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New Chips Support Increased Network Speeds To 400Gbps

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Marvell Semiconductor has a new product out, and it’s a game changer.  Their new “Alaska” chip (the Alaska C 88×7120) is the first on the market to support the new 802.3 standard.  The 802.3cd is on tap to eventually replace current Ethernet ports running at 25Gbps to 100Gbps with ports that will run at 50Gbps, 200 Gbps, and 400 Gbps.

The future is now.

Granted, the Alaska chips aren’t for sale just yet, but they are sampling to customers (“Sampling” in the chip world is akin to beta testing in software).  The chip supports sixteen 50 Gbps ports, four 200 Gbps ports, and two 400 Gbps ports, which will quadruple network output.  Even better, the new chips support both copper and fiber-optic wiring, as well as SerDes (long-reach serialization/deserialization) on system and line side interfaces, allowing OEMs to use the chips for wide-area interfaces.

Also of interest, the new chips use PAM4 (pulse-amplitude modulation), which is a four-level signaling scheme that’s designed to replace NRZ (non-return to zero) binary modulation, and even better, the new PAM4 protocol will be backwards compatible with NRZ hardware.

The port density on the new chip has been optimized to enable both Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable – Double Density and Octal Small Form Factor Pluggable port types for 500 GbE, 200 GbE, and 400 GbE deployments.

If all of those technical details make your head spin, not to worry.  The short of it is that once these chips go mainstream, network output is going to increase dramatically, which means that network speeds are about to get even faster.

Unless you run or manage a huge data center, you’ll probably never have direct contact with these chips. However, as big data centers begin deploying them, you’ll absolutely see the benefits.

Attacks on Health Organizations Increasing At Alarming Rate

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It used to be the case that credit card companies and retail outlets were the primary targets of hackers around the world.  Make no mistake, they still get attacked with regularity, but the hackers have found a new and even more lucrative target:  Health Organizations.

According to a new report jointly produced by the Ponemon Institute and Merlin International, the medical/healthcare industry suffered nearly a quarter (23 percent) of all the data breaches that occurred in 2017.  It gets worse.  Those breaches exposed PHI and PII of more than five million individuals.

The reason for the shift away from credit card data to medical records comes down to profits.  PHI and PII can often be sold on the Dark Web for ten times the amount that credit card information will bring.  The hackers are simply obeying the laws of economics and going where the money is.

Brian Wells, the Director of Healthcare Strategy at Merlin International had this to say about the report:

“In an increasingly connected, digitally centric world, hackers have more opportunities and incentive than ever to target healthcare data, and the problem will only increase in scope over time.

Healthcare organizations must get even more serious about cyber security to protect themselves and their patients from losing access or control of the proprietary and personal information and systems the industry depends on to provide essential care.”

Worst of all, a shocking percentage of medical/healthcare companies don’t seem to be serious about cyber security at all.  Although the average cost of a medical data breach is approximately four million dollars, a staggering 49 percent of companies in the industry don’t have an incident response plan of any kind.  There’s no process in place to properly respond to an attack, or to mitigate the fallout if a breach occurs.  These companies are sitting ducks.

Used with permission from Article Aggregator

Windows Media Player May Be Replaced By Microsoft App

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A Reddit user named “Noam_ha” recently posted a screenshot displaying a popup message when users open the venerable Windows Media Player (WMP), asking users if they would instead like to open the video file with the company’s more modern Movies and TV app.

The popup message touts the Movie and TV app’s advantages, which includes better battery life if running on a phone or laptop, better compatibility with more modern video formats, a mini-view, and support for 360-degree video on Augmented Reality devices.

There are several interesting things to note here:

First, while the new popup message clearly signals Microsoft’s preferences, the reality is that in many ways, the Movie and TV app is a poor substitute for WMP.  It only has modest functionality and has a downright awful interface. Even worse, many features found in WMP (like streaming video from online repositories, queuing, and variable play speeds), are simply not present in the new app.

Second, this appears to be a recent shift inside the company, because WMP comes pre-installed on Windows 10.

On the other hand, WMP hasn’t received a significant update since the Movie and TV app was first released with the launch of Windows 7.  In that respect, at least, the writing has been on the wall for some time now.

This marks the second beloved app that Microsoft has decided to kill in recent months.  Recall that just last year, the company announced the end of Microsoft Paint, a kludgy, barely functional graphics program that was nonetheless, strangely beloved by users.  It was retired and replaced with “Paint 3D,” and now, all indications are that Windows Media Player is headed for a similar fate.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but given the condition of  the new Movies and TV app, the decision probably isn’t going to win Microsoft any friends.

