Comment 4 inShare154 Yandex, Google’s Russian Rival, Is Twitter’s New Real-Time Search Partner
A significant step for Twitter in its international growth: Yandex, Russia’s search giant, today announced that it will carry Twitter data in all of its search results.
The news also underscores one possible route to revenue generation for Twitter: Yandex describes this as a licensing deal. The terms of it were not disclosed but Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30 million for a similar search agreement.
The agreement with Yandex will see Twitter’s data firehose appear both in Yandex’s blog search, as well as through a dedicated URL, twitter.yandex.ru. Read more...
Enterprise gets social: Twitter-style data streams, engagement ‘apps’
Enterprise software developers are just as talented as their free-wheeling consumer-facing peers, but are shackled by the need to prioritise enterprise security over personal utility, and by the fact that IT buyers differ significantly from IT users, as 37 Signals' Jason Fried has pointed out. But a new breed of enterprise software seeks to overlay and augment crufty old systems with dynamic, user-friendly social software, and may well become a $4bn market within the next five years, according to Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard.
Data, not surprisingly, is both the engine behind this shift and the glue sticking it all together.
Enterprise software systems, new or old, throw off immense amounts of data, or "digital exhaust". With the rise of programmable interfaces, or APIs, getting access to that exhaust is easier than ever, but data is only useful if harnessed, made comprehensible, and turned to business value.
Unfortunately, most data is "exhaust" in the traditional sense of the word: waste. If enterprises collect data they do so in data warehouses that sit largely untapped. This is a shame given the potential of data to transform the way we work.
Enter the data stream. Read more...
The top 10 H-1B visa users in the U.S.
Offshore outsourcing companies continued to make up the majority of the top 10 H-1B visa users in 2011, according to new government data. These offshore firms have been adding employees by the thousands as their revenues increase.
Cognizant, a New Jersey-based IT services provider with major operations overseas, led the list. The company had 4,222 initial or new visas approved and 1,493 renewal petitions.
Google was last on the list, with 383 new H-1B visas and 232 renewals.
Offshoring is showing signs of being a major political issue this year, but opinions remain divided.
President Barack Obama highlighted it in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. But he hasn't coupled offshore outsourcing with visa usage. One of the leading Republican candidates, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, has called for eliminating the H-1B cap and says the cap policy is wrong.
The data for this story comes from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. One list shows new applications for H-1B visas; the second list shows the combined totals for new visas and renewals. A H-1B visa must be renewed every three years. Read more...
The Patriot Act and your data: Should you ask cloud providers about protection?
Worries have been steadily growing among European IT leaders that the USA Patriot Act would give the U.S. government unfettered access to their data if stored on the cloud servers of American providers -- so much so that Obama administration officials last week held a press conference to quell international concern over the protection of data stored on U.S. soil.
Patriot Act Games
The unease over the reach of Patriot Act provision -- which expands the discovery mechanisms law enforcement can use to access third-party data -- has been amped up by the sales and marketing efforts of some European cloud providers, seeking to set apart their services as a way to keep corporate data out of the hands of the American government. The most blatant examples are two Swiss companies touting their cloud options as "a safe haven from the reaches of the U.S. Patriot Act," but it's become a popular topic at negotiating tables across the continent.
"I don't see how you have a pitch meeting with one of these European cloud providers and not have subject of the Patriot Act concerns come up," says Alex Lakatos, a partner and cross-border litigation expert in the Washington, D.C. office of Mayer Brown.
Anxiety was heightened last year when a Microsoft UK managing director admitted that he could not guarantee that data stored on the company's servers, even those outside the U.S., would not be seized by the U.S. government.
"Some of it certainly is companies trying to take advantage of the Patriot Act to market against U.S. competitors," Lakatos says. "Some of it is just the general concern Europeans have about the Patriot Act." While the 9/11-inspired legislation has been misused in a variety of ways, says Lakatos, some of those perceptions don't necessarily mesh with reality. Read more...
IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms
IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data.
The breakthrough may someday allow data storage hardware manufacturers to produce products with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's hard disk and flash drives.
