Hackers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the lousy stock firmware your routers shipped with.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Google Fiber is reportedly hoping to rely on wireless technology instead of fiber-optic cables in about 12 major cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas, where it has planned faster internet service.
Google's parent company Alphabet has also suspended Google Fiber gigabit speed projects in San Jose, Calif., and Portland, Ore., according to unnamed sources in a Wall Street Journal report.
Google Fiber officials could not be reached to comment on the report. The report also said that Google Fiber is also hoping to boost its high-speed internet expansion by leasing existing fiber or asking cities or power companies to build the networks, instead of Google Fiber building its own.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Big news today from storage vendor Rubrik—both on a product front and a business one.First to the dollars: Rubrik is announcing a $61 million Series C investment led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and angel investors. This is a huge round, especially given the current state of the venture capital space, and it is a testimony to Rubrik's execution to date.The investment takes Rubrik's total funding to date to $112 million and will give the company the confidence to ramp up its sales, marketing and operations spend to take advantage of the opportunity it has. And if you needed an indication of just how big that opportunity is, that $112 million has poured in over a short period of only 30 months precisely because the market opportunity is huge. The legacy data management market is estimated to be $48 billion in value, and it is undergoing seismic changes right now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Walking a mile in another man’s smartphone is the best way to review a smartphone. During the past 10 days, I walked the shoes of the ZTE Zmax Pro user. It was a challenging review to prepare and write because it is a great phone (priced at $99 with ZTE and Metro PCS subsidies). But how do I explain it? What follows are case study references for evaluating budget smartphones.Flagship, top tier $600 - $700 phones are easy to review. HTC, Samsung and Motorola rarely miss their mark. Every vendor in the supply chain cooperates with the phone maker—from System on a Chip (SoC) makers to plastic extrusion suppliers—to push past the specs and the build quality of the last, most recently announced flagship smartphone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about Apple’s upcoming iPhone 7, a new rumor claims that Apple’s next-gen iPhone will incorporate new fast-charging technology that will enable the device to get up to a full charge much more quickly than is currently possible.Sourced from Twitter user The Malignant, the iPhone 7 will reportedly support and, in turn, will presumably come with a charger that will support five volt/two amp charging, a considerable step up from the 1 amp charge that currently comes with the iPhone.
#Apple according to the source (导航i世界) seems #iphone7 will support #fastcharge at least 5V2A pic.twitter.com/Lu0AqnVHudTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce.com has acquired business intelligence and analytics startup BeyondCore, as part of its strategy to make its software more intelligent.“I am thrilled [to] announce @Salesforce has acquired @beyondcoreinc to enhance the AI capabilities of Analytics Cloud,” wrote Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a tweet on Monday.The financial terms of the deal were not not disclosed.BeyondCore in San Mateo, California, had already started integrating its product with the Salesforce platform. At the Gartner BI Summit earlier this year, the company showed off this integration, which would be part of its upcoming BeyondCore 7 release, wrote CEO Arijit Sengupta in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some small and medium-sized businesses need fast, and flexible storage gear as much as large enterprises. The need to quickly spin up new applications, even without a storage specialist on staff, can drive those demands. The gear for doing so is gradually getting more affordable.On Monday, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise extended two of its storage product lines into more affordable territory, in one case adopting an ARM processor to help cut the cost of a system.HPE says the new systems give smaller organizations a way in on two of the hottest trends in enterprise storage: software-defined storage and flash. The former helps to line up the right storage for each application, even as a company’s demands quickly change, while the latter can give a speed boost to any type of storage arrangement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's no secret that Oracle's aggressive licensing tactics can be a source of considerable pain for its customers, and that's just where TmaxSoft is betting it has an edge. Not only does the company promise users of its Tibero database roughly half the license fees, it also uses a licensing model so transparent that it recently became the first to be verified by the Campaign for Clear Licensing.Tibero's price list is "a single page and very easy to understand," said Martin Thompson, chief agitator for CCL, when the verification was awarded late last year. "The prices and products are clearly set out, and there are no hidden extras that customers need to look out for.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I recall my first conversation with Rowan Trollope, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Internet of Things (IoT) and applications, back in 2012. He joined Cisco to head up the companies Collaboration Business Unit, and it was clear from our first conversation that collaboration under Trollope would be markedly different than it had been.The calling card for Cisco Collaboration has always been great technology, but the usability of the products has been mediocre. So, this became one of the primary focus areas for Trollope. For example, when a user receives an invitation for a WebEx meeting, he or she used to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the email and look for a hyperlink to click. Now there’s a big button at the top of the invitation that says “Join WebEx,” making the product significantly more usable, particularly for mobile users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An anonymous group claims to have stolen hacking tools that might belong to the National Security Agency and is auctioning them off to the highest bidder.It’s a pretty bold claim, but the hackers have offered sample files, and some security researchers say they appear to contain legitimate exploits.The files were allegedly stolen from the Equation Group, a top cyberespionage team that may have links to the NSA.The Equation Group is known to use some of the most advanced malware and probably helped develop the infamous Stuxnet computer worm, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A couple of weeks ago Amazon announced its quarterly numbers. As has been the case over the past year or so, the numbers looked good. Really good. Derided for years as a profitless company propped up by investor largesse, Amazon grew its revenues by 31 percent, from $23.9 billion to $30.4 billion, while profits leapt 832 percent, from $92 million to $857 million.Most of the profit came from AWS: on $2.88 billion in revenues, AWS reported $718 million in operating income. In Q216, AWS grew 58 percent year over year (YoY), down slightly from Q1’s 64 percent, but still healthy. As I wrote earlier this year, AWS’s curious failure to align with Amazon’s overall low-margin approach to pricing indicates that it is deliberately keeping prices high to avoid further increasing customer demand. Said another way, AWS’s growth is governed by capacity, not customer demand — which means we can expect it to continue its 50 percent growth rate for the next several years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The rise of mobile in the enterprise has led many CIOs to become concerned about the potential for data loss due to a lost or stolen device — phones, laptops and the like lost in taxis, restaurants and hotel rooms. But a new study has found that CIOs also need to spend more time focusing on the office itself.In July of this year, Kensington, a supplier of desktop and mobile device accessories (including laptop locks), surveyed 300 U.S. IT professionals from a range of industries for its IT Security & Laptop Theft report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This presidential election presents one of the clearest choices in U.S. history between two major-party candidates. But one thing has been rarely discussed: Where do the candidates stand on tech issues? Whether it’s net neutrality, investing in tech infrastructure, building an educational pipeline of tech workers, privacy or any of several other tech issues, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton take very different approaches. It’s worth looking at their varied stances.
