The Week in Mac Apps: Keep an eye on your camera activity with OverSight

Hands-on: Microsoft's Surface Studio is a Windows PC for the Mac crowd

Its beautiful display and intriguing peripherals grab your attention, but this is more workstation than PC.

Microsoft’s Surface Studio charges aggressively into territory once held by Apple, combining an elegant design, a massive, lovely display, and an eye-popping price tag. We had a chance to try the company’s first-ever desktop after it was announced Wednesday morning. Here’s what stood out during the demo. 

Although the specs fall slightly short of state-of-the-art, everything felt extremely fast and responsive. The base $2,999 offering includes a 6th-generation (Skylake) Core i5, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M 2GB GPU, a 1TB hybrid drive, and 8GB of memory. At the highest end, the $4199 model includes a 6th-gen Core i7, 32GB of memory, and a GTX980M GPU, along with 2TB of storage.  

Mark Hachman

A fantastic display is what’s going to grab your attention first.

What I like most about the Surface Studio is how it pivots, literally, from a single-purpose workstation into an easel for artistic creation or sharing. A pair of hinges gracefully lifts the massive 28-inch, 4500x3000 PixelSense display from a nearly vertical position to about 20 degrees off the horizontal. The display itself offers Adobe sRGB and DCI-P3 color settings, individually color-calibrated. If there’s any drawback, it’s that the monitor itself lacks any other positioning feature. There’s no way of raising it higher, save for propping it up with a book or stand. 

Though it’s designed for creativity, I found one pleasing productivity aspect: When in monitor mode, the display was large enough and detailed enough to allow for four snapped windows in each corner. True, you can do this with any display attached to a Windows 10 machine. But the Studio display’s vast real estate actually makes this practical, with little in the way of visual compromise.

Mark Hachman

The Surface Studio reclined, in “tablet mode”. I found it comfortable to sketch upon, at least for the short periods I tried it.

The Surface Studio ships with a standard Surface Pen, plus an updated Microsoft Sculpt mouse and keyboard, wrapped in Surface gray. I’m lukewarm on the peripherals (though you could certainly replace them with your own hardware). The mouse felt flattish, versus the smooth curve I prefer. I was also hoping for a keyboard a bit more like the Surface Book's, rather than the chiclety feel of the Surface tablet's detachable keyboard. They both felt like flimsy cupholders on a luxury automobile.

Mark Hachman

Microsoft’s Surface Studio mouse.

The Dial, though, is intriguing. A $99 optional peripheral, the Dial augments the mouse and keyboard with quick, easily accessible shortcuts packaged in something that looks remarkably like a hockey puck. I’ve detailed my impressions in a separate article. 

While the Studio doesn’t include the modular functionality that was hinted at in a patent filing, it does include a 5MP front-facing camera and a dual-mic array. Orally triggering Windows 10’s Cortana assistant (“Hey, Cortana!”) worked surprisingly well in the crowded demo room. I didn’t try the camera.

Mark Hachman

Microsoft says that front-facing ports would have interfered with the zero-gravity hinge. It’s still obnoxious, though.

I’m not sure I like Microsoft’s decision to package its expansion ports inside the base. Microsoft essentially took its Surface Hub and tied it to a standard motherboard, encased it in plastic, and called it a day. The Studio puts four USB 3.0 ports inside the base, but points them toward the back, probably making it a pain to plug in anything. There’s an SD card reader and a headphone jack—again, facing the rear. Unlike the Surface tablets, there’s no USB port on the side of the monitor, which I rather miss.  Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi complete the package.

The Studio is a lovely piece of hardware, and I can’t wait to spend more time with it. But remember, it isn’t necessarily for you or me. Microsoft is clearly aiming this at the creative community who normally would buy a Macintosh. I’ll be interested to see how many actually make the jump.

This story, "Hands-on: Microsoft's Surface Studio is a Windows PC for the Mac crowd" was originally published by PCWorld.

AMD drops Radeon RX 460, RX 470 prices ahead of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 launch

Preemptive price jostling.

This article was originally published Sunday, 10/23/16, and updated on 10/24/16. 

Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti graphics cards aren’t even out yet and they’ve already prompted AMD to slash the prices on two-thirds of its Radeon RX 400-series lineup.

As of today, the Radeon RX 460’s “suggested e-tail price” will start at $100 and the Radeon RX 470 will start at $170 “with new holiday programs.” An AMD representative couldn’t clarify what “new holiday programs” meant, exactly, but those adjusted costs represent a $10 discount from the launch-day SEPs for both cards.

Scanning Newegg this morning, a couple of Radeon RX 460s indeed clock in at $100, while PowerColor’s Red Dragon RX 460 will set you back just $95 after rebate. Most 4GB versions of the RX 460 have also settled down at AMD’s stated $140 SEP for the card after months of pricing inflation.

That pricing inflation’s still in effect for the RX 470, however, despite the holiday program pricing ostensibly launching today. Only two models on Newegg are on sale for the RX 470’s original—not adjusted—SEP of $180, and one of those only hits the mark after a $10 mail-in rebate. The majority of Radeon RX 470s still cost $200 or more, though some offer $15 mail-in rebates. At the time of writing none hit the $170 price point that AMD says will debut today. (But on the plus side you can finally find a Radeon RX 480 that actually costs $200, and another that’s just $190 after a mail-in rebate!)

Update Monday 10/24/16: A single RX 470 from XFX has popped up on Newegg for $170. Unlike most graphics cards on Newegg, however, this card doesn’t offer free shipping.

Brad Chacos

AMD’s preemptive price jostling comes as Nvidia finally turns its attention towards sub-$200 graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti launch Tuesday at $110 and $140, respectively—the very same price as the Radeon RX 460’s original SEP. While performance reviews for the new GeForce cards haven’t launched yet, Nvidia itself says that “The GTX 1050 Ti [is] on average 40 percent faster and more than 128 percent more power efficient than the [Radeon RX 460] at stock speeds.”

Time will tell if Nvidia’s chest-beating proves warranted. But we’ve long considered the RX 470 and 4GB RX 460 overpriced for the relative performance offered, going so far as to call the former “A great graphics card with a terrible price.” These cost adjustments in the face of new competition are welcome indeed—though we’d recommend waiting to see how the GTX 1050 performs before rushing out to buy either of AMD’s newly discounted cards.

Tune into episode 9 of PCWorld’s Full Nerd podcast below, where executive editor Gordon Mah Ung, games reporter Hayden Dingman, and yours truly talk about GTX 1050 vs. RX 460 in detail, as well as Battlefield 1 and Razer’s impressive new Blade Pro laptop before diving into Hayden’s must-see blindfolded mechanical keyboard challenge.

New Samsung loyalty program hints that the Note line may not be dead after all

The company is offering Note7 buyers in Korea discounts on the S7 line and a cheaper upgrade to an S8 or a new Note.

Samsung isn’t giving up on customer loyalty without a fight. 

Samsung is aiming to win back those burned by the Note7 debacle with a new upgrade program that indicates the Note line isn’t dead after all. Targeted specifically at buyers in Korea, the company will give an S7 or S7 Edge to those who bought a Note along with an upgrade promise to a new Galaxy S8 or Note8 phone.

That’s the first solid piece of evidence we’d heard that Samsung isn’t shuttering the Note line altogether. The company had previously hinted that the Note was dead given the spectacular demise. You can’t get worse product association than having your phone banned from U.S. flights or burning down a Jeep and garage.

Given that Korea is the home hub for Samsung, it makes sense the company is starting there as a first test in trying to keep customers. Although the road ahead looks incredibly bumpy, with multiple class-action lawsuits headed to the docket both in Korea and the U.S.

Why this matters: Practically speaking this might mean a new Note may appear again some day, presumably without the tendency to catch on fire. Note owners tend to be loyal, and some of them might be willing to give it another try even after this debacle. However, it’s going to take some time for such a reboot, and many may have moved on to other alternatives like Google’s Pixel XL.

For comprehensive coverage of the Android ecosystem, visit Greenbot.com.

$85 billion AT&T, Time Warner deal under scrutiny from politicians, consumer groups

AT&T said Saturday it will acquire Time Warner for $85.4 billion

The plan by AT&T to acquire Time Warner for US$85.4 billion has come under the microscope of U.S. politicians and public interest groups that are concerned about the antitrust implications of the mega-deal.

On Saturday, Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO, said the deal would let it combine premium content with the networks to deliver it to every screen, including mobile displays.

But many politicians including Democratic party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump are concerned about the implications of the deal.

U.S. Senators Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, and ranking member Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, said they will hold in November a subcommittee hearing on the proposed acquisition.

