Networking

Shares of chip maker NXP Semiconductors and of networking equipment vendor Extreme Networks both jumped in late trading as the two firms raised their forecasts for the quarter just ended.
NXP, which sells a broad line of semiconductors that go into many kinds of devices, but which has especially strong presence in automobile electronics, raised its outlook for revenue for last quarter to $2.27 billion, above the prior view of $2 billion, offered back on July 28th. Analysts have been modeling $2.01 billion.
CEO Kurt Sievers said that NXP “experienced material improvement in demand across all end markets, but particularly in the Automotive and Mobile end markets.”
Added Sievers,

Additionally, demand improved in both our direct and distribution channels. The business environment has improved at a faster than anticipated pace, driving a broad-based increase in revenue, which also enabled higher gross margin. Given the improved outlook, we increased operating expenses in relation to non-executive variable incentive compensation, which taken together, resulted in operating profit margin substantially above guidance.

Extreme, meanwhile, raised its outlook for revenue for the quarter, its fiscal first quarter, to $233 million to $236 million, above a prior forecast offered on August 5th for $220 million to $230 million. Earnings per share is now expected in a range of 5 cents to 8 cents, above its prior view of 1 cent to 4 cents. 
Analysts have been modeling $223.6 million and 2 cents per share. 
NXP plans to release full details on Monday, October 26th, after market close. The company will host a conference call with analysts the following morning, at 8 am, Eastern, which you can catch on the company’s investor relations Web site. 
CEO Ed Meyercord remarked that the “first fiscal quarter outlook improved across a number of financial metrics.”
Added Meyercord,

Our better-than-expected performance is a result of strong bookings and customer response to our ‘effortless’ strategy. The simplicity of our ExtremeCloud IQ platform, edge switching and Wi-Fi applications, and our end-to-end fabric technology is creating differentiation in the market during a challenging business environment. We are especially pleased with our team’s execution, as this marks the second quarter of sequential revenue and EPS growth in our business at a higher level of Non-GAAP profitability.

CFO Remi Thomas said the company carried out “continued cost and expense control drove” which lead to “solid operating leverage, and in turn strong cash flow.”
Added Thomas,

This allowed us to repay $20 million of our $55 million revolving credit facility during the quarter and reduce our net debt by approximately $24 million sequentially – all while maintaining ample liquidity as cash and cash equivalents remained relatively stable compared to the prior quarter.

NXP shares are up $8.47, over 6%, at $143.30, in late trading.
Extreme shares are up 63 cents, or 15%, at $4.74.
Extreme’s management will host a conference call to discuss the results in full on October 28th at 8 am, Eastern time. You can check it out on the Extreme investor Web site. 

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Microsoft, the onetime monopolist, must find it hard to play the role of underdog. But that’s exactly where the company finds itself today when it comes to the highly non-competitive search market, where Google continues to lead and Microsoft is an extremely distant number two.
Google’s dominance also extends to the browser category, where Microsoft Edge is far behind Chrome. It’s still too early to tell whether Microsoft’s all-new Edge browser, based on Google’s open source Chromium code base, can make a dent in Google’s overwhelming lead on desktop PCs.
Ironically, Microsoft’s latest strategy for winning people over to Bing and Edge involves the same sort of tactic that got them in trouble in the 1990s: tying its search engine and its browser tightly to Windows. The difference in 2020 is that Windows no longer has monopoly power in a world dominated by mobile devices.
That background helps put today’s Microsoft Edge announcements in better context. While Google is under pressure from European antitrust authorities for anticompetitive behavior in online shopping, Microsoft is integrating Bing-powered online shopping tools into Edge.
The first new feature adds price comparison tools to Edge collections. (For more on how Edge collections work, see “Bye-bye, Chrome: 10 steps to help you switch to Microsoft’s new Edge browser.”) When you add a product to a collection, Edge adds a “compare price to other retailers” link that displays a list of prices for that item from other retailers, along with direct links to those pages.

