Released a little over a month ago, Microsoft's new Edge browser has gotten a set of critical security patches.

As part of its monthly round of security fixes, colloquially known as Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released a critical bulletin, MS15-095, with four patches covering vulnerabilities in the Windows 10-only Edge browser.

Overall this month, Microsoft issued 12 bulletins covering 56 vulnerabilities. Five bulletins were deemed as critical, meaning they should be addressed as soon as possible.

In addition to Edge, this month's patches cover issues in Internet Explorer, Windows, Office, Exchange, the .Net framework, the Hyper-V virtual machine, Active Directory, and Skype for Business.

To read this article in full, please click here

Everyone loves a bargain, even in the IT industry.

Following a beta period launched in May, Google has made its low-cost "preemptible" virtual machines available as a full commercial offering.

The Google Compute Engine Preemptible Virtual Machines can cost 70 percent less than regular VMs on the Google Cloud Platform, with the stipulation that Google can shut down these machines at any time.

Google offers these VMs using the leftover capacity within their data centers. A VM can act as a virtual server, one that contains an operating system, application and support libraries.

To read this article in full, please click here

Biometric technologies may soon replace cumbersome passwords, but the U.S. National Institute of Technology is looking out to a time when you won't even have to press your finger onto a grimy fingerprint reader to gain entry to a computer.

NIST has funded a number of companies to make touchless fingerprint readers possible, and is creating a framework for evaluating possible technologies for widespread use.

Touchless fingerprint readers could be particularly useful for quickly identifying large numbers of people, such as a queue entering a controlled facility, NIST contends. Germaphobes would also appreciate the technology, as they would not have to touch potentially germy fingerprint readers to gain access to their computers.

To read this article in full, please click here

Responding to customer hunger for bigger virtual machines, Microsoft has bulked up its most powerful VM with more storage and higher throughput, paving the way for running large-scale, database-driven applications in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

The newly launched GS-Series is based on the G-series of VMs, which proved to be surprisingly popular since they were launched in January, said Corey Sanders, Microsoft Azure director program management. Usage of this VM has doubled by 50 percent in the last three months, he said.

The G series, which runs on the Intel Xeon E5 v3 processors, is the most powerful VM offered on Azure. Customers use the G-series to run databases -- including Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, and even NoSQL databases such as MongoDB -- that power internal and public-facing applications, as well as serve as the cornerstone for data warehouse-style data analysis, Sanders said.

To read this article in full, please click here

VMware is making a case that network virtualization can improve security in the enterprise.

VMware, one of the biggest proponents of virtualizing the entire data center, says CIOs concerned about protecting their IT infrastructures from attackers should look at virtual networking, which has been around a while but isn't as popular as server virtualization.

"The security industry is messy and complicated, and we spend the bulk of our dollars on products that don't really solve the problem. It simply isn't working," said Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, in a keynote talk at the VMworld conference in San Francisco.

To read this article in full, please click here

VMware executives demonstrated new virtualization technologies designed to run in the data centers of the future at the company's annual VMworld conference.

VMware showed off a new capability of moving a live, running virtual machine (VM) from one data center in California to another in Virginia. Executives also demonstrated how the company is working with containers, a rapidly emerging virtualization technology popularized by Docker.

The ability to move live VMs is an advance on the company's vMotion technology, which has been available for several years. The vMotion technology offers a way to move a VM from one part of the data center to another, while keeping the application inside the VM running.

To read this article in full, please click here

VMware has updated its stack of data center virtualization software, rounding out capabilities that allow an organization to run an entire data center operation and related cloud services as a single unified entity.

Among the new additions are components to the vCloud Air suite of software for running cloud services. The company has expanded its network virtualization software to provide more ways of moving a workload across a data center. And it has also released a new version of its OpenStack distribution for running cloud workloads.

VMware believes that the architecture best suited to deliver enterprise and cloud-native applications is one based on virtualizing organizations' compute, network, and storage resources so they can be delivered on multiple platforms, said Mark Chuang, VMware senior director of product marketing and management.

To read this article in full, please click here

IBM is beefing up its offerings in software-defined storage, which promises to let IT departments better deal with large amounts of storage by uncoupling the management software from its underlying hardware.

The company has expanded two products in its Spectrum line, Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Accelerate, to allow customers to build hybrid storage systems by combining in-house Spectrum deployments with IBM Cloud storage services.

"We have clients using Spectrum today who are looking for a way to leverage the cloud to hold long-term retention items, or because they are running low on capacity," said Sam Werner, IBM director of storage and software defined environments. "We can extend the capabilities they have today, and allow them to have a new cloud storage tier."

To read this article in full, please click here

An ex-Google engineer is developing a new file system for Linux, with the hopes that it can offer a speedier and more advanced way of storing data on servers.

After a number of years of development, the Bcache File System (Bcachefs) "is more or less feature complete -- nothing critical should be missing," wrote project head Kent Overstreet, in an e-mail to the Linux Kernel Mailing List late Thursday.

Linux currently has plenty of working file systems, though no one file system seems to be best-suited for all uses.

The main goal of Bcachefs is to match the speed of traditional Linux file systems with the advanced scalability and reliability of newer file systems, Overstreet wrote.

To read this article in full, please click here