University of Ottawa researchers say their discovery that a twisted optical beam in a vacuum travels more slowly than the speed of light could be a boon for quantum computing and communications, and could benefit enterprise IT shops down the line.Their research, which began in late 2013, is outlined in the paper "Observation of subluminal twisted light in vacuum," published in The Optical Society's Optica journal.MORE: 10 of today's really cool network & IT research projectsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Glassdoor Economic Research
A deep dive into crowdsourced salary data from more than half a million employees shows that the gender pay gap is very real, and that male computer programmers make far more than their female counterparts.The Economic Research arm of online jobs marketplace Glassdoor has issued a report titled Demystifying the Gender Pay Gap that attempts to explain why males are making so much more than females across industries and countries. While the researchers have come up with explanations for much of the pay gap in the United States, about a third of the gap is unexplained and presumed to be due to factors such as intentional or unintentional bias as well differences in pay negotiations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco, which kicked off 2016 with news that the leader of its engineering troops would soon be leaving the company, has now undertaken a major reorganization of that same group and disclosed another high-profile departure.The company announced internally that the moves, designed to better align engineering with Cisco business priorities under new-ish CEO Chuck Robbins, include the exit of 18-year veteran and Service Provider leader Kelly Ahuja. Cisco did not say where Ahuja might be headed, but did say he will be replaced by Yvette Kanouff, who will lead an expanded Service Provider organization. Kanouff joined Cisco in 2014 from Cablevision and has been Cisco's SVP and GM, Cloud Solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco, which kicked off 2016 with news that the leader of its engineering troops would soon be leaving the company, has now undertaken a major reorganization of that same group and disclosed another high-profile departure.The company announced internally that the moves, designed to better align engineering with Cisco business priorities under new-ish CEO Chuck Robbins, include the exit of 18-year veteran and Service Provider leader Kelly Ahuja. Cisco did not say where Ahuja might be headed, but did say he will be replaced by Yvette Kanouff, who will lead an expanded Service Provider organization. Kanouff joined Cisco in 2014 from Cablevision and has been Cisco's SVP and GM, Cloud Solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Say you don't feel like plowing through my recent investigative report on "WiFi Hotspot Blocking Persists Despite FCC Crackdown." Maybe I can at least entice you to check out the infographic my colleague Steve Sauer assembled for that story, as well as the consumer complaints to the FCC themselves, which you can scroll through via the Scribd widget embedded below. Those complaints were gathered via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FCC in the wake of the agency fining Marriott and others big bucks for purposely blocking people's Wi-Fi hotspot devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If PINs, passwords and biometrics just aren't making you feel secure about your smartphone contents, researchers at Rutgers University might have a new alternative: free-form gestures.They've conducted a study of such doodling for smartphone security in the field (initially with Android phones...sorry iPhone fans) and will formally publish this paper on "Free-Form Gesture Authentication in the Wild" in May. The system, which involved installing software on study participants'phones, enabled users to doodle using any number of fingers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FCC has slapped hotels and other organizations with nearly $2.1 million in fines since the fall of 2014 for blocking patrons’ portable Wi-Fi hotspots in the name of IT security, or more likely, to gouge customers for Internet service. But Network World’s examination of more than a year’s worth of consumer complaints to the FCC about Wi-Fi jamming shows that not all venue operators are getting the message (see infographic below).Indeed, more than half of the 50-plus complaints whose contents we pored through following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FCC came within the few months after the FCC’s initial action on this matter, a $600,000 fine on Marriott in October of 2014. Another two dozen complaints trickled in to the FCC in 2015 – a year that began with the FCC serving stern notice that Wi-Fi blocking is prohibited and ended with the agency dishing out a $718,000 fine to big electrical contracting company M.C. Dean for blocking consumers’ Wi-Fi connections and a $25,000 fine to Hilton Worldwide for “apparent obstruction of an investigation” into whether Hilton blocked consumers’ Wi-Fi devices. The spectrum used by Wi-Fi is unlicensed, and therefore available Continue reading
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, whose names have been linked since their seminal paper introduced the concepts of public key encryption and digital signatures some 40 years ago, have been named winners of the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award (a.k.a., the "Nobel Prize of Computing").The work of MIT grad Diffie, formerly chief security officer of Sun Microsystems, and Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, has had a huge impact on the secure exchange of information across the Internet, the cloud and email. ACM
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman
The annual Association for Computing Machinery prize carries a $1 million prize, with financial support from Google. Past winners have included the likes of Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, database visionary Michael Stonebraker and recently deceased AI innovator Marvin Minsky.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
UC Berkeley on Friday revealed that it has alerted 80,000 current and former faculty, staff, students and vendors in the wake of a late December "criminal cyberattack" that could have compromised Social Security and bank account numbers.
We're not talking an epic breach possibly affecting millions of people as did last year's Anthem and Ashley Madison compromises. But the revelation still must be unsettling for an institution that prides itself on cutting-edge cybersecurity research. UC Berkeley was among several big-name schools to receive millions from the Hewlett Foundation for cybersecurity policy research, and the school last year established the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The latest move in the topsy-turvy world of Yahoo is to ditch its Labs organization and squeeze its researchers into its product teams to help bring new ideas to market more quickly.Yahoo VP of Research Yoelle Maarek spun the development this way in a blog post this week:
Recently we announced our efforts to make Yahoo a more focused company. This focus will let us accelerate the pace of innovation to make our products even better. We saw these changes as an opportunity to better align our research efforts, while preserving Yahoo’s culture of exploration and inquiry. As a result, we are reorganizing Yahoo Labs and moving forward with a new approach to research at Yahoo.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Boston healthcare organization CIO and longtime technology standards leader John Halamka has been quite open over the years about his organization's technology efforts and challenges. Back in 2002 he shared his hospital's 3-day struggle with network slowdowns. Last Year, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO sounded the alarm that an FDA warning about a compromised medical device wouldn't be the last.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You might think that a niche conference on cabling design and installation held in Orlando in February would be a sleepy little affair, but I found just the opposite to be true.
