Archive for March 27, 2019

Guest Post: The European Copyright Firewall? VPNRanks Opinionates That VPNs Like Pure & Express Are in for a Field Day

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 27, 2019 by itnerd

The EU Copyright Directive passed on 26-3-19 and will now bring in sweeping reforms to existing copyright laws, making them more suitable to match the challenges presented by the complex modern, digital landscape. Based on the new directive, VPNRanks.com suggests that VPN providers who advocate for Internet freedom can benefit from it.

However, this new legislation has run into major controversy as many Internet activists are now saying that the new EU Copyright law will make it increasingly difficult for users to share content on social sites like Facebook and Twitter, among others, without any reprimands.

While the whole legislation has been increasingly controversial, its two parts are the ones that rouse major concerns. Firstly, Article 11, contained in this new document passed today by the EU Parliament, stipulates that publishers will have to be paid by anyone who wishes to share or display any part of their content, like excerpts, if it’s copyrighted.

The other concerning part of the same legislation, Article 13, will prevent unauthorized uses of any copyrighted content. Any site which wishes to upload such content will be directly liable to pay the publishers or creators of the said content, making it harder for these sites to allow easy upload of popular content like memes, GIFs and images, etc.

But apart from the big tech and content owners, the biggest beneficiary of this new law is going to be the VPN industry. Just like how the VPN industry protects users in controversial activities like torrenting, they will extend the same shroud to users looking to bypass these laws in Europe, without harboring the fear of getting hit by financial or legal litigation.

Providers like PureVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and NordVPN, who prime themselves as protectors of ideals like net neutrality, are highly likely to see users flocking to acquire their subscriptions in the upcoming months as countries in EU pass their own laws from time to time to meet the two-year deadline as required by this legislation’s working framework.

Commenting on the changing internet landscape, Aazim Akhtar, the editor of VPNRanks.com, said, “Net neutrality will always be in danger as long as governments and corporates continue to believe that things should be policed and under their control. The new EU law is an extension of the same ideal, so it’s imperative for users to now start talking about their freedom much more seriously.”

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Schneider Electric Combines Physical Infrastructure with Cisco’s HyperFlex Edge for New Micro Data Center Options

Posted in Commentary with tags , on March 27, 2019 by itnerd

Schneider Electric, the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, announced today new solutions for micro data centers that couple APC by Schneider Electric physical infrastructure with Cisco’s HyperFlex Edge, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions for quick and efficient deployment in edge environments.

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Together, Schneider Electric and Cisco can now offer IT global channel partners and system integrators access to several new reference designs for HyperFlex deployments that can be used as-is or be customized to meet specific micro data center needs. These solutions have been pre-engineered to seamlessly join APC and Cisco equipment for solutions that are pre-integrated, remotely monitorable, and physically secure.

This new offer is part of Schneider Electric and Cisco’s commitment to delivering world-class edge and IOT solutions that offer the highest level of flexibility, resiliency, and speedy deployment.

Partners of Schneider Electric and Cisco are encouraged to speak to their account representatives about these solutions and other options to fit their application needs. To learn more about this offer and our collaboration with Cisco, visit their web site.

This offering comes on the heels of APC NetShelter® SX with Shock Packaging achieving Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Pre-rack and Ship Certification, expanding certification from one standard size to covering the entire product line including 13 preconfigured SKUs and Micro Data Center Xpress SX 24U and 42U. With this certification, APC, the leading brand of physical infrastructure for edge data centers and integrated IT solutions, is offering channel partners and customers the assurance of pre-tested, proven system compatibility, providing more options for greater flexibility and faster deployment, saving time and money.

For the ability to manage these many environments, Schneider Electric provides the EcoStruxure™ IT platform with Cisco UCS manager integration, which can simplify data management and provide visibility of the power infrastructure across the two platforms through a single pane of glass.

Check out the APC alliances page to learn more about how Schneider Electric and Cisco are working together to create solutions that power advanced data center technologies.

 

 

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Apple Apologizes To “Small Number” Of Users Who Have #KeyboardGate Related Issues

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 27, 2019 by itnerd

If you’re lucky enough to have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, you might want to take a read of this article by Joanna Stern who takes a look at one of Apple’s biggest complaints, #KeyboardGate seeing as she herself is a victim of this issue.

If the link above doesn’t work, try this:

In said article, an Apple PR human says this:

We are aware that a small number of users are having issues with their third-generation butterfly keyboard and for that we are sorry. The vast majority of Mac notebook customers are having a positive experience with the new keyboard.

Well, it’s not a “small number” of people as I know about 20 or so myself. Plus as I detailed here, YouTube star Unbox Therapy has had issues with this keyboard to the point that he dumped MacBooks for a Windows 10 laptop. Then he told his almost 14 million subscribers about it on his YouTube channel which cannot be good for Apple.

Face it, Apple has a serious problem here and while apologies are a start (and rare for Apple which says that they are feeling the heat over #KeyboardGate), what MacBook users need is a fix for this along with their other quality issues like #FlexGate. After all, I’ve been holding off giving Apple roughly $6000 CDN of my money because of these quality issues, and I have been advising my clients to not by their notebooks until Apple demonstrates that they have addressed these issues. After all, voting with your dollars is a great way to get a company to do the right thing. Which Apple clearly doesn’t want to do.

