Blair Hanley Frank
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Blair Hanley Frank
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Here’s how Microsoft is using containerization to protect Edge users
One of the biggest security risks for computer users is their web browser. According to Microsoft, 90 percent of phishing emails use the browser to initiate attacks, which can then be used to help attackers establish a beachhead inside a company. Microsoft is aiming to better protect users and organizations from the threats that they face with a new feature called Windows Defender Application Guard. It's designed to isolate Microsoft Edge from the rest of the files and processes running on a user's computer and prevent computer exploits from taking hold. This is a move that could drive greater adoption of Microsoft's browser in the enterprise, at a time when the company is fiercely competing with Google in that space. Security of company assets is a big problem for enterprises, and Microsoft is offering them another way to help protect their users without requiring those users to be security experts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Here’s how Microsoft is using containerization to protect Edge users
One of the biggest security risks for computer users is their web browser. According to Microsoft, 90 percent of phishing emails use the browser to initiate attacks, which can then be used to help attackers establish a beachhead inside a company. Microsoft is aiming to better protect users and organizations from the threats that they face with a new feature called Windows Defender Application Guard. It's designed to isolate Microsoft Edge from the rest of the files and processes running on a user's computer and prevent computer exploits from taking hold. This is a move that could drive greater adoption of Microsoft's browser in the enterprise, at a time when the company is fiercely competing with Google in that space. Security of company assets is a big problem for enterprises, and Microsoft is offering them another way to help protect their users without requiring those users to be security experts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Well, I never! iOS 10’s voicemail transcription has a potty mouth
Anyone who has looked at automatically-generated subtitles on YouTube can tell you that asking a computer to describe what a human says can lead to hilarious results. Now, Apple has brought that issue to iOS 10 with support for transcribing voicemails.It's a cool feature that makes it easy to know what your Aunt Matilda said about the gastrointestinal problems her dog is having, without actually having to listen to a three-minute-long, blow-by-blow description. But be careful about trusting it -- or reading the transcriptions around sensitive eyes.I learned that the hard way Thursday when someone left me a message about a reorder special on a wine club shipment. Except my iPhone didn't hear it that way, proudly telling me about "wearing your c**k s**t."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Larry Ellison says Amazon is ’20 years behind’ Oracle
Larry Ellison continued his assault on Amazon during his second keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld on Tuesday."Amazon Web Services are simply not optimized for the Oracle Database. I'll go further than that: Amazon Web Services aren't optimized for their own databases either, as you will see," he said, while showing off a set of benchmarks that showed Oracle Database performing several times faster on Oracle's cloud than it does on Amazon's cloud. "It doesn't get better, it gets worse."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Oracle’s infrastructure business focuses on bare metal to go after AWS
Larry Ellison made a splash this week when he said that Oracle would give Amazon a run for its money in the cloud. Then, the company outlined the pillar of the tech titan's infrastructure offering: beefy, bare-metal servers running in the cloud. That's right: Oracle is going after a market that's full of virtualized workloads with servers that clock in with a whopping 36 physical CPU cores, according to Vice President of Engineering Don Johnson. Rather than starting from the low end of the infrastructure market and working its way up, Oracle is starting at the top and working its way down. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google’s new acquisition makes building chatbots easier
Google took a shot at Facebook's chatbot-building services on Monday with its acquisition of API.ai, a company that helps developers build and improve conversational interfaces for their services. API.ai has more than 60,000 developers using its platform to create conversational user interfaces for apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger and Kik. Its tools make it easier for programs to parse human language and translate it into action. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.The company offers a vast suite of capabilities for natural language understanding, including pre-defined knowledge packages known as Domains, which make it easier for assistants to understand a variety of common requests any additional coding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Oracle pushes hybrid by letting customers rent cloud hardware
One of the big issues facing public cloud vendors is convincing companies to take on-premises workloads and move them to a public cloud data center. Oracle is trying to enable that shift with a new set of products that allow customers to get the same hardware that Oracle runs in its data centers behind their own firewalls. Executive Chairman Larry Ellison unveiled the Big Data@Customer and Exadata@Customer machines on Sunday, building on the company's Cloud@Customer hardware offering.It's a move by the company to take advantage of Oracle's expertise building hardware and combining it with software to reach customers as they're in the process of migrating to the cloud. Ellison expects on-premises and cloud workloads will have to coexist for at least 10 years, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Oracle is also getting in on the chatbot revolution
Oracle CTO Larry Ellison ordered himself some new business cards on stage at the company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sunday, just by having a conversation. As part of his keynote address to attendees, Ellison took the time to show off a new set of tools for creating intelligent chatbots that integrate with Oracle's software. It's aimed at making it easier for businesses to build bots that let users connect with their enterprise software, and help businesses connect with consumers. Chatbots are a hot topic in the tech industry, with companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Slack all building tools that companies can use to create intelligent, automated conversation partners. Their growing popularity comes down to a few factors, including the proliferation of smartphones, fast internet connections and messaging apps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering
Larry Ellison has a message for Amazon Web Services: Oracle is going to give Amazon a run for its money in the cloud market."Amazon's lead is over," he said during his keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. "Amazon's going to have serious competition going forward."To that end, the company he co-founded is launching a set of new cloud datacenters that are aimed at providing more powerful compute instances to help it compete against the likes of AWS, Azure and other cloud players. The generation 2 datacenters will be capable of bringing a variety of performance improvements to customers who want to run high-performance workloads in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Asana’s new feature lets users ‘track anything’
Asana is making it easier for users to adapt its work-tracking software to more than just task management.The company announced Thursday that it's launching support for creating custom fields inside the product, so that it's possible for people to use the same service they rely on for tracking work tasks to also manage other things. So, a recruiting team could use custom fields to track a candidate's name, status, interview times and more.The custom fields feature was first announced last year at an Asana press event. It's an important part of how the company plans to expand its product to reach not only its current user base, but also businesses with more complicated and customized workflows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Windows Desktop apps are now in the Windows Store
Developers can now distribute their Windows desktop apps to people shopping through Windows 10's app store, with an update from Microsoft Wednesday.It's a move powered by Project Centennial, which lets developers take older Windows apps (known in Microsoft parlance as Win32 apps), port them to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), and then sell them on the Windows Store. The first of those apps are rolling out over the coming days, and developers can now submit their Centennial-converted apps for future release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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For new characters, it’s Pokémon Wait
People who are hoping to get their hands on some new Pokémon should be prepared to wait a while longer. John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic Labs, told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt that players should expect to see new creatures arrive in the game at events that bring players together, but only after the company has finished its long global rollout. "The introduction of new Pokémon into the world, and having events where that might be showcased, those concepts go together really well," he said. "So, I think you can expect to see that happen in kind of a synchronized way going forward." It's a move from the playbook that Niantic has developed running Ingress, the augmented reality game that it launched prior to Pokémon Go while it was a part of Google. Over the past several years, Niantic has hosted events for players of that game, which often host thousands of players. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Could machine learning help Google’s cloud catch up to AWS and Azure?
