Fredric Paul
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Fredric Paul
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Cybercrime—from inside an Ohio prison
Plenty of companies have smart, resourceful IT teams that diligently support their organization’s computers and networking operations. But I’m not sure how many of them could pull off the technological tricks that a group of inmates at Ohio’s Marion Correctional Institution did.From e-waste to identity theft According to local news reports that blew up over the internet last week, at least five prisoners built a pair of working PC out of parts scavenged from e-waste as part of a program designed to teach computer skills by having inmates break down end-of-life computers and recycle the parts. The inmates smuggled the PCs to a training room, hid them in the ceiling and then ran wiring to connect to the prison network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Is it crazy to be afraid of password managers?
I admit it: Like most people, I’m terrible at passwords. Too often I use too-simple passwords, and I don’t always come up with a new one for every site and service I log into. Then, when I do come up with a strong, unique password, I often forget it entirely and have to request an email to reset it—typically to something either too easy to guess or something I’ll instantly forget again.+ Also on Network World: Stop using password manager browser extensions + That’s why password managers exist. They’re designed to let you enter a single, secure password in one place and then generate new, strong passwords for every application where you need one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Is it crazy to be afraid of password managers?
I admit it: Like most people, I’m terrible at passwords. Too often I use too-simple passwords, and I don’t always come up with a new one for every site and service I log into. Then, when I do come up with a strong, unique password, I often forget it entirely and have to request an email to reset it—typically to something either too easy to guess or something I’ll instantly forget again.+ Also on Network World: Stop using password manager browser extensions + That’s why password managers exist. They’re designed to let you enter a single, secure password in one place and then generate new, strong passwords for every application where you need one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Why the White House Office of American Innovation can’t replace the U.S. Digital Service
Last week, the White House announced the Office of American Innovation, intended to disrupt and fix ossified government agencies and procedures using ideas taken from the business world—primarily the high-tech industry. Led by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the Office of American Innovation is Trump’s spiritual, if not actual, successor to President Obama’s United States Digital Service.Both agencies were created to cut through government red tape to get things done faster and more efficiently. And that’s a noble goal, no matter which president tries to make it happen. But the two approaches are significantly different, and I believe their widely varying approaches will lead to very different results.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Amazon’s successful drone delivery test doesn’t really prove anything
Last week, Amazon Prime Air released dramatic video of a drone delivering bottles of sunscreen in a test at Amazon's MARS conference in a controlled environment at Palm Springs International Airport in California.Pretty cool stuff, even if the company has already demonstrated the ability to complete actual commercial drone deliveries in the United Kingdom. But my longstanding skepticism for the practicality of drone deliveries hasn’t diminished. More than two years ago, for example, I listed 10 reasons Amazon's drone delivery plan still won't fly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The real reason shadow IT is so widespread
At your company, who’s responsible for what technology is bought and implemented?It’s a critical question, with deep implications for how your company leverages technology to get things done and drive competitive advantage. A recent survey from Spiceworks takes a stab at answering this question. But while the survey offers a number of insights, it leaves out perhaps the most important constituency in the procurement process.+ Also on Network World: Struggling with shadow IT? Maybe re-evaluate the IT department + As you can surmise from the title—ITDMs and BDMs: Tech Purchase Superheroes—the Spiceworks survey was taken mostly from the standpoint of vendors trying to sell you hardware, software and services. It focuses on teasing out the differences between two key groups: IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs). Amidst perceptions that the balance of power is shifting from IT to the business, the survey attempts to find out if the two groups work together in a smooth, well-oiled process or if they struggle to coordinate separate agendas. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The real reason shadow IT is so widespread
At your company, who’s responsible for what technology is bought and implemented?It’s a critical question, with deep implications for how your company leverages technology to get things done and drive competitive advantage. A recent survey from Spiceworks takes a stab at answering this question. But while the survey offers a number of insights, it leaves out perhaps the most important constituency in the procurement process.+ Also on Network World: Struggling with shadow IT? Maybe re-evaluate the IT department + As you can surmise from the title—ITDMs and BDMs: Tech Purchase Superheroes—the Spiceworks survey was taken mostly from the standpoint of vendors trying to sell you hardware, software and services. It focuses on teasing out the differences between two key groups: IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs). Amidst perceptions that the balance of power is shifting from IT to the business, the survey attempts to find out if the two groups work together in a smooth, well-oiled process or if they struggle to coordinate separate agendas. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Is this the world’s first combination head shop/computer store?
