nomm, a 36-year-old Estonian citizen, agreed to the movie studio’s estimate of $400m of harm to copyright owners as part of the deal.

Also as part of the deal Nomm had acknowledged that through his work as a computer programmer for Megaupload, he had become aware of copyright-infringing material being stored on its sites, including films and TV shows that had contained FBI anti-piracy warnings.

Assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell said that the conviction was a significant step forward in the largest criminal copyright case in US history.

Dotcom has long maintained that he had not encouraged users to upload pirated material, and has said he cannot be held responsible for what others had stored on his service.

He said that he had no grudge against Nomm, saying that he had nothing but compassion and understanding for Andrus Nomm and I hope he will soon be reunited with his son.

In an interview with Radio New Zealand, Mr Dotcom’s lawyer attempted to play down the significance of the latest development.

Nomm was interested in just getting one year and being done with this, essentially he lost on procedure rather than merit.  It looked more like a scripted guilty plea that was more of a Hollywood public relations stunt.

He thought it strange that Nomm pleaded guilty as Nomm was involved particularly in video streaming which was not a copyright crime in the United States.

He also said as part of his plea bargain that no filtering was going on, but the failure to filter was at most a civil and not a criminal issue.

The issue as to whether all this case is civil and not criminal appears to be at the heart of Dotcom’s defence. If the movie studios can convince the US government that its civil cases are criminal conspiracies then it can use government-funded police as private security guards and lock people up rather than suing for damages.

An extradition hearing for Mr Dotcom and three of the other accused is scheduled to take place in Auckland in June.

US spooks hide in hard drives

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

spyIf you own hard-drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba all your data could have been seen by US spooks.

According to Kaspersky Lab, the US National Security Agency figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Micron and Samsung.

Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.

The Russian outfit did not name the US as the country behind the software, but said it was closely linked to Stuxnet, which was a NSA-led effort.

A former NSA employee told Reuters that Kaspersky’s analysis was correct, and that people still in the spy agency valued these espionage programmes as highly as Stuxnet. Another former intelligence operative confirmed that the NSA had developed the prized technique of concealing spyware in hard drives.

Kaspersky published the technical details of its research on Monday, a move that could help infected institutions detect the spying programs, some of which trace back as far as 2001

The announcement could lead to a backlash against Western technology, in countries such as China, which is already drafting regulations that would require most technology suppliers to provide copies of their software code for inspection.

Kaspersky said the spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.

Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.

The information was news to Western Digital, Seagate and Micron who said it was the first they had heard of it. Toshiba and Samsung declined to comment and IBM just ignored hacks requests.

LTE gains grip on the market

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

PhoneBy the end of 2014 over 100 million people were using LTE Advanced networks and that’s set to grow so that by 2018 a billion people will be covered.

That’s according to a report from ABI Research which said a number of developments this year will spur the makeup of 4G networks.

Those include an LTE spectrum auction in India on the 25th of this month. France has recently confirmed the 700MHz frequency band can be used for telco services.

ABI Research said it expects “fierce competition” in the marketplace over the next four years as more LTE and LTE Advanced systems are rolled out.

According to ABI, there were 49 commercially available LTE Advanced networks globally, with Europe leading the way, followed by the Asia Pacific region. However, the USA is top in population coverage at 7.8 percent with AT&T, Spring, Verizon and T-Mobile all in the fray to capture the market.

Tablet shipments set to slump

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

gala_appleApple is likely to hit a pothole for sales of its iPad this year with one report estimating shipments will slump by 40 percent in this calendar quarter.

But it won’t just be Apple that will be hit by the slump, according to a report in Taiwanese wire Digitimes.

All manufacturers are likely to see a fall as shipments of large screen smartphones – so called phablets – start to erode the tablet market.

Digitimes quotes its own intelligence unit saying that shipments of tablets worldwide will be 244 million this year, a drop on last year of something like 11.8 percent.

The tablet market also faces competition from low end notebooks which are to some extent being subsidised by Microsoft and other vendors.

Tablets are not generally seen by people as products that need upgrading. Apple will have to rethink its strategy on the sector as it prepares to launch more iPad models this year.

Infosys pays $200 million for US firm

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

India_flagIndian firm Infosys said today that it has spent $200 million to buy a company that specialises in automation technology.

The Bangalore based company bought Panaya, which is based in New Jersey.

Infosys has been seeking for some years to diversify its business after its initial success came in the outsourcing marketplace.

According to CEO Vishal Sikka, the company wants to leverage the importance of the cloud and AI. Sikka said that buying Panasya was an important step in diversifying its current lines of business.

Panaya sells CloudQuality, automation in the cloud and is intended as an automation method.

Sikka said: “This [acquisition] will help amplify the potential of our people, freeing us from the drudgery of many repetitive tasks, so we may focus more on the important strategic challenges faced by our clients.”

Infosys has over 165,000 employees worldwide and works in 50 countries.

Banks hit by cyber crooks

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

wargames-hackerRespected anti virus company Kaspersky Labs believes that crooks have targeted banks and that could lead to as much as one billion dollars of losses.