Microsoft adds price comparison option to its Collections feature for Edge.
A second new feature expands the Bing Rebates program, which offers cash back to shoppers who sign in using a Microsoft account and then click a product link from a Bing search page. Rebates are available in a wide range of categories, including fashion, electronics, groceries, travel, games, entertainment, and books.
A separate new feature expands the “Give with Bing” feature to seven new markets: the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Searches made through Bing earn points for anyone signed in to a Microsoft account; those points can be redeemed as contributions to more than 1.4 million charitable organizations worldwide, with Microsoft matching those contributions through the end of the year.
The goal, of course, is to win over Google fans to Edge and Chrome. Today’s announcements are part of a series of moves that try to put Bing in front of users who would otherwise never go there by making Bing the default search engine in the new Edge. Microsoft is also pressing that campaign by including Bing results when users enter terms in the Windows 10 search box, and organizations that use Microsoft 365 accounts can integrate work-related results from online assets, including SharePoint libraries and OneDrive for Business.
But the challenge might just be too overwhelming. Today’s announcements come just days after the release of a long, detailed report from a Congressional antitrust subcommittee that documents Google’s overwhelming structural dominance in search.
“The overwhelmingly dominant provider of general online search is Google,” according to the report. Google “captures around 81% of all general search queries in the U.S. on desktop and 94% on mobile,” they noted, compared to Bing, which captures a mere 6% of the market.
That dominance comes even as Microsoft spends billions of dollars a year to maintain its search index, a job that literally no one else in the Western world can do. The House subcommittee report notes that “Today the only English-language search engines that maintain their own comprehensive webpage index are Google and Bing. Other search engines—including Yahoo and DuckDuckGo—must purchase access to the index from Google and/or Bing through syndication agreements.”
See also:  Bing rebrands to Microsoft Bing | Microsoft Edge to get a web screenshot utility | How Edge’s new sleeping tabs will save your laptop battery life | Is Google better than Bing? I asked Google and Bing (and got surprising results)
And despite that massive investment over more than a decade, Bing continues falling further behind Google.
Congressional antitrust investigators quoted a 2016 Google document that calculated Bing had suffered significant declines in query volume revenue. They concluded that “Google’s monopoly power is durable and its lead insurmountable.”
As anyone who studied the Microsoft antitrust trial in the 1990s can tell you, though, no lead lasts forever, and a determined competitor can turn the tables with luck and persistence. Just ask Apple, which was a distant second behind Microsoft in the personal computing market at the beginning of the 21st Century. An investment from Microsoft kept Apple alive, and today it’s the largest publicly traded company in the world. More

Cisco has released security updates for high-severity security flaws affecting Webex Teams for Windows, its Identity Services Engine, and Video Surveillance 8000 Series IP Cameras. 
In this month’s first round of security updates from Cisco, the most serious vulnerability addressed is a remote code-execution (RCE) and denial-of-service (DoS) bug affecting its Video Surveillance 8000 Series IP Cameras.

