In a move that could lead to a ban on selling its products in the United States, the US International Trade Commission has ruled that Arista does in fact infringe on a number of Cisco’s technology patents.Arista now must decide if it wants to ask the US government to overturn the so-called “import ban” or ask that an appeals court toss the decision, observers say. It could also decide to build products in the US – a move that Cisco says would “not only would violate the ITC orders, but the federal court has the authority to enjoin local manufacturing of infringing products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm is offering to fund projects that will simplify the massively complex task of building models for machine learning applications.Models are a fundamental part of machine learning. Similar to algorithms, they help teach computers to, say, identify a cat in a photo, forecast weather from historical data or sort spam from legitimate email.But writing the models takes time and requires many skills. Typically, data scientists, subject matter experts and software engineers all have to come together to develop the model.When New York University researchers wanted to model block-by-block traffic flow data for the city, it took 60 person-months of work by data scientists to prepare the data for use and an additional 30 person-months to develop the model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Slideshow: Check out the sensors that make IoT clickImage by Stephen LawsonSensors are at the heart of the Internet of Things, collecting the data that powers wearables and smart cities alike. This week in San Jose, makers of sensors and related gear gathered for the Sensors Expo & Conference. Here's a look at some of these components.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With WWDC now behind us, the next big event on Apple's schedule is its highly anticipated iPhone 7 unveiling. Likely to take place sometime this coming September, the iPhone 7 will be under a lot of pressure to boost sales. Of course, iPhone sales are still incredibly strong, but Apple in 2016 experienced its first year over year drop in iPhone sales in history. In other words, analysts and pundits will be looking at the iPhone 7 to deliver in a big way.That said, a recent report from The Wall Street Journal suggests that the iPhone 7 may not include any game-changing features. Specifically, the report relays that Apple's traditional schedule of implementing major design changes to the iPhone every two years will be adjusted ever so slightly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Let’s Encrypt, a free certificate authority launched by the Internet Security Research Group in November 2014 and backed by some of the biggest names in the industry, today revealed that rival CA Comodo is attempting to “improperly” trademark the Let’s Encrypt brand.And it’s difficult to see how that isn’t the case.From a blog post by ISRG executive director Josh Aas:
Some months ago, it came to our attention that Comodo Group, Inc., is attempting to register at least three trademarks for the term “Let’s Encrypt,” for a variety of CA-related services. These trademark applications were filed long after the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) started using the name Let’s Encrypt publicly in November of 2014, and despite the fact Comodo’s “intent to use” trademark filings acknowledge that it has never used “Let’s Encrypt” as a brand.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Proving who pulled off a cyber attack is never easy and sometimes impossible. That’s the reality investigators face as they try to figure out who breached the network of the Democratic National Committee, which revealed last week that hackers had made off with confidential documents including research on Republican presidential opponent Donald Trump.Russia was fingered as the likely suspect, until a hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0 stepped up and claimed that he acted alone. But despite what appear to be DNC documents posted by Guccifer online, some security experts remain convinced that a group of skilled Russian hackers was behind the attack - likely acting on behalf of the Russian government. Here's why they think that:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Financial services companies have traditionally shrunk from the notion of releasing applications that haven't been thoroughly baked and battled tested. But in today's digital world, companies that agonize over building the perfect app risk losing out to more nimble competitors. That's why many companies are turning to agile software development to push more products out the door and rescue other projects from oblivion.
This is certainly true for Principal Financial Group, a provider of insurance, retirement planning and other asset management services for corporate employees. In 2013, the Des Moines, Iowa, (needed?) company was struggling to prioritize and complete software projects. One insurance business unit in hyper-growth mode couldn't get group benefits products to market fast enough. A services unit was slogging through a project that had gone on for too long and had no end in sight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has significantly upped the tally of U.S. government gag orders slapped on demands for customer information, according to court documents filed last week.In a revised complaint submitted to a Seattle federal court last Friday, Microsoft said that more than half of all government data demands were bound by a secrecy order that prevented the company from telling customers of its cloud-based services that authorities had asked it to hand over their information.The original complaint -- the first round in a lawsuit Microsoft filed in April against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General Loretta Lynch -- had pegged the number of data demands during the past 18 months at 5,624. Of those, 2,576, or 46%, were tagged with secrecy orders that prevented Microsoft from telling customers it had been compelled to give up their information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle's namesake database may have been born on-premises, but the next big update to the software will make its debut in the cloud.Oracle Database 12c Release 2, also known as Oracle Database 12.2, is slated for release in the second half of this year. It will first be made available in the cloud, with an on-premises version arriving at some undefined point in the future.“We are committed to giving customers more options to move to the cloud because it helps them reduce costs and become more efficient and agile," Oracle said in a statement sent by email. "Oracle Database 12.2 will be available in the cloud first, but we will also make it accessible to all of our customers.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Panzura is a company that’s been around for eight years but two months ago brought in the first new CEO after founder Randy Chou left the business. LinkedIn
Panzura CEO Patrick Harr
