Smart street lights start to make their way

Internet of ThingsWhile high prices have prevented municipal authorities from investing in “clever” street lights, that’s starting to change.
ABI Research said that the number of installed lights with networking abilities will grow from two million now to over 40 million by 2019, said analyst Andrew Zignani.
LED  lights give energy savings, an increase in lifespan and the ability to be networked, he said. Such networking will not only allow for better control of illumination but lamps will be able to report to a central location when there are defects.
Although networking is now mostly using power line communication (PLC), that dominant position will face competition from radio frequency (RF) and cellular networking.
ABI estimates that by 2020, RF systems will account for two thirds of street lights installed.
Some cities around the world are seeing potential for street lighting infrastructure based on the internet of things, said Zignani.  Street lights will be linked to other aspects of smart grids.

PC shipments edge up

pc-sales-slumpShipments of PCs during any fourth quarter used to be strong until two years ago.
But figures released by Gartner said that worldwide PC shipments grew by a miserly one percent during the last quarter of 2014.
Shipments amounted to 83.7 million units and analysts at the company think the results are a “slow but consistent improvement after two years of decline”.
Tablets had been responsible for displacing PCs but that peaked in 2013 and the first half of last year.
People are drifting back to PCs, said Gartner, although different regions showed different results.
The US market showed the highest growth and the European region was strong too.
Lenovo is now the worldwide leader in shipments with 19.4 percent of the market, followed by HP and Dell. Acer and Asus were fourth and fifth.
HP showed growth of 16 percent in the quarter, while Lenovo’s growth slowed.
The chief driver for sales were mobile PCs including thin and light.  Prices around the $300 mark helped boost sales.

 

Google chucks rocks in glass house

obj058aIt seems that there is a large amount of pot calling kettle black when it comes to security.

Last month, Google angered Microsoft by releasing the details of a security vulnerability ahead of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday. Microsoft said that the patch was set to be released two days after Google went live with the details and that they refused to wait an extra 48 hours so that the patch would have been released along with the details of the exploit.

That would all be fine but Google does not have the same standards for itself. An exploit has been uncovered in Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) – which covers roughly 60 per cent of Android’s install base, according to the Android Developer dashboard – and Google is saying that they will not patch the flaw.

The flaw, which exists in WebView impacts nearly 1 billion users, when using Google’s own numbers as a base along with Gartner figures.

To make matters worse Jelly Bean was first announced in June of 2012, which means that Google is dropping support for its mobile OS less than three years after it was released.

Google is clearly stating that legacy support for the OS is not on their agenda even while phones are still being flogged with Jelly Bean under the bonnet.

The question is why if Google is being such a bastard about its own operating system is it so keen to throw Microsoft under the bus?

Cameron wants to read all internet communication

stupid cameronBritish Prime Minister David “one is an ordinary bloke” Cameron is insisting that he should be allowed to read any internet communication on the planet.

Cameron claims that there are places on the world wide wibble where terrorists can hide and he wants a  “comprehensive piece of legislation” to close the “safe spaces”. To do this he wants authorities to be able to access the details of communications and their content.

Apparently all the surveillance powers Cameron already has were not enough to stop an attack similar to the one which happened in Paris taking place in Blighty.

Mr Cameron said the recent attacks in Paris showed the need for such a move and he said he was comfortable that it was appropriate in a “modern liberal democracy”.  After all he and his chums will not be snooped on.

Speaking at an event in the East Midlands, Cameron said he recognised such powers were “very intrusive” but he believed that they were justified to counter the growing threat to the UK, as long as proper legal safeguards were in place.

The coalition introduced emergency legislation last year to maintain internet and phone companies’ obligation to store their customers’ personal communications data and to give access to the police.

But an attempt to extend these powers to include internet browsing history and social media sites were dropped following opposition from the Liberal Democrats.

Legislation would be needed to allow for “more modern forms of communication.”

He would also legislate in the “more contentious” area of the content of these online communications. There should be no “means of communication” which “we cannot read,” he said.

Previous governments had backed away from going down such a route, Cameron said, but he believed this would have to change so that, “in extremis,” such material could be obtained with a signed warrant from the home secretary.

It looks like voting him out will not get rid of such a law either — Labour leader Ed Miliband said it was important for security services to “keep up to date with technology” but said it had to be “done in the right way”, with “basic liberties” protected.