Networking

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2020-3544, has a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10, on par with similar RCE and DoS flaws it disclosed in August affecting the Video Surveillance 8000 Series IP Cameras. 
SEE: Security Awareness and Training policy (TechRepublic Premium)
Both sets of vulnerabilities were reported by Qian Chen of Qihoo 360 Nirvan Team and both concern flaws in the Cisco Discovery Protocol, a Layer 2 or data link layer protocol in the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking model. 
Similarly, both are due to “missing checks when an IP camera processes a Cisco Discovery Protocol packet”.
“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious Cisco Discovery Protocol packet to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute code on the affected IP camera or cause it to reload unexpectedly, resulting in a DoS condition,” Cisco notes in the new advisory. 
Any Cisco customers with the product that updated to firmware releases 1.0.9-4 and later after the August advisory should be safe, but customers that didn’t update to that release or later will still be vulnerable. There are no workarounds. 
The second most severe flaw affects the web management interface of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and occurs because the interface doesn’t properly enforce role-based access control. 
The bug, tagged as CVE-2020-3467, has a severity rating of 7.7 out of 10. A remote attacker needs to be authenticated with read-only admin credentials to exploit the flaw.
However, if that condition is met, the attacker could modify a vulnerable device’s configuration after sending a crafted HTTP request to it and then bring unauthorized devices onto the network or block permitted devices from accessing the network.   
The issue affects ISE releases 2.3, 2.4. 2.5, 2.6, and 2,7. Versions 2.2 and earlier and version 3.0 are not vulnerable. Cisco has patch recommendations for each release in its advisory. 
The bug was reported to Cisco by Sebastian Halter of Deutsche Telekom.   
The third high-severity flaw affects Cisco’s Webex Teams client for Windows, but it can only be exploited by a local attacker with valid credentials on the Windows system. Nonetheless, an attacker could load malicious DLL files or Windows software libraries that execute when Webex Teams launches. 
“A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system with the privileges of another user’s account,” Cisco explains. 
SEE: Cisco announces plans to acquire Kubernetes security player Portshift
Cisco Webex Teams for Windows releases 3.0.16269.0 and later are not vulnerable to the flaw. The flaw has a severity rating of 7.8 out of 10 and was reported by Hou JingYi of Qihoo 360 CERT.   
Cisco also disclosed 11 medium-severity bugs for products that should be patched or updated. These issues affect Cisco’s StarOS, SD-WAN vManage, Nexus Data Broker software, ISE, Industrial Network Director, Firepower Management Center, Expressway Series and Telepresence Video Communications Server, Email Security Appliance, Vision Dynamic Signage Director, and its Video Surveillance 8000 Series IP Cameras.
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Microsoft Azure status page on Oct. 7 around 3:30 p.m. ET
Last week, a major Azure Active Directory authentication issue affected users worldwide. A follow-up Exchange/Outlook issue later in the week affected European and Indian Office 365/Microsoft 365 customers. This week, Microsoft’s cloud services issues are continuing, affecting a number of Exchange, Outlook, Teams and SharePoint users.Microsoft was still warning some Office 365/Microsoft 365 customers as this week kicked off of some possible residual Exchange/Outlook issues, including problems accessing the admin center and syncing issues between Outlook mobile and desktop. I asked Microsoft if these issues were related to last week’s Azure Active Directory authentication problems, but was told the company had no comment. (I am hearing the issues were likely not interrelated, for what it’s worth.)On October 7, users, primarily in the U.S., began reporting in the afternoon ET they were having issues accessing their admin center dashboards. Around 2:30 p.m. ET, users took to Twitter and other social channels to report they were unable to access Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook.com, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. At the same time, warnings of issues with Azure Active Directory and Azure Networking services popped up on the Azure status page.Around 4:00 p.m. ET, some Office 365/Microsoft 365 customers began reporting their services were recovering. (For my part, I still cannot access my M365 Admin Center, even as of 5:00 p.m. ET.)The Azure team also posted a preliminary root cause analysis around the same time on the issues users experienced accessing Microsoft or Azure services. In that report, Microsoft said between roughly 2 p.m. ET and 3:40 p.m. ET a subset of customers encountered issues connecting to resources that leveraged the Azure network infrastructure across regions. (“Resources with local dependencies in the same region should not have been impacted,” according to company officials.)Microsoft identified “a recent change (that) was applied to WAN (wide-area-networking) resources causing connectivity latency or failures between regions” as the cause. To mitigate, the Azure team rolled back the recent change to a healthy configuration.Earlier today, October 7, the Azure team also noted that some subset of customers experienced traffic routing to “unhealthy backends” with Azure Front Door. Microsoft attributed that issue to a “configuration change (which) was deployed causing the incorrect routing of traffic” and reverted the change to fix the issue.The Microsoft 365 team, for its part, attributed the inability to access services to a “network infrastructure change” which may have impacted multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Outlook.com. That same team also said it added this afternoon additional capacity to handle “an observed spike in admin center traffic caused by actions to mitigate a prior incident with similar impact.”After last week’s Azure AD issue — caused by the faulty testing of a change, coupled with a rollback failure — this week’s outage is not a good look for the Microsoft cloud.   More

Brazilians see remote working as a desirable feature of employment, but the ability to work from is not translating into greater access to job opportunities, according to research.
A study carried out with over 20,000 participants globally by software firm Salesforce has found that 53% of Brazilian workers would change jobs if it means they could work from home.
However, 87% are not seeing any change regarding job opportunities despite the increased uptake of remote working: the majority of respondents (71%) have said they see that format of work as restricted to only a parcel of the population. Unemployment in Brazil is currently affecting over 13 million people, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

Of the Brazilian workers who continued to come into a physical location to perform their duties, 57% of survey respondents believe they could operate from home if their employers provided the right tools to do so.
The majority of participants (75%) said companies should prioritize the training of their workforce and 77% have stated that technology will play a key role in that process.
When it comes to skills Brazilians perceive as important to retain or get a job, 96% cited socio-emotional capabilities such as adaptability and collaboration. In terms of technical skills, participants perceive as important for employers, areas often cited included data analytics (mentioned by 95% of respondents), software development (92%) and data science (91%).
A separate study, published in August by Brazilian business school Foundation Institute of Administration (FIA) has found that 139 companies of all sizes across Brazil has found that 46% of businesses have adopted remote working during the pandemic. Some 36% of the companies that adopted the home office approach are not planning to stick to it after the pandemic, while 34% plan to offer the option of remote working to up to 25% of their workforce and 29% will offer remote working to 50% of all staff.
Of all the companies that have gone remote, 67% struggled with technical aspects, particularly when it comes to staff familiarity with communication tools, cited by 34%, followed by difficulties around remote access to systems (34%) and getting hold of support staff to help with technology issues (28%). More

