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Microsoft has ported its SQL Server software to Linux and has promised to release it in full by next year. From today, the Windows giant, which once likened Linux to cancer, will show off to a lucky few a preview of its SQL database's core engine for the open-source operating system. The full SQL Server 2016 for Linux will be made available by mid-2017, we're told. Scott Guthrie, exec veep of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group, said in a blog post on Monday that the Linux port "will enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server...

A while back ATT sold out their CT business to Frontier. It was awful for a while. It took me almost a year to get them to bump me up to 6000 Kbps on my DSL line. It has gotten better and the price is half what I was paying ATT. I have a modem/router from them (Netgear 7550) and am using that. When I had ATT I bought a Netgear N600 DGND3700v2 Modem/Router and it worked pretty well. Lately (well for the past three months) I have been losing connection to the internet on several devices. For example: I'll...

If no candidate arrives in Cleveland with a majority of delegates, resulting in a brokered convention, who would be your top choice to be the Republican’s nominee? Take NR’s latest poll and let your voice be heard.

It generated controversy and criticism when word of it first broke back in October, even though Peeple, a people-rating mobile app that was likened to being the "Yelp for people," hadn't launched yet. Now, after a number of tweaks to the concept, the people-rating app finally launched today. Peeple is available to download for free for iPhones or iPads. The app, which was created by two friends in Calgary, Canada, allows users to rate other users in three categories: personal, professional, and romantic. The idea is to provide "a reference check for the people around us," the creators say on...

The data-storage company Seagate has been tricked into handing over sensitive tax documents about its employees to unknown people on the internet after it was targeted by an email scam. Brian Krebs reports that Seagate was sent an email that pretended to be from someone inside the company. An employee fell for it and handed over information on thousands of people. These email scams are known as "phishing" attacks, in which criminals impersonate company employees to try to gain information about the company or its customers.

“The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Apple Inc. and left in place a ruling that the company conspired with publishers to raise electronic book prices when it sought to challenge Amazon.com’s dominance of the market,” The Associated Press reports. “The justices’ order on Monday lets stand an appeals court ruling that found Cupertino, California-based Apple violated antitrust laws in 2010,” AP reports. “The 2-1 ruling by the New York-based appeals court sustained a trial judge’s finding that Apple orchestrated an illegal conspiracy to raise prices. A dissenting judge called Apple’s actions legal, ‘gloves-off competition.'”“Apple Inc. must pay $450...

that was installing a backdoor through which it was altering core WordPress files so it could log and steal user credentials from infected sites. First signs of something being wrong were spotted by the Sucuri team, a company that provides website security. Sucuri's researchers were alerted by one of their clients to the presence of a weirdly named file (auto-update.php) that didn't exist until a recent plugin update. The plugin in question was Custom Content Type Manager (CCTM), a popular WordPress plugin for creating custom post types that, in the three years since it was uploaded on the WordPress plugin...

By Jim Finkle BOSTON (Reuters) - Apple Inc customers were targeted by hackers over the weekend in the first campaign against Macintosh computers using a pernicious type of software known as ransomware, researchers with Palo Alto Networks Inc told Reuters on Sunday. Ransomware, one of the fastest-growing types of cyber threats, encrypts data on infected machines, then typically asks users to pay ransoms in hard-to-trace digital currencies to get an electronic key so they can retrieve their data. Security experts estimate that ransoms total hundreds of millions of dollars a year from such cyber criminals, who typically target users of...

The March roll-up update for Windows 10 appears to be causing headaches for users, some of whom have been left with computers that don't boot up after the patch has been applied. Microsoft issued the update on March 2 Australian time and users who installed it via Windows Update soon after started complaining of problems. Some experienced extremely long start-up times, with their devices taking over an hour to reach the user account login prompt. Others said they were forced to boot from USB thumb drives with an earlier installation version of Windows 10 and attempt startup repair. Also reported...

Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email and a technological leader, died Saturday. Raytheon Co., his employer, confirmed his death; the details were not immediately available. Email existed in a limited capacity before Tomlinson in that electronic messages could be shared amid multiple people within a limited framework. But until his invention in 1971 of the first network person-to-person email, there was no way to send something to a specific person at a specific address. Tomlinson wrote and sent the first email on the ARPANET system, a computer network that was created for the U.S. government that is considered a...