Just a few doors down the street from the iconic corner of Haight and Ashbury, ground zero for San Francisco’s Summer of Love 50 years ago, sits a most unusual store. On the ground floor of a building once occupied by Jimi Hendrix, Ashbury Tech is a unique melding of old and new San Francisco.From tobacco to tech That’s because the three-level is store is not your garden-variety electronics shop. Until earlier this year, in fact, it had been known as Ashbury Tobacco Center for the past 23 years. And approximately half of its floor space is still dedicated to bongs, pipes, vapes and other accouterments of what is commonly known as a head shop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Possibly the worst mass invasion of internet privacy ever
In January, a bank in Edina, Minnesota, received a request for a $28,500 wire transfer from someone claiming to be local resident Douglas Junker. Though bolstered with a faked picture of a passport, the request later turned out to be fraudulent, and local cops were reportedly stymied on how to catch the thief. Until, that is, they came up with a novel idea: Hoping to find out how the fraudster got the picture, Edina Police Detective David Lindman applied for a search warrant to obtain the names, email addresses, account information and IP addresses of everyone in the entire town of 50,000 who had searched for any variation of the victim’s name between Dec. 1, 2016, and Jan. 7, 2017. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Possibly the worst mass invasion of internet privacy ever
In January, a bank in Edina, Minnesota, received a request for a $28,500 wire transfer from someone claiming to be local resident Douglas Junker. Though bolstered with a faked picture of a passport, the request later turned out to be fraudulent, and local cops were reportedly stymied on how to catch the thief. Until, that is, they came up with a novel idea: Hoping to find out how the fraudster got the picture, Edina Police Detective David Lindman applied for a search warrant to obtain the names, email addresses, account information and IP addresses of everyone in the entire town of 50,000 who had searched for any variation of the victim’s name between Dec. 1, 2016, and Jan. 7, 2017. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Native apps vs. mobile websites: A new battlefront opens
It’s one of the most challenging ongoing conflicts in mobile technology: native apps vs. mobile websites. Is it better to develop apps for specific mobile operating systems like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android or instead turn to websites that are optimized for mobile browsing. Performance vs. flexibility Traditionally, the tradeoff has been that native apps can do more and perform faster because they can be tied more directly to the mobile operating system and the device hardware. Mobile web apps, on the other hand, are typically easier to develop and more flexible. You can build an app once, and it runs reasonably well everywhere—rather than have to develop multiple versions for every mobile OS. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Consumer Reports decision to rate cybersecurity is a huge deal
Conventional wisdom has it that most consumers simply don’t pay much attention to computer security and privacy issues. Perhaps worse, they don’t think they can do much to protect themselves without foregoing many of the benefits of our digital, connected age. Consumer Reports is trying to change both of those things. Consumer Reports’ new cybersecurity standard The influential publication and public-interest organization announced on Monday that it has collaborated on a digital consumer-protection standard designed to define “how companies should build these products to really be good for consumers in terms of privacy and other issues,” said Maria Rerecich, who directs electronics testing at Consumer Reports, in a statement. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Consumer Reports decision to rate cybersecurity is a huge deal
Conventional wisdom has it that most consumers simply don’t pay much attention to computer security and privacy issues. Perhaps worse, they don’t think they can do much to protect themselves without foregoing many of the benefits of our digital, connected age. Consumer Reports is trying to change both of those things. Consumer Reports’ new cybersecurity standard The influential publication and public-interest organization announced on Monday that it has collaborated on a digital consumer-protection standard designed to define “how companies should build these products to really be good for consumers in terms of privacy and other issues,” said Maria Rerecich, who directs electronics testing at Consumer Reports, in a statement. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Wearables in the starting lineup for NBA and MLB?
