Legion of Angels News Archive

A New York Times story reported Thursday that Sun co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim was quitting Sun for a startup. But Sun says no; it’s a part-time gig.

“There have been a few inaccurate articles published regarding the status of Sun co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim,” the company said in a statement. “Sun can confirm that Andy will remain with Sun to continue his present involvement with the Sun Systems group in helping to drive new product architectures, including X64 servers and storage servers, and will continue to work on key strategic initiatives such as HPC. Andy will move to part-time work status and spend the remainder of his time involved in the start-up community where he worked prior to re-joining Sun in 2004.”

Also in a statement Bechtolsheim, who is currently chief architect and senior vice president of Sun’s systems group, said he was “very proud of all the accomplishments we have achieved as a systems team, including the Sun Fire X4000 family of X64 servers, the Sun Constellation System, the Sun Fire storage servers and Flash Storage, and Sun Datacenter Switch 3×24, and I look forward to many more over the coming years.”

The fact that, Bechtolsheim is staying with Sun is good news for the server company, considering all the bad news the company has endured lately.

Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems warned Wall Street that it expected to report a big loss in the third quarter. The company said it expects to lose 25 cents to 35 cents a share. Excluding one-time charges, the loss is expected to be about 2 cents to 12 cents a share. This is worse than the loss of 1 cent a share loss that many analysts had expected.

The company, which has been battered by competition and slowing demand from financial customers, has struggled for nearly a decade with financial issues. And the current economic crisis has only exacerbated the situation.

In another sign of trouble, Sun Microsystems’ largest shareholder, Southeastern Asset Management, upped its stake this week and taken a more aggressive attitude toward its investment.

But luckily for Sun it looks like its star hardware man won’t be abandoning them. Instead, he will be helping lead a new startup in the networking sector that will go head-to-head with another of his former employers Cisco Systems.

On Thursday, a small Silicon Valley switching company called Arista Networks announced that it had named Bechtolsheim as chairman and chief development officer for the company.

Bechtolsheim, who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, is a well known figure in Silicon Valley. And had become a sort of prodigal son at Sun, leaving the company in 1995 to found a networking startup called Granite Systems. And then returning to Sun nearly a decade later at a time when the company needed help breathing new life into its product line.

For Bechtolsheim the move to start a new company is likely to reap big rewards in the-not-so-distant-future. He has a long history of starting and selling companies. After selling Granite to Cisco in 1995, he stuck around the networking giant for several years. He left in 2003 to start a new company called Kealia, which made high-end media servers. A year later, Sun reclaimed Bechtolsheim when it bought Kealia, a move that powered a fundamental technology shift to sell servers based on x86 chips as well as its own UltraSparc processors.

Now Bechtolsheim is heading up a company that makes 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching equipment designed to shuttle Internet traffic at super fast speeds between servers in high-end data centers. The startup faces a lot of competition in this highly competitive market, especially from networking heavyweight Cisco Systems. But given Bechtolsheim’s strong ties to Cisco, it’s likely he could once again end up as Cisco’s prodigal son as well.

Adding more weight to the prediction that Cisco will one day buy Arista is the fact that the company has also hired 15-year Cisco veteran Jayshree Ullal to act as CEO of the company. Ullal headed up Cisco’s Ethernet switching division and helped develop the company’s data center switching strategy. She left Cisco in May.

Source — Yahoo!

A new report from security services provider ScanSafe finds that companies are at increasing risk of having employees inadvertently download backdoors and password stealers onto corporate computers from Web sites that have malicious software hidden on them.

A company in ScanSafe’s focus group faced a nearly 500 percent greater risk of exposure to those threats in September than was faced in January of this year, according to ScanSafe’s Global Threat Report released on Tuesday.

Companies in the energy sector are at greater risk from Web-based malware than other industries, the report concludes. The energy sector, worldwide, faces a 189 percent higher risk of exposure from workers visiting sites with malware on them than other industries, followed by the pharmaceutical and chemicals industry, construction and engineering, and media and publishing.

“On a more positive note, government agencies were at 0 percent, which indicates they were at neither higher nor lower rates of exposure compared to other verticals,” Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at ScanSafe, writes in a blog post.

The industry with the lowest rate of exposure was aviation and automotive. Landesman says she can’t say exactly why one sector is more at risk than another but expects to release more findings soon that could help answer that question.

Overall, there was a flattening in the volume of threats in August and September, although ScanSafe is seeing a spike in October. Landesman says things could get ugly from a malware perspective throughout the rest of this year.

The holidays tend to be busy for socially engineered-types of malware, Landesman said. Plus, “the economy is hurting people’s finances and this could encourage criminals to up their efforts to gain more money through illicit means,” she said.

Also on Tuesday, security firm MessageLabs released statistics on the numbers of phishing attacks related to the banking crisis.

MessageLabs intercepted 7,000 phishing attacks exploiting Bank of America on October 16 and 15,000 on October 17, reaching 125,000 total e-mails over that weekend. American Express was the focus of a phishing attack that started on October 20 and reached 35,000 e-mails for the day.

