Today’s topics include Google banning crypto-currency mining extensions from the Chrome store, and worldwide converged systems revenue increasing by 9 percent in 2017.
Effective immediately, Google will no longer allow developers to upload crypto-currency mining browser extensions to the Chrome Web Store, and those already in the store will be delisted in late June.
Google will continue to permit extensions designed for blockchain-related purposes that do not involving mining.
James Wagner, product manager for Google Extensions Platform, said the company made this decision due to security concerns. “Over the past few months, there has been a rise in malicious extensions that appear to provide useful functionality on the surface, while embedding hidden crypto-currency mining scripts that run in the background without the user’s consent,” Wagner said, adding that such mining scripts can consume significant CPU resources and seriously impact overall system performance and power consumption.
Industry analyst International Data Corp. reported April 3 in its Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker that worldwide converged systems revenue increased 9.1 percent year over year to $3.6 billion during the fourth quarter of 2017. Full-year sales surpassed $12.5 billion, representing a 9.4 percent increase over the previous year and the first time the market surpassed $12 billion in a calendar year.
“The number of organizations deploying converged systems continued to expand through 2017,” said Eric Sheppard, IDC Research vice president of Enterprise Servers and Storage. “While not all market segments increased during the year, those that did grow were able to provide considerable benefits related to the most core infrastructure challenges facing today’s data centers.”
IDC’s converged-systems market view offers three segments: certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure, integrated platforms and hyperconverged systems.