Some elements of the US Telecom challenge seemed unlikely to succeed, including its key claim that the precedent set in the “Brand X” case is does not apply, and therefore that the definition of “telecommunications” is not ambiguous. Politico reports that the appeals court judges had seemed skeptical of the applicability of the FCC’s new net neutrality rules specifically to mobile broadband and internet exchange traffic, but Tuesday’s ruling represents an unqualified victory for the FCC. Net neutrality advocates are hardly enthusiastic about the FCC’s regulations.

Republican lawmakers have opposed the regulations and introduced the Internet Freedom Act into Congress last year, which was immediately sent to the Subcommittee on Communication and Technology.

Verizon successfully blocked FCC net neutrality regulation in appeals court in 2014.

Source: TheWHIR

Google said that the TPP requirement of the 12 participating countries that allows cross-border transfers of information and prohibits them from requiring local storage of data will make it more difficult for TPP countries to block internet sites.

Critics call the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and say the agreement could force sites to remove content that allegedly infringes on copyright without a court order, punish internet users who share copyrighted material, and put restrictive limits on “Fair Use”.

“So, the ‘don’t be evil’ era at Google is officially over? I am extremely disappointed that Google would take this stance,” said an anonymous user in the top comment on Google’s blog post outlining its stance, referencing a slogan that Google used to include in its Code of Conduct.

Here are other organizations and tech companies that support the TPP:

• Internet Association
• Information Technology Industry Council
• Business Software Alliance
• Semiconductor Industry Association
• Silicon Valley Leadership Group
• TechNet
• Tech CEO Council
• Telecommunications Industry Association
• Software & Information Industry Association

And hundreds of technology companies that oppose it, including GlowHost, Golden Frog and Minerva Hosting.

It will be interesting to see if Google responds to critics and backtracks its decision. For now it seems to be holding steady.

Source: TheWHIR

Their discussions centered around making the web “open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing, and hosting across millions of computers around the world, with no centralized control,” according to the conference site.

They’re not alone. The organization Redecentralize has been working toward similar goals since last year. The Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s work for digital privacy and openness goes back even further. And BlueYard, a VC firm, hosted a similar event about web openness in Berlin just a few days before the Decentralized Web Summit.

It seems clear that there is sustained and growing interest in online freedom and privacy.

How the Web Became Less Open

What are all these people worried about? What’s wrong with the web today as they see it?

Mostly, they don’t like the tendency of online data to be stored on and routed through centralized servers. These are certainly problems for anyone who believes information online should be free and private.

They’re also not happy about online censorship, which means governments or other authorities block certain websites within their jurisdictions. And they don’t like governments spying on web users in the way the Snowden revelations highlighted.

READ MORE: Government Blunder Exposes Snowden as Target in 2013 Lavabit Email Case

How to Make the Web Open Again

Arguably, however, these are not problems that can be solved by rearchitecting the web alone.

The main issue with online privacy and freedom isn’t that the design of the web — let alone the internet as a whole — is fundamentally flawed. Instead, it’s that most online consumers services have been designed in ways that centralize information and place privacy controls in the hands of vendors, not users.

There are lots of effective ways to protect your privacy online. You can browse using Tor or a VPN to hide your identity and view censored websites. You can use tools like HTTPS Everywhere to add another layer of data encryption. You can avoid placing data in clouds whose servers you don’t control. You could run your own email server if you really wanted. You can center your online activity around platforms like Usenet, which remains as free and decentralized now as it was decades ago, before the web appeared and made Usenet forums an afterthought for most internet users.

SEE ALSO: IANA Transition Proposal Gets NTIA Stamp of Approval

But most ordinary consumers don’t do these things. They have not heard of Tor. They might use a VPN for work, but probably don’t understand how that’s different from using a VPN for privacy reasons. They upload private data to proprietary clouds without hesitation. They use proprietary protocols, like Skype, for online communication even though they have no way of verifying that their data remains as secure and private as the service providers claim.

Changing Consumers

In other words, what needs to change is web user behavior, not the technology itself.

Yes, there might be changes programmers could make to the way the web works that would make it inherently more private and harder to censor. But the tools for beating censorship and assuring privacy already exist. The challenge is just to make them easy enough that ordinary people will actually use them.