I’ve worked from four homes and several coffee shops over the last 15 years. Lockdowns simply proved that my infrastructure was as flexible as I’d hoped. Which is a combination of deeply rooted heavyweight capability and flyweight mobility. 
Today, writing is the largest part of my workflow, but I expect to go back to much more audio production as I roll out the novel I’ve been working on for the last 5 years. I’m ready for that.
Office kit

iMac
Apple Inc.
Late 2014 iMac. Planning to upgrade to an Apple Silicon iMac in the next year, assuming it will be more powerful than the iPad Pro. Still love the display even though the rest of the system is less than ideal, especially for 4k video. I’m sure the newest bottom-of-the-line 27″ iMac would be fine for some years to come.
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Apple Magic Trackpad 2
Apple Inc.
I love Apple’s trackpads even more than the Kensington trackballs I used for years, but resisted upgrading to the second iteration until the physical clicking began to wear on my wrist. 
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Fujitsu ScanSnap IX1500

The Fujitsu ScanSnap is one of the best pieces of office hardware I’ve ever owned, and by far the easiest to use scanner. For research I’ll often buy a used copy of a book, remove the binding, and send the sheets through the ScanSnap. It automagically performs OCR, creating a fully searchable and editable PDF. I have an older model, but the IX1500 has the same goodness. My one gripe with it is that Fujitsu stopped updating the driver for my model, but I found a better driver on the Mac App Store, and it still works great after a decade.
Optical. LG Electronics 6X Blu Ray Writer  M-Disc support put this over the top for me.
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Power. My office has 3 battery backup units, and for the last year or so none of them has worked. I don’t need them.
I’m well aware of power issues. That’s why I had 3 BBUs in the first place. But with much of my storage in the cloud, and powerful battery powered computing off-line, I no longer see the point of BBUs. Surge protectors, yes. BBUs, no.

Humanscale Freedom
Humanscale Inc.
My chair is almost as important as my display, and the Humanscale Freedom chair is the best. Unlike the popular, and similarly priced, Herman Miller Aeron chair, which has a dozen or more adjustments that you may never get right, the Freedom adjusts when you sit. You can adjust seat height, arms, lower back support, and headrest. The rest is automatic, thanks to a clever lever system. I’ve had mine for 15 years and it’s still going strong.
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Enacfire E60
Enacfire Inc.
I went through quite a few wireless headphones before I found the Enacfire E60 earbuds that were good quality, easy to use, with long battery life, and cost way less than Apple’s audio. I’m currently testing the Enacfire F1 earbuds, and they seem to be more of the same in an even smaller case.
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USB-C cables. I carry several short – 6″ or so – cables so I can plug in anything that needs plugging in.

Home Office Tours

Add-on storage. I hate paying Apple’s inflated prices for internal storage, so I typically buy the minimum configuration – 64GB then and 128 GB now – and carry an add-on USB SSD. I like the new blade form factors – M.2 – and there are many 3rd party cases for them on Amazon.
The Take
Office is office. Mobile is mobile. I’ve stopped trying to meld the two and the flexibility and redundancy of the approach works well for me. 
Messing with home infrastructure is, for some people, a rewarding hobby, and even a paying job. I’m not one of those people. For me, they’re tools. Checking drivers and troubleshooting network issues is irritating, not fun.
That’s why I’m willing to pay top prices for essential gear, like the SM7B or the iPad Pro Magic Keyboard. For the future I’m expecting great things from Apple Silicon. For one, a 32 inch iMac that can handle multiple 4k video streams. But I’ll cross that bridge when – and if – we get there.
Comments welcome, of course. 

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After several delays, SpaceX has finally launched its 12th Starlink Mission, which brings its internet-beaming satellite constellation to just under the 800 it needs to deliver moderate coverage in North America.  

Networking

With this latest launch at Tuesday, 7:29 am EDT from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX has now launched 775 Linux-powered Starlink satellites. But, via CBS News, only 728 Starlink satellites remain in orbit, according to astronomer Jonathan McDowell’s latest Space Report.  
As noted by Space.com, before Tuesday’s successful Starlink launch, SpaceX had scrubbed four attempted launches due to weather and other issues. SpaceX integration and test engineer Siva Bharadvaj said Tuesday was “a happy end to Scrub-tober”.
SEE: Network security policy (TechRepublic Premium)
More importantly for broadband-starved potential customers in the US, this latest batch of 60 Starlink satellites clears the way for a public beta in northern US and possibly southern Canada. 
“Once these satellites reach their target position, we will be able to roll out a fairly wide public beta in northern US and hopefully southern Canada. Other countries to follow as soon as we receive regulatory approval,” tweeted SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. 