[This is from a famous scifi writer. He argues that rather than being scared of the danger of artificial intelligence in the future and trying to have government regulate it, more competition, not restricting competition, is best!] Official Statement to the TNC Convention 02016 by David BrinIt is, of course, wise and beneficial to peer ahead for potential dangers and problems — one of the central tasks of high-end science fiction. Alas, detecting that a danger lurks is easier than prescribing solutions that can prevent it. Take the plausibility of malignant AI, remarked-upon recently by luminaries ranging from Stephen Hawking...

I am at my wits end. I am certainly capable of streaming many debates and town halls to my laptop. But, I want to display them on the TV. Both are smart TV's and have Tivo wired to my personal network. Any ideas how to accomplish this wirelessly?

Mozilla developers have taken steps to ban the popular YouTube Unblocker add-on after it was caught altering browser security settings and even installing a second add-on without the user's consent. YouTube Unblocker is a Firefox add-on that allows users to view YouTube videos blocked in their country. It does so by using a collection of proxy servers to reroute YouTube content through countries in which the videos are whitelisted. This past weekend, a user complained about the add-on exhibiting sneaky behavior, saying that his Avast antivirus blocked a download coming from a third-party website as soon as he installed the...

Cisco has issued a patch for its Nexus 3000 series and Nexus 3500 platform switches to remove a hardcoded password for a user account which would allow attackers full remote access. In a security advisory, Cisco said the account "could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to log in to the device with the privileges of the root user with bash [command] shell access." Remote access is possible via Telnet, or by Secure Shell on a specific release of the NX operating system. Serial console access locally is also possible. Cisco said the account is created during installation on the devices...

Consumer technology company Sony is recalling battery packs for certain models of its Vaio laptop over concerns faults with the kit could cause the device to catch fire. It's the third major recall of battery packs from a laptop manufacturer in just a month. In February, both Toshiba and Panasonic recalled battery packs sold with their laptops and notebooks over similar fire hazard concerns. The month prior, Apple was forced to recall wall power chargers due to their potential to cause electric shock, while Microsoft asked 285,000 Australian customers to send back power cords for its Surface Pro devices over...

comScore, Inc. today released data from comScore MobiLens and Mobile Metrix, reporting key trends in the U.S. smartphone industry for January 2016. Apple ranked as the top smartphone manufacturer with 43.6 percent OEM market share.198.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones (79.1 percent mobile market penetration) during the three months ending in January. Apple ranked as the top OEM with 43.6 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers (up 0.3 percentage points from October). Samsung ranked second with 28.5 percent market share (up 0.6 percentage points), followed by LG with 9.6 percent, Motorola with 5 percent and HTC with 3.2 percent.Source:...

New York—Amazon has confirmed it removed the ability to encrypt locally stored data on its Fire tablets, saying that customers weren't using the service. The change comes as Apple squares off against the FBI over access to an encrypted iPhone. Apple says giving the government access would make all other iPhones more vulnerable to hacks. But the encryption that Amazon has removed is somewhat different than the security involved in the Apple case. And Amazon made the change well before the brouhaha started. Amazon made the switch when it introduced its new Fire OS 5 in September with new Fire...

Since about 1 PM Pacific time, the internet has been really, really slow. Wondering if it's me or my machine or outside...

We mentioned these before, and they are for real. Samsung is now shipping the industry's largest solid state drive (SSD) - the "PM1633a," a 15.36 terabyte (TB) drive. First revealed at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in August, the 15.36TB SSD is based on a 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, for use in enterprise storage systems. Because the PM1633a comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, enterprise storage managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack, compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch storage drive "To satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs from leading...

This is a screen capture of a Facebook reply: Seen here (Reddit): https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/48rr9f/according_to_facebook_a_group_created_to/ The hideous Facebook group page is STILL THERE!: https://www.facebook.com/assassinatedonaldtrump About the group: "This page does not partake in any violent acts toward Mr. Trump, but we support the concept of the inevitable assassination of Donald J. Trump." WTF???