Friday, August 2, 2013

TechEye

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Kenneth Brill, datacentre pioneer, dies

Posted: 02 Aug 2013 04:12 AM PDT

The man who is credited with playing an enormous role in shaping the modern data centre has died of cancer. Kenneth Brill was 69.

Brill singled-handedly crafted an industry out of nothing, before him and his UpTime Institute, there was no identity or commonality among data centres.

He saw how it was possible to create an industry that could share and use information to improve operations.

UpTime created tier classifications for comparing data centres. These days people are always talking about tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 data centres.

He was also a big fan of data centre energy efficiency. He wanted to see better communication between IT staff and the engineering teams that run data centres, which he believed was the only way to get the most from operations.

Brill's last major statement was following Amazon's prolonged outage. He warned that the concentration of computing resources with large cloud providers was putting people who champion internal reliability at a disadvantage.

He thought that cloud providers were facing similar problems to Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant - in that it will work fine until a following disaster has enormous consequences.

Brill predicted that there will be more failures than we have been seeing, "because people have forgotten what we had to do to get to where we are." 

Huawei paranoia blocks company from key markets

Posted: 02 Aug 2013 04:03 AM PDT

Apparently the Chinese telecoms company Huawei is now developing tools for the Chinese government to commit cyber-espionage in Africa, according to an article.

Motherboard speculates that Huawei's expansion into the African continent is nothing to do with finding a market which appreciates cheap over expensive.

It claims Huawei is wiring up the whole of Africa so that Chinese spooks can spy on the continent. But it ignores the equally rapid expansion of companies from other companies, for example, India.

Motherboard's sole evidence is that US politicians have labelled Huawei a national security threat. After all - US politicans get it right everytime.

Because of that ruling, which has been ignored in other more civilised parts of the world, Huawei's efforts investing billions of dollars in Africa over the last 20 years and providing affordable mobiles, internet access, and telecommunications networks is sinister.

US paranoia about Africa appears to be getting worse. Over the last few months Huawei has closed major deals in Africa to get more areas on the grid and these too are supposed to be about spying.

Motherboard quotes former NSA and CIA head Michael Hayden, who has repeatedly raised warning flags about Huawei's suspected espionage.

But in an interview he accidently revealed what all these spying accusations are actually about.

He insists that Chinese companies see themselves in global economic competition with the United States, and they see real advantages of at least having the possibility of exploiting African networks in the future.

In other words, all of this paranoia is more about shutting China out of markets that America and American corporations would quite like to own. Cheaper Huawei tech makes this difficult.

US allegations have focused on Huawei supplying back-end telecommunications equipment - wi-fi routers, mobile networks, communications hardware to a third of the world. This is the sort of gear where it's a doddle to provide back doors.

The US would know that. It does exactly the same sort of thing to its own citizens, so it is probably guilty of projecting onto Huawei.

"Even if there aren't any backdoors, which is a large hypothesis, just the Chinese state having access to the architecture of your system is a tremendous advantage for the Chinese should they want to engage in any electronic surveillance, any electronic eavesdropping," Hayden said.

Then why would giving your infrastructure to Cisco be any different? Given that the US has indicated that it is cheerfully willing to spy on its allies, why would anyone buy US gear either?

As we wrote earlier this week, the accusations directed at Huawei are astoundingly hypocritical to begin with - considering what we know the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand have been getting up to.

Sorry, Star Trek teleportation is impractical

Posted: 02 Aug 2013 03:47 AM PDT

Star Trek fans will be disappointed to hear that researchers at the University of Leicester have calculated the time and energy required to beam a complete person from the Earth’s surface to a location in space.

The method of teleportation depicted in sci-fi is called called “destructive copying”.  This means that a source person is scanned and copied down to the molecular level and then reconstituted at a secondary location.

While they don’t tell you that this would be a suicide machine as the source person would be destroyed during the copying procedure, it would also take huge amounts of energy and bandwidth.

The new study, published by fourth year students at Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, makes painfully clear it would take a hideously long amount of time to transmit all this information to a source location.

Using a theoretical jaunt from the  surface of the Earth to a location in orbit directly above it, the researchers worked out how much data a person is made up of.