Starlink has been running a private beta since July in parts of northern US and while it has had coverage of southern Canada, services there are pending regulatory approval. However, the private beta was largely limited to SpaceX employees, according to TechCrunch. 
One group Musk said SpaceX has prioritized is emergency services. Last week, the Washington state military’s emergency-management unit revealed it had been using seven Starlink end-user terminals for connectivity since early August in fire-ravaged parts of the state.    
In an update after Tuesday’s launch, SpaceX said the way Washington’s first responders deployed Starlink in Malden, just south of Spokane, Washington, is “representative of how Starlink works best – in remote or rural areas where internet connectivity is unavailable”.
The public beta means more would-be Starlink customers, who are looking to ditch sub-par broadband connections, traditional satellite services, and mobile broadband substitutes, will have a chance to test SpaceX’s satellite broadband service. 
SEE: Starlink starts to deliver on its satellite internet promise
Starlink satellites orbit Earth at an altitude of about 500km, or 311 miles, far closer to Earth than traditional conventional satellite broadband services.    
Richard Hall, the emergency telecommunications leader of the Washington State Military Department’s IT division, vouched for Starlink’s broadband throughput, low latency, and ease of setting up the ‘UFO on a stick’ end-user terminals.  
SpaceX in August applied to the Federal Communications Commission to boost the number of end-user terminals it’s permitted to deploy from one million to five million, after 700,000 US residents signed up to be updated about the service’s availability.
SpaceX recently presented the FCC Starlink internet performance tests showing it was capable of download speeds of between 102Mbps to 103Mbps, upload speeds of 40.5Mbps to not quite 42Mbps, and a latency of 18 milliseconds to 19 milliseconds. 
However, SpaceX still has some way to go in ramping up production of the end-user terminals. Currently, it has the capacity to produce “thousands of consumer user terminals per month”. 

The latest launch means SpaceX has now launched 775 Linux-powered Starlink satellites.
Image: SpaceX
More on Elon Musk’s SpaceX and internet-beaming satellites More

When it comes to covering your home or small office — which are often the same things these days — with Wi-Fi, it’s hard to beat mesh networking. Now Eero, an Amazon company, is introducing Eero for Service Providers. This is an all-new hardware and software offering designed to help internet service providers (ISPs) meet customers’ increasing demands for exceptional home Wi-Fi.
This is not just a bundling of a selection of Eero Wi-Fi mesh routers with your existing internet service. It also includes remote network management for your ISP and security and privacy management tools for you.
The bundle starts, of course, with the routers. Besides offering Eero’s existing whole-home mesh Wi-Fi systems to customers, ISPs will also get access to the all-new Eero 6 series. These come with Wi-Fi 6. This new Wi-Fi technology supports faster speeds and more simultaneously connected devices. Eero claims that this is its fastest Wi-Fi network yet. 
There are two models:

The Eero Pro 6, which is a tri-band router that offers a single band and connects via 2.4GHz, but it also offers two bands for 5GHz to allow more devices to connect at the fastest speeds. It can cover up to 2,000 square feet per router. 
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Eero Pro 6’s less expensive brother, the Eero 6, is a dual-band device that can cover up to 1,500 square feet. Both the Pro 6 and Eero 6 have two Ethernet ports and a USB-C port for charging devices.
View Now at Amazon
These new devices also come with a built-in Zigbee smart home hub. This IEEE 802.15.4 personal-area network standard Internet of Things (IoT) hub lets you manage compatible IoT devices on your networks. This way you don’t need a separate Zigbee hub. 
The new Eero Secure will give both users and ISPs advanced security and privacy subscription service. This blocks malware, spyware, phishing, and other malicious threats. It also comes with built-in, ad blocking, and content filtering
For ISPs, Eero Insight builds on Eero’s existing Remote Network Management software. This combines monitoring user history to predict and address customer problems before they change from annoyances to real problems. It also includes network monitoring tools such as a network topology viewer, historical speed tests and bandwidth usage, RF diagnostics, alerts, audit logs, outage detection, fleet analysis, and network health. 
For users, all this should mean a more reliable internet connection and that’s always good news.
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