Enterprise, Workstation, Data Center, Cloud, Networking, Software News And Reviews
In-depth product reviews and news of enterprise, workstation, networking, cloud, SMB, data center and software products and services.
We have all heard of the dark web: a lawless digital world, uncharted and unstructured, full of data -- much of it illegally acquired and illegally for sale -- that cannot be viewed without special tools: proxy servers, TOR browsers, and the like. It's a murky and mysterious place, a place where much information resides, but is difficult to unearth for the uninitiated. Until now. Canada's Echosec Systems Ltd. recently released Beacon, a security tool that's designed to shed some light on the dark web. Karl Swannie is the CEO of Echosec, the company behind Beacon. "Beacon is a dark web search...
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It looks as though Apple's autonomous vehicle efforts still have a ways to go before they can compare with the best in the industry. The numbers are in, and Apple reported more self-driving vehicle disengagements than any other company. Apple’s 62 vehicles experienced a grand total of 69,510 disengagements. A “disengagement” is when an autonomous vehicle either gives control back to the driver or when a driver interferes. Ideally, the self-driving car should remain “engaged” during the entirety of the drive unless there is an unusual and unavoidable emergency. Apple...
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Hold onto your wallet. Researchers at ESET have discovered the first known instance of a relatively new strain of cryptocurrency-stealing malware, called a "clipper", on the Google Play Store. They reported their findings to the Play Store's security team on February 1st, who quickly took down the offending application. The attack uses a remarkably simple trick to part users with their digital funds. Cryptocurrency values are assigned to a long, unique string of characters known as a wallet. In order to make a transaction, a sender typically needs to enter the recipient's wallet address in their...
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In October of last year, when Intel officially unveiled its 9th Generation Core series processors, the company also took the opportunity to announce a semi-new breed of workstation processor, namely the Xeon W-3175X. Technically speaking, the architecture at the heart of the Xeon W-3175X isn’t new – the monstrous 28-core / 56-thread processor is based on Skylake-SP, just like the first wave of Xeon Scalable processors that were released in 2017. What Intel has done with the Xeon W-3175X, however, is selectivity bin the die and tweak and tune the power and turbo boost profiles to increase...
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Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has made no bones about embracing subscription services for their products. Office 365 has largely phased out its perpetual licensed counterpart - e.g. Office 2019 - by enticing users with a low up-front cost, continual updates, and additional perks utilizing Microsoft's cloud services. According to Nadella, Microsoft is now looking to differentiate the subscription package further. "I think about Microsoft 365 as a two-sided market," says Satya Nadella. "What we are doing with Office 365 or what we will soon be talking about as Microsoft 365...
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Google’s G Suite has long been a cheaper alternative to Microsoft’s Office 365 plans. However, this price gap is quickly shrinking. Google recently announced that it will be increasing the price of G Suite Basic and Business by 20 percent. This is the first time Google has upped the pricing in over a decade. G Suite Basic Edition will increase from $5 to $6 USD per user/month, while the Business edition will increase from $10 to $12 per user/month. There will be a few pricing adjustments based off of the markets in various regions. The new pricing will be effective starting April 2nd,...
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Are you tired of manually deleting files to make way for a Windows 10 update? A solution is on its way! Microsoft will now reserve at least 7GB of your device’s storage to help facilitate smooth Windows 10 updates. Windows currently does not check to see whether a user has enough space on their device before beginning an update. Users who currently do not have enough storage space usually receive an error message and must delete some of their files. Windows 10 19H1, also known as version 1903, will save at least 7GB of a device’s storage to guarantee that there is room for any...
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AMD has gone on record saying it's "betting big on 7 nanometers" and the innovations that come with it. One of its upcoming 7nm products is "Rome," a next-generation Epyc processor that will be the world's first 7nm datacenter CPU, with increased instructions per clock (IPC) throughput and a big overall performance lift. Part of that performance lift will apparently come from having twice as much L3 cache as current-generation Epyc processors. How do we know this? AMD didn't offer up any specific details about Rome, at least not on a fine grain level. However, with a launch being imminent and with...
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Micron on Wednesday made a couple of announcements aimed at advancing the mobile memory and enterprise storage markets. Starting with the former, Micron said it has begun mass producing the industry's highest capacity monolithic memory for mobile devices and applications, and specifically 12-gigabit (Gb) low-power double data rate 4x (LPDDR4x) DRAM. The LPDDR4x DRAM is being produced on a 10-nanometer class process technology. Micron claims the new memory is capable of reducing power by up to 10 percent at similar data rates of 4,266 megabits per second (Mbps) compared to previous generation memory....
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There's no question that Intel has held a stranglehold on the enterprise CPU market with its family of Xeon processors. However, that all began to change last year with the introduction of AMD's first Zen-based EPYC processors which offered impressive performance at eyebrow-raising price points for potential customers. While AMD has gained some server market share thanks to EPYC, it is really looking to turn the tide with its second-generation EPYC products based on 7nm Zen 2 architecture. These new processors are part of the "Rome" family and are currently sampling to customers. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa...
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The brain is the most complex organ in the body and the most difficult to unravel. Scientists have developed a variety of ways to better understand the brain, including the use of supercomputers. The world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer, the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker), was just switched on for the first time yesterday. The mammoth array of server cabinets boasts one million processor cores and is able to perform 200 trillion actions per second. SpiNNaker has been twenty years and ￡15 million (nearly 19.5 million USD) in the making. The project was originally supported...
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Given all the hubbub concerning solid state drives (SSDs) these days, it's easy to forget that there's still a rather large market for traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Western Digital clearly hasn't forgotten about the market, and is now claiming storage leadership with its new Ultrastar DC HC620. The Ultrastar DC HC620 is available in capacities of up to 15TB, which is just 1TB greater than the previous high watermark for currently shipping HDDs. The Ultrastar DC HC620 makes use of a 3.5-inch form-factor (SAS and SATA interface are available) and leverages second-generation...
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A senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit public interest organization, says Epson may be engaging in "deceptive" behavior by intentionally preventing third-party ink from working in its printers. According to the complaints EFF has received, Epson is doing this through firmware updates, though it's not clear what specific models might be affected. If true, it's easy to see why printer owners and organizations like the EFF would be miffed at Epson. Genuine printer ink is typically expensive, especially compared to what generic alternatives cost. There is a presumed...
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One aspect of smartphones that largely gets overlooked is security. For many consumers, the technical details surrounding stronger encryption just isn't as interesting as advancements in camera technology and other prominent features. For those who do care to know more, however, Google wrote a blog post describing its Titan M chip that is the backbone of security for its recently launched Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL handsets. "Last year on Pixel 2, we also included a dedicated tamper-resistant hardware security module to protect your lock screen and strengthen disk encryption. This year, with Pixel...
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