Kaspersky thinks the attacks were made using so-called phishing scams to access up to 100 banks’ networks and so gained access to cash machines and drew out the money.

But the attacks are confined mostly to Russia, with some attacks made on banks in Ukraine and China.

The company worked with Interpol on an investigation and it claims that the attack is one of the most significant security breaches yet.

The amount is difficult to pin down and it’s believed the billion dollar figure may have been overstated.

The crooks involved in the scam are believed to still be active but there’s no indication on where they’re based or how they gained access to ATMs.

Apple wants to build legendary nightmare

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

Titans were nightmare monsters from Greek legend.

Titans were nightmare monsters from Greek legend.

The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell of a yarn which claims that Apple wants to get into the automotive industry and make self-driving cars named after legendary nightmares. 

Apparently, the numbers people have looked up the numbers and concluded that there is a gap in the market for outrageously priced cars which need to be replaced every year because some ridiculously trivial “update” has been added.

Of course the news has not come from Apple,  it is leaving that announcement to its unpaid press officers – or journalists, as they like to call themselves.  Steve Jobs wanted an iCar so apparently it will happen.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has hundreds of people working on a top secret project: an electric minivan.   Apparently, this job is “massive” and is codenamed Titan – named after the godlike beings who tried to destroy the world.

The project is expected to last years, and it’s entirely possible that Apple will say “sod this for a game of soldiers” lets go back to making expensive toys.

However for the next 20 years you can expect lots of sittings of cars which the Tame Apple Press will try to convince you are the prototype.  Gizmodo, for example said

“Recently, a janky-looking Dodge Caravan outfitted with what appears to be self-driving car technology has been spotted around the Bay Area. However, it’s worth noting that that minivan might just be doing work for Apple Maps.”

So in other words, every souped up van a reporter sees for the next 20 years might be Apple’s self-driving van.  We are not sure that we can put up with it.

Insurance industry drags feet on big data

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News


next-years-mainframe-model-comes-in-nearly-half-the-spaceThe insurance industry is in danger of falling behind other companies because it is not interested in the latest digital technology.

Reuters reported that while some insurers are using developments such as telematics, or social media sources, to increase the amount of information they have about customers to reduce claims and make insurance cheaper for all most are luddite laggers.

Famously we will probably need  “black boxes” in our cars so that we can be rewarded with lower insurance premiums if we drive carefully.

But apparently when it comes to Big Data, insurance companies are saying a big “no.”

This is because the insurance industry is still locked in the early 20th century, where pen and paper were mightier even that the typewriter.

Staff at Lloyd’s, home to more than 90 trading syndicates in London’s financial district, still trundle suitcases of claim forms for complex insurance transactions.

Lloyd’s Chief Executive Inga Beale has said the industry needs to take technology on board to maintain its role in global business. The firm recently appointed a Chief Data Officer and Beale said the sector needs to attract new, tech-savvy talent.

Part if the difficulty is that there are a mass of different systems out there and firms are often  swallowed up by bigger insurers, makes it hard to streamline technology.

Firms might like the idea of technology, but cannot be bothered spending because they are having trouble balancing their books with bond yields at record lows.

This is despite the fact that a report from Morgan Stanley and Boston Consulting Group says the first movers will clean up.

They say a full transformation to becoming a digital company could cut an insurer’s combined ratio by 21 percentage points, in other words making the firm more profitable. Expenses could fall by 10 percent of premiums and claims by 8 percent.

 

War between LG and Samsung turns ugly

Posted on February 16, 2015 by - News

Newspaper Seller, 1939The competition between LG and Samsung appears to have taken an ugly turn with the arrest of a senior LG manager on a charge of deliberately damaging Samsung products.

An LG Electronics spokeswoman confirmed on Sunday that Jo Seong-jin and two other employees have been indicted by local prosecutors.

The impending court case continues a run of disputes between the cross-town rivals. The two companies compete on several fronts, including televisions and home appliances, and have quarrelled publicly.

Samsung filed an official complaint in September, accusing Jo and other LG employees of deliberately damaging Samsung washers at retail stores in Germany. The police investigated and found that it was all true.

LG had agreed to pay for what it called “accidental damage” to four machines after mediation by German authorities.  However it seemed that it couldn’t resist taking a pot shot at the quality of its rival’s products at the same time and Samsung lashed back at slanderous claims and filed an official complaint.

Ham Yoon-keun, a lawyer who will be defending Jo in court, said in a statement provided by LG said that it was questionable whether there is sufficient evidence to prove that the president of a global company deliberately destroyed the machines where employees of the competing company were present.

Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that representatives of Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics met recently in an unsuccessful attempt at mediation by prosecutors.

Meanwhile Samsung Display admitted that four of its employees were indicted on Friday on charges of stealing organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display panel technology from LG Display.

LG sniffed that the information is one of LG Display’s business secrets, Samsung Display’s such action should obviously be considered as a theft.

Samsung Display said the indictment was excessive, arguing that the technology in question was already widely known.