Tag: techeye

Intel 730-series SSDs dogged by rumour

Posted on March 9, 2015 by - News

watchdogIntel’s 730-series SSDs, which received glowing reviews, has been dogged by a rumour that it lacks power loss data protection, a feature which was highlighted in Intel’s review guides.

The rumour was confirmed by Intel’s customer support department which made the mistake of implying that the SDD’s spec had changed.

The customer support person said that the SSD 730 was never built with the capacitor for the power loss data protection.

This means, the SSD does not have the capacitors at all, therefore the Intel’s website has the correct information of the drive.

Power data loss protection is a relatively important feature for anyone buying these drives and it puts reviewers such as Toms’ Hardware on the spot for not noticing it. The only problem is that when Toms’ reviewed the Intel 730 240GB SSD, it spotted it had two large capacitors on the PCB.

After all the fact that Intel included such technology on a mass-market drive was news.

Intel moved to kill the rumours this week. Jeff Fick, Product Marketing Engineer on the Intel SSD 730 Series insisted that the Intel SSD 730 Series incorporates power loss protection circuitry, capacitors and firmware support to help protect user data.

He said that Intel customer support got it wrong.  In fact it looks like contrary to Intel’s tech support’s statements, the capacitors do indeed exist and do provide a level of protection rarely seen on enthusiast-level SSDs.

AMD to release life preserver

Posted on March 9, 2015 by - News

titanic-life-preserverThe troubled chipmaker AMD is about to fight back against Nvidia dominence with its upcoming AMD Radeon R9 300-series graphics cards.

Specifications of the cards started to leak last month and now there are new rumours of an official announcement at the Computex show.

AMD is planning to introduce the new cards during Computex in June and there will be a single new card at CeBIT and a few re-branded cards before Computex.

Managers at AMD apparently want a “full line up” of cards to be released at the same time. I needs this to cover the ground lost to rival Nvidia over the last year.

Nvidia took a significant market share in the GPU market but AMD CFO Devinder Kumar was confident that in the the second half of 2015 there would be a launch of a new graphics product which would set everything right.

“We will gain back the market share which is low from my standpoint and historically,” he claimed.
There is nothing really on the roadmap other than the AMD Radeon R9 300-series that can do that, so it looks like this rumour has legs.

Apple wants iWatch owners to stay cool

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

fobwatchOne of the biggest obstacles to using an Apple watch when they’re released is that the battery life won’t be very long.

And that’s prompted Apple to tell its developers designing apps for the watch to design them to be viewed for only 10 seconds or so.

It’s also told watch developers to keep distractions to a minimum – such as notifications pushed to users, according to Bloomberg.

The range of Apple watches, expected to be formally announced next week, at an event in San Francisco.

Analysts have estimated that sales of the watches, which certainly aren’t cheap, could be between 14 and 15 million during 2015. To use an Apple watch, it has to be linked to an Apple iPhone.

However, the jury is still out on how well smart watches will do. Short battery life will certainly limit their appeal, while many people will not see the advantage of having a smart watch as well as a smart phone, which also tells the time as well as doing lots of other things.

 

Hyper scale data centres give storage boost

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

emcboxIDC said that the storage market ended well. In the last quarter, worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue grew 7.2 percent year on year to amount to close to $10.6 billion.

And capacity shipments rose by 43.7 percent compared to the same quarter the previous year to represent 99.2 exabytes.

Eric Sheppard, a research director at IDC, said spending on enterprise storage grew in most markets worldwide with factors including demand for midrange systems using flash memory and systems designed for hyper scale data centres.

EMC was the top dog in fourth quarter, with a 22.2 percent market share. That company was followed by HP (13.8%), Dell (9%), IBM (9%) and Netapp (7.2%).

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SAP slashes jobs

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

sapbeerSoftware giant SAP said it will cut around three percent of its employees worldwide but added that it would create different jobs as it struggles to get up to speed on cloud computing.

The job cuts include SAP offering some employees early retirement, and won’t make forced redundancies in its European offices.

SAP has around 75,000 workers worldwide.

The company is struggling to compete with up to date cloud based companies including Workday and Salesforce and is working to beat the competition.

Reuters said that SAP will create new job opportunities in the cloud business, the database Hana and the expenses software Concur – it paid over $7 billion for Concur in 2014.

Microsoft Freaks out over security

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

Microsoft campusSoftware giant Microsoft said that people using all versions of Windows could be affected by the recent Freak phenomenon.

Freak is a vulnerability caused by software engineers making encryption weaker in operating systems as a result of an order by the USA in the 1990s.

Previously, it was known that the Freak vulnerability affected devices such as Apple and Android operating systems.

Microsoft described Freak “as an industry wide issue that is not specific to Windows operating systems”.