SEE ALSO: FBI Subpoenas Tor Developer to Testify in Criminal Hacking Investigation

And that presents a huge opportunity for service providers. As user interest in online openness and privacy increases, organizations that prioritize these features and make them easy for non-geeks to implement will thrive.

Original article appeared here: Do We Need a More Open, Private, “Decentralized” Internet?

Source: TheWHIR

Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last

LinkedIn is Digital Realty’s sixth-largest customer, judging by the amount of rent it pays to the San Francisco-based data center REIT annually. Its top tenant is IBM, and CenturyLink, Equinix, Facebook, and AT&T are second, third, fourth, and fifth, respectively.

If Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn closes successfully, Digital Realty will be able to claim it as one of its biggest customers, which should be good news for the data center provider, considering the rate with which the Redmond, Washington-based giant has been ramping up its data center spending. The company spent 65 percent more on data centers in the first quarter of this year than it did in the first three months of 2015.

See also: New LinkedIn Data Center Strategy Similar to Microsoft’s

In the first quarter, Microsoft leased close to 50MW of data center capacity in three locations from two different providers: CyrusOne and DuPont Fabros Technology, according to the commercial real estate firm North American Data Centers. Last year, Microsoft’s data center leasing activity included about 28MW total in three deals, with Digital Realty, DuPont Fabros, and Vantage Data Centers.

LinkedIn has five data center locations, using Digital Realty in four of them, according to Digital’s investor report for the first quarter. Digital doesn’t disclose specific locations its customers are in, but, as Data Center Knowledge has reported in the past, LinkedIn is in Digital’s data centers inNorthern Virginia and Dallas-Fort Worth markets. The social network has also said publicly that Digital is its data center provider in Singapore. It is unclear where the fourth LinkedIn location Digital has cited is.

Overall, LinkedIn occupies about 280,000 square feet of data center space in the four Digital locations.

In 2014, it also signed a 2MW lease with Equinix in Los Angeles, according to North American Data Centers, and last year took 10MW with Infomart Data Centers in the Portland market.

Original article appeared here: LinkedIn Deal Means More Microsoft in Digital Realty Data Centers

Source: TheWHIR

That verification is an advantage in fighting fraud online and may help Apple gain traction with e-commerce retailers. Target Corp., United Airlines, Lululemon Athletica Inc. and Etsy Inc. are among businesses that have signed up. The feature will help speed up and simplify the checkout process by making it unnecessary for customers to type in credit-card numbers. That may help reduce the number who abandon their shopping carts before paying, Ajay Kapur, chief executive officer of Moovweb, which adapts websites for mobile devices.

“Apple Pay for the web is probably the biggest thing in e-commerce technology that I can remember, since e-commerce itself,” Kapur said in an interview ahead of the announcement. “With a thumbprint, it will be as seamless as buying on Amazon.” His company is investing $10 million in building Apple Pay into its online software, he said.

Safari Only

The feature is only available through Apple’s Safari browser, and not on Google’s Chrome, the world’s most-popular browser, which has more than a billion mobile users.

“Apple Pay in browser limited to Safari is going to be a tough one to swallow for many,” said Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, wrote on Twitter.

Still, the move online is a blow to companies like PayPal, which offers shoppers one-click payment, said Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics LLC. PayPal also lets users of certain devices log into their accounts with a fingerprint reader.

“For PayPal, it’s pretty much a direct attack on their core business,” Entner said in an interview. “If Apple figures out a more convenient way of going through the authentication process, customers that have Apple Pay may pick that and not use PayPal.”

PayPal, a payment option on Apple.com, has much larger scale in the payments market, said PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar. The company has 14 million active merchant accounts, and 170 million active consumer accounts, he said. “PayPal is much more than a button on a website,” he said. “What we are building is truly an operating system for digital commerce.”

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Dominates Cloud Infrastructure Software Market: Synergy

In a letter to Microsoft employees on Monday, Nadella outlined the vision for the LinkedIn acquisition.

“Along with the new growth in our Office 365 commercial and Dynamics businesses this deal is key to our bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes. Think about it: How people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done and ultimately find success requires a connected professional world,” he said. “It requires a vibrant network that brings together a professional’s information in LinkedIn’s public network with the information in Office 365 and Dynamics. This combination will make it possible for new experiences such as a LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you’re trying to complete.”