“That’s why we said there needs to be an independent look at these issues, to make recommendations about what needs to be changed for the future,” he added.

In other words, it is not fair you letting Cameron look at your emails I want a peek too.

Liberal Democrat Civil Liberties Minister Simon Hughes said he would not support “blanket powers” that would take away the liberties of “innocent civilians.”

What no one seems to be understanding is that if any government brings in laws the terrorists will work out a way to avoid them and it will be ordinary people who cannot get around the laws who will lose their privacy.

 

Amazon expands in EU

FireOnTheAmazonPosterOnline bookseller Amazon has created 6,000 new full-time positions in Europe in 2014 to respond to booming demand.

The company said that it now employed 32,000 permanent staff in the European Union, with the new jobs created in logistics centres, customer service, software development, supply chain management and design.

Amazon vice president for EU retail Xavier Garambois said the company was still investing and will be hiring even more in in 2015.

He said that customer demand in Europe was bigger than ever.

Amazon said around 1,200 of the new jobs were in Germany, its second-biggest market after the United States where it employs 10,000 warehouse staff plus more than 10,000 seasonal workers. Britain had the next most new positions with the rest spread around other countries.

It does not seem that Amazon is particularly concerned about the increased union militancy of its staff in Germany. Last year Amazon was been hit in Germany by a series of strikes over pay and working conditions.

Trade union Verdi has organized frequent strikes since May 2013 to try to force the retailer to raise pay for warehouse workers in accordance with collective bargaining agreements across Germany’s mail order and retail industry.

So far these issues have not been resolved and Amazon insists that its warehouse staff are logistics workers and that they receive above-average pay by the standards of that industry.

 

Aselayer signs deal with Finning

server-racksA deal which will see Finning offer Baselayer’s modular data centre technology in the United Kingdom and Ireland has been signed.

Baselayer is the data centre firm that split from IO and has been on the hunt for more customers.

The deal will see Finning offer BaseLayer’s modular data centre technology, which is designed to optimise energy efficiency and to be used both inside and outside of buildings.

Baselayer said that the deal means that Finning can distribute operational data centre capacity wherever and whenever customers need it.

Peter McNamara, VP of worldwide sales and customer operations at Baselayer said in a statement that the partnership expands Baselayer’s reach and strengthens its  ability to transform the data centre industry.”

Ian Wilcoxson, market Sector manager for data centres at Finning, said: “Baselayer’s data centre infrastructure has been adopted by some of the most demanding enterprise technology users in the world.”

“The standardised modules, built using lean manufacturing principles, deliver high levels of reliability, security and efficiency,” he said.

 

Anti-censorship killings mean more censorship

GodSilence It appears that all those European leaders standing against censorship moves of the Parisian terrorists have decided that the way to deal with them is by using more censorship.

In the wake of this week’s terrorist attacks in Paris, which began with the killing of 12 people at the offices of satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, the interior ministers of 12 EU countries have called for an increase in internet censorship.

France, Germany, Latvia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the U.K. said ISPs need to help “create the conditions of a swift reporting of material that aims to incite hatred and terror and the condition of its removing, where appropriate/possible”.

In other words, adopt a similar line to what has been agreed in the UK where ISPs use filters to stop citizens seeing “extremist” online content.

What this is supposed to do is not actually clear, governments have proved themselves unable to define what is a site designed to incite hatred and terror.  After all you would think that a site which calls for the dismantling of the European Union and for immigration to stop would be classed as hate speech but it is UKIP it is considered safe along with the comments section of the Daily Mail site.

Ironically the left wing Charlie Hebdo has itself frequently been accused of hate speech for its portrayal of Muslims and others. It has also been sued by the Roman Catholic Church several times for its anti-religion stance.

Ironically, this could mean that the newspaper which literally lost lives to anti-censorship could be closed as western governments try to protect themselves from Muslim censorship.