"Looking at this conservatively ... instead of 1TB on a device you'd have 100TB to 150TB. Instead of being able to store all your songs on a drive, you'd be able to have all your videos on the device," said Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research Staff Member and lead investigator on this project.
Today, storage devices use ferromagnetic materials where the spin of atoms are aligned or in the same direction.
The IBM researchers used an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism, where atoms spin in opposite directions, allowing scientists to create an experimental atomic-scale magnet memory that is at least 100 times denser than today's hard disk drives and solid-state memory chips. Read more...
Study: iPhone 4S users consume the most data
iPhone 4S users consume twice as much data as iPhone 4 users, signaling that operators will have to continue to battle with growing data volumes, according to a report published by network management software vendor Arieso.
Apple's iPhone has put some operator networks under immense pressure since the first version arrived, as users download more data than their networks can handle. The iPhone 4S takes data consumption to new levels, according to Arieso's report, which looks at usage patterns of at least 1,000 phones of each model, the company's CTO Michael Flanagan said.
The latest addition to the iPhone family is the champion among smartphones when it comes to data usage. Owners of the iPhone 4S download almost three times as much data as users of the iPhone 3G, which Arieso uses as the benchmark, and twice as much as the iPhone 4, whose users were the most demanding in last year's survey.
Reasons for the growing data volume include the addition of Siri and iCloud, according to Flanagan. Read more...
Flaw in Web app frameworks pushes Microsoft to patch ASP.net promptly
Many Web app frameworks are vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack targeting the way they handle hash tables, researchers revealed Wednesday, prompting Microsoft to announce an "out-of-band" patch for its ASP.Net platform just hours later.
Hash tables are used to store and retrieve data rapidly, allocating the data to different slots in the table based on the results of a calculation -- the hash function -- performed on the data itself. Ideally, the hash function would return a different result, or hash, for each possible item of data, but this is not achievable in practice, so implementations of hash tables have to deal with "hash collisions," where two or more different pieces of data generate the same hash.
A collision slows the storage and retrieval of the data involved, the time taken for those operations typically increasing with the square of the number of items involved in the collision, according to Alexander Klink of German security consultancy N.runs and Julian Wälde of Darmstadt Technical University. Read more...
ross-site scripting flaws plague Web apps, report says
Cross-site scripting flaws are the most prevalent vulnerabilities found in Web applications, posing a risk to data and intellectual property, according to a study of thousands of applications by vendor Veracode.
Veracode, a company that specializes in finding vulnerabilities in code, analyzed more than 9,900 applications that were submitted to its cloud-based scanning service over the last 18 months.
For Web applications, 68 percent contained cross-site scripting flaws, Veracode found in its study. Cross-site scripting is an attack in which a script drawn from another website is allowed to run even though it shouldn't and it can be used to steal information or potentially cause other malicious code to run. Read more...
Red Hat RHEL 6.2 boosts storage performance and cuts cost
Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with new technologies designed to cut the cost and improve performance of enterprise storage, the company announced Tuesday.
RHEL 6.2 also offers new features to boost reliability and improve I/O performance.
"As systems get more complex, and [run] more consolidated workloads, it becomes increasingly important to be able to efficiently deploy and manage these large-scale systems," said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of Linux engineering.
For storage, RHEL 6.2 is the first version to fully support iSCSI extension of RDMI (Remote Directory Memory Access). This will allow organizations to achieve the throughput of a SAN (storage area network) using iSCSI disks and Ethernet. "iSCSI obviates the need for separate Fibre Channel hardware, enabling you to use commodity Ethernet channels for your storage infrastructure," Burke said. As a result, "RHEL 6.2 can be used as a storage server." Read more...
Four rising threats from cyber criminals
Criminal hackers never sleep, it seems. Just when you think you've battened down the hatches and fully safeguarded yourself or your business from electronic security risks, along comes a new exploit to keep you up at night. It might be an SMS text message with a malevolent payload or an errant signal designed to jam GPS receivers.
Whether you're protecting corporate data or simply trying to keep your personal files safe, these threats -- some rapidly growing, others still emerging -- put your systems at risk. Fortunately, security procedures and tools are available to help you win the fight.