The new head honcho is Patrick Harr, an executive who formerly worked at VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise on its Helion Cloud Platform and Nirvanix – the now defunct public cloud storage company. He’s been brought in to scale the company’s growth, he says. And he’s got a clear plan of how to do it: He wants to bring enterprises to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hybrid Trojan program created for financial fraud has started redirecting users of four large U.S. banks to rogue websites in order to hijack their accounts.GozNym is a relatively new threat, first discovered in April, and is based on the Nymaim malware dropper and the Gozi banking Trojan. Like most banking Trojans, GozNym can inject rogue code into banking websites displayed in local browsers in order to steal credentials and other sensitive information.However, in addition to this old technique, the cybercrime gang behind it has also built the necessary infrastructure to host rogue copies of banking websites, and they've started to redirect victims there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM has many goals with its upcoming Power9 chip, and one is to challenge the dominance of Intel's x86 chips in the data center.The company wants chips based on Power architecture to take a double-digit server chip market share by 2020, Doug Balog, general manager for Power Systems at IBM, said in an interview.It'll be a three-way battle between x86, Power, and ARM, which has a similar goal of a double-digit market share in the next four years. IBM's Power is off to a better start in terms of socket share, Balog said. IBM already is being used in servers, while ARM server processors are largely still being tested.Intel dominates the data center server chip market with a 90-plus percent market share. But IDC has predicted that Intel's share will shrink as ARM-based chips and AMD's x86-based Zen take away some of that lead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
154 million U.S. voters’ records were exposed due to a misconfigured CouchDB instance, according to MacKeeper security researcher Chris Vickery. “It was configured for public access with no username, password, or other authentication required.”Vickery determined the leaky database was on Google’s Cloud services and traced it back to a client of L2, a company which claims to be the country’s “most trusted source for enhanced voter” data.The database included fields for addresses, age, congressional as well as state senate districts, education, estimated income, ethnic, name, gender, languages, marital status, phone, voting frequency, presence of children, and if the voter was a gun owner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The recent E3 show saw Microsoft break with game console tradition. Normally when a console is released, the vendor does not change the specs for its lifespan (traditionally five to seven years). This way, developers will always have one hardware spec to target when creating games. That kind of certainty helps in game development and keeps the amount of patching down compared with PC games.But just three years after the release of the Xbox One, Microsoft gave its console a massive upgrade in the form of the Xbox One S, a console that will be 40 percent smaller than the Xbox One but will have six times the compute power. The Xbox One has around one teraflop of compute power, the S will have six teraflops, which means 4K video and virtual reality, according to Microsoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Digital is the way of the marketplace today. One look at our hyper-connected, data-driven ways of working, and it’s clear that digital is also the way of the future. In the midst of rewiring business models, mindsets and mechanisms for the digital age, it’s important to ask about leadership. Who has the skills and experience to take on the challenging job of digital transformation today and tomorrow? Who from across the senior leadership ranks is best equipped to be CEO? Will it be COOs or CFOs? CMOs or CIOs?Because digital technologies touch all areas of the business, the best candidates for CEO roles will have experience associated with all of the major C-level roles—operational (COO), financial (CFO), marketing, sales, customer engagement (CMO) and information technology (CIO and CTO). Few senior executives could claim substantial experience in all of those areas until the recent emergence of the CDO (Chief Digital Officer) role. CDOs, tasked with leading and delivering digital transformation across all areas of the business, are gaining broad and varied business experience and skills. That diverse experience is one reason that leading candidates for the CEO roles of tomorrow may well be the CDOs (Chief Digital Officers) of today. Continue reading
IBM and the XPrize organization have opened registration and set guidelines to competing for a $5 million purse to those interested in building advanced AI-based applications that could address the world’s biggest issues – everything from clean water to better energy resources.According to IBM and XPrize, the four-year competition aims to “accelerate adoption of AI technologies, and spark creative, innovative and audacious demonstrations of the technology that are truly scalable and solve societal grand challenges.+More on Network World: Cisco: IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte level in 2016+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Three vendors, including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, have won a key U.S. government authorization that allows federal agencies to put highly sensitive data on their cloud-computing services.The AWS GovCloud, Microsoft's Azure GovCloud, and CSRA's ARC-P IaaS have received provisional authority to offer services under the high baseline of the government's Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), a set of security standards for cloud services.The FedRAMP high baseline, including more than 400 security controls, allows federal agencies to use AWS for highly sensitive workloads, including personal information, AWS said Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The prevalence of ransomware programs, both those that encrypt data and those that don't, has exploded over the past two years, with companies being increasingly targeted.Based on an analysis by security vendor Kaspersky Lab, more than 2.3 million users encountered ransomware between April 2015 and March, a jump of almost 18 percent over the previous 12 months.This includes programs that only lock the computer's screen to prevent its use as well as those that hold the data itself hostage by encrypting it -- the so-called cryptors. The rise of cryptors in particular has been significant, accounting for 32 percent of all ransomware attacks last year compared to only 7 percent the year before, according to Kaspersky Lab.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Large parts of the internet may need to quickly adopt alternative revenue methods to thwart a massive surge in ad blocking.Ad blocking is not going away, says eMarketer, a research firm that has just published startling projections. In fact, the digital marketing expert says more than a quarter of U.S. internet users will use ad blockers to perform ad-free web browsing in 2016. A double digit (34 percent) increase will lead to 69 million ad blocker users this year, eMarketer predicts.And it’s going to get worse. The researcher says that number will be closer to 86 million ad blocking internet users in 2017. That’s growth of another 24 percent and will mean that almost a third (32 percent) of all internet users will use the barriers next year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Forward looking IT security pros need to better address known risks, monitor closely the value of shadow IT devices and solve the inherent weaknesses introduced by the internet of things, Gartner says.The consulting firm has taken a look at five key areas of security concern that businesses face this year and issued predictions on and recommendations about protecting networks and data from threats that will likely arise in each.The areas are threat and vulnerability management, application and data security, network and mobile security, identity and access management, and Internet of Things security. Gartner’s findings were revealed at its recent Security and Risk Management Summit by analyst Earl Perkins.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here