UPDATE: I should point out that Apple initiated a service program offering free repairs of 2015-2017 MacBook and 2016-2017 MacBook Pro keyboards. But this hasn’t solved the issue which is what users of these notebooks want. I should also note that the 2018 MacBook Pro and 2018 MacBook Air do not qualify for this fix. Likely because they are either too new, Apple mistakenly believes that they won’t have this issue, or both.

 

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Rogers Launches eSIM For Business Customers On iPhone…. And Fido’s Stance On eSIM Is As Clear As Mud

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 27, 2019 by itnerd

So if you’ve been following the mess that is Rogers support for eSIM on the iPhone XS/XS Max/XR, you’ll recall that Apple appeared to announce that Rogers was supporting eSIM for Apple’s newest phones. But then appeared to back away from that by removing references to Rogers from its various web pages. And in the process leading to a lot of Rogers customers being confused.

Well, Rogers is back on this Apple webpage which lists carriers that support eSIM:

esiim

And after some poking around, I found this on Rogers Community Forums which is announcing eSIM support for business customers only. Meaning consumers need not apply. And its only for iPhone XS/XS Max/XR. Which means if you nave some other eSIM device like some of the flagship Android phones, you need not apply. Plus this is only available on BYOD and no-term plans. If you want to be on a contract with Rogers, then your only option is a physical SIM card rather than activating the eSIM on the phone.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they won’t get a lot of interest from customers given the above. But I’m free to be proven wrong.

Now you’ll also notice that Rogers flanker brand Fido is listed as supporting eSIM. Except that if you ask Fido, they’ll say something like this:

So that’s weird seeing as Apple is saying that they do support eSIM. What’s up with that? Perhaps Rogers/Fido and Apple should collectively clarify this as it’s not exactly clear what the truth is.

 

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Xerox Unveils New Services Offerings

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 27, 2019 by itnerd

Xerox has announced a new services portfolio, comprised of five horizontal and four industry-specific services that are built to address clients’ digital transformation imperatives.

Xerox Horizontal Services

Streamlining time-consuming, business-critical processes – vital to the success of any operation – can be accomplished with Xerox’s Horizontal Services, which include:

 

 

Xerox Sector-Specific Services

Addressing the unique needs of industries, such as insurance, healthcare, public sector and retail, Xerox’s first set of sector-specific services provides new ways to enhance the client experience, including:

 

 

Availability

The first release of the new Xerox Services portfolio is now available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and France. For more information on Xerox Services visit www.xerox.com/services or contact a Xerox sales representative.

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Tunstall Canada Selects Essence Telecare Solutions

Posted in Commentary on March 27, 2019 by itnerd

Essence, the leader in IoT-enabled independent living solutions for seniors, and Tunstall Canada Inc., a leading provider of telecare and remote patient monitoring solutions, recently launched a partnership to offer advanced PERS and home care solutions to the senior care market. The Essence-Tunstall agreement makes the entire suite of Essence’s Care@Home senior care solutions available in the Canadian market.

With the goal of expanding its medical alert and telecare systems solutions for seniors, Tunstall Canada selected Essence, with its range of LTE cellular-based Care@Home products, as the ideal partner to deliver these new advanced systems.

Essence’s unique Care@Home PERS panel – with multiple communications channels – enables a wide range of services such as fall detection, voice alerting, and activity monitoring. Additionally, with the Care@Home Active mobile panic button, seniors can be protected with the same fall detection and alerting capabilities both when they are at home and when they’re away.

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Windows 10 Devices Open To ‘Full Compromise’ From Huawei PC Driver: Microsoft

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 27, 2019 by itnerd

This isn’t going to help Huawei make friends and influence people. According to ZDNet, researchers at Microsoft have discovered a buggy Huawei utility that could have given attackers a easy way to undermine the security of the Windows kernel:

Microsoft has now detailed how it found a severe local privilege escalation flaw in the Huawei PCManager driver software for its MateBook line of Windows 10 laptops. Thanks to Microsoft’s work, the Chinese tech giant patched the flaw in January. As Microsoft researchers explain, third-party kernel drivers are becoming more attractive to attackers as a side-door to attacking the kernel without having to overcome its protections using an expensive zero-day kernel exploit in Windows. The flaw in Huawei’s software was detected by new kernel sensors that were implemented in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, aka version 1809.

The kernel sensors are meant to address the difficulty of detecting malicious code running in the kernel and are designed to detect user-space asynchronous procedure call (APC) code injection from the kernel. Microsoft Defender ATP anti-malware uses these sensors to detect actions caused by kernel code that may inject code into user-mode. Huawei’s PCManager triggered Defender ATP alerts on multiple Windows 10 devices, prompting Microsoft to launch an investigation. […] The investigation led the researcher to the executable MateBookService.exe. Due to a flaw in Huawei’s ‘watchdog’ mechanism for HwOs2Ec10x64.sys, an attacker is able to create a malicious instance of MateBookService.exe to gain elevated privileges. The flaw can be used to make code running with low privileges read and write to other processes or to kernel space, leading to a “full machine compromise.”

Lovely. To be clear, this is a bug as opposed to a back door which is what everyone from national governments to security experts have accused Huawei of building into their products. But I suspect that people who are already suspicious of Huawei are going to take this and spin this as “see you can’t trust Huawei.” Having said that, I have to admit that this isn’t going to help their public image at all as it makes them look less than trustworthy.

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