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Today’s topics include the long-sought official close of Dell’s buyout of EMC; Google’s September Android update that patches 55 vulnerabilities; why Amazon, Apple and Google are supporting Microsoft’s lawsuit against a blanket gag order imposed on all demands for customer data issued by the U.S. Department of Justice; and Qualcomm’s partnership with AT&T and Verizon to develop drones and internet of things components.
Dell Technologies has officially closed its acquisition of top-tier storage vendor EMC and its federated businesses 11 months after announcing the $60 billion-plus deal that will create a massive company that will compete across all segments of the enterprise IT landscape.
Dell closed the deal Sept. 7, a week after Chinese antitrust regulators gave their approval.
The acquisition creates a $74 billion company with 140,000 employees spread over 180 countries—including a 40,000-person sales force and 30,000 more in services. The merged companies will sell everything from PCs and data center infrastructure to hybrid cloud services, security, the internet of things and virtualization technology.
Google’s September Android security update provides users with patches for 55 vulnerabilities spread across three patch levels. Google first began to split Android updates into two patch levels with the July update, which fixed 108 security vulnerabilities.
The basic idea behind the new three-patch model is to make it easier for handset vendors to deliver the most important patches for a subset of vulnerabilities.
To date, Google has patched more than 115 media server-related Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures flaws in Android.
Amazon, Apple and Alphabet’s Google subsidiary have filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Microsoft’s legal arguments in a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year. On April 14, Microsoft filed its suit against the U.S. government agency, arguing that a statute in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act violates both the First and Fourth Amendments and is unconstitutional.
The statute, Section 2705(b), provides courts with so-called secrecy orders that prevent service providers from disclosing when the government is seeking customer data. Microsoft asserts that such gag orders violate the Fourth Amendment by not informing individuals that their property has been searched or seized by the government.
In addition, the company said the law violates its own First Amendment right to free speech.
Qualcomm is partnering with top-tier carriers AT&T and Verizon as it looks to gain traction in the emerging drone and internet of things markets. On the first day of the CTIA Super Mobility 2016 show Sept. 6 in Las Vegas, officials with the mobile chip maker said Qualcomm and AT&T plan to run tests to determine how well drones operate on commercial 4G LTE networks, which could help accelerate the use of drones in the corporate world.
At the same time, Qualcomm will integrate Verizon’s ThingSpace internet of things platform-as-a-service into one of its LTE modems. The idea is to make it more economical to connect many of the billions of devices that make up the IoT via LTE networks and to make it simpler to build, deploy and manage such devices.