1. Text-message malware
While smartphone viruses are still fairly rare, text-message attacks are becoming more common, according to Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at mobile messaging company Neustar and director of the Conficker Working Group, a coalition of security researchers that came together to fight the malware known as Conficker. PCs are fairly well protected today, he says, so some black-hat hackers are now targeting mobile devices. Their incentive is mostly financial: Text messaging provides a way to break into devices and make money.
Khoi Nguyen, group product manager for mobile security at Symantec, confirmed that text-message attacks aimed at smartphone operating systems are commonplace now that people are increasingly reliant on mobile devices. It's not just consumers who are at risk, he adds. Any employee who falls for a text-message ruse using a company smartphone can jeopardize the business's network and data and possibly cause a compliance violation. Read more...
Cloud Seen Driving Data Center Traffic; to Surge by 2015
Cloud is in. The cloud, a significant component that would rewrite the future of information technology and video/content delivery, is being seen by conglomerates as an important arena to log on to. With more companies getting on to this new computing services terrain, the cloud is turning out to be the fastest growing component of data center traffic.
Estimates are that the cloud will grow four-fold at 33 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to touch the 4.8 zettabytes mark annually, by 2015. It has been pointed out that cloud comprises 11 percent of data center traffic, and would be up by 33 percent of the total by 2015. Read more...
AT&T reports attempted customer data hack
AT&T today notified customers that there had been an "organized and systematic" attempt to hack into their personal account information.
The company sent out an email to customers informing them of an "attempt to obtain information on a number of AT&T customer accounts" but also emphasized that it did "not believe that the perpetrators of this attack obtained access" to users' online accounts. The company said that the perpetrators had tried using "auto script" technology to "determine whether AT&T telephone numbers were linked to online AT&T accounts." AT&T said it is now focusing its efforts on finding out who attempted the hack and what their intent was for gathering customer information. Read more...
Three questions that could put out Amazon’s Fire
A US congressman is pushing Amazon for details of its cloud-based browsing, Silk, specifically asking what data the company is gathering and how it intends to make use of it.
In an open letter (2-page PDF/263KB, short and to the point) Congressman Edward Markey asks Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos specifically what information is being collected by Silk, how Amazon intends to make use of it, and how the company will go about ensuring users have given explicit permission to have their behaviour monitored in this way.
That last point intimates that such permission should be explicitly requested, while Amazon was probably hoping that the usual user assent to unread Terms & Conditions would suffice. Read more...
Google will use Zagat’s (so you don’t have to)
Google bought Zagat Survey this week for an unknown amount between $50 million and $200 million. Zagat specializes in ratings for restaurants, hotels and travel destinations informed by the input of some 350,000 contributors.
The acquisition is Google's 104th. (The blog TechCrunch claims that the deal did not merit an FTC antitrust review, which happens automatically for any deal worth $66 million or more.)
Google offered Zagat competitor Yelp $500 million in December 2009, but the offer was rejected.
Silicon Valley companies often make acquisitions to gain access to talent, intellectual property or markets. But Google's Zagat buy is mostly about data and a winning methodology for maintaining it. Read more...
T-Mobile Javascript comment stripper breaks websites
Attempts by T-Mobile to speed up mobile data connections are breaking websites.
The bug intermittently affects mobile device users and PC users using tethered connections. It is caused by "optimisations" to the sites' Javascript code made on the fly, in attempt to optimise the amount of data received. Instead of stripping out comments, the optimisation – or more precisely, "pessimisation" – also strips out strings in the code itself.
MySociety first publicised the issue last week.
A developer told us the bug struck while his team was giving a demo to a potential investor. The team subsequently spent two days tracking down what had caused the issue.
"T-Mobile have managed to strip out bits of JavaScript code as well as comments. The jQuery library suffers, too. Worse than that, the script files are cached and won't get replaced when the user moves off 3G and back on to a decent ISP: in effect, T-Mobile has broken websites permanently," said the dev. Read more...
Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing
At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility.
But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them.
While these types of costs don't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing initiatives, they will have an impact on the overall cost-benefit analysis of cloud services. Read more...