“We have carefully examined consolidation in these industries to ensure that existing market leaders do not block or co-opt new options for receiving video content or exercise disproportionate control over the video content market,” the senators said Sunday. “We will continue to carefully review and investigate any consolidation in this industry to makes sure that it does not harm consumers.” 

There is concern that as the owner of pipes to the consumer such as DirecTV, the satellite TV company it acquired last year, and its broadband and mobile services, AT&T could skew the market by giving preference to content from Time Warner over that of its rivals.

DirecTV might favor Time Warner content by crowding out or refusing to carry other programming that viewers might prefer, wrote John Bergmayer, senior counsel at Public Knowledge, a public interest organization in Washington, D.C., when press reports of the proposed acquisition first started making the rounds.

AT&T might also make it  expensive or difficult for competitors to DirecTV or to its streaming service to access Time Warner programs,  so as to drive customers to its own platforms, Bergmayer said in a statement last week, which expressed similar concerns about AT&T favoring its own content on its broadband networks.

Clinton has also weighed in favor of a close scrutiny by regulators of the AT&T-Time Warner deal, her spokesman told reporters on Sunday. Brian Fallon said that there were “a number of questions and concerns” about the proposed acquisition “but there’s still a lot of information that needs to come out before any conclusions should be reached,” according to Reuters.

Her Republican rival Donald Trump had earlier stated that his administration would block the deal, claiming it would result in “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

The Twitter account of Senator Bernie Sanders, who earlier withdrew his bid for the Democratic party nomination, on Sunday tweeted that “the administration should kill the Time Warner/AT&T merger. This deal would mean higher prices and fewer choices for the American people.”

AT&T expects that the transaction with Time Warner will close by the end of 2017, and said it was subject to review by the U.S. Department of Justice, and possibly the Federal Communications Commission to the extent that FCC licenses may have to be transferred to AT&T under the deal. But AT&T may be too optimistic about the time line as political and other forces line up against the deal.

A similar acquisition proposal by Comcast to acquire NBC Universal in 2009 likewise came under regulatory scrutiny and the deal was finally cleared in 2011 after a number of conditions were imposed.

“AT&T’s reported proposal to acquire Time Warner for more than $80 billion raises some immediate flags about consolidation in the media market, which is an area I’ve worked to address for years,” said Senator Al Franken in a statement Saturday. The senator from Minnesota said he would be asking for more details on the deal in the next few days as he was skeptical of huge media mergers because “they can lead to higher costs, fewer choices, and even worse service for consumers.”

Franken said regulators often agree as was evident when Comcast’s bid to buy Time Warner Cable was stymied last year.

AT&T’s rivals are also likely to watch closely as events unfold, more so as Time Warner has been a coveted acquisition in the past. Disney has said that the deal will have to be reviewed by regulators. “A transaction of this magnitude obviously warrants very close regulatory scrutiny,” Zenia Mucha, chief communications officer for the Walt Disney Company, told some media outlets. 

Late Sunday, AT&T said  that the editorial independence of CNN, a part of Time Warner, would be maintained. “Our intent is to operate Time Warner as it operates today, with autonomy in its divisions,” it said in a statement.

U.S. indicts Russian for hacking LinkedIn, Dropbox, Formspring

Czech police arrested the 29-year-old earlier this month

The U.S. has charged a suspected Russian hacker with breaking into computers at LinkedIn, Dropbox and a question-and-answer site formerly known as Formspring.

On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted 29-year-old Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin following his arrest by Czech police in Prague on Oct. 5.

LinkedIn has said that Nikulin was involved in the 2012 breach of the company that stole details from over 167 million accounts. However, a U.S. court filing unsealed on Friday only gave limited details on Nikulin's alleged crimes.

In March 2012, he hacked a computer belonging to a LinkedIn employee for the purpose of financial gain, federal prosecutors claim. Then In May of the same year, he allegedly hacked Dropbox.

Nikulin also allegedly targeted Formspring, which has now become a portal for dating service Twoo. In June of 2012, he hacked Formspring's user database and downloaded the account information, including email addresses and encrypted passwords.

An accomplice of his then used Gmail to sell the stolen information.

Under the charges, Nikulin could face up to 32 years in prison. He currently remains in custody in the Czech Republic, but local courts there could choose to extradite him to the U.S. The Russian government, however, is demanding that he be returned to his home country.

Both LinkedIn and Dropbox were involved in major data breaches in 2012. In Dropbox's case, details on 68 million accounts were stolen. That data was later found circulating online and probably came from black market internet forums.

Huawei Mate 9 looking good in purple in what appears to be an official render

Huawei Mate 9 looking good in purple in what appears to be an official render

The Huawei Mate 9 is scheduled to be announced on November 3 - less than two weeks from now, and with the big day coming closer, we've been witness more and more leaks on the high-end phablet. Here's another.

Coming from trusted source Evan Blass (@evleaks), the single image depicts the flat-screened Manhattan version (supposedly, there will be an even more premium dual-curved Long Island model), this time in a darker than the usual rose gold purplish tint.

Huawei Mate 9 render

A minor design change from previously leaked renders - the lens properties have been relocated from the top to the side. The presence of the Leica-branded ('co-developed', the two companies insist on calling it) dual-camera setup has been more or less established by now, but this design we're seeing here does have a particular air of finality to it.

Another key aspect of the Mate 9's hardware that deserves a mention is the Type-C USB port on the bottom - Huawei is keeping up with the times. In a good way, not in a ditch-the-headphone-jack kind of way - the 3.5mm jack is alive and well on the phablet's top. That other hole looks somewhat too large to be a secondary mic, and there's one above the camera on the back, so it remains a mystery for now.

As for the specs, a Kirin 960 chipset is all but certain, and a 6-inch FullHD display seems like a safe bet, for the Manhattan, at least. We'll know for sure in due time.

MediaTek SoC confirmed for upcoming Meizu Pro 6s

MediaTek SoC confirmed for upcoming Meizu Pro 6s

Meizu has confirmed that its upcoming Pro 6s smartphone will be powered by a MediaTek chipset. The confirmation came from none other than the Chinese company's VP Li Nan in a post on Weibo (China's Twitter).

While Nan didn't confirm exactly which MediaTek SoC will be in the handset, he did say that the Helio X25 chipset that powers the Meizu Pro 6 is sufficient for everyday tasks, effectively refuting rumors that the Pro 6s will be powered by the Helio P20 SoC.

Aside from this, the VP also revealed that design-wise, the Pro 6s will be almost identical to the Pro 6. The Meizu Pro 6s has already been the subject of several leaks and rumors - you can take a look at them by heading this way.

Counterpoint: Samsung's share of India's premium smartphone market may come down drastically

Counterpoint: Samsung's share of India's premium smartphone market may come down drastically

According to a new report from market research firm Counterpoint Research, Samsung's share of India's premium smartphone market - which currently stands at 58% - may come down drastically to 35% in the fourth quarter of 2016.

Not only this would be the lowest share for the South Korean company in many years, it would also result in the firm losing its top spot in the country's premium segment, which includes phones priced at INR 30,000 (around $450) and above.

As for why Samsung would be losing such a significant chunk, the report notes a couple of reasons: the Galaxy Note7 fiasco and strong iPhone 7 sales.

Needless to say, and as the report also notes, Samsung's loss would be Apple's gain - the Cupertino-based company is expected to claim a share of 57% in India's premium smartphone market in Q4.

When reached out for comment, Manu Sharma (Vice President, Mobile Business, Samsung India) refuted such reports saying, "We don't agree at all. In fact, we are doing exceedingly well with record sales in mobile business and the festive season has started on a high for us. We continue to sustain our leadership position across all price points."

"We are seeing a very good off-take of powerful S7 and S7 Edge devices... The industry analysts research reports are not based on empirical facts. Such projections by any research agency or analyst, therefore, is incorrect," he added.

Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 (2016) with S Pen lands in the US on October 28

Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 (2016) with S Pen lands in the US on October 28

Samsung is announcing that another of its tablets is headed to the US market, and very soon - later this week, in fact. Starting on October 28 (that's Friday), you'll be able to purchase the Galaxy Tab A 10.1 (2016) with an embedded S Pen stylus. The device will be available straight from Samsung as well as at other retailers for a recommended price of $349.99.

That amount of cash will net you the Wi-Fi-only version of the tablet, mind you, no LTE connectivity to speak of here. The US version of the slate is almost identical to the international models, save for a new RAM / internal memory configuration - this one gets 3GB of the former and 16GB of the latter.

The Galaxy Tab A 10.1 (2016) has a 10.1-inch 1,920x1,200 touchscreen, an 8 MP rear camera, a 2 MP front camera, a microSD card slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 7,300 mAh battery. It's powered by Samsung's Exynos 7870 chipset (with a 1.6 GHz octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU) and it runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

Samsung still clueless about what caused Galaxy Note7 fires

Samsung still clueless about what caused Galaxy Note7 fires

If you recall, nearly a couple of weeks ago, Samsung said it is currently investigating the reason behind Galaxy Note7 fire incidents, and will share more information in weeks to come.

