The U.K. government has published a report on the staggering scale of surveillance in the country last year.The report, compiled by the Interception of Communications Commissioner's Office (IOCCO), covers the surveillance activities of the U.K.'s three main intelligence agencies (MI5, the Secret Intelligence Service, and GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters), the tax authority, and a number of police forces.It shows that warrants for the interception of communications rose 9 percent and that authorities continue to collect communications metadata -- information about who called or connected to whom, when, how often -- with abandon. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While you wait for your new iPhone to come in, Amazon already has iPhone 7 cases and screen protectors in stock, and many of them are significantly discounted. Here are our picks for the best discounted iPhone 7 cases you should consider dropping in your cart right now, in various styles and colors.
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45% off Spigen Continue reading
A few months back I reported on rumors of new Surface-branded all-in-one PCs from Microsoft that could target both other all-in-ones as well as Apple's languishing iMac line. Now new information says they are coming soon.Citing her usual deep bench of sources, Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet says there will be a hardware launch event in late October, one year after a New York City event at which Microsoft unveiled the Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, Lumia 950 and 950 XL.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Reading about Cisco exec Rob Soderbery's departure from the company, I couldn't help thinking back to the first time I came across the enterprise products muckety-muck: Back at Interop 2013 in Las Vegas, where Soderbery took on Cleveland Cavalier star Kyrie Irving in a basketball shooting contest in the name of IoT marketing.The Stanford- and Caltech-educated Soderbery was pumping up Cisco's vision for software-defined networking as well as the internet of things, and it is IoT where the Irving cameo came in. Cisco was getting into the game of a much more connected pro sports world, where sensors in everything from basketball shoes to basketballs help teams better measure player and team performance and improve the fan experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Xen Project has fixed four vulnerabilities in its widely used virtualization software, two of which could allow malicious virtual machine administrators to take over host servers.Flaws that break the isolation layer between virtual machines are the most serious kind for a hypervisor like Xen, which allows users to run multiple VMs on the same underlying hardware in a secure manner.The Xen hypervisor is widely used by cloud computing providers and virtual private server hosting companies like Linode, which had to reboot some of its servers over the past few days to apply the new patches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Hong Kong-based technology manufacturer, USBKill.com, has taken data security to the "Mission Impossible" extreme by creating a USB stick that uses an electrical discharge to fry an unauthorized computer into which it's plugged."When the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges -- all in the matter of seconds," the company said in a news release. USBKill.com
The USB Kill 2.0 stick.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Republican lawmakers are making a last-ditch bid to thwart the proposed transfer by the U.S. of internet governance to a multistakeholder body, by calling on the government to reconsider its plans to put the transition into effect by month end.Raising fears that control of the internet could pass to authoritarian regimes, the legislators wrote in a letter Thursday to Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker that there were unresolved issues, such as the ability to ensure that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers would in fact follow its own bylaws after the transfer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A decision by the University of California to lay off IT employees and send their jobs overseas is under fire from U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif) and the IEEE-USA.The university recently informed about 80 IT workers at its San Francisco campus, including contract employees and vendor contractors, that it hired India-based HCL, under a $50 million contract, to manage infrastructure and networking-related services.The university employees will remain on the job until the end of February, but before then they are expecting to train their foreign replacements. The number of affected employees may expand. The university's IT services agreement with HCL can be leveraged by any institution in the 10-campus system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Not enough is being done to protect networks from solar storms that could wipe out electric power grids and destroy satellites. The end game in a catastrophic solar storm would be the internet’s time synchronization not working anymore. That would stop the internet altogether.“An impending calamitous solar storm” is how Joseph N. Pelton, the former dean of the International Space University (ISU) in Strasbourg, describes the perceived event in his press release.Pelton, who is also a current executive board member of the International Association of Space Safety (IAASS), has published an article in Room: The Space Journal (subscription) on the subject.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Cisco executive wheels keep churning. Today the person in charge of Cisco’s enterprise engineering organizations Robert Soderbery said he has left the company via a post on LinkedIn.
