UK approves extradition of British hacker to the US

A U.K. official has ordered the extradition of a British man to the U.S. on charges of hacking government computers belonging to NASA and the Department of Defense. Lauri Love, a 31-year-old hacktivist, has been fighting his extradition, but on Monday, U.K. Home Secretary Amber Rudd signed the order. "Mr. Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting U.S. military and federal government agencies," the U.K. Home Office said in a statement. The U.S. originally charged Love in 2013 for allegedly stealing confidential data from thousands of government employees, including Social Security numbers and credit card details. U.S. investigators accuse Love and his accomplices of causing millions of dollars in damages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Small businesses now get CRM tool with their Office subscription

Small businesses that need a tool to track their relationships with customers now have a new weapon from Microsoft in their arsenal.On Monday, the company launched Outlook Customer Manager, a lightweight customer relationship management (CRM) system. It allows users to track their customers, manage deals in progress, track tasks and more, all from their Outlook email client.The launch builds on Microsoft's ongoing push to capture the small business market. Earlier this year, the company launched Bookings, a service designed to help service-focused businesses manage customer appointments.It's a move by Microsoft to further compete with Salesforce and other players in the cloud CRM space. Companies that already have an Office 365 Business Premium subscription may not want to choose one of the competing CRM systems, if they can get OCM for free.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Urban Airship Scaled to 2.5 Billion Notifications During the U.S. Election

This is a guest post by Urban Airship. Contributors: Adam Lowry, Sean Moran, Mike Herrick, Lisa Orr, Todd Johnson, Christine Ciandrini, Ashish Warty, Nick Adlard, Mele Sax-Barnett, Niall Kelly, Graham Forest, and Gavin McQuillan

Urban Airship is trusted by thousands of businesses looking to grow with mobile. Urban Airship is a seven year old SaaS company and has a freemium business model so you can try it for free. For more information, visit www.urbanairship.com. Urban Airship now averages more than one billion push notifications delivered daily. This post highlights Urban Airship notification usage for the 2016 U.S. election, exploring the architecture of the system--the Core Delivery Pipeline--that delivers billions of real-time notifications for news publishers.

2016 U.S. Election

In the 24 hours surrounding Election Day, Urban Airship delivered 2.5 billion notifications—its highest daily volume ever. This is equivalent to 8 notification per person in the United States or 1 notification for every active smartphone in the world. While Urban Airship powers more than 45,000 apps across every industry vertical, analysis of the election usage data shows that more than 400 media apps were responsible for 60% of this record volume, sending 1.5 billion notifications Continue reading

Visual Studio for Mac: Microsoft publishes details a little early

Premature publication of news is a common mistake on both our end and that of vendors. Today was Microsoft's turn to suffer an oops with the premature announcement that it is bringing its flagship development tool to the Mac. Microsoft will be hosting its Connect(); 2016 developer conference in New York City later this week, which will be the launch grounds for Visual Studio for Mac, but for whatever reason, the news was published early to an MSDN blog. Several sites, including TechCrunch and Neowin, got the news before the blog post was taken down, although a cached version is available from Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Aims To Simplify Network Management

How Nvidia’s Own Saturn V DGX-1 Cluster Stacks Up

Not all of the new and interesting high performance computing systems are always in the upper echelons of the Top 500 supercomputing list, which was announced at the opening of the SC16 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City this week. Sometimes, an intriguing system breaks into the list outside of the top ten or twenty most powerful machines in the bi-annual rankings of number-crunching performance, and such is the case with the new “Saturn V” supercomputer built by Nvidia using its latest GPUs and interconnects.

The Saturn V system, nick-named of course for the NASA launch vehicle that eventually …

How Nvidia’s Own Saturn V DGX-1 Cluster Stacks Up was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Vonage partners with IBM Watson to enable cognitive communications

Since Alan Masarek joined Vonage as its CEO, the company has been on a mission to redefine how businesses communicate with workers and customers. The term unified communications has been somewhat of a fallacy, as collaboration tools are disjointed and require a high amount of manual integration. Sure, there has been some advancements with respect to bringing voice, video and content sharing together, but the tools are primarily limited to users communicating with other workers with basic collaboration tools. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The Future of Enterprise is Data

Fundamentally, a database just stores retrieves data. But the future, declared Eifrem, belongs to those who can connect the data and make it instantly useful to decision-makers, whether they be customers seeing recommendations in real time, CEOs seeing at a glance how suppliers are performing, or the security experts seeing fraud that before was invisible. —The New Stack

The post Worth Reading: The Future of Enterprise is Data appeared first on 'net work.

Forward Networks’ SDN Pioneers Want to Make the Network Less Error-Prone

Even without SDN, a network needs automation, Forward believes.

A Closer Look at 2016 Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings

The bi-annual rankings of the Top 500 supercomputers for the November 2016 systems are now live. While the top of the list is static with the same two Chinese supercomputers dominating, there are several new machines that have cropped up to replace decommissioned systems throughout, the momentum at the very top shows some telling architectural trends, particularly among the newcomers in the top 20.

