TechEye |  |
- Cloud infrastructure market shows strong growth
- New Zealand bans trolls
- Cameron pledges to spy on everything
- French STMicro surrenders to Huawei
- Radio licence cock-up meant Yellowstone lost its wolves
- Nvidia teams up with Big Blue and Mellanox
- Memory business hit by cloud storage
- Intel rejigs its management, borgs McAfee
- Smartphones may become pregnancy testers
| Cloud infrastructure market shows strong growth Posted: 03 Jul 2015 03:30 AM PDT
With net revenues of $6.3 billion in the first quarter, for both public and private cloud IT services, this is the second highest growth in the five quarters market research company since IDC started tracking the sector. Cloud infrastructure accounted for 30 percent of overall IT infrastructure spending in the quarter, IDC said, outstripping the growth of the whole sector and showing that data workloads were shifting to cloud based systems. The winning vendors in the first quarter were HP, Dell, Cisco, EMC, Netapp and Lenovo. But if you count original device manufacturers such as Quanta, they outstripped the traditional winners in the sector and held 28.8 percent of market share in the quarter. ODMs supply their servers directly, bypassing the routes to market and offering a significant price premium over the HPs and Dells of this server world. |
| Posted: 03 Jul 2015 03:16 AM PDT
The country passed the the Harmful Digital Communications Bill, in the hope of stemming "cyber-bullying". If you use digital communications to cause "serious emotional distress" to a person you open yourself to an escalating series of punishments. Starting with negotiation, mediation or persuasion the law can create offences such as not complying with an order, and "causing harm by posting digital communication". The most serious offenders would face two years in jail or a maximum fine of NZ$33,900. Gareth Hughes, one of the four Greens MPs to vote against the bill, said it was overly broad and risked limiting freedom of expression. The opposition Labour party said that it was "wedged" by the NZ government: while some of the bill was "worthy of discussion" the law had "deeply worrying" elements. The bill covers posts that are racist, sexist, or show religious intolerance, along with hassling people over disability or sexual orientation. There’s also a new offence of incitement to suicide which carries a three years’ jail sentence. The regime will be enforced by a yet-to-be-established agency that will make contact with publishers and social media platforms, and if it can’t resolve a complaint, the agency will be able to escalate it to the district court. A platform like Facebook or Twitter can opt into the safe harbour – but only if they agree to remove allegedly offending material either on-demand or within the bill’s 48-hour grace period. It is also interesting because it is a law which potentially criminalises children over the age of 14. |
| Cameron pledges to spy on everything Posted: 03 Jul 2015 03:15 AM PDT
Cameron has a point, if they didn't want the idea then why did they vote for him when he did say he had such a crazy plan before the election. Cameron is to remove all "safe spaces" on the Internet, apparently for terrorists to communicate with each other. This means removing British people's right to use encryption Replying in the House of Commons to a question from the Conservative MP David Bellingham, who asked him whether he agreed that the “time has come for companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to accept and understand that their current privacy policies are completely unsustainable?” Cameron replied: “We must look at all the new media being produced and ensure that, in every case, we are able, in extremis and on the signature of a warrant, to get to the bottom of what is going on.” Of course this move is causing some problems for British business who really do not want Cameron reading their emails or forcing them to give the government cryptographic backdoors. Some apparently are thinking of leaving the country altogether out of a fear that they will be handing over technology secrets to MI6. To be fair, Cameron insists that Britain is not a state that is trying to search through everybody's emails and invade their privacy, although so far he has shown that with its chums in the NSA that is exactly what he has been wanting to do. The key issue is now whether the proposals will be realistic about what can and can’t be done when dealing with modern encrypted communications. Our belief is that if Cameron wants to keep businesses on side, then this is something which will be mysteriously dropped or replaced with a licencing programme which will allow encryption for registered companies which pass a security screening and can make guarantees that their encryption keys do not fall into the wrong hands. This is of course incredibly socialist of Cameron. * Yesterday it was revealed that GCHQ had been spying on Amnesty International, an allegation that had been denied.