 

Citrix buys intelligent storage firm

Citrix HQPrivately owned Sanbolic has been bought by Citrix for an undisclosed amount.
Sanbolic is effectively a company specialising in storage management, whether that be using SSD, flash or hard drives in NAS, SAN, server side or cloud deployments.
The company offers load balancing, application availability and high performance management.
Citrix said it will build the capabilities of Sanbolic into its XenDesktop, XenApp and ZenMobile product suites.
Citrix said the acquisition means that its customers can use virtual apps and VDI across their businesses, guaranteeing workload service level agreements.
It said over 200 of its customers already use Sanbolic to allow availability and clustering of XenApp and XenDesktop.
Momchil Michailov, the CEO of Sanbolic, said that it has 13 years of experience with enterprise customers using server side and converged storage management.
Citrix senior VP Geir Ramleth said the complexities of infrastructure hinder VDI and application delivery deployments. The acquisition of Sanbolic will help Citrix manage the problem head on.  Employees of Sanbolic will now work for Citrix.

Scientists grab photons on silicon chips

MIT building - Wikimedia CommonsResearchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claim to have built light detectors that can register individual photons on a silicon chip.
The MIT team said they have increased the accuracy of the detectors and transferred those that work to an optical semiconductor.
The approach gives denser and larger arrays, said the MIT team with 100 times better accuracy than previous arrays.
The researchers first built a silicon optical chip using regular manufacturing processes. Then they grow a flexible film of silicon nitride on a separate silicon chip – and then the superconductor niobium nitride is despised in a pattern that can detect photons.
Gold electrodes are deposited on both ends of the detector.
Dirk Englund, a professor at MIT and part of the team, said the project was aided by IBM and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
Previous detectors only managed to pick up 0.2 percent of single photons, but MIT said detectors on its chip reached 20 percent.
We’re still a way away from quantum computing though – because MIT says 90 percent or more is needed for a working quantum circuit.

 

Worldwide IT spending still to grow

Pic Mike MageeIT spending worldwide will reach $3.8 trillion 2015 – that’s up 2.4 percent from last year.
But market intelligence company Gartner has warned that its earlier prediction of 3.9 percent will be affected by the rise in the price of the US dollar as well as conservative sentiment about services and devices.
But Gartner research VP John-David Lovelock sought to play down the reduction.  He said it “is less dramatic than it might at first seem.  The rising US dollar is chiefly responsible for the change.  Stripping out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding growth figure is 3.7 percent.”
Gartner breaks down the spending by categories as follows:

Screen Shot 2015-01-12 at 12.09.23

Datacentre systems will be worth $143 billion in 2015, while enterprise software will total $335 billion.
There will be a price war in cloud per seat during 2015 with price drops of as much as 25 percent right through until 2018.  Vendors are discounting cloud offerings heavily, said Gartner.

 

GloFo takes aim at China

renesas-chips (1)Abu Dhabi foundry company Global Foundries (GloFo) is seeking to make more partnerships in mainland China.
GloFo, which was spun off by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) some years ago, recently bought IBM’s foundry business, along with a large number of patents for $1.5 billion.
A report in the South China Morning Post quoted senior GloFo VP Chuck Fox as saying the firm would use IBM’s previous presence in mainland China to continue to grow its business in the country.
He said that his company is already in talks with a number of partners in China and is expected to announce deals when they happen.
Competition to win contracts from so called fabless chip companies comes from the like of Taiwanese major TSMC, mainland company SMIC, and even Intel.
Golf already has a partnership with Samsung in a bid to beat TSMC for orders to manufacture chips.

 

Broadband essential to SMEs

oldphoneA survey has revealed that Britain’s small to medium enterprises (SMEs) still have worries about growing their businesses in 2015.
The survey, commissioned by TalkTalk Business, asked 1,000 British small businesses how optimistic they are about revenues and growth this year.
Of those surveyed, 27 percent are “very optimistic”, but of those remaining, 20 percent don’t think 2015 will be a bumper year.
Obviously TalkTalk has an agendum with this survey and the results showed close to 90 percent of the SMEs believed broadband connectivity is vital to their businesses.
The top five priorities the survey discovered for SMEs is that they wanted to grow revenues; improve their teams’ morale; expand their businesses; cut costs; and invest in new technology.
TalkTalk has launched a broadband package aimed at SMEs, and figures it has released claim that its business package is cheaper than BT Business Unlimited, Plusnet unlimited and Chess essential max broadband.

 

QNAP brings AMD NAS to market

QNAP-tvs873-frontFor a while now AMD has been largely ignored by the makers of NAS x86 gear – who have tended to favour Intel or, more lately,  ARM.

QNAP has become the first vendor to bring an AMD-based x86 NAS to the market and was showing off its wares at CES over the weekend.