Google has been offering public cloud services for several years now, but the company has continued to lag behind Amazon and Microsoft in customer growth. Under the leadership of VMware co-founder Diane Greene, who serves as the executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise, the tech titan has focused harder on forging partnerships and developing products to appeal to large customers. It has added a number of key customers under Greene's tenure, including Spotify. One such win is Evernote, which announced Tuesday it would be migrating its service away from its private data centers and to Google's public cloud. When Evernote was looking for a public cloud provider, the company was interested in not only the base level infrastructure available, but also high-level machine learning services and services for building machine learning-driven systems, said Anirban Kundu, Evernote's CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Azure Service Fabric enters public beta for Linux workloads
Developers who want help running Linux- and Java-based microservice applications will have a new Microsoft service to take for a spin. Microsoft announced Tuesday that it's launching the public beta of Service Fabric support for running applications on the popular open source operating system with the popular programming language. It's an expansion of Service Fabric's capabilities, at a time when Microsoft is spending more effort to support Linux in addition to platforms it controls.Service Fabric on Linux was first announced at the company's Build developer conference in San Francisco earlier this year, and the public beta will be made available on Sept. 26, during Microsoft's Ignite conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Here’s why Microsoft and Google have the same competitor as a partner
It sounds like the start of a bad joke: executives from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and IBM walk into a conference with one thing in common. But all of those companies are appearing on stage at BoxWorks in San Francisco, in part because they all work with the cloud storage and content services company in one capacity or another.Box works with Microsoft to integrate its products with Office 365, Amazon to host services in different cloud data centers, and IBM on new applications, services and sales. Google is the newest addition to that club -- the two companies announced Wednesday that they're working on storing Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files inside Box. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Box’s developer platform revamped with new content types, UI tools
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
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Here’s how Box has redesigned its entire offering
Wearing a bright red hat embroidered with "Make Software Great Again," Box CEO Aaron Levie took the stage at the BoxWorks customer conference on Wednesday to serve as emcee for the unveiling of massive redesigns and upgrades to the company's cloud storage and content services products. Box's web interface is getting a complete redesign, with new organization, search and preview capabilities. The company is launching a new desktop app to help Windows and Mac users access their files. It's also coming out with a desktop app for users of its Box Notes collaborative document editing service. It's all part of what Levie called the "all new Box," aimed at modernizing the company's services to meet the needs of customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google just blew up its all-in strategy for productivity software
For a very long time, Google has focused on building its own productivity software to serve everyone from consumers to massive enterprises, and then locking people into its core experience. That all changed on Wednesday. The company announced that it's partnering with Box to let users of the enterprise cloud storage and content services platform edit documents with Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, but keep them stored inside Box. It's a vast departure from the company's previous direction, which required people to store files edited with Docs inside Google Drive. Google said that the company is working on turning its Docs productivity suite into an open platform, and is open to working with other storage providers in a similar way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft may finally have its Slack killer
Despite a varied portfolio of collaboration services, Microsoft is still struggling to field a strong competitor to enterprise group messaging apps like Slack and HipChat.It has SharePoint, Skype for Business and Yammer, but none of them is really a direct competitor to the slickly designed, GIF-stuffed and bot-laden crop of modern messaging applications. That may be about to change, according to a report from MSPoweruser on Tuesday. Microsoft is supposed to be working on Skype Teams, a new service with group chat capabilities that's a more direct competitor to Slack. The service, currently being tested internally at Microsoft, is supposed to let users chat both privately and in groups. It has a number of features now found in Skype, including video and voice calling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Azure August Roundup: New high-performance compute instances and more
August was a slow month for tech news, but Microsoft continued to update its Azure cloud platform with a variety of new features, including a new type of instance for high-performance computing. Here's the breakdown of all the features you need to know about:A new instance type powered by Nvidia Tesla GPUs Microsoft announced the private beta of a set of new compute instance types to power applications that need a lot of parallel processing. The new N-series virtual machines are powered by Nvidia's Tesla GPUs and built for high-performance computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here