West Virginia, one of the poorest US states and 45th out of 50 in Internet access is considering a bill that would see the creation of a state-run ISP that would cover the state bringing Internet access to rural areas not well serviced, or not serviced at all, by the incumbent cable carriers. The move could easily take West Virginia from a technical backwater to a market leader. The stated goal of the move is, of course, to connect the state's famously disconnected regions to the rest of the world, but it is obvious that a powerful ISP backbone is just what the low cost, low tax, great scenery state needs to move into a powerful position for hosting tech companies with easy access to the NOVA and Captial markets.

So thought that we should share the news and pics of @DonutDetroyer and the drone.

About a week ago, our own @DonutDetroyer had a rather nasty encounter with a drone. He's had a bit of surgery since then and is now starting to recovery.

HPE announces their newest high end Integrity server (Integrity is the server series that sits between the Proliant and the Superdome.) Their latest offering is the MC990 X which has a few surprises.

First this is an Intel Xeon E7, eight socket server (AMD64 architecture.) This is very big as it signals a closing of the Itanium era. As of 2015, HPE was the last company shipping Intel Itanium (IA64) architecture servers and while they are still providing Itanium in the Superdome line, it is clear that the process is winding down. No one knows if a new Itanium will even release yet before the architecture is decommissioned.

The MC990 X supports eight beefy Xeon E7 procs for a total of 144 physical cores (and 288 logical processors) in an single AMD64 chassis.

Unlike previous HP Integrity offerings, the MC990 X is pure Linux. No other OS (no HP-UX, Windows, OpenVMS) is supported. This is a major move, especially as the move from Itanium to Xeon would, in theory, enable a Windows return to the high end Integrity line. HPE is certainly sending a message here.

HPE partnered with another legendary RISC UNIX manufacturer, SGI (of IRIX and MIPS fame) to develop this new server model.

In a not very surprising move, Verizon has found its cloud product to be non-viable and is closing its doors. Customers have one month to migrate to another provider.

NVidia has released new blobs to help enable open source drives to work with Linux. It's a half hearted effort, but at least it is something.

Amazon is expanding the Echo ecosystem with the new Amazon Echo Dot. Basically the Dot is the old Amazon Echo but with the speaker removed, so perfect for people who already have a sound system and just want to add the Alexa functions.

Youtube Video

Hackerboards looks as a super tiny Braswell CPU based SOM that can support Linux and 4K video.

Thank goodness as the world was horribly short on Linux distros. Another one, Apricity, has emerged. Based on Arch Linux with rolling updates and a Cinnamon desktop.

Open Source and free VeraCrypt, hosted by Microsoft, is often seen as the key replacement for defunct TrueCrypt. Linux and Ubuntu has a how to on Installing Veracrypt on Linux.

Security today...