Of course there is a much larger strategy at play. According to a report by WindowsITPro, “this purchase is all about the data and what larger insights Microsoft can bring to the members of LinkedIn and to Microsoft’s continued embrace of big data.”

Nadella said that as Weiner remains LinkedIn CEO, he’ll report to Nadella and join its senior leadership team.

“In essence, what I’ve asked Jeff to do is manage LinkedIn with key performance metrics that accrue to our overall success,” Nadella said. “He’ll decide from there what makes sense to integrate and what does not. We know that near term there will be no changes in who reports to whom so no reporting relationships at Microsoft will change in that regard. This approach is designed to keep the LinkedIn team focused on driving results while simultaneously partnering on product integration plans with the Office 365 and Dynamics teams.”

In premarket trading on Monday, LinkedIn shares surged 49 percent to $194.63 while Microsoft fell 3.7 percent to $49.50, Bloomberg reported.

Original article appeared here: Microsoft to Acquire LinkedIn: What You Need to Know

Source: TheWHIR

Last week, Heroku announced a new feature, called Heroku Teams, which lets groups of software developers manage different projects, permissions, and people with centralized administration and billing. The new feature is available for free for up to five users.

Earlier this year, Heroku Private Spaces became generally available after being in beta since September as part of the Salesforce App Cloud launch. According to Heroku, Private Spaces is “a new Heroku runtime designed from the ground up to meet the trust and control requirements of the most demanding applications.”

Source: TheWHIR

Apple has been striving to power 100 percent of its operations, including several large-scale data centers, with renewable energy. Its data centers started consuming more energy than any other part of the company’s operations in 2013.

See also: Cleaning Up Data Center Power is Dirty Work

With the exception of colocation facilities it uses in addition to the data centers it owns, Apple has been able to claim that its data center infrastructure is powered entirely by renewable energy, using a combination of its own generation capacity and renewable energy purchases.

The application doesn’t mean Apple may eventually sell energy directly to consumers. The company is asking the commission to grant its new subsidiary market-based rate authority, which is a license to sell energy on the wholesale market at market rates, as opposed to rates established by energy regulators.

The authority is a mechanism to enable energy companies that aren’t vertically integrated in a given market – meaning they don’t own enough generation and transmission infrastructure to be essential to ensuring the region has enough power – to compete with the ones that do, while the ones that do have to sell energy at rates set by regulators because they hold too much power in the market.

There’s also no indication that Apple is looking for a way to sell excess energy its renewable-energy generation projects produce. The commission’s approval would simply give it more flexibility to sell the energy it generates to make it more economical.

Google has had a subsidiary registered as an energy company for years for this reason. If a company invests in a utility-scale photovoltaic installation or a wind farm, it usually cannot plug its data center into the generation source directly. The energy has to go to the same utility grid all other electricity users in the area are on.

Google sells the clean energy it pays for on the wholesale energy market, recouping its costs and applying renewable energy credits to the regular grid power it buys for its data centers, making it “carbon-neutral” as a result. The company has said this scheme makes using renewable energy at least as economical as simply buying grid energy if not more economical in some cases. As the cost of renewable energy goes down over time, Google expects to actually make a profit from the energy it sells.

See also: Google Makes its Biggest Renewable Energy Purchase Yet

Apple owns four data center sites in the US, which together consumed 455 million kilowatt-hours of energy in 2015, according to the company’s latest sustainability report:

• Newark, California: 137 million kWh in 2015
• Reno, Nevada: 46 million kWh in 2015
• Prineville, Oregon: 54 million kWh in 2015
• Maiden, North Carolina: 218 million kWh in 2015

The company has data center projects underway in Mesa, Arizona, Athenry, Ireland, and Viborg, Denmark.

It also uses shared colocation data centers in the US and elsewhere around the world, but says the vast majority of its online services are supported by its own facilities.

The company has built three solar arrays and a fuel-cell plant in North Carolina, a solar array in Nevada, and two micro-hydro systems in Oregon, which use the power of water flowing through local irrigation canals.

