Xpertfeed

Summary: Microsoft fixes a bug that made its file-hosting service, OneDrive, slow on Linux but not on Windows. Microsoft has resolved a bug that made OneDrive and OneDrive for Business slow on Linux machines but not on any other platform, including iOS, Chrome OS, macOS, and Windows. A Microsoft OneDrive spokesman called Edgar has now confirmed that the issue has been resolved, pointing to a failure in a browser component designed to speed up background processing called prefetching. "We identified that StaticLoad.aspx, a page that prefetches resources in the background for Office online apps was using the link prefetching browser mechanism only for certain platforms, iOS, Chrome OS, Mac, Windows, but for Linux it was falling back to a less efficient technique that was causing the issue. Rest assured that this was not intentional. It was an oversight," Edgar  said  on  Hacker News . Microsoft fixed the issue by disabling prefetching and then enabled it again...

Summary: AMD takes aim at the highly lucrative mainstream PC market with its new Ryzen 5 chips. The high-end processor market may be where all the bragging rights lie, but it's the mainstream market where the volume is, and AMD is taking aim at that segment with its new Ryzen 5 processors. Ryzen 5 is AMD's new line of mainstream processors, joining the already released high-end Ryzen 7 chips, and the budget Ryzen 3 chips which are planned for the second half of the year. Ryzen 5 is a much bigger deal than Ryzen 7 because the mainstream processor sub-$300 market is about twice as big as the high-end market processor market. And AMD's re-entry into this mainstream market presents a real threat to Intel's dominance over the PC industry. AMD is unveiling four Ryzen 5 chips, ranging from the $249 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600X down to the $169 4-core/8-thread Ryzen 5 1400: Model Cores/Threads Speed (GHz) Cooler Price ($) Ryzen 5 1600X 6/12 3.6/4.0 - 249 Ryzen 5...

Summary: The secretive system uses data and other techniques to ferret out cops and root out anyone who may do the service harm. An internal program used by Uber for years to dance around the police in areas where the ride-hailing service was frowned upon has been exposed. In cities such as Boston, Las Vegas, and Paris, alongside countries including China and South Korea, Greyball is used as part of the violation of terms of service (VTOS) program which Uber created in 2014 to ferret out and black-mark anyone that may be a threat to the firm.Dubbed Greyball, Uber's program uses data analytics and a myriad of other tactics to avoid the authorities in places where the service is resisted by law enforcement or banned outright, according  to the New York Times . Predominantly used in the US, Greyball first came to light in the same year when investigators began to hail rides using the Uber app to build a case against the company. One such investigator, Erich England from ...

Summary: History is littered with typo miscues that led to major tech outages, mixups and lots of losses. Amazon Web Services outlined its post mortem on its S3 outage and the cause boils down to one word: Typo. A typo?!? That's crazy right? Not really. In fact, typos plague software, code and have cost companies billions of dollars. The cloud giant offered the following when explaining its outage. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team  was debugging an issue  causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. Folks say misery loves company and the good news for AWS is that the typo club is pretty...

Summary: The city with the highest-profile Linux desktop projects is turning back to Windows, but the fate of Linux isn't tied to the PC anymore. After a nearly decade-long project to move away from Windows onto Linux, Munich has all but decided on a dramatic u-turn. It's likely that, by 2021, the city council will start to replace PCs running LiMux (its custom version of Ubuntu)  with Windows 10 . Going back maybe 15 or 20 years, it was seriously debated as to when Linux would overtake Windows on the desktop. When Ubuntu was created in 2004, for example, it was with the   specific intention of replacing Windows   as the standard desktop operating system. Linux on the desktop has about a two percent market share today and is viewed by many as complicated and obscure. Meanwhile, Windows sails on serenely, currently running on 90 percent of PCs in use. There will likely always be a few Linux desktops around in business -- particularly for developers or data sc...

Summary: DXC Technology will be the name of the new $26 billion IT services company formed by the proposed merger of CSC and HPE's Enterprise Services business. Upon the closing of the proposed merger between Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the new organisation will be renamed to DXC Technology before it begins its journey as a  $26 billion IT services giant. The completion of the merger is slated for April 3, 2017, which will see DXC Technology list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DXC, subject to final approvals. "With a mission of leading clients on their digital transformation journeys, DXC Technology will be recognised globally as a force multiplier, enabling clients to seize the opportunities presented by today's rapidly changing technologies," Lawrie said in a statement on Wednesday.Current CSC chairman, president, and CEO Mike Lawrie will serve as DXC Tech...

Summary: The successful Series C finance round brings the bug bounty platform's funding to $74 million. HackerOne  has announced $40 million in Series C financing and plans to use the cash to expand the platform's hacking community. HackerOne, a bug bounty platform utilized by thousands of companies worldwide to find researchers able to responsibly disclose security flaws for cash rewards and credit, has over 100,000 hackers on its books. Due to rising popularity with businesses interested in hosting up a bug bounty program without starting from scratch, the vulnerability discovery 'outsourcing' system has proven to be a successful model for tackling today's constant cyberattacks and vulnerability exploitation by cyberattackers. The Series C funding round, led by Dragoneer Investment Group, also indicates the rising interest of investors. HackerOne says the company enjoyed " unprecedented business growth" in 2016, and as the average cost of a b...

Summary: The security release fixes three flaws in the content management system. WordPress has patched three security flaws including a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability and SQL injection problem which could lead to the creation of new vulnerabilities. The first bug, reported by David Herrera of Alley Interactive, is an information disclosure vulnerability which reveals the user interface for assigning taxonomy terms in the "Press This" function -- used to publish posts through browsers -- to users that do not have permission to see it.Last week, the content management system's (CMS) developers said  in a security advisory  that the new fixes resolve three important security issues, all of which impact WordPress versions 4.7.1 and earlier. The second issue was discovered in the WP_Query process, used to access variables and functions in the WordPress core, by researcher Mo Jangda. When passing data seemed "unsafe," the system became vulnerable ...

Summary:With a new policy after the US election, Google reveals the results of its actions to limit fake news sites. Google has released its 2016 Bad Ads report, to show how serious it is about combating deviants who abuse its massive ad network, from fraudulent advertisers to phony news sites. The company says it axed 1.7 billion bad ads in 2016, just over double the 780 million it took down in 2015 for violating its various policies.  In 2016 it also introduced important new policies to combat the rise of fake news. In the wake of Brexit and the US election, Facebook, Twitter, and Google were criticized for not doing enough to prevent fake news spreading on their platforms.  In November, Google introduced  a new AdSense policy  for publishers to prevent fake news sites from generating ad revenue on its platform. Since launching the policy, Google says it has permanently banned nearly 200 AdSense publishers for violating its new rules against  "mi...

Summary: Microsoft's latest acquisition, 3D data-optimization vendor Simplygon, is part of Redmond's strategy to make 3D part of future users' experiences. Microsoft is acquiring Simplygon , a Swedish 3D data-optimization vendor, for an undisclosed amount. The announcement, made by corporate vice president of Next Gen Experiences Kudo Tsunoda, on January 17, is part of Microsoft's " 3D for Everyone " strategy, of which the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update is a key piece. Simplygon will help Microsoft simplify the process of capturing, creating, and sharing information in 3D, Tsunoda said. The Simplygon technology will complement the new Paint 3D application (codenamed "Beihai") and new online creator community, Remix3D.com. Simplygon was developed by Donya Labs AB in Sweden, a company developing "automatic 3D data-optimization solutions." Simplygon currently is a player in the 3D game optimization and augmented reality/virt...