HP’s Whitman suggests Googorola may close Android
HP CEO Meg Whitman foresees a great future for webOS, the mobile operating system that her company acquired in the $1.2bn Palm deal and is now contributing to the open source community – and part of her reasoning is based on her distrust of Google.
"I think that Android may end up as a closed system because of [Google's] relationship with Motorola," Whitman said in her keynote presentation at HP's company's global partner summit in Las Vegas, according to Channel EMEA.
"I think there is room for another operating system," she said. "iOS is great but it is a closed system." Android is currently open – as long as you're not relying on getting all the info about the latest and greatest versions under development – but Whitman suggests that developers not bank on it remaining so.
Without as much as a nod to Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 or upcoming tablet-capable Windows 8 – or, for that matter the MeeGo/Bada open source Tizen mashup or any other mobile OS – Whitman positioned webOS as the go-to alternative to Apple and Google's offerings.
Not that she believes that there will be any mad rush to webOS. "These things take time, she believes. "We decided to contribute webOS to the open source community," she said, "and this will take three to four years to play out." Read more...
IBM puts AIX 5.3 on extended life support
Two of IBM's oldest and most popular operating systems for its Power-based servers are being put out to pasture after years of service.
Last week, IBM said that it would be offering service extension on AIX 5.3, the operating system that was announced way back in July 2007 concurrent with Power5-based System p5 and i5 iron. AIX 5.3 was the first release of IBM's homegrown Unix variant that supported logical partitions (making a virtual machine that spans cores) and micropartitions (the ability to carve one core into as many as ten virtual machines); it also offered symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) shared memory that spanned up to 32 cores. The combination of AIX 5.3, decent Power5 iron, and very aggressive pricing put Big Blue on top in the Unix business.
IBM actually stopped selling AIX 5.3 back on April 29 last year, and offers AIX 6.1, launched in September 2008, and 7.1 – which debuted in August 2010 as the Power7-based systems were being rolled out – for licensing on current and prior Power Systems iron. IBM plans to cut off standard support on AIX 5.3 on April 30 this year. After that you will need to get extended support or move your AIX 5.3 to a workload partition.
Starting with AIX 7.1, IBM allowed the Unix operating system to carve up a virtual private server, called a workload partition, and run AIX 5.2 applications inside of this unchanged. This workload partition support for AIX 5.2 was important since none of the modern Power systems support this vintage operating system. Read more...
Linux skills in demand, wages up
If you work as a Linux developer or system administrator, your pay should be increasing -- and so should your job offers -- according to a new survey of hiring managers.
The survey found that salaries for Linux developers, system administrators and those with related skills increased 5% last year, with bonuses averaging about 15%.
The survey of approximately 2,000 hiring managers and staffing agencies was conducted by The Linux Foundation, an industry group, and Dice, an employment jobs board. The study only looked at Linux and didn't benchmark gains across other platforms.
Dice has about 11,000 jobs posted on its site that require Linux experience to some extent -- an increase of 17% from last year, said Alice Hill, managing director of Dice.com. Read more...
Google’s tracking of Safari users could lead to FTC probe
Google's alleged circumvention of do-not-track controls on Apple's Safari browser could lead to big fines from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission if the agency determines Google has violated a privacy settlement the company agreed to in March, some privacy advocates said Friday.
Violations of a settlement with the FTC can lead to fines of US$11,000 per incident. It's unclear how many times Google may have circumvented do-not-track protections on the Safari browser, distributed with iPhones, iPads, some iPods and Macintosh computers.
Google was "incredibly stupid" to slip tracking cookies into Safari, given that the company is under scrutiny by the FTC and privacy advocates, said Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "I'd be very surprised if there was not some type of FTC action."
An FTC spokeswoman didn't immediately return messages seeking comment on the privacy allegations. Read more...
Apple’s new OS X tightens screws on some malware
Apple will introduce a new Mac security model with OS X Mountain Lion this summer that by default lets users install only programs downloaded from the Mac App Store or those digitally signed by a registered developer.
Some experts called Gatekeeper -- Apple's name for the model and technology -- a game-changer while others criticized it as less than watertight.
Gatekeeper will block the installation of the most common kind of Mac malware yet: Trojan horses unwittingly executed by users who have been duped into downloading and installing fake software.
Last year, several campaigns of "scareware," programs that posed as antivirus software but actually infected systems with attack code, made headlines. Apple responded to the scareware threat by repeatedly updating a rudimentary blocking list that debuted two years earlier.
Apple even took the trouble during the skirmishing to issue a tool that scrubbed infected machines of the "Mac Defender" malware.
Mountain Lion, which Apple said Thursday will ship late this summer, uses a new mechanism to bar malicious applications from most Macs. Read more...
DDoS attackers start targeting IPv6 networks
Cybercriminals have started launching DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks against networks that transmit data over IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), according to a report published recently by DDoS mitigation vendor Arbor Networks.
Even though 2011 was the first year when IPv6 DDoS attacks were recorded, such incidents remain rare because they are not economically relevant for Internet criminals, said Bill Cerveny, a senior software quality assurance engineer at Arbor.
Some companies have projected increases of more than 100 percent for their IPv6 traffic volumes over the next 12 months, but the changes will be insignificant compared to the overall traffic volume. Read more...
TechAmerica Foundation: Governments need to get into the cloud
Cloud computing presents opportunities for governments to modernize and improve cost efficiency, public officials stressed Thursday at the introduction of a report advising state and local governments on cloud adoption. But one California official cited government tendencies making the modernization process a slow one.
The TechAmerica Foundation's State and Local Government Cloud Commission released its report entitled "The Cloud Imperative," offering best practices for cloud computing for state and local governments. In an introduction of the report at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices in Mountain View, Calif., government officials including California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom and San Jose mayor Chuck Reed emphasized potential benefits of cloud computing.
"San Jose's approach is very simple. We're trying to do more with less," Reed said in explaining San Jose's perspective on the cloud. Newsom, however, stressed how governments need to wake up to technological change. "You're seeing with this rapid and extraordinary change with the cloud in the private sector how it is dramatically changing the way people are doing business," bringing down costs and boosting collaboration, he said. "But government has been slow to pick up on this." Read more...
Microsoft blasts Google over iPhone browser tracking, pushes IE9 while it’s at it
With Google acknowledging that it utilised features in its services to bypass Apple’s built-in security measures in its Safari mobile browser to track users, Microsoft has taken the opportunity to join the debate, condemning the search giant and using it as a platform to tout the security of its own browser, Internet Explorer 9.
Remarking that Google’s tracking practices are “not new”, Microsoft’s blog post entitled ‘Browse Without Being Browsed’ accuses the company of circumventing the privacy protections in Apple’s mobile browser “in a deliberate, and ultimately, successful fashion.”
Microsoft then proceeds to list how its Internet Explorer 9 browser has some of the “strongest privacy protection in the industry,” highlighting its Tracking Protection feature and how it puts users in control of their actions online.
“Not Google. Not advertisers. Just you,” Microsoft declares. Read more...
Adobe confirms new zero-day Flash bug
Adobe on Wednesday patched seven critical vulnerabilities in Flash Player, including one reported by Google researchers that hackers are using in "active targeted attacks." The bug attackers have been exploiting is a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in the Flash Player plug-in used by Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).
"This update resolves a universal cross-site scripting vulnerability that could be used to take actions on a user's behalf on any website or Web mail provider, if the user visits a malicious website," read the Adobe security advisory that accompanied yesterday's Flash update. "There are reports that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in active targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking on a malicious link delivered in an email message." Read more...