Now, according to a new Wall Street Journal report, the South Korean company still doesn't know what exactly caused the fire incidents.

"We recognized that we did not correctly identify the issue the first time and remain committed to finding the root cause," a company spokesperson said. "Our top priority remains the safety of our customers and retrieving 100% of the Galaxy Note 7 devices in the market."

It's worth mentioning that there have been reports that even members of the Galaxy S8 development team have now been tasked to find out the root cause of the problem. This makes sense, especially after reports last week that said if the investigation drags on, the release of the Galaxy S8 may have to be aborted.

October security update starts hitting ZUK Z2

October security update starts hitting ZUK Z2

Lenovo sub-brand ZUK has started rolling out a new update to its Z2 smartphone. The update brings latest security patch - post-update, the Android security patch level will be October 1.

The update also includes several other improvements such as those related to camera and volume.

Given that the update has just started rolling out, it may take time for the update notification to pop up on your device's screen. Meanwhile, if you feel impatient, you can manually check for the update by heading to your handset's Settings menu.

Marshmallow update starts rolling out to Samsung Galaxy S5 mini

Marshmallow update starts rolling out to Samsung Galaxy S5 mini

Samsung has started pushing out a new update to its Galaxy S5 mini smartphone. The update - which is currently rolling out in Russia, and is hitting the device's Duos variant - brings along Android Marshmallow (version 6.0.1).

Weighing in at over 800MB, the update bumps the software version to MMB29M.G800HXXU1CPI5. There's currently no information on what other changes (if any) are included, as well as if and when other markets will get the update.

Google's new Pixel phones to go on sale in India starting tomorrow

Google's new Pixel phones to go on sale in India starting tomorrow

Google has announced the India launch date for its Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. In a tweet this past weekend, the Indian subsidiary of the Mountain View, California-based company revealed that the devices will go on sale in the country starting October 25 (tomorrow).

The Pixels are currently available for pre-order in the Asian country, starting at INR 57,000 (around $850), and just in case you don't already know, the Really Blue color option won't be available in the region. Over in the US, however, the devices have already been launched, and the blue color option is also available.

Windows GDI flaw leads to PowerShell attacks

APT group FruityArmor exploited Windows GDI memory handling to break out of browser sandboxes and launch PowerShell in targeted attacks

A critical vulnerability in the Windows GDI (graphics device interface) that Microsoft patched in its latest round of security updates was exploited by a sophisticated attack group to escape browser-based sandboxes and remotely execute malicious code, according to Kaspersky Lab.

Windows GDI is an API that helps applications work with graphics and formatted text on video displays and printers. The remote code execution flaw stemmed from how GDI handled objects in memory (CVE-2016-3393), and the issue has been addressed in critical bulletin (MS16-120), Microsoft said. The vulnerability affected all supported versions of Windows operating system, Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2010, Skype for Business 2016, Silverlight, .Net Framework, Microsoft Lync 2013, and Microsoft Lync 2010.

An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by tricking a user into visiting a malicious website and clicking on the booby-trapped link, opening a maliciously crafted document sent as an email attachment, or executing a specially rigged file, Microsoft said.

Anton Ivanov, the Kaspersky Lab researcher who reported the flaw to Microsoft in September, found that known advanced persistent threat (APT) group FruityArmor was using this vulnerability as part of a browser-based exploit chain to gain elevated privileges and escape the browser sandbox. FruityArmor relies on Windows Management Instrumentation storage to maintain persistence on infected machines, and on PowerShell to carry out its attacks.

"Since many modern browsers are built around sandboxes, a single exploit is generally not sufficient to allow full access to a targeted machine," Ivanov wrote in a summary on Kaspersky Lab's Securelist.

FruityArmor tricked victims into visiting a malicious page containing a browser-based exploit. The main goal of this module is to load a specially crafted TTF font file containing the exploit to trigger the Windows GDI flaw. With a successful compromise, a second-stage payload uses elevated privileges to execute PowerShell with a meterpreter-style script in order to connect to a command-and-control server and receive additional instructions and executables.

Both the primary malware implant and commands sent by the C&C operators are written in PowerShell, Ivanov said. The implant and the malicious TTF font reside and execute in memory, making them difficult to detect. Many attackers are shifting to fileless malware, where the malicious code executes entirely in memory, to evade detection.

The attacker can cause an integer overflow condition in the cjComputeGLYPHSET_MSFT_GENERAL function from the Win32k.sys system module, where the vulnerability exists. By making a specific segment range in the font file, the attacker can then access "interesting memory," Ivanov said. Though font processing in Windows 10 requires a special user mode process with restricted privileges, the flaw in TTF processing causes fontdrvhost.exe to crash.

While every organization has different patching requirements, IT departments should prioritize patching critical updates. When the vulnerabilities are exploited in the wild, as this remote code execution flaw in Windows GDI is, it should definitely be a priority. Attackers continue to see a lot of success targeting vulnerabilities that already have patches available because not all systems get updated in a timely manner. This was why Ivanov refrained from discussing the vulnerability in depth.

"Please keep in mind that we will not be publishing all the details about this vulnerability because of the risk that other threat actors may use them in their attack," Ivanov wrote.

Snowflake now offers data warehousing to the masses

The cloud data warehouse solution spearheaded by a former Microsoft exec is now cheaper and easier to use, but competition might loom from Amazon -- the very platform it's hosted on

Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse solution co-founded by Microsoft alumnus Bob Muglia, is lowering storage prices and adding a self-service option, meaning prospective customers can open an account with nothing more than a credit card.

These changes also raise an intriguing question: How long can a service like Snowflake expect to reside on Amazon, which itself offers services that are more or less in direct competition -- and where the raw cost of storage undercuts Snowflake's own pricing for same?

Open to the public

The self-service option, called Snowflake On Demand, is a change from Snowflake's original sales model. Rather than calling a sales representative to set up an account, Snowflake users can now provision services themselves with no more effort than would be needed to spin up an AWS EC2 instance.

In a phone interview, Muglia discussed how the reason for only just now transitioning to this model was more technical than anything else. Before self-service could be offered, Snowflake had to put protections into place to ensure that both the service itself and its customers could be protected from everything from malice (denial-of-service attacks) to incompetence (honest customers submitting massively malformed queries).

"We wanted to make sure we had appropriately protected the system," Muglia said, "before we opened it up to anyone, anywhere."

This effort was further complicated by Snowflake's relative lack of hard usage limits, which Muglia characterized as being one of its major standout features. "There is no limit to the number of tables you can create," Muglia said, but he further pointed out that Snowflake has to strike a balance between what it can offer any one customer and protecting the integrity of the service as a whole.

"We get some crazy SQL queries coming in our direction," Muglia said, "and regardless of what comes in, we need to continue to perform appropriately for that customer as well as other customers. We see SQL queries that are a megabyte in size -- the query statements [themselves] are a megabyte in size." (Many such queries are poorly formed, auto-generated SQL, Muglia claimed.)

Fewer costs, more competition

The other major change is a reduction in storage pricing for the service -- $30/TB/month for capacity storage, $50/TB/month for on-demand storage, and uncompressed storage at $10/TB/month.

It's enough of a reduction in price that Snowflake will be unable to rely on storage costs as a revenue source, since those prices barely pay for the use of Amazon's services as a storage provider. But Muglia is confident Snowflake is profitable enough overall that such a move won't impact the company's bottom line.

"We did the data modeling on this," said Muglia, "and our margins were always lower on storage than on compute running queries."

According to the studies Snowflake performed, "when customers put more data into Snowflake, they run more queries.... In almost every scenario you can imagine, they were very much revenue-positive and gross-margin neutral, because people run more queries."

The long-term implications for Snowflake continuing to reside on Amazon aren't clear yet, especially since Amazon might well be able to undercut Snowflake by directly offering competitive services.

Muglia, though, is confident that Snowflake's offering is singular enough to stave off competition for a good long time, and is ready to change things up if need be. "We always look into the possibility of moving to other cloud infrastructures," Muglia said, "although we don't have plans to do it right now."

He also noted that Snowflake competes with Amazon and Redshift right now, but "we have a very different shape of product relative to Redshift.... Snowflake is storing multiple petabytes of data and is able to run hundreds of simultaneous concurrent queries. Redshift can't do that; no other product can do that. It's that differentiation that allows to effective compete with Amazon, and for that matter Google and Microsoft and Oracle and Teradata." 

[An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified "uncompressed storage" as "compressed storage". The pricing of this feature is the same.]