10 best practices to prevent data and privacy breaches
The antics of groups like Anonymous and LulzSec over the past few months have made data breaches seem inevitable. If information security vendors like HBGary and RSA Security aren't safe, what hope does an average SMB have? It is true that there is no silver bullet, and no impervious network security, but there are a variety of things IT admins can do to prevent network breaches and protect data and privacy better.
The Web safety and online identity protection experts at SafetyWeb.com and myID.com helped put together a list of 10 different data and privacy breach scenarios, along with suggestions and best practices to avoid them.
1. Data breach resulting from poor networking choices. Names like Cisco and Sun are synonymous with enterprise-level networking technologies used in large IT departments around the world. Small or medium businesses, however, generally lack the budget necessary for equipment like that. If an SMB has a network infrastructures at all, it may be built around networking hardware designed for consumer use. Some may forego the use of routers at all, plugging directly into the Internet. Business owners can improve network security and block most threats by using a quality router, like a Netgear or Buffalo brand router and making sure to change the router password from the default. Read more...
Microsoft looks to business tools for health care
Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, demonstrated some applications on Thursday that apply current technologies to problems facing the health care industry.
He spoke at the Pacific Health Summit in Seattle.
Technology developments aimed at businesses can help the medical field more than many people in health care may think, he said. For example, health care organizations often say that they have so much data, including patients' medical, billing and insurance information, that it will be a challenge for technology companies to build applications around the data, Mundie said. Read more...
Update: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo collaborate in search
In a rare display of collaboration, Google has joined forces with its search rivals Microsoft and Yahoo in a project intended to improve the Web crawling and indexing of structured data, which often originates in databases and loses its format when converted into HTML.
The three companies have launched a site called Schema.org, which contains a common set of HTML tags that they hope webmasters will use to mark up structured data on their sites.
"Schema.org aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages to help search engines better understand their websites," Google said in a blog post. Read more...
Microsoft SQL Server Replication Overview
Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another and then synchronizing between databases to maintain consistency. Using replication, you can distribute data to different locations and to remote or mobile users over local and wide area networks, dial-up connections, wireless connections and the Internet. This SQL Server Replication Overview will explain the terms and functions available through Microsoft SQL Server. Read more...
Update: Sony Ericsson online store, Sony BMG Japan hacked
Sony Ericsson Canada today confirmed that it was hit by a security breach that allowed about 2,000 customer records, including first name, last name, email addresses and the hash of encrypted passwords to be illegally accessed.
No additional personal or credit card information was compromised, the company said in a statement to the IDG News Service this afternoon.
Earlier today, The Hacker News (THN) had reported that it received a tip from a Lebanese hacker who had breached the site and accessed email addresses, passwords and names of thousands of users of Ericsson's Eshop online store in Canada. The information was then posted on Pastebin.com. Read more...
‘Project Triforce’: How Facebook Tested Its New Data Center
When Facebook built its first company-owned data center in Prineville, Oregon, designing and managing the facility was only part of the challenge. In a blog post Monday, the company explained how it had to stress-test its entire software infrastructure by commandeering a giant cluster of production servers on the other side of the country.
The Oregon data center marked a change of tack for Facebook, which had relied exclusively on two leased facilities in Northern California and Virginia. The Prineville data center was the first to be designed and built from scratch Read more...
World’s servers process 9.57ZB of data a year
Three years ago, the world's 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.
Researchers at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times.
By 2024, business servers worldwide will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, according to a report compiled by the scientists. Read more...
Despite Improvements, Data in the Cloud Remains Dirty
Few parts of our lives remain untouched by software in the cloud. From connecting with friends on Facebook to organizing your finances on Mint, these tools are becoming increasingly embedded into our professional and personal lives.
But the seemingly innocuous act of "liking" this article, for example, uses real power--power mostly derived from burning coal.
This was the conclusion of a new study released by Greenpeace this week. The report--part of Greenpeace's "Cool IT" campaign--found that while leading IT companies have made significant improvements in efficiencies throughout their data centers, they continue to derive their energy through carbon-emitting energy sources, primarily coal.
That's good news for small business, which now have the option to purchase cutting-edge cloud-based business applications from among an increasingly robust group of providers, all fighting to make their services cheaper and more user friendly. Read more...