UK agency’s effort to gather facial images via Yahoo chat sessions brings in too many other body parts. 9 Android Apps To enhance Security, Privacy (Click image for larger view.) The Five Eyes, a term used to explain the transnational intelligence-gathering alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the united kingdom, and the united states, will be more aptly named the Million Eyes, to mirror more accurately the agencies’ ability to access webcam communications. The UK’s GCHQ intelligence service, with the aid of the NSA, reportedly grabbed snapshots from millions of Yahoo users’ webcam chat sessions in recent times, about 7% of which contained “undesirable nudity.” On Thursday, in line with documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Guardian published information about an intelligence-gathering program called Optic Nerve, which began in 2008 and continued a minimum of through 2012, designed to check facial recognition technology and to spot persons of interest. [Should Google Glass users learn self-defense? Read Google Glass Prompts Attack, Woman Claims.] Optic Nerve... Read More »

VMware shows strong profits in fourth quarter, renewed strength because it spending revives. Commoditization? What commoditization? VMware concluded 2013 with strength: Its fourth quarter was up 15% over the year-ago period, and revenue for the complete year was up 13%, to $5.21 billion over 2012. These numbers disguise greater than they reveal. VMware continues to go upstream at an accelerating pace into virtual datacenter and personal-cloud management. That isn’t just a revenue producer for the corporate today, but a trademark that, because it budgets strengthen, VMware is able on the way to yield growing revenue far into the longer term. The other view — that VMware is in a market that’s being commoditized — is thrown into doubt by the fourth-quarter figures. For example, without its Pivotal divesture, those numbers would had been up 17% for the year and 20% for the quarter. By moving Cloud Foundry, Spring, Greenplum, and RabbitMQ into Pivotal, VMware got both lower-yield open-source products (and the headcount related to them)... Read More »

Unlikely partners team to present Desktop-as-a-Service on Google Chromebooks. Will pricing lure users to head faraway from Windows XP systems? 6 Ways SDN Shakes Up The Enterprise (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) VMware has teamed up with Google to produce virtualized Windows desktops on Chromebooks. The move comes at a time when many enterprises, uncertain of what desktop to adopt next, have delayed moving off Windows XP or moving to Windows 7 or Windows 8. VMware and Google executives claim companies can save $5,000 a head over other PCs with their joint arrangement. Which can entice the estimated 29% of enterprise users still running Windows XP. Microsoft has announced it would end technical support for XP on April 8. VMware and Google announced the partnership at VMware’s Partner Exchange show this week in San Francisco. Windows applications haven’t previously run on Chromebooks, a skinny Web client whose slimmed-down Linux operating system was designed primarily to display feedback from applications running on Internet servers.... Read More »

Let’s deconstruct the “flash will die” theory. I’ve read about a articles recently predicting a sudden and abrupt end to the flash market. The rationale given was that as flash NAND gets cheaper, it also becomes less reliable. Here is due to the decreasing flash lithography and the increasing write density (choice of bits per cell). Each of those lowers the life expectancy of the technology. The concept is that, as this continues to happen, flash turns into unsustainable and the industry will move directly to something else. While I agree that flash will someday get replaced by another technology, i don’t believe that’s going to happen anytime soon. Except for NVDIMM, most competing memory technology is five to 6 years faraway from being appropriate for the enterprise, and NVDIMM should be used only in small quantities as a result of cost. There’s various technology that supports the flash NAND market. This includes flash controller technology that controls how and where flash is written. The... Read More »

Glassdoor characterizes these actual job interview questions as “oddball.” We give these questions the answers they deserve. Employment site Glassdoor on Friday plans to publish a listing of the pinnacle 25 Oddball Interview Questions for 2014, compiled from tens of thousands of interview questions shared by job seekers last year. Of those, 16 come from tech companies. Job interviews are nerve-wracking enough, but if combined with ill-conceived questions, they are often downright harrowing. It doesn’t must be that way. Job interviews may be conducted diligently and respectfully. But both parties do their homework. Sadly, that won’t always the case and job interviews, at the least in the course of the first round, often include one-size-fits-all questions that quantity to being poked with a pole, so a reaction may be recorded and a few poorly reasoned conclusion may be drawn. Now it’s probably never advisable to be a snarky job seeker. But when you end up confronted by such eye-rolling questions as these and also you... Read More »