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| French STMicro surrenders to Huawei Posted: 03 Jul 2015 03:12 AM PDT
This was announced by the French Government, which must also have given its thumbs up to the deal which also sticks two fingers up at its glorious 'amburger eating US allies. The French government said that the move will bolster its supply relationship with the Chinese telecom equipment provider. The five-year deal, signed during a visit to France by Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang, is expected to lead to an increase in orders for the semiconductor manufacturer, the statement said. This means that clearly the French have given nil point to US paranoia on the Chinese spying. We guess it is because the French have worked out that they are more likely to be spied on by the US. |
| Radio licence cock-up meant Yellowstone lost its wolves Posted: 03 Jul 2015 03:12 AM PDT
This could have meant that the park would not know what its wolves were up to, which is a slightly worrying state of affairs if you are a sheep. The problem was caused by the fact that the park's radio licence was under the name of Ed Bangs, who led the US Fish and Wildlife Service effort to reintroduce wolves to the park in the 1990s. When Bangs retired in 2011, everyone forgot that the licence needed to be renewed. Authorities sold the bandwidth to NorthWestern Energy. Fortunately for Yellowstone, NorthWestern Energy is not being a bastard about the problem and is letting researchers share the frequencies, meaning the park can avoid more than $450,000 in estimated costs to restart the programme. Northwestern spokesman Butch Larcombe said the company was using those portions of its frequencies that interfere least with the wildlife collars. He said that would continue until the collars wear out and fall off the animals, which Smith said takes several years. This saved everything really as restarting the programme would have required researchers to capture the wolves and elks already wearing collars and replace the devices with ones that operate on a different frequency. Interference began in radio signals from collared wildlife in September, after NorthWestern acquired the frequencies to improve communications for its own employees in the park and remotely control its power distribution network. The interference continued through the winter and into the spring, but researchers still could track the animals from the air during monitoring flights, Smith said. New collars in coming years will use new frequencies, under a 10-year license. Let’s hope that they put the right name on the licence. |
| Nvidia teams up with Big Blue and Mellanox Posted: 03 Jul 2015 02:38 AM PDT
In case you haven't been following the story so far, IBM has wheeled heaps of companies into the OpenPOWER foundation – and the centre in Montpelier will give open source software developers technical assistance to develop high performance computing (HPC) applications. Mellanox keeps itself out of the limelight but it is responsible for Infiniband, while Nvidia has its Tesla advanced computing platform. IBM brings its licensable POWER architecture in the picture. The French centre is the second such establishment – the three opened a centre in Germany last November and are the founding members of the foundation. The aim is to help solve big challenges scientists and others face using HPC architectures and technologies. IBM's VP of HPC, Dave Turek, said the opening of the centre shows his firm is committed to open source collaboration. Nvidia brings its NVLink graphics processor interconnect to the party, while Mellanox' Infiniband offloads data to the network level. |
| Memory business hit by cloud storage Posted: 02 Jul 2015 06:34 AM PDT
That's according to analysts from DRAM Exchange, which said that these types of products were a major revenue source for vendors, but those times are changing. DRAM Exchange – a subsidiary of Trendforce – said that companies are struggling because of cloud storage services and high density flash storage designs. Companies like Dropbox and Spotify are big in the cloud service business and increasing use of such services eliminates the need for people to buy flash cards and memory cards. The move is underlined by the availability of services like Google Drive, Microsoft's One Drive, and Apple's iCloud and Apple Music. Assistant VP of DRAM Exchange Sean Yang said: "Memory module makers are very worried about market saturation and decline when they are planning for their next flash drive products." Yang added that the global financial market's downturn means vendors of smartphones, notebooks and tablets are slimming down their forecasts. Because of all of this, DRAM Exchange thinks NAND flash memory prices will fall significantly during this third quarter. |
| Intel rejigs its management, borgs McAfee Posted: 02 Jul 2015 06:19 AM PDT
Its CEO, Brian Krzanich, said that Intel president Renee James will stay at Intel until next January to take a job as CEO of an unnamed company. She has been at Intel for 28 years and said that when Brian Krzanich and her were given their current jobs, she wanted to be a CEO somewhere else. Krzanich explained that he'd made the changes to make the company more efficient. Long time employee Arvind Sodhani, who is the president of Intel Capital, will retire in January after 35 years with the company and will be replaced by Wendell Brooks. Intel Security – formerly McAfee – has been integrated into Intel rather than being an independent division and Chris Young will become general manager of the unit. Aicha Evans has been promoted to the firm's management committee. She was formerly head of the communication and devices group. Josh Walden, who was in charge of Intel's New Technology division, will look after interactive computing devices, perceptual computing and wearables. Executives Hermann Eul and Mike Bell will step down. |
| Smartphones may become pregnancy testers Posted: 02 Jul 2015 06:08 AM PDT
The idea is that readings from the sensor could use a smartphone app to give results and the scientists suggest that combined with GPS an app could tell a patient to the way to a hospital or a doctor. Writing in Optics Express, the scients said that the sensor uses surface plasmon resonance (SPR) to detect what's in a liquid. SPR happens when light strikes a metallic film and while most of the light gets reflected, a small band is picked up by surface electrons, making them resonate. By adding recognition elements to the film, an app can use a biological sample to detect its composition. SPR devices usually need bulky lab equipment using a light detector and light source but a smartphone already has both. The prototype the scientists made (pictured) uses a 400 micrometre diameter core multimode fibre with a silver coated sensing region. |
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