Cisco and VMware eat their anticloud words

VMware once tried to rally the troops against Amazon by dismissing it as a 'bookseller.' Now the old guard has been forced to change its tune

Competing with Amazon Web Services is rough. Just ask VMware and Cisco, both of which have been made to eat cloudy humble pie in recent days.

Both companies sneered at AWS for being a low- or no-margin commodity player a few short years ago, one that would never touch their "higher value" products. Now? We'll let them speak for themselves.

Networking the cloud

Cisco sells billions of dollars worth of networking gear and has been the dominant networking vendor for what feels like centuries. It's a great company with a storied past. It's also seriously at risk thanks to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and other public cloud vendors that encourage enterprises to rent essential infrastructure.

Two years ago, Cisco hired Nick Earle as its senior vice president of cloud sales and go-to-market. At the time, Earle wasn't concerned by AWS. "Commodity riffraff!" seemed to be the thinking that went into a statement he made to CRN:

If you look at what [AWS is] doing, it's clearly a line grab and they are cutting prices and strategically losing money. Cisco does not believe in strategically losing money.

Instead, Earle posited, "ACI and dynamic programmability of the network allows us to have differentiated and higher-value services." Allegedly low-margin vendors like AWS are "shaking because this is a really expensive game. To keep on building data enters and to keep on dropping prices is not the strategy we believe in."

Unfortunately, it is a strategy that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud customers believe in. Oh, and it turns out it's pretty darn profitable, with AWS notching healthy margins that are big enough to carry Amazon's overall operations well into the black.

Cisco, to its credit, has noticed.

Last week Cisco's European, Middle East, Africa, and Russia president Edwin Paalvast took the stage at the Canalys Channel Forum and told them to dig for niche markets because "no doubt [AWS has] won in mass startup [markets] like very big data applications. They are the norm and can't be beaten any more." Hmm, "can't be beaten"? That doesn't sound good.

Yet Cisco remains convinced that the AWS model is likely unsustainable. Paalvast argues: "AWS is a gamble. If you really look at their financials they leased everything out; if they keep growing like they are today, they'll win." However, he goes on, "If they have a hiccup, they will be bankrupt."

With all due respect, Cisco, I wouldn't bet on a strategy based on praying for hiccups. It hasn't worked for VMware, after all.

Beat the bookseller

First it was VMware President and COO Carl Eschenbach, who in 2013 took stock of VMware's brand and ecosystem strength and declared, "I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books." Not to be outdone, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger went a step further and insisted that AWS's victory was everyone else's defeat: if "a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever."

The "we" Gelsinger referred to was VMware and its partners. He was sounding an alarm about the public cloud's threat to VMware's domination of the datacenter:

We want to own corporate workload. We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever.

Gelsinger finally, decisively changed his tune last week when he got on stage with AWS chief Andy Jassy to announce a partnership in which VMware software will be offered as a service on AWS. The Register snarkily headlined it this way: "Amazon AWS: 'Hi there!' VMware: 'We submit. Please, save us.'"

Gelsinger, a bit humbler now, said it thus: "This is the result of our customers telling us what they needed." He's right, but he would have been equally right to admit this three years ago.

The reason VMware fought reality for so long is all about self-preservation. As InfoWorld's Eric Knorr suggests, "This is ultimately an on-ramp [to the AWS public cloud] without an off-ramp." It's a great way to extend the private cloud, which VMware controls, into the public cloud, which is AWS' strength. Don't expect AWS to pave the way back to the private cloud.

A very cloudy Hotel California

This is the problem for all these legacy heavy-hitters, those that Wired has called "the walking dead." They can no longer explain away the gravitational pull of public clouds like AWS or Microsoft Azure, yet they don't have a way to stop them, either.

Analyst Chip Chowdhry, speaking of hardware incumbents, makes it clear that something profound is happening across the enterprise IT landscape, a trend that doesn't affect hardware vendors alone:

We attend 8 to 11 technology conferences every month. We have not come across a single customer who is increasing their enterprise hardware spend. Actually every customer who we spoke to is decreasing their enterprise hardware spend. Every customer we spoke to continues to increase their workloads on AWS and Microsoft Azure by more than 100 percent.

This is only going to accelerate. At least Cisco and VMware now admit it, however painful it may be.

Cloud growth continues to be the name of the game for Microsoft

Azure and Office 365 offset declines in the PC market, but the company's phone efforts continue to be a drag

Microsoft's ongoing move to the cloud paid off once again over the past quarter, as strong growth from Azure and Office 365 offset declines in the PC market.

The company announced on Thursday that its quarterly revenue for the three-month period ending in September was flat overall at $20.5 billion. The company's net profit was down 4 percent year-over-year from $4.9 billion to $4.7 billion.

Those results were driven by quarterly revenue from the company's Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes Azure and Windows Server, and its Productivity and Business Processes segment, which includes Office 365 and Dynamics. Intelligent Cloud revenue grew 8 percent year-over-year to $6.4 billion, while Productivity and Business Processes segment revenue grew 6 percent to $6.7 billion. 

It's another positive sign for the cloud-focused strategy that the company adopted under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella. 

Azure revenue grew by 116 percent year over year, and Microsoft revealed for the first time that its profit margin from its cloud platform is 49 percent. The company continues to keep the exact revenue and profit numbers from its public cloud platform under wraps, however.

Office 365 commercial revenue grew 51 percent year-over-year. Microsoft reported it now has more than 85 million commercial monthly active users of its cloud-based productivity suite as a service offering.

Surface sales were another bright spot for Microsoft. The company's line of tablets and laptops brought in $926 million over the past quarter, compared to $672 million during the same period in 2015. Phone revenue continued to drag the company down for another quarter, however -- revenue from that division dropped by 72 percent year-over-year.

Microsoft's non-GAAP results of $22.3 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.76 a share blew past analyst expectations for the quarter. The consensus of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters was an expected $21.7 billion in revenue and earnings of $0.68 a share. Investors rejoiced at the news, sending the company's stock to an all-time high above $60 per share, beating a previous high set in 1999.

Hackers create more IoT botnets with Mirai source code

The total number of IoT devices infected with the Mirai malware has reached 493,000

Malware that can build botnets out of IoT products has gone on to infect twice as many devices after its source code was publicly released.

The total number of IoT devices infected with the Mirai malware has reached 493,000, up from 213,000 bots before the source code was disclosed around Oct. 1, according to internet backbone provider Level 3 Communications.

"The true number of actual bots may be higher," Level 3 said in a Tuesday blog post.

Hackers have been taking advantage of the Mirai malware's source code, following its role in launching a massive DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that took down the website of cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs.

Unlike other botnets that rely on PCs, however, Mirai works by infecting internet-connected devices such as cameras and DVRs that come with weak default usernames and passwords.

Since Mirai's source code was released, hackers have been developing new variants of the malware, according to Level 3. It has identified four additional command-and-control servers associated with Mirai activity coming online this month.

About half of the infected bots Level 3 has observed resided in either the U.S. or Brazil. More than 80 percent of them were DVR devices.

Many of the DDOS attacks launched by Mirai botnets are used against game servers and residential IP addresses, Level 3 said. 

"We have observed several attacks using more than 100 Gbps" of traffic, it said. "Large armies of bots participated in attacks, with several using over 100,000 bots against the same victim."

A few vendors that produce devices vulnerable to Mirai are encouraging their customers to take steps to mitigate the risk. Sierra Wireless, for instance, has issued a bulletin, advising users to reboot one of their products and change the default password. 

However, it's unclear if other vendors are taking any steps to do the same. Security firm Flashpoint has identified Chinese company Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology as another maker of DVR products susceptible to the Mirai malware.

Potentially, half a million devices from the company are vulnerable partly due to their unchangeable default passwords, according to Flashpoint. But Xiongmai has not commented on the matter. 

Ecuador says it cut WikiLeaks founder's internet access to prevent U.S. election interference

Earlier on Tuesday, WikiLeaks accused the U.S. of asking Ecuador to intervene

Ecuador's embassy in the U.K. says it alone was responsible for cutting WikiLeak's founder Julian Assange's internet connection, stating that the country doesn't want to interfere with the U.S. elections.

"The government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of other countries," it said in a Tuesday statement. "It does not interfere in external electoral processes or support a particular candidate."

As result, the government has temporarily cut access to some private communications at the embassy, where Assange has resided for four years.

Earlier on Tuesday, WikiLeaks blamed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for asking Ecuador to cut Assange's internet access, which was shut down on Saturday. The State Dept. said that didn't happen.

"That’s just not true. He didn’t raise that." said spokesman Mark Toner. "We weren’t involved in this. We had no involvement in any way, shape, or form in trying to shut down Mr. Assange’s access to the internet."

In its Tuesday statement, the Ecuadorian government indicated it was a unilateral decision, saying it does not yield to pressure from foreign states.

