Free Republic

Pro-Russian hacking outfits Killnet, REevil and Anonymous Sudan have allegedly formed an alliance to launch a concerted cyberattack on the Western financial system, particularly targeting the SWIFT wire transfer system, according to CyberKnow.Forged in the underground hacking forums, the groups stated their “no money – no weapons – no Kiev regime” formula to cut off the pipeline of Western aid to Ukraine.Their primary target is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system, which powers most international money and security transfers, failure of which could potentially cripple the Western financial system.Other targets in their crosshairs include European and US...

The U.S. Department of Defense secured an exposed server on Monday that was spilling internal U.S. military emails to the open internet for the past two weeks. The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data. The exposed server was part of an internal mailbox system storing about three terabytes of internal military emails, many pertaining to U.S. Special Operations Command, or USSOCOM, the U.S. military unit tasked with conducting...

A pair of Iranian hackers have been charged with breaking into a Missouri tech firm’s cloud-computing account and running up a $760,000 bill while mining cryptocurrency. Prosecutors say the two men, who live and operate in Iran, managed to access the company’s Microsoft Azure cloud-computing account and install several new servers and programs to mine a cryptocurrency called Monero — a process known as cryptojacking... ..The company was unaware of the intrusion until it received a bill from Microsoft for $760,00 for the use of the additional server capacity, prosecutors said....

Microsoft has just announced the release of Windows 365 and Cloud PC. This new service, built on top of Azure Virtual Desktop, enables you to bring their Windows 10 and eventually Windows 11, desktop, apps, tools, data, and settings to your personal and work devices, including Windows PCs (naturally!) but Macs, iPads, Linux, and Android devices as well. Let me repeat that: Windows 365 will enable you to run your Windows desktop, apps, data, etc., etc. on Linux. That's the Linux desktop they're talking about. Ever since I started running Linux back in the early '90s, I've heard over and...

Microsoft Azure just announced a new design for modular, portable data centers. Azure is the company's cloud computing service, used by big names including Boeing, eBay, and Samsung. The Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) is designed to work just about anywhere, including nontraditional areas where cloud computing previously wouldn't have been possible. Data centers are the "backbone of the Internet," where data and photos from the cloud are physically stored

Late Wednesday, Microsoft (ticker: MSFT) reported financial results that handily beat Wall Street expectations. The company posted adjusted fiscal second-quarter earnings per share of $1.51, above the $1.32 Wall Street consensus. Revenue of $36.9 billion beat estimates of $35.7 billion. On Thursday, Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler reaffirmed his Outperform rating for Microsoft shares, citing the company’s stellar earnings report. He also raised his price target for the stock to $203 from $174. “This was again another strong quarter as Microsoft continues to deliver Commercial Cloud growth as well as growth in numerous other areas,” he wrote. “The cloud story continues...

Amazon Web Services is "still evaluating options" after the Department of Defense selected Microsoft for a $10 billion contract to move the agency's database to the cloud, according to a source close to the situation. "We're surprised about this conclusion," an AWS spokesperson said in a statement. "AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion. We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure." This...

On Friday (April 5), clusters of purple, blue and yellow lights appeared in the country's night sky; as the ghostly shapes hovered, their eerie glow and unusual formation invited speculation about visiting alien spacecraft. But extraterrestrials weren't behind the demonstration. It was NASA, launching a new rocket system from Norway to study the flow of winds in Earth's upper atmosphere, representatives of the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops, Virginia, tweeted that day. Following the appearance of an aurora that night, NASA created another spectacular light show with chemical compounds, expelled by the Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment (AZURE). This...

Microsoft on Monday announced Azure Sphere, a new technology to protect the processors that power smart appliances, connected toys, and other gadgets. Azure Sphere is powered in large part by Linux, a free operating system that Microsoft once viewed as a major threat. It's the first time ever that Microsoft has made Linux part of a product offering. Microsoft announced on Monday a new technology called Azure Sphere, a new system for securing the tiny processors that power smart appliances, connected toys, and other gadgets. We'll get to the specifics in a moment, but here's the really notable part:...