Dubbed the TVS-x63 lineup has four, six and eight bay models. Each of them has a four or eight GB of RAM. The 8-bay model also comes with a ‘+’ SKU and a 10GBASE-T NIC pre-installed in the spare PCIe slot. The ‘+’ version comes with either 8 or 16 GB of RAM.

What makes this NAS different from many of the others out there is that QNAP specifies the CPU in the TVS-x63 models as ‘AMD quad-core 2.4 GHz with Radeon Graphics.’ This turns out to be AMD’s GX-424CC SoC.

This 4C/4T Steppe Eagle configuration is based on the Puma microarchitecture and has a TDP of 25 W. The L2 cache is 2 MB in size. The cores run at 2.4 GHz while the integrated Radeon GPU runs at 497 MHz.

This can support DDR3 memory at 1866 MHz. Puma supports out-of-order execution and is expected to turn out a performance similar to Silvermont in the Bay Trail SoCs.

The TVS-x63 has two HDMI outputs to handle multi-media. It supports true 4K output for the UI as well as QvPC. Video playback is restricted to 1080p and the the VCE engine is supported by the firmware, enabling hardware-accelerated transcoding similar to what we saw with the TS-x51 and TS-x53 Pro units that used Quick Sync.

The AMD offering by QNAP is a bit of a surprise and could force a price drop in similar NAS specs in the next few months. This is assuming that Intel’s vendors are beating a path to Intel’s door demanding either a product or a price which matches what AMD has done.

The TVS-863+-8G is expected to retail for $1400 which is really cheap if you take into account that the . 10G port is pre-installed. More basic models cost $1200 for the TVS-863-4G, $1000 for the TVS-663-4G and $800 for the TVS-463-4G.

 

EMC warns of the perils of masses of small data

zxzzzzd1Guy Churchward, head of EMC’s $20-billion core technologies division, has warned that small data is going to cause even bigger headaches than the big stuff.

Taking to the Economic Times  Churchward said that data challenges for the Internet of Things or driverless cars were huge,

He said that millions of driverless cars, and billions of other internetconnected devices will not be Big Data. “What you have is not big data, it is actually `small data’ – because what it is, is billions and billions of small data objects.”

EMC expects IoT to create a sprawl of billions of autonomous devices, which will create security, storage and management nightmares in future.

Churchward warned that  “small data sprawl” will take the challenges of Big Data and make them 100x more difficult.

Security, storage, management and applications would be completely different in a world filled with billions of devices, each of which will have its own big data. None of the currently available tools and applications would work in such environments.

Part of EMC’s over $2.3-billion research and development budget is being used to address this `small data’ problem but the company thinks that it will take between three to five years to start bearing fruit.

 

Big Content forces Chilling Effects to self-censor

 seal_3Big Content has pressured the Chilling Effects DMCA archive to censor itself, just as the world is starting to see those who stand up to censorship as heros.

The organisation decided to wipe its presence from all popular search engines to prevent it being sued by copyright holders.

Chilling Effects was an archive of all sites which had been shut down with a DMCA court order.  For years it was quietly showing how free speech was being threatened by take-down orders.

Google now processes more than a million takedown requests from copyright holders, and that’s for its search engine alone.

Google partners with Chilling Effects to post redacted copies of all notices online seeing it as one of the few tools that helps to keep copyright holders accountable. It shows inaccurate takedown notices and other dirty deeds by the content industry.

Founded by Harvard’s Berkman Center, it offers an invaluable database for researchers and the public in general.

Chilling Effects removed its entire domain from all search engines, including its homepage and other informational and educational resources and it looked like Big Content is behind it.

Its pages contain hundreds of millions of non-linked URLs to infringing material. Copyright holders are not happy with these pages. Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars described the activities of the Chilling Effects projects as “repugnant”.

Berkman Center project coordinator Adam Holland told TorrentFreak,  Chilling Effects has now decided to hide its content from search engines, making it harder to find.

The self censorship may sound strange coming from an organisation that was founded to offer more transparency, but the Chilling Effects team believes that it strikes the right balance, for now.

“It may or may not prove to be permanent, but for now it’s the step that makes the most sense as we continue to think things through,” he added.

The notices themselves remain online, but with just the site’s own search it’s harder to find cases of abuse. The copyright holders on the other hand will be happy.