Mike Wheatley
Latest from Mike Wheatley
PlayStation Network and Xbox Live hacked on Xmas Day, forcing millions of gamers offline
Thousands of video gamers had their Christmas Day fun ruined yesterday thanks to a bunch of mischievous hackers who contrived to knock out both Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service yesterday. Ho ho ho! Even worse, it seems that neither service has quite managed to recover. While the PSN status page ...
IDC highlights top Big Data trends for 2015
Fewer tech trends are likely to be hotter than Big Data analytics in 2015 as far as the enterprise is concerned. Hot on the heels of Forrester’s forecast that Hadoop will become an “enterprise priority” in the next 12 months, International Data corp. has just gazed into its own crystal ball, and sees a future ...
North Korea kicked entirely offline in apparent Sony hack retaliation
If you play with fire, expect to get burned. That’s a lesson that North Korea has learned the hard way after suddenly finding itself wiped off the face of the Internet, following an outage that appears to be the result of a retaliatory attack from the US, Sony and their allies. It’s just the latest ...
South Korean nuclear plant breached by unknown hackers
North Korea’s ongoing cyberwar with Sony Pictures and the US might be stealing most of the headlines this Christmas, but that hasn’t spared its near-neighbor South Korea from a hacking scandal of its own. Reports at the weekend suggested one of the country’s nuclear power stations may have been compromised by hackers, though the operator ...
GitHub urges developers to patch critical Git client bug
GitHub has revealed the existence of a flaw in its client software, and is recommending users upgrade to a new version as soon as possible. The vulnerability first announced at GMANE, and it was later confirmed by GitHub itself, which simultaneously issued a patch. It’s recommending “all users of GitHub and GitHub Enterprise update their ...
Microsoft admits “human error” led to last month’s Azure outage
Microsoft has just published a blow-by-blow account of what went wrong during last month’s Azure cloud storage service outage, which caused thousands of websites, including its own Windows Store and MSN.com, to go offline. The Microsoft Azure service interruption on Nov. 18 resulted in intermittent connectivity issues with the Azure Storage service in multiple regions, ...
Open Garden nets $10.8M to expand mesh-networking FireChat app
Open Garden, the company behind the offline messaging app FireChat that doesn’t need a mobile network, has just announced a fresh funding round of $10.8 million to boost its growth in emerging markets. The FireChat app was only released this year, but it’s quickly gained in popularity due to its ability to connect smartphone users ...
Teradata gobbles up Hadoop-happy data cruncher RainStor
Data cruncher Teradata Corp., which has slowly but surely been expanding its Big Data analytics capabilities, has just snapped up RainStor Inc., maker of a data archiving application that sits on top of Hadoop. The deal was completed for an undisclosed sum, and underlines its growing desire to deliver enterprise-grade Hadoop solutions. For those who ...
US-Cuba detente presents opportunity for Internet freedoms
Cuba remains one of the last nations on Earth where Internet access remains, for the majority of its people, a forbidden fruit. According to the watchdog group Freedom House, barely five percent of Cuba’s citizens enjoy unrestricted access to the Web. But with yesterday’s news that the United States is moving towards normalizing its relations ...
The rise of automation: Opportunity or a disaster in the making?
The idea that technology will eventually do away with the need for manual, human labor is nothing new. Ever since the first enterprising farmers began using cattle to plough their fields instead of doing the job manually, workers have been fearful of losing their jobs. But while that may have happened, it’s also true that ...