The Cutwail botnet, which controls more than 1 million active unsuspecting zombie computers on the Internet and is believed to be the largest botnet, is responsible for those phishing attempts, MessageLabs said.

Source — Yahoo!

TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp said on Thursday it expects to beat its sales forecast for its PlayStation Portable handheld game gear for the year to March.

Sales of Sony’s PSP would likely hit 16 million units this year, instead of its previous outlook of 15 million units, it said.

Source — Yahoo!

SAN FRANCISCO - Samsung Electronics Co. is equipping Blu-ray DVD players so they can retrieve movies and TV shows from Netflix Inc.’s Internet streaming service, accelerating Netflix’s push to develop more delivery methods beyond the mail.

The deal, to be announced Thursday, could set the stage for Netflix to embed software connecting to its streaming service directly into television sets made by Samsung.

In a statement, Netflix and Samsung said they are planning to plant the streaming capability in a variety of home entertainment products. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive officer, declined to elaborate on the other possibilities in an interview.

This won’t be the first time that Netflix has piped its online content through Blu-ray DVD players — devices built to show movies in high-definition quality that outshines traditional DVD players.

LG Electronics began selling a $350 Blu-ray player with Netflix streaming earlier this month.

Netflix currently has nearly 8.7 million subscribers, most of whom still go online to request DVD rentals that are mailed to them a day or two later. But the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company has been trying to provide more instant gratification with a 21-month-old service that beams movies and TV shows over high-speed Internet connections in less than a minute.

After a slow start, the “Watch Instantly” service has been become more popular as Netflix expanded the selection to include more recent titles and forged various partnerships that have made it easier to watch on a big-screen TV instead of being tethered to a personal computer.

A Silicon Valley startup, Roku Inc., has been selling a $100 device that streams Netflix’s service to TVs for the past five months and Microsoft Corp.’s popular video game console, the Xbox 360, will become compatible within a few weeks.

Samsung’s connection to the Netflix service will work through two Blu-ray models, the BD-P2500 and BD-P2550, that have already been on the market. Consumers who already own those Samsung models will need a free software upgrade to make the players compatible with Netflix’s streaming service. Future models, carrying a suggested price of $400, will have the Netflix feature built in.

Fetching the movies and TV shows from a streaming library of more than 12,000 titles requires a minimum subscription of $8.99 per month that also includes DVD rentals delivered through the mail.

Netflix is aiming to make access to its streaming service a standard feature in all Blu-ray players, much like Dolby sound has become a staple in consumer electronics products, Hastings said.

Although they are still in relatively few households, Blu-ray players are expected to become more prevalent as prices fall and more consumers upgrade their TV sets to take full advantage of the February transition from analog to digital transmission.

With the sagging economy causing consumers re-examine their spending habits, Netflix can use every edge it can get. Subscriber growth has been running behind last year’s pace in the past two months, a trend Hastings expects to last through at least the rest of the year.

Netflix is hoping to soften the blow charging an additional $1 per more month to about 500,000 subscribers who rent Blu-ray DVDs. The surcharge is effective Nov. 5.

Source — Yahoo!

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Digital video recorder maker TiVo is set to announce Thursday that hundreds of movie titles, most significantly from Disney, will be available to its broadband subscribers courtesy of deals with CinemaNow and Jaman.

TiVo is no stranger to delivering movies to TV screens by way of the Internet; it has been doing so through a relationship with Amazon Video on Demand, a service that has been up and running since last year, though under the name Unbox.

Amazon VOD, though, doesn’t include Disney films. CinemaNow offers a service that includes movies from many studios, though TiVo users will only get Disney films. Thus, TiVo now can offer movies from all the major studios through a combination of Amazon VOD and CinemaNow.

For the past few years, TiVo has been repositioning itself as a retriever of entertainment content wherever it resides, as opposed to a simple recorder of TV shows. That’s why it has struck several partnerships, including one with YouTube.

The company views the strategy as a way to differentiate itself from other DVRs from cable and satellite TV companies that do less but are cheaper and more popular. There are about 36.2 million DVRs in U.S. homes, but only about 3.6 million of them are TiVos.

Like with Amazon VOD, the Jaman and CinemaNow services will allow users to choose movies — either by way of their TV screens or by cell phones or computers — and have them downloaded to their TiVo hard drives. The titles will show up as saved content similar to the TV shows they have recorded.

CinemaNow rents movies for as little as $2.99 and includes such titles as “Dumbo,” “The Fox and the Hound” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”

Jaman’s contribution is a boatload of such independent titles as “Super Size Me” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” Jaman titles will rent for as low as $1.99, with some short films and more obscure titles being offered for free.

“Our goal is to offer unlimited media content through one device with one easy-to-use interface, and these partnerships ensure that vision has become reality,” TiVo GM of content services Tara Maitra said.

Source — Yahoo!