The Truth: Docker Sells its Enterprise Business, New MacBook Pro, Chrome Ad-Blocker Changes
Thursday, 14 November 2019
Good evening and welcome to another edition of The Truth! Well, there certainly is a lot of stuff happening in the tech world today. It’s late, so let’s get right into it…
VMware has fixed a number of vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-12207, CVE-2019-11135, CVE-2019-5540, CVE-2019-5541, CVE-2019-5542) in VMware Workstation, Fusion and ESXI. For one of these, remote code execution is in the cards.
Heise is reporting “massive disruptions” of several online services like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Netflix and Twitter in Germany. Mobile traffic, mostly in Vodafone’s network, was also effected. Apparently routing issues were at fault (German).
Mexico’s national oil company Pemex is being extorted by hackers. They have demanded around $5 million in Bitcoins and the company has had to shut down several computer systems across its country-wide operations, but production is apparently not effected. Reuters is reporting that the company does not intend to pay a ransom. The company is saying (Spanish) that it was hit by ransomware on Sunday but that it has neutralised the attack.
Panic in Docker land. The Register is on the scene: “Docker has handed the Enterprise portion of its containerization business to Kubernetes cloud outfit Mirantis in a surprise sell-off. The move will see Mirantis take on all of the products, intellectual property, and customer contracts, and at least some of the employees, of the Docker Enterprise container management service. Mirantis also says it will run Docker Enterprise’s alliances and partner programs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Mirantis, known for being an early backer of both Kubernetes and OpenStack, says it will fold Docker Enterprise into its existing container service, offering the two products side-by-side to businesses. While Mirantis said it will continue to offer support in the near-term for Docker’s products, it was less committal in the longer term, with key products such as orchestration tool Docker Swarm only getting two years of planned support.” Many commentators are already saying Docker has given up on the enterprise with this deal. They are saying they want to become a “developer platform”, focusing on developer desktop tools and the Docker Hub package registry. Oh yeah, and their CEO is also out. “Docker says it has secured a $35m VC funding round and has named chief product officer Scott Johnston as the new CEO of the company when Bearden steps down.” Sounds to me like the investors stepped in and forced a change. I guess Red Hat saw this development coming in 2015 when they pivoted big to Kubernetes and became the go-to people for enterprise Docker environments.
The first official build of Microsoft’s new Edge browser, now based on Chromium, has arrived. This first version is targeted at ARM and meant for the new ARM-based Surface Pro X tablet/laptop/convertible/whatever device.
It seems, Icahn is getting involved in the Xerox-wants-to-buy-HP story. He’s pushing for a takeover. The notorious investor owns 10.6% of Xerox and 4.24% of HP stock. This stuff is getting serious now.
Meanwhile, Cisco has reported their quarterly numbers and is warning that its business is slowing down.
Apple has finally updated its MacBook Pro, something power users for a long time had been clamouring for. As expected, these things are expensive: “The $2,799 portable has a Retina display and some beefy but by no means unique specs, starting with a 2.3GHz eight-core ninth-generation Intel Core i9 processor, 16GB of RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU with 4GB of GDDR6 memory, and 1TB of SSD storage. The $2,399 version has a six-core Core i7 processor, 512GB of storage, and a Radeon Pro 5300M.” Apparently they have also finally fixed the damn keyboards.
Google is starting to get serious about breaking most ad-blockers in the upcoming Chrome 80. “In spite of the overwhelmingly negative feedback on the Manifest V3 extension system, Google is standing firm on Chrome’s ad-blocking changes. Manifest v3 has become a bone of contention for many ad-block companies. This is because Google developers have introduced an alternative to the webRequest API (earlier used for ad-blocking) named the declarativeRequest API, which limits the blocking version of the webRequest API. Many ad blocker maintainers and developers felt that the introduction of the declarativeNetRequest API can lead to the crippling of many already existing ad blockers.”
Five GitHub employees have actually resigned over the company’s business relations with the US government agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). GitHub currently has more than 800 employees.
The non-profit organisation that sells .org domains has been bought by a for-profit company. As The Verge points out, it’s pretty obvious that these domains will now get more expensive: “On June 30th, ICANN, the non-profit that oversees all domain names on the internet, agreed to remove price caps on rates for .org domain names – which were previously pretty cheap. Seems like something a for-profit company might want.”
Catching up with many everyday people, Doom creator John Carmack has also realised that VR is doomed, so to speak. He’s stepping down as CTO of Oculus, apparently to move on to the next buzzword: AI. “I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old”, he said. I dunno. He could’ve stayed with VR to solve the problem of what it’s good for. That solution really isn’t in sight either.
50 years ago today, NASA found out what happens when you launch a big-ass rocket into some big-ass clouds: It turns out you don’t need a thunderstorm for a lightning strike. The rocket will generate the lightning itself. So much for Rule 1-404.
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