We already described the status of the major Chinese and Japanese systems in our analysis of the June 2016 list and thought it might be more useful to look at some of the broader …

A Closer Look at 2016 Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Know What You’re Sinking Your Teeth Into—Eliminate Virtual Network Blind Spots

Don’t blindly bite down on something until you know it’s just right.

37% of IT pros to look for new jobs in 2017

If your IT department isn’t already worried about staff retention, some new stats might change that. A new poll finds 37% of IT pros plan to begin searching for a new employer in 2017, and 26% plan to accept a new job.Many factors are driving people’s desire for a job change, according to Spiceworks’ 2017 Tech Career Outlook. The most frequently cited reasons are: to advance my IT skills (cited by 69%); to get a more competitive salary (64%); to work at a company that makes IT more of a priority (40%); I’m burnt out at my current job (40%); to find a better work-life balance (38%); to get better benefits (401k, healthcare) (33%); to work with a more talented IT team (26%); to get better work-from-home options (24%); to get a better job title (22%).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Datacenter adds enterprise orchestration, security policy and refreshed UI

Today we are excited to introduce new additions to Docker Datacenter, our Container as a Service (CaaS) platform for enterprise IT and application teams. Docker Datacenter provides an integrated platform for developers and IT operations teams to collaborate securely on the application lifecycle. Built on the foundation of Docker Engine, Docker Datacenter (DDC) also provides integrated orchestration, management and security around managing resources like access, images, applications, networks and more across the cluster.

This latest release of Docker Datacenter includes a number of new features and improvements focused in the following areas:

• Enterprise orchestration and operations to make running and operating multi container applications simple, secure and scalable
• Integrated end to end security to cover all of the components and people that interact with the application pipeline
• User experience and performance improvements ensure that even the most complex operations are handled efficiently

Let’s dig into some of the new features.

Enterprise orchestration with backward compatibility

This release of Docker Datacenter not only integrates the built in orchestration capabilities of Docker Engine 1.12 utilizing swarm mode and services, but also provides backwards compatibility for standalone containers using the docker run commands. To help enterprise application teams migrate, it is important Continue reading

37% of IT pros to look for new jobs in 2017

If your IT department isn’t already worried about staff retention, some new stats might change that. A new poll finds 37% of IT pros plan to begin searching for a new employer in 2017, and 26% plan to accept a new job.Many factors are driving people’s desire for a job change, according to Spiceworks’ 2017 Tech Career Outlook. The most frequently cited reasons are: to advance my IT skills (cited by 69%); to get a more competitive salary (64%); to work at a company that makes IT more of a priority (40%); I’m burnt out at my current job (40%); to find a better work-life balance (38%); to get better benefits (401k, healthcare) (33%); to work with a more talented IT team (26%); to get better work-from-home options (24%); to get a better job title (22%).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook just had a very, very bad week

There’s a rule of thumb in journalism that says three of anything is a trend. If that’s true, then the world’s largest social network is in the middle of one very tough trend. In the last week or so, the company has been absorbing criticism on three separate fronts, from embarrassing gaffes to potentially helping sway the results of that election—in multiple ways. Facebook = election influencer?  Let’s start at the top: with the election. Donald Trump’s victory surprised a lot of people, and one reason—say the Monday morning quarterbacks—is that Facebook and other social networks are how many people now get their news, which is creating bubbles where subscribers see primarily content that supports their own positions and politics. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Keys to Selecting a VIM

In the move to the telco cloud, some key considerations are crucial in NFVI components selection.

Blockchain adoption in banks coming, but slower than expected

Recent headlines suggest that blockchain technology is revolutionizing financial services. JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank, Wells Fargo and several other leading banks are using the digital ledger technology to conduct equity swaps, cross-border trades, and other transactions.You might think that blockchain has gone mainstream. Not so fast, says former UBS CIO Oliver Bussmann, who claims it may take banks two years to run blockchain in production due to regulatory hurdles, a lack of standards and other stumbling blocks. “This is real, this will come but in a very regulated environment. We will go through a lot of validation,” says Bussmann, who jumpstarted blockchain efforts when he was leading IT at the Swiss bank last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blockchain adoption in banks coming, but slower than expected

Recent headlines suggest that blockchain technology is revolutionizing financial services. JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank, Wells Fargo and several other leading banks are using the digital ledger technology to conduct equity swaps, cross-border trades, and other transactions.You might think that blockchain has gone mainstream. Not so fast, says former UBS CIO Oliver Bussmann, who claims it may take banks two years to run blockchain in production due to regulatory hurdles, a lack of standards and other stumbling blocks. “This is real, this will come but in a very regulated environment. We will go through a lot of validation,” says Bussmann, who jumpstarted blockchain efforts when he was leading IT at the Swiss bank last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT users review 6 software test management tools

Software teams use test management tools to plan and track the quality assurance (QA) process — whether the tests are manual or automated — and then manage projects to eliminate the software defects uncovered by the tests.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The 10 fastest supercomputers in the world

Fast and powerfulThe twice-annual Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world (adjudged by their performance on the Linpack benchmark) is out this morning, and there are a pair of newcomers on the list. Check it out.TrinityImage by Los Alamos National LaboratoryTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here