It pointed out that while Assange has no internet access, Wikileaks hasn't been restricted from carrying out its journalism.

Assange had previously vowed to release stolen emails from a Hillary Clinton aide, which might hurt her presidential election chances. WikiLeaks has already released thousands of those documents and continues to do so.

The U.S. government, however, suspects that WikiLeaks is helping Russian government hackers to influence the outcome of the presidential election. Earlier this month, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly pointed a finger at Russia for hacking U.S. officials and political groups, and then publishing the stolen documents through sites such as WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks hasn't named its sources, but Assange has denied trying to sabotage Clinton's campaign. The site is fighting off speculation that he is a Russian spy and also recruiting an army of internet users to defend itself from critics. 

Tim Cook or Bill Gates as Clinton's VP? It was considered

The tech CEOs both made a short list of possible vice presidential candidates

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft founder Bill Gates were both on a list of potential vice presidential candidates for Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to a leaked email published on Tuesday by Wikileaks.

The email, apparently sent by campaign chairman John Podesta on March 17, named the two tech titans alongside 37 other people as "a first cut of people to consider for VP."

Also on the list, published by WikiLeaks, was Gates' wife Melinda. She co-founded the charitable foundation that bears both their names.

Other business leaders that made the cut were General Motors CEO Mary Barra, Bloomberg News founder and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.

Clinton's eventual vice presidential pick, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, and former Democratic presidential candidate rival Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont were also on the list.

It's unclear from the email how far in vetting any of the names got.

Cook subsequently held a fundraiser for Clinton in August. In June, Cook also held a fundraiser for Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Enterprises outsmarting themselves with security, while attackers easily use common techniques

Attackers use common techniques to steal data while companies focus too much on sophisticated attacks

Bad guys use common techniques to steal data, while companies focus too much on sophisticated attacks, according to the second annual Hacker's Playbook, based on an analysis of nearly 4 million breach methods.

Security professionals are figuring out how to block attacks from state-sponsored, advanced, persistent adversaries, said Itzik Kotler, CTO and co-founder at penetration company SafeBreach, which produced the report.

"But if you look at the different hacks, they're not all carried out by nation-states," he said. "They're carried out by script kiddies and cyber criminals."

In fact, while conducting penetration tests on behalf of its customers, SafeBreach found that old standbys are extremely effective.

There are few adversaries skilled enough to create zero days. The majority of attackers use and reuse common techniques -- which is exactly what SafeBreach did when running its penetration tests.

Corporate environments typically offered many exfiltration channels, including HTTP, IRC, SIP and Syslogs.

Take, for example, Internet Relay Chat which dates back to before the Web was invented. "It is not sophisticated at all," he said. "And, to our knowledge, it has no business value. But it can still be used to initiate a connection out of a company and carry data."

Syslogs are event logs from network and security products sent to external aggregators for consolidation and analysis -- and are usually not scrutinized by security. They should be limited to specific servers, encrypted, or sent via a VPN tunnel.

Simiarly, SIP, which is used for voice-over-IP communication sessions, needs to be limited to specific, pre-identified servers.

And HTTP is the most common type of outbound traffic, and is the easiest protocol to take advantage of, according to SafeBreach. These communications need to be monitored and inspected by data loss prevention platforms.

When it comes to getting into a company in the first place, companies are still not locking down many common approaches.

For example, executable files in attachments were successful in a quarter of all attempts. So were Microsoft Office macros and visual Basic scripts.

And one of the oldest tricks in the book -- encrypted zip files downloaded via HTTP -- still works.

The kinds of files should be limited by policy or inspected by next-generation firewalls, SafeBreach recommended.

And the top five most successful malware kits have been around for a year or more, including Citadel, Dridex, Hesperbot, SpyEye and Cryptolocker.

Finally, human error was a common problem. The most damaging mistake was misconfiguring malware sandboxes and proxies. For example, sandboxes were often not set up to cover all ports, protocols, file formats, and encrypted traffic. And misconfigured proxies allow attackers to move laterally within corporate networks.

This story, "Enterprises outsmarting themselves with security, while attackers easily use common techniques" was originally published by CSO.

Dropbox for iOS now has in-app PDF signing

Dropbox for iOS improves on mobile productivity with a slew of new productivity features for iMessage and iPad

Now you can "sign" a PDF file right from your iPhone with the new Dropbox update.

On Tuesday, Dropbox released a new version of its iOS app with a slew of features to boost your mobile productivity. Dropbox for iOS now includes in-app PDF signing, a new iMessage extension and widget compatibility, as well as exclusive iPad features. The new Dropbox for iOS app is available now from the App Store.

"Working from your phone or tablet can make a big difference in your productivity, but sometimes it's still hard to match the efficiency of working at your desk. We want to change that," Dropbox product manager Matteus Pan wrote on the company blog.

Here's a breakdown of all the new iOS features that Dropbox released this week.

PDF digital signing

The process of returning a signed PDF used to be laborious. You had to print the PDF, sign it, scan it, and email or fax it back. With the new Dropbox app, you can digitally sign the PDF in-app so you don't need a printer nearby.

The update lets you also add text to fill out other fields in the PDF, making the process of sending PDFs back and forth a lot faster.

iMessage and widget for iOS 10

Dropbox also has new features to make the most out of the new iOS 10. The iMessage extension, for example, lets you find and share files, photos, and documents with your contacts without leaving the Messages app.

With the Dropbox widget, you can access all your files and documents from the lock screen. The widget also has shortcuts to upload a new file or photo and scan a document to your Dropbox.

iPad-only features

Dropbox for iOS also has integrated support for picture-in-picture on your iPad, which lets you watch an uploaded video from your Dropbox while using another app in the background.

According to Dropbox, the new iOS app will also support iPad Split View in the coming weeks. This means that you'll be able to add your Dropbox to your iPad split-screen while working on another app like Safari or Notes.

This story, "Dropbox for iOS now has in-app PDF signing " was originally published by Macworld.

US IT and engineering salaries rise nearly 4 percent in 2015

It was the second-highest annual increase since 2010, according to an IEEE-USA survey

IT and engineering salaries in the U.S. rose 3.9 percent in 2015, the second-highest annual increase since 2010, according to a survey from IEEE-USA.

The median income for IT and engineering professionals rose to $135,000 in 2015, up from $130,000 in 2014, IEEE-USA said. Salaries rose nearly 4.3 percent between 2013 and 2014, after rising just 0.6 percent in 2013.

Engineers working in systems and control, including the subspecialties of robotics and automation, control systems, industrial electronics and cybernetics, saw the largest salary increases in 2015. Their salaries rose 8.7 percent to $130,000.

Workers in the fields of industrial applications, computers, and electromagnetics and radiation also saw salary increases of more than 5 percent in 2015, according to the survey of more than 9,600 people. While the jobs with salary hikes of more than 5 percent are "hot sectors," IEEE-USA doesn't research why those job categories are seeing higher salary increases, said Daryll Griffin, program manager for careers and innovation programs at the organization.

Workers in communications technology, circuits and devices, and signals and applications all saw salary increases of 1.7 percent or less. Those three fields, however, are already the highest paid among nine job catagories in the IEEE-USA survey, with communications technology workers earning a median income of $152,500 a year.

In 2009, the median income for IT workers and engineers in the U.S. was $113,500, according to the survey. While IT and engineering salaries have grown every year since then, IEEE-USA doesn't try to predict salary increases going forward, Griffin said.

IEEE-USA, representing U.S. engineers and technology workers, has pushed Congress to revamp the high-skill H-1B foreign worker visa program despite the salary increases. 

Computerworld's IT salary survey also found a 3.9 percent increase between early 2015 and early 2016.

Last December, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that IT jobs in the U.S. would grow by 12 percent over the next decade.

Problems continue with Windows 10 Anniversary Update 1607, KB 3194798

With recurring and new problems in spades, Win10 Anniversary Update is still not ready for prime time

Microsoft released its latest cumulative updates for Windows 10 this past Tuesday. KB 3194798, which brings Windows 10 Anniversary Update version 1607 up to OS Build 14393.321, continues to generate all sorts of complaints. Chief among them: It still won't install on many machines.

It's the eighth cumulative update for Win10 Anniversary Update in the past 10 weeks.

For the very small slice of Win10 1607 customers who were once Windows Insiders, then reverted to normal "current branch" Win10 without re-installing, the repeated installation of Win10 caused no end of headache. It's a problem that first appeared with the preceding Cumulative Update, KB 3194496, released Sept. 29.

I saw the problem in action while watching Leo Laporte struggle with his repeatedly malfunctioning Surface Book on the latest edition of Windows Weekly. Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott step Laporte through the installation of a Microsoft-issued patch (start at 54 minutes).

