Jon Brodkin – Page 2 – MIIS Cyber Initiative

Google balloons, “cell towers in the sky,” can serve 4G to a whole state

Jon Brodkin Cloud March 11, 2015March 19, 2015

Google’s plan to deliver Internet service from balloons in the stratosphere has come a long way since being unveiled in June 2013.

A single “Project Loon” balloon can now remain in the air for more than six months and provide 4G LTE cellular service to an area the size of Rhode Island, according to Google. Company officials have taken to calling Loon balloons “cell towers in the sky.”

While there’s no announced date for a widespread service launch, Google has provided Internet to a school in Brazil and is partnering with cellular operators Vodafone New Zealand, Telstra in Australia, and Telefónica in Latin America.

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VMware alleged to have violated Linux’s open source license for years

Jon Brodkin Uncategorized March 6, 2015March 19, 2015

Virtualization software maker VMware is facing a lawsuit alleging that it has been violating the GPLv2 free software license for years with its use of Linux and other source code in ESXi.

Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig filed the suit in the district court of Hamburg, Germany with funding from the nonprofit Software Freedom Conservancy, which works to “promote, improve, develop, and defend” free and open source software. The case centers on “a combined work that VMware allegedly created by combining their own code (‘vmkernel’) with portions of Linux’s code, which was licensed only under GPLv2,” the group said in an FAQ describing the lawsuit.

VMware denies the lawsuit’s accusations, calling them “without merit,” but it did not address them specifically in its public statement on the matter. The ESXi hypervisor is a key part of VMware’s leading position in the enterprise virtualization market. VMware, which is owned by EMC, made $1.7 billion in revenue and $326 million in net income in the most recent quarter.

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