More on Network World: Cisco: IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte level in 2016+
Soderbery wrote: “It has been a fascinating time to be at Cisco and there are many experiences I take away with me. It was an incredibly diverse set of challenges, from the incessant battle with the likes of HP and Huawei for market share, to creating new products, businesses and even markets. My colleagues and I were fortunate to be early movers in IoT and the digital transition, which led to new businesses in new industries for Cisco; manufacturing, transportation, utilities and smart cities. In October of 2012 I met the Meraki [a company Cisco acquired in 2012] founding team and realized that the amazing company they built, when combined with the power of Cisco, would be something very special, which indeed turned out to be true. And of course the more recent work in networking innovation with Cisco Digital Network Architecture, and driving the transition to a software centric architecture has been exciting Continue reading
RSA
Amit Yoran
Enterprises should expect business as usual from RSA in the wake of its being swept up by Dell this week in the largest tech deal ever, with company executives saying it will retain a good deal of autonomy to carry out its strategic plans.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Old data breaches carried out years ago are entering into the limelight thanks to anonymous internet users like Keen.Earlier this week, Keen, a data collector who runs the site Vigilante.pw, helped to uncover details about stolen data taken from the popular porn site Brazzers. A copy of almost 800,000 accounts, probably originally hacked back in 2012, fell into his hands.The stolen database is just one of the many Keen has on file, in fact, and each one can involve thousands or even millions of internet accounts. Vigilante.pw continually archives past data breaches as a way to warn the public. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Designed to protect and safeguard your electronic gadgets and save time on the go by easily storing and finding everything you need. This travel organizer offers a secure storage space for cord management, laptop and computer accessories putting everything you need in one place. This organizer also gives you special space inside for credit cards, passports, also for boarding passes, smartphone, tickets and has many pockets where you can put coins, keys, USB, SIM card, earphones, and other small accessories. Give yourself or someone else the gift of stress-free travel. The travel cord organizer's typical list price of $30.99 has been reduced 55% to $13.99. See the discounted Travel Cord Organizer now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel has many disparate business units doing their own thing. The challenging task of tethering them is a top priority for Intel's second-in-command, Venkata Renduchintala.Renduchintala, known as Murthy, was appointed last November to run Intel's PC, client, and internet of things businesses. He's made his presence felt: Within six months of his appointment, Intel cut struggling products like mobile CPUs and sharpened its focus on growth areas of IoT, servers, and connectivity.One common thread in all the areas of growth is connectivity, with modems and wireless products now as important to Intel as its CPUs. Intel needed a serious kick in its modem development efforts, which is why CEO Brian Krzanich poached Renduchintala from Qualcomm, a bitter Intel rival, where he was in charge of connectivity offerings. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. In 2012, the social networking site LinkedIn suffered a data breach in which username/password combinations were stolen. Four years later, in 2016, at least 117 million sets of credentials from this breach were available for purchase online. MySpace suffered a similar data breach, and years later 427 million sets of credential were posted online.These events have prompted e-commerce companies that have not suffered a data breach to urge their customers to change their passwords as soon as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A decade ago, security meant a big firewall at a single ingress point. All devices and applications were under IT’s tight control, so they did not create significant security risks. Today, everything has changed. The rise of cloud computing, BYOD, shadow IT, WiFi devices, software defined everything and other trends have blown up the tightly controlled model and created a rather chaotic system. Adding to the challenge is that attackers are getting smarter and targeting IoT systems and end users directly, which often bypasses the security technology. This is why some security experts say there are two types of organizations, those that have been breached and know about it and those that have been breached and don’t know about it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While Box is probably best known for its user-facing storage and content services, the company is also operating a separate platform for developers, and it received a handful of updates Thursday.The platform, which lets developers integrate Box's tools for managing content into the apps they're building, now supports new content types, annotations, and watermarking. In addition, the company launched a new set of tools for building web user interfaces and a revamped developer console.Continuing to upgrade the platform may make it more appealing to developers, at a time when Box is fighting to be one of the services that developers take to power their applications. The Box Platform gives developers the ability to build Box's file storage and content services capabilities into an application, without having to build all of that themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As expected, the iPhone 7 that Apple announced yesterday will ship without a headphone jack. For many people, possibly including me, that will be a deal killer, but not necessarily for the obvious reasons. See also: When it comes to the iPhone’s headphone jack, I’m with Woz Because while there won’t be a headphone jack in the box, there will be an adapter, so you can still connect all those suddenly obsolescent non-Lightning headphones all us Luddites have been spending big bucks on for the past 10 years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Engaging customers is an ongoing challenge for companies large and small, but Salesforce has been working to make it easier. On Thursday, the CRM giant took its efforts a big step further with the launch of Lightning Bolt, a new product designed to jump-start the process of building customer communities, portals, and websites.Last year, Salesforce introduced Lightning Templates for Community Cloud, enabling companies to create customized communities for their customers, partners, and employees. Lightning Bolt takes the template concept up another notch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In January, V. Miller Newton, CEO and president of PKWARE, made his annual list of predictions for most likely cyberattacks of the year.
Number 3 on the list: The U.S. electrical grid will be attacked. He's been making predictions since 2011, and claims 95 percent accuracy so far (he also predicts that healthcare systems were at risk and that smart watches would be hacked).
[ Related: Battling cyberattacks with bombs? ]
"This country's infrastructure runs on antiquated technology and systems," he says. "We've already seen an electrical power grid hacked in December of last year in Ukraine," which blacked out 103 cities and partially blacked out an additional 186.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here