Blatant nosiness is the reason why email users click on the links embedded within electronic messages, according to university researchers.This new evidence, discovered in a study, throws into question the basic premise behind phishing. That presumption is that when an iffy email looks like it comes from a legitimate organization, but contains a link to a bogus website where financial details are guzzled by bad guys, that gullible people are being bamboozled by the apparent legitimacy of the email.+ Also on Network World: 10 companies that can help you fight phishing +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ireland will join Apple in appealing the European Commission’s finding that Apple owes the country more than US$14 billion in back taxes.The Dail, Ireland’s parliament, voted 93 to 36 late Wednesday night to file an appeal against the ruling, which came out last week. The government is now set to ask the EC to reverse its ruling, which said Ireland’s tax treatment of Apple from 2003 to 2014 was illegal and distorted competition.Ireland could stand to gain €13 billion ($14.5 billion) in tax revenue from the ruling, but government officials and lawmakers said imposing the tax would hurt the country’s reputation as a good place to do business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Having seen all sorts of makeshift fixes – from post-it notes to bandages to condom wrappers – used to block wireless access point LEDs from beaming and sometimes blinking, some IT shops have begun turning off the lights altogether even though it can make their jobs a little tougher. Lively discussion broke out online this week among a forum of university IT pros after one member inquired about this “first-world problem,” as he contemplates whether to disable LEDs on APs across the board in an effort to improve dorm residents’ quality of life (i.e., help them grab more shuteye by reducing in-room light pollution). More than a dozen peers replied that they have indeed turned off the lights, some doing so in a wholesale manner, others taking it case by case. They say technicians can re-enable LEDs temporarily if need be for troubleshooting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Devops is transforming how developers and operations teams work together to deliver better software faster. At its core, devops is about automation. When several tasks in development, testing, and deployment are automated, developers can make changes to code and deploy to production frequently. Amazon, a leading devops proponent, at one point claimed to have more than 1,000 deployments a day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The best gear money can buyImage by Rob SchultzOne of the PC’s greatest strengths is its extreme flexibility. There’s a vast selection of hardware out there, of all different shapes and sizes and makes and models—so much so that even if your budget’s not a concern, buyer’s paralysis very well could be.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You hold your smartphone in front of your face, the angle and distance guided by on-screen feedback. It flashes near-infrared (NIR) light into your eyes -- a brief dull-red glow. Your smartphone recognizes one or both of your irises, and unlocks itself.At least, that's the new smartphone login scenario. Previously seen mostly in military devices and fixed installations, iris scanning is joining other biometric authentication methods (such as fingerprint scanning, facial recognition and voice recognition) intended to move mobile devices beyond the limitations of password-based security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Website disruptions are more than a mere annoyance. They can quickly add up, leading to declines in productivity and revenue. These website errors not only affect your end-users, they also pull key players away from other projects to help put out the fire to avoid major profit losses."Latencies and inconsistent website behaviors doesn't only damage the customer experience and deter consumers away from your site; it can also lead to drastic revenue loss. In fact, Amazon calculated that a one-second delay costs up to $1.6 billion per year in sales," says Mike Kane, senior product marketing manager at Dyn, an internet performance management company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Empowering the patientImage by ThinkstockThere is serious personal risk associated with a healthcare data breach, especially with multiple connected devices and health record systems generating and storing a patient’s sensitive health data. Every person interacting with an online system needs a digital identity, and it should be authenticated in real time, so that unusual behavior can be detected at any time, whether at login or midway through a session.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You should be worried about the November election. Not so much that the candidates you support won’t win, but about the risk that the “winners” may not really be the winners, due to hackers tampering with the results.Or, that even if the winners really are the winners, there will be enough doubt about it to create political chaos.This is not tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. The warnings are coming from some of the most credible security experts in the industry.Richard Clarke, former senior cybersecurity policy adviser to presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, wrote recently in a post for ABC News that not only are US election systems vulnerable to hacking, but that it would not be difficult to do so.