Back on Oct. 6, Ed Bott at ZDNet had a thorough discussion of the botched settings and Microsoft's downloadable tool to fix the problem. The fix works for some, doesn't for others. As Foley says, "If the installation fails, keep trying." Bott says Microsoft promised the patch will be available in Windows Update at some point. I haven't seen it.

That's only one segment of the non-installing faction. On the Reddit thread devoted to the update, poster life036 says, "I've got 6 SP4s in deployment right now and KB3192441 / KB3194798 are failing on all of them. Tries to install for an hour, then fails and rolls back for another hour." There are many more complaints.

Looks like Microsoft still hasn't fixed the bug with with freezing and randomly disconnecting external drives, which I discussed on Aug. 4, again on Sept. 13, Sept. 15, and Sept. 30. That problem is still there, although the SSD freezing issue, which I discussed before, appears to be fixed.

There's a new report of 100 percent disk usage, which seems to be fixed by setting AHCI Link Power Management to active. That setting has also been credited for solving a freeze on installation.

Many people are reporting that the Disk Cleanup Utility, run with "Clean System Files" reports an absurdly large amount of old files -- and the bug occurs with both the Win10 1607 patch, KB 3194798, and the Win10 1511 patch, KB 3192441. Poster JO on AskWoody says:

After installing KB3192441 I wanted to do a clean-up: Disk Clean-up said there were 3.99TB of old Windows Update files. My SSD is only 32GB! Now I see more people having this issue. What's going on? I did the clean-up anyway, took about 10 minutes and now it's all fine.

I'm seeing multiple reports of this patch knocking out USB service on the Surface Pro 3. Many people report that the USB Host Controller won't start after applying the update, rendering the Type Cover, USB port, and USB in the Dock useless.

Microsoft's getting closer, but I still don't recommend that folks move to 1607, the Anniversary Update. Wait for the kinks to get ironed out. If you're using Win10, you'd be well advised to stick with the Fall Update 1511 and continue to block the Anniversary Update. Or you can join the unpaid beta team on 1607.

Verizon Pixel phones will get Android updates at the same time as those sold by Google

Verizon also reaffirmed you'll be able to uninstall the three Verizon apps that will come preloaded on the Pixel sold in the company's stores

Contrary to what we first thought, it's looking like you needn't worry about buying a Google Pixel smartphone directly from Verizon.

The carrier says its deal with Google means that Android updates will function just like on iOS: when Google pushes them out, they'll be ready to download. Verizon issued a statement to Ars Technica clarifying the matter after original reporting indicated there'd be a delay in updates in order to verify and test updates on Verizon's network.

First and foremost, all operating system and security updates to the Pixel devices will happen in partnership with Google. In other words, when Google releases an update, Verizon phones will receive the same update at the same time (much like iOS updates). Verizon will not stand in the way of any major updates and users will get all updates at the same time as Google.

Google chimed in as well, telling Ars there won't be any delay. "OS updates and monthly security patches will be updated on all Pixel devices (Verizon and non-Verizon versions) simultaneously," said a company spokesperson.

Verizon also reaffirmed you'll be able to fully uninstall (not just disable) the three pre-loaded Verizon apps. It's a big leap forward for a carrier-branded phone. Such devices are usually loaded down with bloatware and lag far behind Google's previous Nexus phones when it comes to Android updates.

Finally, the Verizon version will also be carrier-unlocked. This will let you take it to another carrier should you decide to switch networks later on. It technically has a locked bootloader, but that is only really of concern to hackers who like to root their phones (a small but vocal population).

This story, "Verizon Pixel phones will get Android updates at the same time as those sold by Google" was originally published by Greenbot.

Gitless simplifies Git version control

The experimental system built on top of Git has no staging area and offers completely independent branching

Gitless, an experimental version control system built atop Git, could make life easier for developers who find Git difficult to use.

"Many people complain that Git is hard to use," the project's web page states. "We think the problem lies deeper than the user interface, in the concepts underlying Git. Gitless is an experiment to see what happens if you put a simple veneer on an app that changes the underlying concepts."

Because Gitless is implemented on top of Git, users can always fall back to Git. "With Gitless, you get a version control system that's easier to learn and to use than Git while retaining much of what makes Git so popular," developer Santiago Perez De Rosso said.

Gitless is compatible with Git -- every Gitless repository is a Git repository -- and Gitless can be used in Git repos without having to do any migrations, meaning co-workers can keep using Git if they prefer. Thus, developers can focus on building software rather than spending months learning their version control system or spending hours trying to get their repository back to a "sane" state, said De Rosso, a student at MIT.

Now in a beta stage of development, Gitless reduces complexity by having no staging area, De Rosso said. "Yet many of the things you would use the staging area for in Git (such as to select segments of files to commit) can still be done in Gitless thanks to a more flexible commit command."

Another main difference is in branching. In Gitless, branches are independent of each other, as if they have their own working directory. "For example, you can be in the middle of resolving conflicts and switch to a different branch to fix a bug, and then switch back to the original branch to finish fixing conflicts," De Rosso said. This eliminates many problems with branch-switching in Git, in which users occasionally need to stash or resort to other workarounds to shuffle between development tasks, he said.

A critic of Git, blogger and software engineer Steve Bennett, saw some promise in Gitless based on what he read on the project's website. "[Overall], it looks like they've fixed all of the commands I hated the most," he said. "If they'd add explicit support for things like Git Flow, PRs, user management etc, it could be perfect."

Samsung cuts revenue and profit forecast after Note 7 fiasco

The revenue and profit cuts come a day after the company scrapped the Note 7 smartphone

Samsung Electronics has cut its revenue and profit forecasts for the third quarter, after the disastrous launch of its flagship Galaxy Note 7, which eventually led to the company recalling the smartphones and stopping their production in the wake of reports of overheating batteries.

The South Korean company said Wednesday that revenue for the quarter was likely to be about 47 trillion won ($4.2 billion), down from the 49 trillion won that it had expected earlier this month in a preliminary forecast. Operating profit is expected to drop by about 2.6 trillion won to 5.2 trillion won.

The company said it was revising its revenue and profit forecast because of the Note 7 debacle.

Samsung said Tuesday it was discontinuing production of the Note 7 smartphone, after fires and even explosions were reported involving replacement units that had been issued after it was found that a battery-cell issue could lead to overheating and even fires in some of the Note 7 phones shipped since mid-August. About 1 million Note 7 phones were to be replaced by the company under a recall announced by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the U.S. in mid-September.

Among the commitments the company gave to customers in the U.S. under the recall program was a promise to replace the smartphones with new Note 7s, or refund the cost of the phone, or exchange it with Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphones. By Monday, when the company asked carriers and retailers worldwide to stop the exchange of the Note 7, only the other options were left to customers.

The reduced revenue and profit forecast could reflect the lost business in the third quarter and the costs of the recall.

Steam's adding support for Sony's DualShock 4 PlayStation controller

Sony's PlayStation 4 controller will soon work with games that support it on Steam.

PC gamers that use a controller (present!) instead of a keyboard and mouse will soon have a new option that isn’t yet another Xbox controller. Valve announced during its Steam Dev Days conference on Tuesday that Steam would soon offer native support for Sony’s DualShock 4 controller, a.k.a. the controller that comes with the PlayStation 4, as first reported by Gamasutra.

Steam will add native support for other controllers soon, but Valve decided to start with the DualShock 4 because Sony's gamepad shares some similarities with Valve's own. Features like the touchpad and gyroscope on the DualShock 4 overlap with features on the Steam Controller.

"Existing native support for the PS4 controller on the PC is a bit weak," developer Lars Doucet told the crowd at Steam Dev Days. "In this case Steam itself is communicating directly with the device so everything that’s nice and reliable."

Mentioned in this article

DualShock 4 Wireless Controller for PlayStation 4 - Jet Black

$46.99 MSRP $59.99

View

on Amazon

Why this matters: Sony’s DualShock 4 is a fantastic device, but its support for PCs is indeed pretty bad. For years, users who wanted to use a DualShock controller had to resort to third-party software. That changed recently, however, when Sony turned a half-hearted eye towards the PC in August. To mitigate the abominable PC support it announced a $25 Bluetooth adapter dongle that lets a DualShock 4 work with PCs and Macs. Native drivers would’ve been a preferable option instead of a dongle, but perhaps that would’ve interfered somehow with Sony’s plans to bring PlayStation Now game streaming to PCs. Whatever the reason, there’s clearly a lot of room for Valve to offer a better solution for PC gamers.

Steam is the glue

Valve

The key to all this DualShock goodness on Steam, of course, is that the games must support it, and from the sounds of it that’s going to be pretty simple. All game developers have to do is support the Stream Controller API and the software takes care of the rest.