The students decided that transferable data could be represented by the DNA pairs that make up genomes in each cell. This means that there are 10 billion bits of information in each cell.

After calculating the amount of information encapsulated in a typical human brain, the total data content was shown to be 2.6x1042 bits.

If you managed to have a bandwidth rate of about 29 to 30 GHz  it would take 4.85x1015 years to transmit that amount of data, which is 350,000 times longer than the current age of the Universe.

Sadly.

Sony is still up the Swannee

Posted: 02 Aug 2013 12:43 AM PDT

Sony said that any figures which show it making a profit for the first time in two years should not really be seen as a comeback.

The outfit said that its electronics division faces hard times ahead and only had its nadgers pulled out of the fire by a very weak yen.

Sony is facing pressure from activist shareholder Daniel Loeb's proposal to split the company in two.

Loeb wants Sony to spin off as much as a fifth of its money into an entertainment arm which will take care of all the movies, TV and music the business owns.

According to Reuters, he thinks this will make the outfit more transparent and accountable.

Sony's financial announcement will give some weight to his demands.

Sony logged an operating profit of $369.68 million in the April-June quarter.

Its Xperia smartphones have sold well and the company lowered its yen exchange rate on so-called assumptions which will boost its earnings from sales overseas while cutting costs.

Sony said that consumer electronics were really in trouble and it had cut full-year sales targets for products from PCs to TVs to video cameras.

Chief financial officer Masaru Kato said in a statement that Sony made alright  first quarter results but he is pessimistic about the future.

The company has been restructuring like a mad thing. The TV business showed the greatest progress from streamlining with an operating profit for the quarter. That is the first time it has made money in three years.

Sony said it expected its game division to fall into the red this fiscal year, because it would have to pay development costs related to its new PlayStation 4 console. 

Dell finds itself in court in Dellaware (sic)

Posted: 02 Aug 2013 12:40 AM PDT

Tinman Michael Dell's attempt to buy his own company back is now heading to court.

Activist investor Carl Icahn has sued Dell and its board in the latest move to derail a $24.4 billion buyout bid by the computer maker's founder and CEO, Sir Michael Dell.

According to Reuters, Icahn wants the courts to block rule changes Michael Dell has proposed ahead of a shareholder vote set for Friday.

Icahn and his affiliates also want the court to stop Dell from changing the record date by which shareholders must have purchased their shares in order to vote.

All this would stop Michael Dell from using any Dell shares acquired since 5 February at any annual shareholder meeting when his buyout bid was announced. This will allow Icahn to put forward his own directors for the company.

The lawsuit also seeks the court to bar the company from changing any shareholder voting requirements.

As we reported yesterday, word on the strasse is that Dell probably will not have enough votes to carry the day at any shareholder meeting unless he can rig the election in some way.

The lawsuit, filed in the tiny Americahn (sic) principality called Delaware - not Dellaware! -  seeks to force the company to call an annual shareholder meeting on the same day as the special meeting on the buyout.

Icahn thinks that Michael Dell is trying to buy his own company back too cheap. Apparently there are some "tenuous" talks between the buyout group and Dell's special board committee for a higher bid. 

Murdoch forces worldwide Microsoft Skydrive rebranding

Posted: 01 Aug 2013 08:24 AM PDT

Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB has successfully legalled Microsoft into dropping the name of its cloud service, SkyDrive, over a trademark dispute.

BSkyB runs 'the Cloud', a free wi-fi network with hotspots all over the UK. During the case, Sky complained members of the public could find the branding of 'SkyDrive' - the cloud storage product - with the British 'Sky' brand. Some respondents said "Anything with Sky in seems to remind me of Rupert Murdoch and I don't like him", while another said "It's just SkyDrive so I would assume it is something to do with Sky the company".

Ultimately BSkyB laid out the more convincing case and Microsoft was ruled against. Sky was only looking to prevent SkyDrive from using that name in Europe, but Microsoft, instead of appealing, has decided it will rebrand the service globally.

In a statement, Microsoft said through its teeth: "We're glad to have resolution of this naming dispute and will continue to deliver the great service our hundreds of millions of customers expect, providing the best way to always have your files with you".

BSkyB said it was pleased Microsoft agreed not to appeal the trademark infringement judgment.