Microsoft doesn’t believe that peoples’ computers have yet been publicly exploited.

Microsoft said it is working with its partners to give information to customers to help them secure their machines. The security advisory can be found here.

Police arrest 57 varieties of cyber crooks

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-06 at 14.16.57The National Crime Agency (NCA) said it has made 57 arrests in the UK this week for people suspected of illegal acts related to computers.

The alleged offences include network intrusion and data theft from enterprises and governments; distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks; cyber related fraud and malicious software and virus development.

The NCA worked with local police forces across the UK to make the arrests.

25 people in the London and Essex area were arrested by the Metropolitan Police on suspicion of cyber fraud including theft and money laundering.

Five men were arrested in Kidlington, Oxford for an alleged conspiracy to commit computer misuse offences.

One man was arrested in the West Midlands on suspicion of network intrusion on the US Department of Defense.

Peter Goodman, deputy chief constable, said that cyber crime wasn’t victimless and SMEs can be bankrupted by cyber attacks. Publication of personal data could seriously affect people.

The NCA says people should go to www.getsafeonline.org and www.cyberstreetwise.com to stay up to date on how to keep your computer more secure.

AMD leans on ARM for next phase

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News


arm-wrestlingAMD is pinning its hopes on ARM servers and custom designs to pull its nadgers out of the fire, sources inside the company are saying.

New CEO Lisa Su has said ARM servers will account for as much as 15 percent of the total server market in less than five years and AMD wants a slice of that.

It is a long term gamble, and one which is a move away from AMD’s traditional x86 plans.

What is also strange about the plan is that it does create rivals from companies that are also bidding to put ARM in the data centre.

There is also the problem that ARM adoption in the server space is new and lacks the software and driver maturity of x86 – something which AMD actually knows rather a lot about.

To keep the flag flying. AMD plans to increase its custom semi-design business. AMD has recently signed a number of new customers up to its “semicustom” practice, which it expects to grow into a business worth as much as $1 billion in much-needed new revenues.

Canadian’s club spammer

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

mountie-maintain-rightManon Bombardier, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC’s) Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer has fined an outfit $1.1 million for spamming.

Compu-Finder has 30 days to object or pay up.

After an investigation, CRTC found Compu-Finder sent out spam in which the unsubscribe mechanisms did not function properly.
The emails sent by Compu-Finder promoted various training courses to businesses,

The four violations happened last year between July 2, 2014 and September 16, 2014. Compu-Finder spam accounted for 26 per cent of all complaints submitted last year.

Canada’s anti-spam legislation was adopted by Parliament on December 2010 and came into force on July 1, 2014.

Bombardier said that Compu-Finder flagrantly violated the basic principles of the law by continuing to send unsolicited commercial electronic messages after the law came into force to email addresses it found by scouring websites.

Complaints submitted to the Spam Reporting Centre clearly indicate that consumers didn’t find Compu-Finder’s offerings relevant to them, he said.

VMWare sued for GPL violations

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

VMWare has beenrms-meets-open-sauce-detail (1) sued in Hamburg for failing to comply with Open Source rules.

The Software Freedom Conservancy said that Christoph Hellwig’s lawsuit against VMware has started in the district court of Hamburg.

In a statement the Conservancy said that it was a regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy’s ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GPLv2.

For those who came in late, GPLv2 is the licence of Linux and many other Open Source and Free Software included in VMware’s ESXi products.

Hellwig is a key Linux kernel developer and one of the earliest members of Conservancy’s GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers. He has been muttering about VMware’s misuse of GPL-licensed code since 2007.

In 2011, Conservancy discovered that VMware had failed to provide nor offer any source code for the version of BusyBox included in VMware’s ESXi products (as required by BusyBox’s licence, GPLv2).

Hellwig joined Conservancy’s GPL Compliance for Linux Developers in late 2012 and helped provide an analysis of the non-compliant releases of ESXi that VMware provided.

The conservancy said that it became apparent that VMware’s current ESXi products infringed many of Hellwig’s own copyrights, due to VMware’s failure to comply with Linux’s licence, GPLv2.

But VMware’s legal counsel finally informed Conservancy in 2014 that VMware had no intention of ceasing their distribution of proprietary-licensed works derived from Hellwig’s and other kernel developers’ copyrights, despite the terms of GPLv2.

The Conservancy and Hellwig claim that VMware has combined copyrighted Linux code, licensed under GPLv2, with their own proprietary code called “vmkernel” and distributed the entire combined work without providing nor offering complete, corresponding source code for that combined work under terms of the GPLv2.

Hellwig is an extensive copyright holder in the portions of Linux that VMware misappropriated and used together in a single, new work without permission.