“You now don’t have to write your own key rebinding interface if you don’t want to,” Doucet said. “As long as you support the Steam [Controller] API, the user just pulls open the overlay, changes their inputs, goes back to the game, everything just works.”

Valve didn’t specify a date for when DualShock 4 support would roll out, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for the announcement.

Azure roundup: FPGAs, new VMs and fresh Europe regions

Microsoft Ignite brought a ton of cloud news

Microsoft's big Ignite conference for IT pros wrapped up at the end of September, and that means the company dumped a ton of new cloud capabilities to attract people to Azure. Here's the run-down on all the major news you need to know about:

Azure data centers in Germany and the UK go live

In its continuing quest to expand the global reach of its public cloud platform, Microsoft announced the general availability of four new Azure regions: two in the U.K. and two in Germany. The UK data centers are fairly standard cloud regions, but data in the German DCs is under the control of T-Systems International, a German company that's a subsidiary of tech giant Deutsche Telekom.

What that means is Microsoft can't access customer data in the German data centers without the permission of the customers or T-Systems, and will only be able to access data under the supervision of the trustee.

Microsoft says that the arrangement it has with T-Systems is the first of its kind. That may help the company attract additional business from companies that want an extra layer of assurance. The launches now mean that Azure is available from 30 different regions, with six more on the way.

Microsoft is racking FPGAs with its servers, and they're taking networking to ludicrous speeds

In probably the single biggest piece of news out of Ignite, Microsoft revealed that it has hundreds of thousands of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (better known as FPGAs) racked up with its servers in Azure data centers around the world. The hardware is being used to power a new Accelerated Networking feature that Microsoft launched in beta, which offers speeds as high as 25Gbps and latency between 25 and 50 microseconds, for no extra charge.

Right now, it's only available for a couple of beefy instance types in Microsoft's West Central U.S. and Western Europe regions, but Microsoft plans to expand the networking capabiliity to all Azure VMs around the world in the future.

Looking forward, the FPGAs will also be used for powering machine learning-driven services. While Microsoft hasn't given any details on exactly which services will be getting the boost, the company has code that can accelerate its high-level Cognitive Services APIs using the FPGAs.

For a deeper dive on the news, check out this story.

Meet the new compute-optimized H-Series and storage-optimized L-Series VMs

Microsoft continued to diversify the different compute instances available through its cloud platform, launching two new instance types aimed at high-powered workloads. H-Series VMs are built to support compute-intensive workloads. They're based on the Intel E5-2667 V3 3.2 GHz processor, and feature a dedicated RDMA backend network.

The company also announced L-series VMs that are aimed at powering applications like NoSQL databases that need low-latency, high-throughput SSD storage with a whole bunch of space. The instances will support up to 6TB of local SSD storage, and will be available "in the coming weeks."

Azure Stack's second tech preview enters public beta, and we see the hardware it'll ship on

Microsoft's system for running an instance of Azure in a private data center continued its winding procession towards general availabiity at Microsoft Ignite. The company publicly released the second techincal preview of Azure Stack during the show, which adds support for services like Azure Queue Storage and Azure Key Vault.

In addition, HPE, Lenovo and Dell showed off prototypes of the integrated hardware systems they'll be selling that will ship with Azure Stack at Ignite. Earlier this year, Microsoft scrapped its plans for letting customers run the Stack software on a variety of hardware. Instead, the only way customers will be able to get a hold of it at launch is through the purchase of expensive integrated systems.

Ken Won, HPE's director of product marketing for cloud software, offered a "guesstimate" that his company's system would cost between $250,000 and $300,000, according to a report by Redmond Magazine. In addition, users could work with HPE to get one subscription-based bill for both their public Azure and Azure Stack use.

Azure Service Fabric hits GA on Windows Server and enters beta on Linux

Go to a cocktail party full of techies, and sooner or later, someone's going to mention microservice architecture. It's a cool method of building large-scale applications that's particularly well-tailored for a cloud-based world. Instead of building one monolithic app that does everything, developers create a series of services that each perform different functions, and combine them into an application.

That allows companies to individually scale the capacity of different services to meet demand on a given week, day, hour, or minute. There's one problem: wrangling all of those different microservices can be a massive pain. That's why Microsoft built Azure Service Fabric. It's based on internal technology that the company used to run its own services in-house, and is now generally available for use with Windows workloads in Azure. In addition, there's now also a beta version of Service Fabric on Linux.

Terminal nerds get a new Azure CLI beta

Some people just want to watch the world burn. And some people want to manage their cloud services without touching a graphical user interface. Those folks got a new Azure command line interface to play with this past month. 

The commands for the new CLI are a bit different from the old one (for one, "azure" is now just "az" in every command). Microsoft has a chart that maps commands from the old interface to the new available on GitHub.

The new CLI doesn't support the old Azure Service Manager/Classic-based services, so Microsoft will continue to support the first version of its command line tools (lovingly called the Azure Xplat CLI). In addition, Microsoft continues to support .NET Core and PowerShell-based CLIs, and is continuing to invest in both those tools and the new Azure CLI.

That's a wrap for this month! Stay tuned next month for some more cloud changes coming out of Redmond.

Tested: Shadow Warrior 2 sees huge performance boosts from Nvidia's multi-res shading

Shadow Warrior 2 is the first traditional PC game to include Nvidia's multi-resolution shading technology, and it's a game changer.

Lo Wang is back, baby. Shadow Warrior 2 ($40 on Steam) launched today and while its procedurally generated levels give the game a bit less bite than its predecessor, it’s still a riotously good time in a satisfying “mindlessly killing demons” sort of way. But we covered all that in PCWorld’s Shadow Warrior 2 review. This article’s dedicated to a pair of Shadow Warrior 2’s PC “firsts” that are almost more exciting for enthusiasts than the game itself: HDR and Nvidia’s multi-resolution shading, and more particularly the latter.

HDR’s straightforward enough. Shadow Warrior 2 is the first PC game to ship with high-dynamic range support, a feature that can drastically improve the color, lighting, and brightness of a scene. You’ll need a modern graphics card with HDMI 2.0 to support it, along with an HDR-capable TV, as no HDR monitors have trickled onto the market yet. But if you can make the hardware stars align, HDR is nothing short of glorious—to my eye, the leap from a non-HDR screen to an HDR screen provides a visual upgrade far exceeding the boost from 1080p to 4K.

Got it? Good. Now onto the truly interesting stuff.

Nvidia multi-res shading

Nvidia’s multi-resolution shading (MRS) has the potential to be a game changer.

I’ve been saying it ever since I first witnessed MRS as part of a virtual reality tech demo, and I sang the same song after trying Obduction with MRS enabled when the technology was absorbed into the GeForce GTX 10-series’ simultaneous multi-projection feature. Now that it’s live and in action, that potential is becoming reality. Multi-res shading delivers massive performance improvements.

Nvidia’s technology was built for VR but adapts well to standard games. MRS divides the screen into several quadrants. While the center of the screen (you know, where the action happens) renders at full resolution, MRS scales down the resolution around the edges of the screen to greatly reduce the workload placed on your graphics card.

Shadow Warrior 2 offers three levels of multi-resolution shading: Disabled, Conservative, and Aggressive. To test out its performance impact, I took the game for a test run on a PC loaded with an overclocked 4.2GHz Core i5-3570K, an EVGA GTX 1080 FTW, and 16GB of RAM, running the Ultra graphics preset at 2560x1440 resolution with Nvidia’s Shadow Warrior 2 Game Ready 373.06 WHQL driver installed. (Take note: Nvidia’s multi-resolution shading tech works on GeForce GTX 900-series and GTX 10-series graphics cards only.)

My numbers were taken from the forested courtyard in the very beginning of the game.

Here’s a shot of the scene with Nvidia’s MRS disabled. Standing still, performance fluctuated between 76 and 82 frames per second, per EVGA’s PrecisionX overlay. (Clicking on any of the images in this article will blow them up to full resolution.)

Shadow Warrior 2 allows you to tinker with the multi-res shading setting on the fly. Here’s the exact same scene with MRS set to Conservative. In particular, note the slight loss in quality to the fire in the upper-left corner, and the extra jaggies visible on the foremost lion statue just underneath the torch. You’ll also see more aliasing on the edges of the car in the bottom-left corner. None of this was really noticeable with the game running; I needed to actively seek out the differences in image quality.

But get this: The Conservative MRS setting raised frame rates all the way to 82fps to 88fps—a roughly 7.5 percent leap that’s much more noticeable than the slight image degradation at the edges.

Finally, here’s the same scene with MRS set to Aggressive. The visual tweaks are much more apparent here, with the aliasing jaggies on the car and lion becoming, well, jaggier, and the torch’s fire degrading into a blob of pixels. Everything in the center still looks perfect, though, and performance once again skyrocketed, all the way to 89fps to 95fps.

