Level 3 to acquire Global Crossing in $3 billion stock deal
Telecom infrastructure provider Level 3 Communications will acquire Global Crossing, which provides Internet Protocol-based networks and Ethernet services and runs data centers, in an all-stock deal.
Level 3 will pay about $3 billion for Global Crossing, but will also assume about $1.1 billion of Global Crossing's debt, the companies said in a press release. The combined telecom/Internet company will own network facilities in more than 50 countries, and will have combined annual revenues of more than $6 billion. Read more...
Microsoft putting ERP in the Azure cloud
Microsoft is moving its Dynamics ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications to its Azure cloud platform, the company announced Monday at the Convergence conference in Atlanta. The belated move represents a major change for the way Microsoft sells Dynamics, which has traditionally been sold through partners in on-premises and hosted form.
The next major releases of Dynamics will run on Azure, and customers "will be able to move to the cloud on their own terms," Microsoft said in a statement. Read more...
Windows 7 share tops XP for first time in U.S.
Windows 7 has passed the 10-year-old Windows XP in U.S. usage share, according to data from an Irish Web analytics company.
In the first 10 days of April, Windows 7's average daily share was 32.2 percent as measured by StatCounter, besting XP's average of 30.7 percent.
It was the first time that Windows 7's U.S. usage share was higher than Windows XP's. Read more...
Hacktivists target Sony
Sony is being targeted by hacktivist group Anonymous, a collection of politically motivated hackers.
Several Sony sites, including PlayStation Network, were offline at the time of writing.
The electronics giant angered Anonymous with its legal action against hackers George "Geohot" Hotz and Graf Chokolo after Hotz and Chokolo released the private key required to develop firmware for Sony's PlayStation 3 console.
The proceedings were described by Anonymous as "wholly unforgivable".
Calling the attack #OpSony, Anonymous said: "You have abused the judicial system in an attempt to censor information on how your products work. You have victimised your own customers merely for possessing and sharing information, and continue to target every person who seeks this information. In doing so you have violated the privacy of thousands.
"Now you will experience the wrath of Anonymous."
The group launched a series of actions under the banner Operation Payback last year, in which MasterCard, Visa, Amazon and PayPal were subjected to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Both the MasterCard and Visa web sites were temporarily brought offline by these actions.
Sony was unavailable for comment.
(Source: computing.co.uk)
Simple Arithmetic for Faster, More Secure Websites
Faster, more secure logins for multimedia sites might be possible thanks to a new approach to website and database security. Boolean logins would allow thousands if not millions of users to more quickly access the content to which they are entitled, such as music, video and images. The same approach might also reduce the risk of hackers accessing the materials illicitly.
Classic user identification requires the remote user sending a username and a password to the system to which they want to be authenticated. The system looks up the username in its locally stored database and if the password submitted matches the stored password, then access is granted. This method for identification works under the assumption that there exist no malicious users and that their local terminals cannot be infected by viruses. Read more...
Dell and IBM ramp up cloud ambitions
IBM and Dell have unveiled a range of products and services that they hope will help them make significant headway in the cloud computing market.
With cloud computing predicted to boom in 2011, two of tech's heavyweights have joined HP in ramping up their cloud technology to compete with more established cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace.
IBM has unveiled SmartCloud, a set of cloud services that allows customers to use the company's infrastructure to run various computing processes and store data. Read more...
Apple iPad to lead tablet market for next five years
Apple and its iPad dominate the tablet market now - and will still be the dominant player in five years' time, analyst house Gartner is predicting.
Despite mounting competition from other operating systems, including Google's Android OS and RIM's QNX tablet OS - with RIM's first tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, due to launch in the US later this month - Apple's iOS will grab more than half the market share for media tablets in the next three years, according to Gartner.
The analyst defines a media tablet as a touchscreen device with a screen size larger than five inches, predominantly designed for consuming media, and running a lightweight OS. Read more...