It’s the last Gestalt IT Rundown of 2018. Since it’s the end of the year, we wrangled Stephen Foskett, Richard Stroffolino, Tom Hollingsworth, and Ken Nalbone together to discuss what they thought were the biggest IT stories of 2018.
IBM Goes Back to the 90s
Struggling to see what IBM is going to do after acquiring Red Hat? Ben Thompson wrote up a great piece putting it into context of IBM’s strategy in the 90s with the emergence of the internet. It’s a really interesting perspective, positioning the acquisition as a return to the mentality of CEO Lou Gerstner.
Security and the US Ballistic Missile System
According to a recent audit, the Army, Navy, and Missile Defense Agency are having some issues with basic security. How bad is it? [I]nvestigators found that many users did not enable multifactor authentication for their accounts Ok, that’s not great. [T]he network was never configured to support multifactor authentication at all. Gulp Investigators found that […]
99 Problems… But Too Many Podcasts Ain’t One
At some point, the podcast industry will have to reconcile with podcast fatigue. But right now, as a listener, there seems to be an infinite bench of shows to choose from, no matter how niche or obscure.
Nvidia PhysX Goes Open-Source
Nvidia announced that their physics simulation engine, PhysX, is going open-source. It’s a result of the growing importance of physics simulation outside of games.
Eastern European Banks Hacked by Raspberry Pi
Cheap, tiny, and full-featured SoCs are great tools for exploring creativity. But those same features also make them great tools to malicious actors. The recent DarkVishnya attacks in Eastern Europe saw them used to gain local access to banking information.
Dell Goes Public 2: Electric Boogaloo | Gestalt IT Rundown: December 12, 2018
Get your IT news of the week with the Gestalt IT Rundown. This week Tim Waldron joins Rich Stroffolino for the show. Rich and Tim discuss the latest US-Huawei drama, Dell going public again, Australia’s encryption bill, and the SuperMicro saga.
Mozilla’s CEO Mourns the Death of EdgeHTML
Mozilla CEO Chris Beard wrote an interesting blog post in response to Microsoft adopting Chromium as the engine for their Edge browser. He makes the point that reducing the number of stakeholders among browser makes gives Google an even bigger influence with web standards bodies.
Microsoft Teams is Beating Slack
Slack can often be seen as the de facto collaborative chat app. But a recent survey by Spiceworks shows that Microsoft Teams is a formidable competitor.
Making the Case for SAN and NAS on AWS
Chin-Fah Heoh sees the IT Pendulum swinging back a little bit from total cloud adoption. New services like AWS Outpost move AWS services into on-premises managed servers. Does this mean we’ll see a return of SAN and NAS, or are these just the wistful visions of a self-proclaimed “storage dinosaur?”