That’s a huge 14 percent average frame rate difference compared to the performance with multi-res shading disabled. To put that in proper perspective, Nvidia’s GTX 960 is roughly 14 to 20 percent more potent than the lesser-powered GTX 950. Enabling Nvidia’s Aggressive multi-res shading is like stepping up to a next-level graphics card, for free.

Hot damn.

Running and gunning

That’s if you’re willing to put up with the visual contrast, of course. Sitting still isn’t a very effective way of measuring in-motion visual quality, so I spent some time running laps around Shadow Warrior 2’s introductory courtyard, firing a revolver, and performing double jumps like a madman. While you couldn’t pick out individual jaggies and pixel blobs like in the screenshot above, the Aggressive MRS preset gave the edges of the screen a softer quality, which sort of felt like peering into the game through a slight vignette filter. I wouldn’t call it overly distracting, and I’d bet you’d become used to it after a short time, but the effect is definitely noticeable.

You might be willing to put up with it for the performance boost, though. While my laps clocked in at a roughly 85fps average with multi-res shading disabled, enabling Aggressive MRS boosted that all the way to the 100fps mark, with occasional dips into the high 90s. Again: That’s huge.

But Conservative MRS is the sweet spot to my eye. Here’s an Nvidia-supplied video of Shadow Warrior 2 running at 4K resolution with Conservative MRS enabled on a GTX 1080.

Enabling it doesn’t force the same “soft edge” effect as Aggressive MRS. The screen’s edges still look crisp, especially while you’re in motion, and you’d have to actively seek out flaws to notice the quality change. But Conservative MRS still provides a sizeable boost to performance, raising the average frame rate during my courtyard laps to the low- to mid-90s. That’s enough of a push to help modest cards hit much more acceptable frame rates, or maybe even allow you to push the game’s graphics settings up a notch.

Lending credence to that thought, Nvidia’s own performance benchmarks show that enabling Conservative MRS in Shadow Warrior 2 is enough to push the GTX 1060 over 60fps at 1440p resolution, and to allow the beastly GTX 1080 to flirt with 60fps at 4K. Enabling Aggressive MRS pushes the GTX 1080 fully over the hump.

Radeon gamers are sure to shriek at the inclusion of this GeForce-proprietary GameWorks tech, but the numbers don’t lie. Nvidia’s multi-resolution shading can unlock meaningful performance gains even if you don’t put the pedal to the metal. I hope Shadow Warrior 2’s MRS inclusion is the start of a beautiful trend, rather than a one-off gift to GeForce owners.

And speaking of one-off gifts to GeForce owners, Nvidia wants to push this technology out to the masses. The company’s giving away $50,000 worth of Shadow Warrior 2 game codes (or 1,250 copies) to registered GeForce Experience 3.0 users later this month, following in the footsteps of an earlier promotion that dished out $200,000 worth of Dead by Daylight codes to GFE users. Have an email address handy.

IBM's Cleversafe storage platform is becoming a cloud service

The system disperses data across nodes for security and fault tolerance

If dispersing data among storage nodes can make it more secure and less prone to loss, wouldn’t spreading it across far-flung cloud data centers make it even more so?

If so, IBM has the right idea with its Cloud Object Storage service, which uses SecureSlice object storage technology that it acquired by buying Cleversafe last year.

The storage-as-a-service offering becomes generally available on Thursday. It lets enterprises use both on-premises gear and the IBM Cloud to store unstructured data objects, which can include things like videos, photos and genomic sequencing data.

Cleversafe’s innovation in object storage was to combine encryption with erasure coding and geographic dispersal of data. SecureSlice encrypts unstructured data, stores the key with the data, and then breaks up that data and puts it on several different storage nodes. In IBM Cloud Object Storage, those nodes can be in data centers spread across an entire continent.

Along the way, SecureSlice uses some data redundancy so its software can recover the data even if some of the nodes fail. Also, breaking apart the encrypted data and key forces would-be thieves to break into multiple storage systems and then reconstruct the data, and the tool that does this resides at the customer's primary data center.

With the new service, IBM extends SecureSlice to hybrid clouds, which enterprises are adopting so they can get the flexibility, scale and lower costs of cloud storage while retaining some control through in-house infrastructure. Research company IDC has estimated that 80 percent of enterprises will use hybrid architectures by 2018.

It took some time to adapt Cleversafe’s exclusively on-premises technology to the cloud, but it was already designed to scale up to petabytes of capacity, said Russ Kennedy, vice president of product strategy and customer success at IBM.

Cloud Object Storage also carries over support for the Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift APIs (application programming interfaces), so applications that use those tools can access data in the system. The service has two storage tiers so enterprises can use it for both backups and primary, frequently accessed data.

The service has already been deployed at about a dozen early-adopter companies, including the link management company Bitly. It’s now available from IBM and its partners in North America and Europe and will later come out in Asia-Pacific, Kennedy said. Also coming later is the ability to buy it directly online.

Customers can choose between Regional Service, which spreads their data across multiple data centers in a given region, and Cross Regional Service, which spans at least three geographically dispersed regions. That doesn’t mean enterprises will be able to move data between continents as part of this service yet, Kennedy said. The Cross Regional Service covers data-center regions within one part of the world.

Honor 8, Honor 8 Smart, and Honor Holly 3 launched in India

Honor 8, Honor 8 Smart, and Honor Holly 3 launched in India

Huawei has launched the Honor 8, Honor 8 Smart, and Honor Holly 3 in India.

Honor 8 is the flagship phone in the Honor series, and has the same dual camera system on the back as the Huawei P9, with one sensor being RGB and the other being monochrome. The phone also has 2.5D glass on the front and back with rounded edges. It runs on Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 950 processor (Cortex-A72 4 x 2.3GHz + ARM Cortex-A53 4 x 1.8GHz, Mali-T880) with 4GB RAM and 32GB storage. On the front is a 5.2-inch 1080p display and 8 megapixel camera. The phone is powered by a 3000mAh battery. The Honor 8 is priced at INR 29,999 ($449).

The Honor 8 Smart has an aluminum alloy frame with a 5.2-inch display 1080p display, 13 megapixel Sony IMX214 camera on the back, 8 megapixel camera on the front, Kirin 650 processor, and a 3000mAh battery. The Honor 8 Smart is priced at INR 19,999 ($299).

Lastly, there is the Honor Holly 3, which will be the first Huawei smartphone to be manufactured in India. It has a 5.5-inch 1080p display, 13 megapixel rear camera, 8 megapixel front camera, and 3100mAh battery. The Honor Holly 3 is priced at INR 9,999 ($149).

Pixels sold by Verizon will be unlocked, receive updates when Google pushes them

Pixels sold by Verizon will be unlocked, receive updates when Google pushes them

One of the things people most liked to get angry about regarding Google's Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones recently was the update situation on Verizon. As you may know, if you're in the US Verizon is currently the only big carrier selling them. You can also grab a Pixel from the Google store or Project Fi, but not AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile. At least not yet.

Add to that the fact that Verizon really isn't generally known for pushing software updates quickly to its devices, plus a poorly worded statement by a Google spokesperson saying "Monthly security updates will come from Google, and system updates will be managed by Verizon for Verizon models, and Google for unlocked models bought from Google Store" - and you've got yourself a scandal.

Well, it turns out that all that outrage was for nothing. Today Verizon finally decided to issue its own statement on the matter. Here it is in full:

First and foremost, all operating system and security updates to the Pixel devices will happen in partnership with Google. In other words, when Google releases an update, Verizon phones will receive the same update at the same time (much like iOS updates). Verizon will not stand in the way of any major updates and users will get all updates at the same time as Google. Also, the Verizon version of the Google Pixel is carrier unlocked, so you can use it where ever you like. Finally, we have three apps pre-installed on the phone Go90, My Verizon (which is your account management tool) and Verizon Messages (your messaging app). As you noted, all three can easily be uninstalled by the user.

This was sent to Ars Technica, and Google told the publication that "OS updates and monthly security patches will be updated on all Pixel devices (Verizon and non-Verizon versions) simultaneously", thankfully clarifying its earlier statement.

At this point you really shouldn't be worried about how soon the Pixels will get updates if you buy either one from Verizon. The iPhones sold by the carrier all get updates at the same time as those from other companies, and Big Red itself made that comparison when talking about the Pixels. What's more, surprisingly the Pixels from Verizon are being offered unlocked too, just like those from the Google store.

As for the infamous Verizon bloatware, it consists of exactly three apps, and all of them can be uninstalled. So hopefully this controversy will finally die down, letting the entire internet once again focus on how the Pixels are overpriced, have chins that are too big, and lack essential features such as wireless charging, OIS, and water resistance.