One year ago, in the first quarter of 2016, Apple reported a record-breaking profit: $18.4 billion on $75.9 billion in revenue. That was great news, but setting the bar so high was a mixed blessing—Apple’s huge uptick in growth ended there, with declining iPhone sales and profits in the three quarters since. But the company…
The Ibex Pro is one supercharged machine that will probably hurt your electric bill. System76’s fastest Ibex Pro with Ubuntu Server 16.10 packs some crazy horsepower with Intel’s latest 22-core Xeon E5 v4 chips and eight Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics processors. It’s got the same number of GPUs as Nvidia’s superfast DGX-1, which is being…
Apple is behind with its taxes, but the tax inspector doesn’t mind. Last August, the European Commission closed a three-year investigation of Apple’s tax affairs with an order to the Irish government that it should recover about €13 billion (US$14.5 billion) in taxes that it believed Apple had underpaid over the last decade. Ireland has…
The Internet Engineering Task Force’s upcoming meeting in Chicago might have fewer attendees than usual, thanks to the Trump administration’s broad immigration ban. Several lengthy discussions on the group’s mailing list highlight the fact that some regular attendees at the IETF’s meetings could have trouble attending IETF 98, which is scheduled for Chicago in March.…
U.S. President Donald Trump called on government agencies to better protect their networks, but he delayed signing an executive order to kick-start a government-wide review of cybersecurity policy. A draft copy of the order, leaked earlier, would give the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security 60 days to submit a list of recommendations to protect…
Spam is making a surprising resurgence as a threat to corporate security and becoming a more significant carrier of attacks as varied as spear phishing, ransomware and bots, according to Cisco’s 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report. The company’s 10th such report says spam is way up. It accounts for 65% of all corporate email among customers…
Apple celebrates diversity, but a big test to its commitment to being inclusive will come at next month’s shareholder meeting. The company is encouraging a vote against a proposal by shareholders to implement an accelerated hiring policy “to increase the diversity of senior management and its board of directors.” But Apple’s senior management and board,…
P4 The dawn of software defined networking (SDN) ushered in an era of disaggregation of the networking control plane from the data plane; management of the network was no longer bound to the networking hardware it ran on. This created a market of overlay control-plane software from companies like Nicira, which was sold to VMware…
While 2016 might not have been a great year for tablets, things are starting to look up for 2017. According to a new report from South Korea-based Naver News, Samsung is prepping the release of a new Galaxy Tab S, the first update to its high end Android tablet in nearly a year and a…
There’s a land grab happening now between networks to link small, battery-powered IoT devices. If countless forecasts are true, there will soon be a lot more tiny, low-power devices like sensors out in the world. The 2G networks that connected many of these to the cloud are gradually going away and newer, more specialized networks…