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To the old legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the European Union's highest court has added another: innocence until proven profitable.It's OK for websites to hyperlink to an image published elsewhere without the rights holder's permission -- as long as they don't know that, and don't make a profit from it, the Court of Justice of the EU ruled on Thursday.The ruling concerned Dutch website GeenStijl, accused by Playboy of linking to an Australian website that published, without the magazine's permission, a photoshoot it had commissioned with Dutch TV personality Britt Dekker.Playboy's lawyers wrote to GeenStijl asking it to remove the link, but it refused -- and published a new link to another website hosting the photos without permission when they were removed from the Australian site. When the pictures disappeared from that site too, GeenStijl allowed its forum users to link to the photos on other sites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM is making headlines with its quantum computing research and brain-like chip called TrueNorth, but it also is bringing interesting technologies to its current Power server lineup.Inside IBM's new S822LC server for high-performance computing is a new interconnect that gives a five-fold speed boost to communication between a CPU and graphics processor.The interconnect is based on Nvidia's homegrown NVLink technology, which has been in the works for years. IBM's two-socket server, which is based on Power8 CPUs, is among the first available with the interconnect.NVLink is essentially an upgrade to PCI-Express 3.0, which has been used for communication between a GPU and other components in a system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There is a typical model for growing technology companies once they pass their IPO milestones—a move towards quickly broadening the product base to derive additional revenue in order to keep the Wall Street analysts happy. Given there has been a dearth of tech IPOs lately—and that one of the ones that did get away, Twilio, is widely regarded as a tech success story—it is interesting to watch what the company rolls out in the short term.We didn’t have to wait long. Twilio today announced a new enterprise plan that not only ticks the analyst boxes for potential increased revenue, but also ticks enterprise boxes for security and administration control.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel’s plans to spin out its security business under the McAfee name could be clouded by the plans of security expert and businessman John McAfee, who claims he had not assigned the rights to his personal name.The chip maker said Wednesday that it had signed an agreement with TPG for a deal that would see its Intel Security business as a separate cybersecurity company in which Intel shareholders would hold 49 percent of the equity with the balance held by the investment firm. Intel would also receive US$3.1 billion in cash. The new company would be named McAfee.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise will spin off and merge what it considers its non-core software assets with U.K.-based enterprise software firm Micro Focus in a deal worth $8.8 billion, the company said Wednesday.Included in the bundle being offloaded are HPE’s businesses focusing on application delivery management, big data, enterprise security, information management and governance, and IT operations management. Combined with Micro Focus, which acquired Attachmate in 2014 and owns Linux company SUSE, it will create one of the world’s largest pure-play software companies, HPE said, with a combined sales force of about 4,000 people.Among the terms of the deal are a $2.5 billion cash payment to HPE and 50.1 percent ownership of the new combined company by HPE shareholders. HPE declined to specify what the staffing impact would be. The combined company will be led by Kevin Loosemore, executive chairman of Micro Focus, and the deal is expected to close by the second half of HPE's fiscal year 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel is going to spin out its subsidiary Intel Security as a joint venture with investment firm TPG, redubbing the new entity with its old name – McAfee.The deal calls for TPG to make a $1.1 billion equity investment and own 51 percent of the company, with Intel retaining 49%.In a joint statement the companies say the investment will be used to help the spinout gain its feet as a stand-alone business and to drive growth.Intel bought McAfee in 2010 for $7.68 billion with the intent of tying McAfee’s security technology with Intel’s chips.Since then Intel has incorporated technology in some chips that power features of its security software, and Intel Security’ endpoint protection technology is well thought of, consistently ranking among the leaders in Gartner’s analysis of that category. It is ranked number two in market share behind Symantec and in front of Trend Micro.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In late August, an FBI alert warning state election officials about an attack on voter registration databases from Illinois and Arizona was leaked and posted in a report on Yahoo News.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The University of California is laying off a group of IT workers at its San Francisco campus as part of a plan to move work offshore.The layoffs will happen at the end of February, but before the final day arrives the IT employees expect to train foreign replacements from India-based IT services firm HCL. The firm is working under a university contract valued at $50 million over five years.This layoff may have huge implications. That's because the university's IT services agreement with HCL can be leveraged by any institution in the 10-campus University of California system, which serves some 240,000 students and employs some 190,000 faculty and staff.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Woodard & Curran is a $200 million integrated engineering, science, and operations company based in Portland, Maine, but has offices scattered across the country. Kenneth Danila, Director of Information Systems, recently helped migrate the company to a cloud based storage system from Panzura to eliminate long delays in sharing huge engineering files, and that shift enabled the company to swap out its expensive MPLS network. Ancillary benefits included a painless way to migrate from one cloud supplier to another (AWS to Azure), and a way to limit the threat of ransomware. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Danila in his Dedham, MA office. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As quantum computers inch closer to reality, experts are sweating over their potential to render many of today's cybersecurity technologies useless. Earlier this year the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology issued a call for help on the matter, and this week the Global Risk Institute added its voice to the mix.Because of quantum computing, there's a one-in-seven chance that fundamental public-key cryptography tools used today will be broken by 2026, warned Michele Mosca, co-founder of the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing and special advisor on cybersecurity to the Global Risk Institute. By 2031, that chance jumps to 50 percent, Mosca wrote in a report published Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here