Even if you didn't know it was called the "Azure Window" and didn't know it was located on Malta, an island nation in the Mediterranean, you probably recognize pictures of the famous rock formation, a stunning land bridge connecting the island to a massive rock jutting out of the sea ... While stunning, the collapse does not come as a complete surprise. Formed by erosion, the Window was eventually destined to be destroyed by erosion: The same waves which carved the window out of the living rock continues to eat away at the structure and threatens to one day cause...

Microsoft Azure, the software giant cloud business, is growing fast with no sign of slowing down. The company's cloud computing business has almost doubled its size in the past year. Launched in 2010, Azure is a cloud computing service providing enterprise customer scale and efficiency for secure server infrastructure and cloud applications. And the cloud business is driving result for Microsoft. The cloud business provides SaaS, IaaS and PaaS and also supports for many different development frameworks, including third-party platform and systems.Azure Is Growing Fast, Double In SizeAccording to TheStreet, Azure is growing fast and its cloud business saw...

You read the title correctly. Microsoft just joined the Linux Foundation. Believe it or not, Microsoft has joined The Linux Foundation as a Platinum member. No, this isn't The Onion and it's not April Fool's Day. Microsoft has joined The Linux Foundation. Microsoft announced that it was joining forces with The Linux Foundation at the Microsoft Connect developer event in New York. Yes, yes I know. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once said, "Linux is a cancer". Yes, Microsoft still forces Android vendors to pay for its bogus Linux patents. And, yes, Microsoft and its cronies are still scheming to...

Redmond will support it inside Azure and send code back to the FreeBSD Foundation Microsoft has published its own distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 in order to make the OS available and supported in Azure. Jason Anderson, principal PM manager at Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center says Redmond “took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image” so it could “ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure”. Microsoft did so “to remove that burden” from the FreeBSD Foundation, which relies on community contributions. Redmond is not keeping its work on FreeBSD...

Microsoft will later this year release its open-source friendly lake for big-data analytics in the cloud. Azure Data Lake Store – announced at Build in April – will be released as a preview, Microsoft said Monday. The store will be built on Apache YARN for developers and data scientists, to analyse information, and will use Azure HDInsight – a managed service for Hadoop, Spark, Storm and Hbase. HDInsight was developed by Microsoft working with Ubuntu-shop Canonical and Hadoop spinner Hortonworks, Microsoft and Canonical said. In preparation for the preview Microsoft Monday threw the doors open on managed Linux clusters. Microsoft’s...

This week, Microsoft unveiled Azure Cloud Switch, a boring-sounding product that's only interesting to developers and IT professionals working on the bleeding edge of networking technology. The scandalous part is actually under the hood: Azure Cloud Switch is, at the core, a specialized version of Linux — a free operating system that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once referred to as "a cancer." Linux, created in the early 1990s by incredibly influential programming firebrand Linus Torvalds and further developed by a veritable army of volunteers from around the world, never quite toppled the dominance of Microsoft Windows on the desktop....

Redmond reveals Azure Cloud Switch, its in-house software-defined networking OS Sitting down? Nothing in your mouth? Microsoft has developed its own Linux distribution. And Azure runs it to do networking. Redmond's revealed that it's built something called Azure Cloud Switch (ACS), describing it as “a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux” and “our foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches.” Kamala Subramanian, Redmond's principal architect for Azure Networking, writes that: “At Microsoft, we believe there are many excellent switch hardware platforms available on the market, with healthy competition between many...

Gone are the days when Linux was considered just “a cancer” by Microsoft’s big honchos, as the new CEO of the Redmond-based company says the open-source platform is quickly gaining ground on its Azure platform. Speaking at a cloud event in San Francisco, Nadella has suggested that “Microsoft loves Linux,” pointing out that the company is working to offer support for more Linux distributions through its Azure cloud service. Nearly 20 percent of Azure is Linux-friendly, he revealed, adding that starting this week, CoreOS is also supported. CentOS, Oracle Linux, Suse, and Ubuntu were already working on Azure. What’s...