Daily Tech Headlines – October 21, 2016
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| Daily Tech Headlines – October 21, 2016 | |
| Number | 98 |
| Broadcast Date | OCTOBER 21, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 5:13 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
Denial of Service hits major sites’ DNS, Microsoft earnings rise high, and evidence port in against former NSA contractor Thomas Martin.
Headlines
- Sites like Twitter, Reddit, SoundCloud and Spotify experienced outages Friday morning due to a denial of service attack on their Domain Name System provider, Dyn. The company optimizes online infrastructure for its clients including handling domain name management.
- Microsoft reports rising revenues thanks to Office, Surface, and cloud services
- Microsoft’s Cloud Buoys Earnings
- Microsoft announced it earned $0.76 per share in Q3 on revenue of $22.33 billion, both on an adjusted basis. Analysts had expected adjusted earnings per share of $0.68 and revenue of $21.7 billion. Office commercial revenue rose 5 percent, and Office consumer revenue grew 8 percent. Intelligent cloud revenue jumped 8 percent, including Azure revenue shooting up 116 percent, and server revenue up 11 percent. Revenue from the personal computing division fell 2% on the year, with phone revenue in particular falling 72%. Surface revenue hit $926 million in the quarter, up 38 percent from the $672 million last year.
- According to a Thursday court filing in the case against NSA contractor Thomas Martin III, investigators seized 50 TB of data some of which was "national defense information." Prosecutors said Martin would soon be charged with violations of the Espionage Act. The new filing indicates Martin took six bankers boxes full of paper documents marked secret or top secret dating from 1996 through 2016. The New York Times reported Wednesday that investigators have yet to connect Martin to the "Shadow Brokers" dump of NSA exploits.
- A privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux Kernel referred to as CVE-2016-5195, appears to be actively and maliciously exploited in the wild. The bug which was patched this week exists in the past nine years of Linux Kernels. Administrators of Linux systems are strongly advised to patch the kernel as soon as possible.
- Bloomberg reports senior executives at AT&T and Time Warner have been meeting to discuss business strategies, one of which was possibly merging the companies. The Wall Street Journal says the talks are in an advanced stage and a deal could come quickly. AT&T owns DirecTV but does not own a major content producer.
- Bloomberg reports that Qualcomm and dutch company NXP Semiconductors could announce a merger as early as next week. NXP reports earnings October 26th, Qualcomm on November 2. If completed it would be the largest deal in the semiconductor industry's history. NXP is known for supplying chips for Secure Identification and Automotive functions and is most well known as the co-inventor of NFC along with Sony.
- Facebook will begin prioritizing fully cached items in your news feed to help minimize the data needed to load the feed. News Feed items generally load as a user scrolls.
- Wal-Mart will invest $50 million in Chinese online grocery service New Dada. Wal-Mart already owns a stake in JD.com which is a part owner of New Dada. Wal-Mart hopes the partnership will help speed up delivery times in China.
- Phone maker ZTE announced the winner of its Project CSX contest, which let customers vote on crowdsourced designed phones. The winning design, with 36% of the vote, features a pair of cameras on the top and bottom bezel of the phone for eye tracking when reading and watching video, a self-adhesive backing, and a split screen functionality for visual security. It also comes in a blue, green and white design with a pattern reminiscent of Zubaz. ZTE plans to begin development of the design, with a launch planned sometime in 2017.
- Paypal announced it earned an adjusted $0.35 per share in Q3 with revenue of $2.67 just about meeting analyst's expectations of $0.35 a share and revenue of $2.65. Revenue was up 18% with total payment volume, coming in at $87 billion off an expected $88.3 billion, representing a 24% increase on the year. That's the lowest since the company spun out from ebay. Active users also saw an increase of almost 11% to 192 million.
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| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – October 20, 2016" |
Daily Tech Headlines – October 21, 2016 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – October 24, 2016" |