Let’s start with net neutrality. For Clinton, it’s straightforward. She supports the FCC’s rulings in favor of net neutrality. Trump opposes the concept. His primary statement on the matter came in a tweet in which he called President Obama’s support of net neutrality an “attack on the internet.” His full tweet is: “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We hear from Apple CEO Tim Cook during the company’s quarterly earnings calls, but lately the leader of Apple has been opening up in ways that non-analysts can understand. First he sat down with Fast Company, and on Monday an in-depth Washington Post interview on Cook’s 5-year anniversary as CEO offered more insight into the company’s past failures and future surprises.
A lot has changed in the last five years, Cook told the Post. Steve Jobs passed away just six weeks after Cook took the reins, which came as a shock, he said. Apple expanded its product lineup after Jobs’s death, and some of those devices were conceived of and developed entirely without Jobs’s input. Apple just sold its 1 billionth iPhone, even as analysts and investors fret over the smartphone’s declining revenue. There are bigger changes in store, Cook said, though he played coy as usual.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Expedia has grown far beyond a search engine for flights -- it's now the parent company of a dozen travel brands including Trivago and Hotels.com -- but according to VP of global product David Fleischman, machine learning has always been at the heart of the company's operations.The business of delivering quality flight search results is tough, and Fleischman describes it as an "unbounded computer science problem". The reason for this is because flight itineraries and schedules are constantly changing, and Expedia's proprietary 'best fare search' (BFS) has to 'learn' and adapt all the time.The extent of the problem can be summed up by one statistic. The average Expedia.com flight search will take three seconds to deliver results. In those three seconds you will see, on average, 16,000 flight options, in order of convenience or price or time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As expected, Windows 10's usage share growth sank after Microsoft ended the free upgrade it had offered customers for the past year.
According to analytics vendor StatCounter, Windows 10's week-over-week gains in the first two weeks of August were 0.13 and 0.15 percentage points, respectively. The increases were the smallest of any two-week span this year, with the exception of two different times -- in April, again in July -- when Windows 10's share fell from one week to the next.
If the remainder of August plays out the same as the first half, Windows 10 will post a one-month increase about a third of July's and approximately a fourth of June's.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After a lot of anecdotal reports, Microsoft acknowledged there is a problem with the Anniversary Update to Windows 10 causing PCs to freeze up. However, it says the problem is isolated to a specific PC configuration.In a Windows forum post, Microsoft claims the freezing issue is experienced only on computers with SSDs where apps are installed on a different drive than the one where Windows 10 is installed. The obvious workaround is to move all apps to the drive where Windows 10 is located, and the company actually recommends this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For decades, PCs were at the center of Intel's business, but not anymore.Self-driving cars, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence are more attractive to Intel, which no longer views PCs as a priority. That's the message the company will try to deliver at Intel Developer Forum, starting on Tuesday.IDF attendees will see drones fly around and robots roaming the floor, and they will be able to try on cool wearables and VR and AR (augmented reality) headsets.Unlike past years, attendees won't be wowed with a lot of blazing laptops and desktops running upcoming PC processors. Instead, Intel will provide an insight into its internet-of-things and data-center strategies. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The X1 car dash camera from KDLINKS currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 2,400 customers (read reviews). It records full-HD Video 1920x1080 at 30 fps, and features a super wide 165° viewing angle. It starts recording immediately after turning on the ignition, and records in a continuous loop, however there is an emergency "lock" feature that can be enabled and will prevent overwriting. It has a motion detection system as well as a night mode ensuring high quality recordings even in poor lighting conditions. A built-in GPS module records GPS data along with your video, so you can review vehicle location, route, and speed information using the KDLINKS software package. A suction-cup style mount allows the camera to rotate 360-degrees, so it can record inside the car, or even while facing the window if desired. The X1's typical list price of $270 has been reduced by 36% to $170 on Amazon. Learn more about the discounted X1 auto dash cam, or buy it now, on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Federal Trade Commission said it will hold a public workshop about all things ransomware on Sept. 7.“With alarming frequency, ransomware hackers are sneaking into consumer and business computers, encrypting files containing photos, documents and other important data, and then demanding a ransom in exchange for the key needed to decrypt the files. Consumers, businesses, and government agencies are falling prey to these schemes, including hospitals whose servers may contain sensitive patient data. New forms of ransomware encrypt files of website operators, threatening not only their files containing stored data, but the very files needed to operate their websites. Other variants of ransomware are now targeting files on mobile devices,” the FTC wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here