Original article appeared here: Apple Creates Energy Company to Sell Renewable Energy it Generates

Source: TheWHIR

“We believe we have huge assets and opportunities to go through that but we like everybody else have to navigate our business, business model, customer relationships, to the other side of this tectonic shift in the industry.”

VMware Bets on NSX

One of these assets is the VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform for the software defined data center (SDDC) – a technology that he says is his number one priority.

“I compare NSX, our networking and security platform, to ESX of 2004. It is that big. It will be even more important than compute virtualization is. I see this as huge for us. We’re going after billions of dollars of potential markets,” he said.

READ MORE: New Partnership will Help Hybrid Clouds Span VMware SDDC and the IBM Cloud

One of the areas that will be less of a priority – at least for now – is containers. Gelsinger says that “containers are early in the hype cycle” and played down recent comments from HPE CEO Meg Whitman that suggested containers could make VMware irrelevant.

“We’ve announced a complete new product family, Photon, which is optimized for container environments. Sort of the thesis behind Meg’s [Whitman] comments were some of the things behind virtualization that have moved from the infrastructure to the application layer and as that moves you don’t need some of that in the infrastructure. We would agree.”

VMware Channel Partners

VMware and other vendors aren’t the only ones navigating these changes; in many ways partners are facing the biggest hurdle on the frontlines as they figure out what all of these changes mean to them.

“We talk about the disruptive cycle and what’s happening; they are absorbing that into their businesses. One of the big shifts that is happening is that business model shift from perpetual to subscription it affects the entire financials of their organization and how they look at their business,” Donna Wittmann, Executive Director, Channels, Alliances and Commercial Sales for VMware Canada said.

“They’re looking at compensation models for their teams and how do they drive the transition and get the right balance.”

“How did channel partners make money in the past? They’d deliver boxes, and then they supported the box and the integration of it and services. That was sort of the standard channel business model,” Gelsinger said. “Now it’s a cloud-delivered service. There’s no box. There are no services to install the box. All of the sudden, how do they work in that environment? It’s a very dramatic shift for a lot of those partners. “

“Some will make it through the transition and some won’t. Some will need to migrate in other different directions for their business models in the future,” he added.

Industry Predictions

As for the industry as a whole, Gelsinger said that the Dell-EMC deal is on the “front end” of a lot of industry consolidation.

“Obviously in this space there will be enormous scale, supply-chain efficiencies that will result,” he said. “Customers will be big winners in all of that.”

While Gelsinger acknowledges the important role that mega cloud providers play in enterprise cloud environments (he referenced a VMware customer, one of the top three car manufacterers in Germany that uses AWS, Microsoft Azure, and VMware) he said that there is “enormous diversity that will occur in this environment” that doesn’t often get addressed.

“I’m not trying to dismiss how big and exciting the mega-clouds are, but to say ‘there’s going to be four global cloud providers’ is dead wrong,” Gelsinger said.

Looking to the Future

The theme of navigation comes up a lot talking to Gelsinger: partners navigating through business model changes, enterprises navigating from on-premise to multi-cloud environments, and of course, VMware’s navigation through the impending Dell-EMC merger.

“When people talk about VMware in the case of these enormous, tectonic shifts that are occurring in the industry [my hope is] that we will have created enough evidence, the growth of those products and our strategy that everybody will say, oh, they’re clearly part of our strategic future,” he said.

Source: TheWHIR

SolidFire’s Mark Conley Opens Up About the NetApp Acquisition and What It Says About the Channel

NetApp’s December 2015 acquisition of SolidFire is still fresh, and the two companies are still figuring out how to best leverage each other’s assets and resources. The VAR Guy breaks the deal down.

And from HPE Discover 2016:

HPE Strengthens Its IoT Play with New Hardware and Software

According to our colleagues at Windows IT Pro, who were at HPE Discover 2016 this week, “the Edgeline EL1000 and Edgeline EL4000 are designed to integrate data capture, control, compute, and storage to deliver analytics processing for near real-time machine learning.”

HPE CEO Meg Whitman Teases “The Machine”

During the day 2 keynote for HPE Discovery 2016, Meg Whitman found a way to excite the crowd about something that will alter the computing landscape but doesn’t quite exist yet.

Source: TheWHIR