Several years ago, BSkyB ordered a VoIP company, Cloudnet Telecommunications, to change its name. BSkyB was furious because Cloudnet was getting better placement on search engines, like Google, and accused the company of trying to pass itself off as the hotspot supplier. It was forced to change its name from Cloudnet to Birchills Telecom.

In another case, the Independent reports, BSkyB took a US company to court over the 'Sky' pen - now known to us as Livescribe.

Murdoch's Revenge?
TechEye hears Sun Microsystems once tried to sue the Sun for similar reasons.

Snowden granted year's asylum in Russia

Posted: 01 Aug 2013 07:50 AM PDT

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has entered Russia, having been granted official papers by Moscow, it has been reported.

Russia Today tweeted the pictured photograph of papers Snowden needed to leave Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport transit zone and enter Russia proper.

AP noted Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, made clear the latest NSA revelations, revealed yesterday, were from data handed over to the Guardian before Snowden agreed not to leak any more information. This is important because Vladimir Putin said Snowden could only gain asylum if he stopped leaking documents that could potentially strain the relationship between Russia and the United States.

"I have just handed over to him papers from the Russian Immigration Service. They are what he needs to leave the transit zone," Kucherena said, before showing a copy to the press.

Snowden, according to the papers, can stay in Russia for one year - until 31 July 2014 - although this can be extended upon request.

Crucially, now that Snowden is on Russian soil, the USA will not be able to have him extradited unless he wishes to go to America voluntarily.

Although Snowden was offered asylum by countries in Latin America, they insisted he would have to make his own way. This would have proved difficult as flights entered American air space, and even if they didn't, Bolivia's president Evo Morales had his personal airplane grounded over European territories in an unprecedented move.

Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, has said because Snowden is the "most wanted person on earth, his security will be a priority".

Kucherena claimed Snowden left the airport unaccompanied in a normal taxi. But Wikileaks said he was accompanied by group activist Sarah Harrison, and that his "welfare has been continuously monitored by WikiLeaks staff since his presence in Hong Kong".

His lawyer added that Snowden will be talking to the press but "needs at least one day of privacy".

A Russian official insisted the decision to grant Snowden asylum will not affect a planned visit to Moscow by US president Barack Obama.

"We are aware of the atmosphere being created in the US over Snowden, but we didn't get any signals [indicating a possible cancellation of the visit] from American authorities," the official said, speaking with news network RIA Novosti. 

Ex Windows chief Sinofsky banned from helping rivals

Posted: 01 Aug 2013 07:08 AM PDT

After receiving a $10 million golden geddouttahere, ousted ex-Microsoft Windows chief Steve Sinofsky has been banned from working for rivals as part of the payoff, it has been revealed.

The Guardian noticed in an SEC filing that Sinofsky, who left the company last November, is contractually unable to join top Microsoft rivals including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Oracle, EMC or VMWare before 2014. He is also banned from entering talks with IBM, Dell, Intel and Nokia with the purpose of disrupting their relationships with Microsoft.

Sinofsky, once considered a natural candidate for next Microsoft CEO, was pushed out of the company by Ballmer late last year in what was seen as Ballmer consolidating his power over the company. Steve Sinofsky spent 23 years at Microsoft and was responsible for the flagship Windows 7 and, most recently Windows 8. But there were murmurings when he left that Sinofsky was a little too aggressive, and a fan of making executive decisions without consulting the other voles.

At the time of Sinofsky's departure, there were rumours he was trying to bring further Microsoft divisions under his control, although this was denied. Ballmer split the executive control of Windows into two positions. After the poor Windows 8 launch, squeezing Sinofsky out of Redmond wasn't too difficult a task for Ballmer, although it surprised pundits.

It is perhaps unsurprising that volish lawyers penned such a restrictive list considering the nature of Sinofsky leaving. He was forced to agree not to approach a long list of companies about reconsidering their custom with Microsoft - including Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, HTC, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, LG, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba.

Of course, given Microsoft's dismal attempts to turn itself into a hardware company - and the disastrous Surface tablet - many partners may not need much of a push to begin with.

As long as Sinofsky doesn't join the board of Microsoft's biggest  rivals before 2014, or squawk to the competition about how lousy Redmond is, he is due over $10 million to cover for 418,000 share options.
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