DeAndre Jordan, the Los Angeles Clippers’ enormous and uber-athletic center, is best known for his monster dunks, State Farm commercials, and last minute change of heart over which team he wanted to play for.But Jordan recently attracted attention for a digital decision: He’s been spotted wearing a WHOOP biometric monitoring device during actual NBA games. Apparently, Jordan was a trendsetter, as ESPN reported this week that Major League Baseball has approved the WHOOP device for use during MLB games! To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The ultimate upgrade to Amazon’s Alexa
In a recent post, I shared 8 ways to make Amazon’s Alexa even more awesome, covering everything from better communications to easier setup and skills creation. I believe those suggestions could help Alexa become even more useful than it already is. But for voice assistants to truly fulfill their destiny, they need something a bit more radical and transformative.They need the human touch.As noted in my previous post, while Alexa does a few things really well, she doesn’t even try to deal with the vast, vast, majority of tasks and questions you might want to pose to a voice-powered assistant. That’s because the current state of AI simply doesn’t support even a tiny fraction of the questions you might want answered or tasks you might want help with. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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8 ways to make Amazon’s Alexa even more awesome
I’ve been using an Amazon Echo for a while now, yet I still find myself amazed at how well its voice assistant technology works—at least within the relatively narrow confines it has set for itself. By sticking to what she can do well, Alexa mostly avoids the common trap of heavily hyped new technology delivering a disappointing experience in real life. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The cloud is growing 7 times faster than the rest of IT
The public cloud just keeps on growing, with increases in spending on cloud services and infrastructure easily outpacing overall IT spending. And it isn’t even close. The latest update to International Data Corporation’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide projects worldwide investments in the public cloud “will reach $122.5 billion in 2017, an increase of 24.4 percent over 2016. Those are big numbers, obviously, but to put them in full perspective, IDC noted that growth rate is nearly seven times the rate of overall IT spending growth. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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We finally know how much a data breach can cost
Everyone knows corporate data breaches can be expensive, but does anyone really know exactly how expensive? Recent estimates for the average cost have landed all over the map, ranging from $4 million to $7 million. But when it comes to the top end of the scale, those appraisals turn out to be laughably small.+ Also on Network World: Everything you know about cyberwar is wrong + The massive Yahoo data breaches of 2013 and 2014 now have a real cost attached to them, and it’s a couple orders of magnitude larger than those piddly estimates. Simply put, the breaches forced Yahoo to renegotiate its sale to Verizon, cutting the price by $250 million to $350 million. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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We finally know how much a data breach can cost
Everyone knows corporate data breaches can be expensive, but does anyone really know exactly how expensive? Recent estimates for the average cost have landed all over the map, ranging from $4 million to $7 million. But when it comes to the top end of the scale, those appraisals turn out to be laughably small.+ Also on Network World: Everything you know about cyberwar is wrong + The massive Yahoo data breaches of 2013 and 2014 now have a real cost attached to them, and it’s a couple orders of magnitude larger than those piddly estimates. Simply put, the breaches forced Yahoo to renegotiate its sale to Verizon, cutting the price by $350 million. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The end of net neutrality is nigh—here’s what’s likely to happen
The concept of net neutrality holds that telecom carriersmay not treat some content differently than other content, depending on who owns it, for example. The idea’s merits have been hotly debated for years, eventually coming to serve as a technological/ideological litmus test. Liberals, typically, favored the concept, believing it is necessary to ensure equal, unfettered access to all kinds of online content. Conservatives mostly disagreed with it, claiming it unfairly and unnecessarily regulated telecom carriers. Late in the Obama administration, net neutrality was codified into policy. But the new chairman of the Federal Communications Comission, Ajit Pai, a former lawyer for Verizon, is an ardent opponent of net neutrality. With the support of the Trump administration and Republican Congress, Pai has already ended enforcement of the rules and is widely expected to scuttle the entire policy as soon as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here