Netflix To Release More Parental Controls To Help Parents

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If you have a Netflix account and children living at home, there’s a reason to cheer about the company’s most recent announcement.  They’re rolling out some robust new parental control features that will allow you to exert much more control over what your children are watching.

You can now set content-specific PINs to lock movies or TV shows. So for example, if you don’t want your children watching “Zombeavers” (yes, that’s a real movie, by the way), you could lock that content with a PIN.  This is in addition to the existing controls Netflix offers that allow parents to set broad PIN-based protections that block content at specified maturity levels.

Additionally, the company has stated that it will start displaying these maturity level designations at the start of each program to give parents greater awareness of what their children are watching.  The changes are slated to be rolled out over the next few months.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the rollout of these changes is slated to coincide with Disney’s planned launch of their own kid-friendly streaming service.

It’s worth noting that Netflix and Disney reached a streaming agreement back in 2012, which didn’t go into effect until 2016.  Disney has stated their intention to end the deal beginning with films released in 2019.  For their part, Netflix will retain the right to show older Disney films until the end of 2019.

Netflix has been the King of the video streaming hill for a long time, but the company is coming under increasing pressure from a growing number of competitors.  The company is fully aware that Disney already has the hearts and minds of millions of children around the world. They realize that unless they do something to bolster their parental controls feature set, they stand to lose ground to this latest entrant in the field of streaming video.

Microsoft To Help Intel With Security Issues

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By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of the “Spectre” and “Meltdown” security flaws that affect every Intel chip produced in the last decade.  Users have been waiting for a fix for both of these since January, when the issues were first discovered.

From the beginning, Microsoft agreed to include the fix for Spectre in its regular software updates but insisted that Intel and PC manufacturers would have to push the Meltdown fix on their own.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of users are still waiting, and in the meantime, untold millions of machines are at risk.  Intel’s first attempt at a fix was so spectacularly bad that the company urged users not to install it until a better fix could be rolled out.

Intel has since released an updated fix, but few users have taken advantage of it so far.  The reason is because most users simply don’t know how.  They’re not aware that they have to go to Intel’s website to manually download and install it, or wait for an OEM push, which could still be months away.

Given this reality and the extreme danger that Spectre poses, Microsoft has reversed course and agreed to make special Windows update releases that include the Spectre fix.  The first such update, KB4090007, is now out and available to users.

There are two important caveats to be aware of, however:

These special updates will not be delivered automatically. Users will have to go to the Windows Update Catalog and select the appropriate package, then run it on their computers

The updates are available only for Windows 10, version 1709, and Windows Server, version 1709

The currently available package (KB4090007) is meant for Intel Skylake CPU owners only. Additional packages will be released over the course of the next few months.

Trustico CEO Leaks HTTPS Certificate Keys Through Email

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The CEO of Trustico, a TLS certificate reseller based in the United Kingdom, finds himself at the center of a controversy that raises a number of disturbing questions about browser-trusted security certificates.

The email in question was sent to Jeremy Rowley, an executive Vice President at DigiCert.  The catalyst that prompted the fateful email was that officials at Trustico notified DigiCert that 50,000 certificates originally issued by Symantec and resold by Trustico had been compromised and should be mass revoked due to security concerns.

Mr. Rowley, not wanting to take such drastic action without proof, asked for it.  In response, Trustico’s CEO emailed the private keys of 23,000 certificates, an action which drew shocked reactions from security professionals around the world when news of the email became public.

If you’re not familiar with the inner workings of browser-trusted certificates, there are a few problems here.  First, there’s no good reason why a reseller should have a copy of the private keys to begin with.  Second, even if that were the norm, to simply email them to a third party shows incredibly poor judgement, especially given that there’s no evidence the email in question was encrypted.  Third, customers used Trustico’s website to generate their private keys, which is a service that should never even have been offered.

To make matters even worse, not long after news of the email hit the internet, Trustico’s website went dark, when a security expert posted details about a critical vulnerability on the company’s website.  The flaw resides in a site feature that allows customers to confirm that certificates are properly installed.  Unfortunately, Trustico’s website had been compromised and any time a user would use the feature, the hackers could use the opportunity to run malicious code.  It’s a tangled web, and it paints everyone involved in a very bad light.

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