Jeff Burt

F5 Networks is unveiling new cloud-based services designed to expand its Big-IP application delivery platform with greater network security capabilities. The goal of the new services, announced June 25 and offered as part of Big-IP v11.2, is to enable organizations to better deal with a threat environment that is getting more sophisticated and more crowded. […]

PayPal is expanding its security-bug-reporting program to include a bounty for reported vulnerabilities, joining a growing list of vendors€”including Google, Adobe, Mozilla and Facebook€”with similar programs. The online payment services company, like others with bounty programs, is hoping to convince people who find security flaws in its operations to report those vulnerabilities to them rather […]

Intel executives for the past several years have been pushing to expand the company€™s reach beyond its core x86-based PC and server chips businesses, and according to one analyst, the effort is paying off. The giant chip maker stands to grow profits by as much as $4 billion in 2013, and about half of that […]

Dell reportedly has upped its offer for enterprise software maker Quest Software to about $2.32 billion, escalating a bidding war with investment firm Insight Venture Partners. Quest officials disclosed June 25 that an unnamed bidder had increased its offer to $27.50 per share, though anonymous sources told Reuters and BloombergBusinessweek that the bidder was Dell. […]

ICANN, the global organization that is overseeing the massive expansion of domain names on the Internet, will soon have a new CEO. Rod Beckstom, who has been in charge of the organization since 2009, will step down as expected July 1, when his term expires. He will be replaced by Fadi Chehadé, who soon after […]

Cisco Systems will look to increase investments€”including in emerging markets€”and grow market share in key sectors despite the uncertain global economy, according to Chairman and CEO John Chambers. The networking giant this week showed off some of that investment, announcing June 20 an expansion of a year-old program in Israel called Maantech that Chambers said […]

Cisco Systems is expanding its converged Unified Computing Systems portfolio, adding four new Intel-powered servers that are primarily aimed at scale-out environments as well as a new virtual networking card. The offerings include two new rack servers and a blade server powered by Intel€™s new Xeon E5-2400 chips for dual-socket systems, and another blade system […]

Calxeda is touting a benchmark test that shows one of its ARM-based EnergyCore chips being 15 times more power-efficient than an Intel Xeon E3 server chip, the latest move in the growing competition between Intel and ARM. The test included a server powered by a quad-core EnergyCore ECX-1000 system-on-a-chip (SoC)€”based on ARM€™s Cortex-A9 design€”with a […]

Z-80 Softcard Two years before Microsoft’s Hardware Group was created, the company released its first hardware product. In 1980, Microsoft rolled out the Z-80 Softcard, a plug-in card for the Apple II computer. The card enabled Apple II users to run Digital Research’s CP/M operating system and supporting software. First Mouse In 1983, a year […]

LinkedIn is the target of a $5 million class-action suit that claims the social networking site€™s data security measures were ineffective, resulting in about 6.5 million user passwords being stolen by a hacker. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California on behalf of Illinois resident Katie Szpyrka, claims that while LinkedIn says […]

eBay will leverage environmentally friendly fuel cells to power an extension of its data center in Utah and using the electrical grid only as backup. eBay officials said June 21 that they plan to use 30 biogas fuel cells as the only power source for the new facility, which is expected to go online in […]

Nvidia officials are not going to change the way they approach Linux, regardless of the obscenity-laced rant aimed at it by the man who helped create the open-source Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds. Speaking at the Aalto Centre for Entrepreneurship in Finland June 14, Torvalds was asked about Nvidia and its lack of support for Linux. […]