EU waters down roaming charges kill off

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

european-commissionEuropean regulators have dropped plans to ban roaming charges and have proposed net neutrality rules allowing privileged access in some cases.

It means that carriers will still be allowed to charge more to use mobiles abroad.

Also worrying are net neutrality rules would bar discrimination in internet access, but allow prioritisation of some services.

This is a watering down of laws first floated in 2013, observers said.

Instead of ending data roaming charges as was promised, the European Commission has recommended that operators be allowed to add surcharges to their domestic rates.

The proposals were said to be “transitional” and mindful of “wholesale costs” incurred by the mobile operators.

In other words it is only temporary and there is nothing to worry about. But, according to Ovum analyst Matthew Howett, they would amount to the continuation of data roaming charges until at least 2018, when European lawmakers would reconsider whether or not to ban them.

He told the BBC that the watering down happened because operators had already introduced more reasonable charges.

The proposals also covered net neutrality rules. Originally the EU sought to ensure that internet users could get online however they wanted and view any legal content they wanted, free from discrimination by their service providers.

Now it seems that there is a provision for specialised services “other than internet access services” to be prioritised if they required high quality internet access to function.

It is not clear what these specialised services are. More optimistic typeshope that it is connected cars and other elements of the internet of things.

The European Commission specified, however, that service providers would have to ensure a good standard of internet access for consumers if they did prioritise such services. This could mean that streaming video content could require users to shell out more cash.

Health insurer tells watchdogs where to go

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

bad-dogIn the wake of a serious hacking, a US health insurer has resolved a problem with government watchdogs snuffling around a huge data leak by banning them from its networks.

Anthem Healthcare lost more than 80 million patient records raising a slight question about what it does about security.

However when the federal auditor asked to scan the company’s systems, it took the bold step of telling the watchdog to sling its hook.

The  Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Office of Inspector General, issued a statement saying that Anthem refused to allow the agency to perform “standard vulnerability scans and configuration compliance tests” this summer, as requested by the OIG. Worse: Anthem refused a similar request in 2013. In each case, Anthem cited “internal policies” that forbid outside access to its network as the reason for refusing to allow the vulnerability scans.

In other words, no you can’t look at our security because that would be a breach of security.

In its dealings with other insurers, the watchdog would have a problem, but OPM has the authority to conduct the audits on Anthem because that health insurer provides health plans to federal employees under the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP).

What Anthem appears to be worried about is that the watchdog might find out that its security problems go much deeper than a one off hacking.

An earlier OPM report filed in September 2013 and based on only limited access to Anthem’s network identified a number of concerns, from porous vulnerability scans that failed to include desktop systems to a loose configuration management program. In each case, Anthem (then Wellpoint) responded by arguing that its current processes were adequate.

Clinton asks government to disclose emails

Posted on March 5, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-05 at 15.01.53Following a report earlier this week that Hillary Clinton used a private email system to conduct government business, she said late last night that she wants the State Department to release all the emails.

Clinton is widely expected to run for president of the US in 2016.

She had been using an email server in her house when she was Secretary of State, and the State Department asked her to supply all those records.

And there are a lot of records – she provided the government department with 55,000 pages of emails.

The State Department said it is reviewing the emails she provided but because of the volume, that may take some time.

Clinton tweeted last night that she wanted the public to see her emails. In a tweet she said she has asked the State Department to release them and they will review them for release.

 

House of Lords pushes for drone registration

Posted on March 5, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-05 at 14.50.27A European Union committee of the House of Lords is recommending that the EU make an online register of people who own drones.

It wants the EU to have a database aimed first at businesses and then individuals who own drones.

The committee wants drones to include software to prevent drones from certain areas using GPS coordinates to prevent them from flying near airports and the like.

But at the same time the committee doesn’t want drones to be over regulated, particularly as the industry will be responsible for over 150,000 jobs by the middle of the century.

There are already rules about flying drones in the UK. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) rules that drones can’t be flown above 400 feet, and should be flown at least 164 feet away from vehicles, buildings and people. It’s also a rule that they can’t be used within 492 feet of a places where there are lots of people, such as a concert.

The committee also recommends that drone flights should be traceable.

 

Connect to your mainframe with your smartphone

Posted on March 5, 2015 by - News

ibm-officeMacro 4 said it is now a piece of cake to connect via the web to your IBM mainframe -if you have one of those in your back room using a smartphone and a tablet.

The company has released a new version of Tubes for z/OS.

The software gives access to mainframe applications using a web browser on a smartphone or tablet.

The company claimed that the software avoids enterprises having to update web interfaces at some cost.

R&D manager Keith Banham said there is no development overhead at all, and you don’t need to run a computer running a terminal emulator.

The software avoids the need to buy 3270 emulation software to access mainframe applications, he said.