The table setter when I arrived was a humorous/informative look by Ekahau's Jussi Kiviniemi at designing Wi-Fi networks for high capacity. The presenter compared such network installation and design to that of setting up a bar, but also made pointed observations about the conference center’s own imperfect Wi-Fi installation history.
The next presentation (“The Moose Project: What Went Wrong? An ICT Case Study from the National Park Service”) was as fiery a talk at a tech conference as I’ve ever heard. Recently retired National Park Service IT specialist Michael Thornton emphasized that he didn’t want to “bash anybody or point fingers” over what he described as a systemic problem with architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) projects, but at the same time he is urging fellow members of the information and communications technology field (ICT) to rise up and convince organizations that ICT pros need to be included in project plans from the start – or else risk botching those projects and wasting millions of dollars.To read this Continue reading
I'm not quite sure if champion cabling installers have groupies, but if they did, 2016 Installer of the Year winner Alberta Luna's would have to be called the Luna-tics.
Luna defended his title this week at the annual BICSI Winter conference in Orlando, topping a field of 15 competitors and taking home the $5,000 prize and extra big trophy. During an interview with me last week, Luna said the secret to his success has been relaxing, something he's learned to do through competing in the event four times now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New enterprise and consumer network technologies are coming fast and furious these days via well-heeled startups, and yes, even more established tech players. But further back in the pipeline, in the research labs of universities and colleges around the world, that's where the really cool stuff is happening.
Take a peek at some of the more intriguing projects in areas ranging from wireless to security to open source to robotics and cloud computing.UNDERWATER WIRELESS
University at Buffalo and Northeastern University researchers are developing hardware and software to enable underwater telecommunications to catch up with over-the-air networks. This advancement could be a boon for search-and-rescue operations, tsunami detection, environmental monitoring and more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There will be bonding. There will be splicing. And there will be firestopping.Yes, it’s time to roll up your sleeves, de-fog your goggles, climb your ladder and get ready for the 9th annual BICSI Cabling Skills Challenge next week in Orlando, where the Installer of the Year will be crowned and awarded a $5K prize (not to mention a towering trophy). This will definitely beat the NFL’s Pro Bowl as a competition fix during the seemingly endless lead-up to Super Bowl 50 on Feb. 7.The Installer of the Year needs to be versatile, good with his or her hands, and smart to boot. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There will be bonding. There will be splicing. And there will be firestopping.Yes, it’s time to roll up your sleeves, de-fog your goggles, climb your ladder and get ready for the 9th annual BICSI Cabling Skills Challenge next week in Orlando, where the Installer of the Year will be crowned and awarded a $5K prize (not to mention a towering trophy). This will definitely beat the NFL’s Pro Bowl as a competition fix during the seemingly endless lead-up to Super Bowl 50 on Feb. 7.The Installer of the Year needs to be versatile, good with his or her hands, and smart to boot. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The billions of dollars invested in cloud, wireless, big data, security and other networking startups in 2015 means that enterprise IT shops will have plenty of new products and services from which to choose.On the heels of that year of the megadeal ($100M or more) and Unicorn (private companies valued at $1B or more), it will be interesting to see how funding for network and IT startups shakes out in 2016. We'll keep track of 2016 funding announcements of possible interest to enterprise IT pros here, so bookmark this page and check back for updates. As we spot trends, we'll roll up collections of like companies and highlight them as well, as we did here for big data and analytics firms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The billions of dollars invested in cloud, wireless, big data, security and other networking startups in 2015 means that enterprise IT shops will have plenty of new products and services from which to choose.On the heels of that year of the megadeal ($100M or more) and Unicorn (private companies valued at $1B or more), it will be interesting to see how funding for network and IT startups shakes out in 2016. We'll keep track of 2016 funding announcements of possible interest to enterprise IT pros here, so bookmark this page and check back for updates. As we spot trends, we'll roll up collections of like companies and highlight them as well, as we did here for big data and analytics firms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wireless LAN purchases aren't exactly going gangbusters these days, but relative to other enterprise infrastructure product sales, WLANs are where it's at.Synergy Research Group's latest figures show that WLAN sales grew 5% over the last 4 quarters vs. 2.3% for 7 segments measured overall (the others being data center servers, Ethernet switches, unified communications apps, routers and the slowest-growers -- voice systems and telepresence).Synergy Res
Synergy Research Group
While you might think that the general availability of faster and more flexible 802.11ac Wave 2 products from WLAN market leader Cisco, #2 HP/Aruba and others has sparked WLAN purchases, Synergy Chief Analyst and Managing Director John Dinsdale says that isn't necessarily the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As we documented this week in our latest Big Data & Analytics Companies to Watch slideshow, venture capital is pouring in to firms looking to help organizations better exploit all the data they're gathering and generating. What's becoming really interesting though is that these companies are starting to target specific areas -- from security to network management -- so that you can actually tell them apart now.Consultancy Deloitte hammers home the increasingly diversified nature of analytics in its new Analytics Trends report in which it cites 6 areas to watch:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bob Brown