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Today’s topics include the Canadian Supreme Court’s order that Google remove web links involved in an intellectual property dispute from search results worldwide; an analysis of the Petya ransomware cyber-attack shows that Ukraine was the hardest hit, Salesforce.com’s Einstein Platform Services provides more machine learning features for application developers; and Nutanix’s introduction of an operating system for hybrid cloud environments.
Canada’s Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling requiring Google to remove search results worldwide pointing to websites being operated by a technology company accused of pirating a rival’s intellectual property.
The ruling is sure to come as a disappointment to internet free speech advocates who have previously noted that such a decision would essentially mean that any country has the right to enforce its laws and decisions on Internet users around the world.
In a 7-2 ruling June 27, Canada’s highest court rejected Google’s argument that forcing removal of the links represented an extra-territorial application of Canadian law and threatened freedom of expression on the global internet.
An analysis by the Symantec Threat Intelligence Team of the impact of the Petya ransomeware cyber-attack shows the overall number of infections is low and primarily affect computer systems in Ukraine with smaller infection numbers in the rest of Europe.
The Petya ransomware, also known as NotPetya or GoldenEye, makes use of the EternalBlue exploit that Microsoft patched in March. The malware uses this exploit to initially gain access to a system and then is able to move laterally across a network in several different ways.
According to Microsoft’s analysis, the new Petya ransomware shares code similarities with the Mimikatz code stealing tool and uses that capability to gain Windows administrator privileges on a network.
Salesforce.com kicked off its Trailhead developers’ conference June 28 with the release of its Einstein Platform Services, a set of new tools designed to help users better understand and anticipate customer demand.
The company is also releasing a beta version of Einstein Object Detection, another developer tool that supports the creation of apps that can recognize images as well as object types and quantities within an image.
A retailer could use Einstein Object Detection to analyze what products have sold or are missing on store shelves. It could also help field service technicians with repairs by recognizing a component or part and pulling up a reference to it from a related database.
Cloud software maker Nutanix on June 28 introduced a new operating system, Nutanix Calm, based on its hyperconverged infrastructure software that can unify public and private clouds under a common hybrid cloud computing architecture.
Nutanix announced the operating system at its .NEXT 2017 conference in Washington, D.C. While its products sound fairly complicated to use, Nutanix is the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage infrastructure for implementing enterprise-class virtualization without complex and expensive network storage.