Big data is best known for its volume, variety, and velocity -- collectively referred to as the "3 Vs" -- and all three of those traits make security an elusive goal. Targeting companies grappling with that challenge, the Cloud Security Alliance on Friday released a new report offering 100 best practices.As its name would suggest, the CSA focuses on promoting the use of security best practices within the cloud computing world; corporate members include VMware, Microsoft, AWS, and Red Hat. In an earlier report, the CSA broke down big data security risks into a set of the top 10 major challenges. Now, for each of those, it presents 10 best practices designed to help enterprises keep their information safe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies today are awash in data, but current tools and processes are not enabling them to keep it secure.That's according to Informatica CEO Anil Chakravarthy, whose says his company -- which has traditionally focused on data management and integration -- is embarking on a major push to go further into data security."You hear about breaches all the time -- just imagine all the ones you're not hearing about," Chakravarthy said in a recent interview. "Data security today is an unsolved problem for customers."Last year, Informatica launched a product called Secure@Source that promises a data-centric approach to information security by helping organizations identify and visualize sensitive data wherever it resides.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A momentous milestoneAug. 25 marks the 25th anniversary of Linux, the free and open source operating system that's used around the globe in smarphones, tablets, desktop PCs, servers, supercomputers, and more. Though its beginnings were humble, Linux has become the world’s largest and most pervasive open source software project in history. How did it get here? Read on for a look at some of the notable events along the way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Small is beautiful, as the old saying goes, and nowhere is that more true than in media files. Compressed images are considerably easier to transmit and store than uncompressed ones are, and now Google is using neural networks to beat JPEG at the compression game.Google began by taking a random sample of 6 million 1280×720 images on the web. It then broke those down into nonoverlapping 32×32 tiles and zeroed in on 100 of those with the worst compression ratios. The goal there, essentially, was to focus on improving performance on the "hardest-to-compress" data, because it's bound to be easier to succeed on the rest.The researchers then used the TensorFlow machine-learning system Google open-sourced last year to train a set of experimental neural network architectures. They used one million steps to train them and then collected a series of technical metrics to find which training models produced the best-compressed results.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Data visualization specialist Tableau Software is bringing in seasoned talent to help it compete in an increasingly cloud-based world. The company has hired longtime Amazon Web Services executive Adam Selipsky as its CEO, replacing cofounder Christian Chabot.Chabot, who has been CEO for 14 years, will continue to serve as chairman of Tableau’s board of directors. Selipsky, who currently is vice president of marketing, sales and support for AWS, will join Tableau on Sept. 16.“Adam is going to take Tableau to the next level,” Chabot said in a press release, citing Selipsky's cloud experience. “He is the right person to lead Tableau to the next stage of growth.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Linux kernel is improving faster than ever, gaining 7.8 patches per hour and 4,600 lines of new code every day.That's according to a new report published Monday by the Linux Foundation and focusing on the state of kernel development. Entitled “Linux kernel development -- how fast it is going, who is doing it, what they are doing, and who is sponsoring it,” the report is the seventh the nonprofit has published on the topic in roughly as many years.This year’s paper covers work completed through Linux kernel 4.7, with an emphasis on releases 3.19 to 4.7. The last report was released March 2015 and focused on versions 3.11 to 3.18.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The cannabis industry is growing up, and it would be tough to imagine more convincing proof than Microsoft's recent announcement that it's getting involved.Though the software giant will stay very much in the background -- its role will focus primarily on providing Azure cloud services for a compliance-focused software push -- the move is still widely viewed as a telling sign."Having them come out and say, 'we're willing to have our name in the same sentence as the word cannabis,' adds to the legitimacy of our industry," said Kyle Sherman, cofounder and CEO of software maker Flowhub.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies large and small have already embraced the hackathon as a way to foster collaboration and innovation, and now the NBA has announced that it's jumping on board.Scheduled to take place next month in New York, the NBA's first-ever event is open to undergraduate and graduate student statisticians, developers and engineers in the U.S. who are interested in building basketball analytics tools. Participants will present their work to a panel of expert judges and an audience of NBA League Office and team personnel. Prizes will be awarded to the top three teams, including a tour of the NBA League Office and a lunch with NBA staff.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's long been known that secret messages can be included in music through techniques such as backmasking, but now a Polish researcher has developed an entirely new approach. By subtly varying the tempo of a particular type of dance music, he's managed to encode information in a way that's completely inaudible to human listeners.StegIbiza is an algorithm for hiding information in a type of dance music known as Ibiza, which originates on the island by the same name in the western Mediterranean Sea. Ibiza music is characterized by its trance-like beat, and that's what Krzysztof Szczypiorski, a professor at Poland's Warsaw University of Technology, made use of.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's long been known that secret messages can be included in music through techniques such as backmasking, but now a Polish researcher has developed an entirely new approach. By subtly varying the tempo of a particular type of dance music, he's managed to encode information in a way that's completely inaudible to human listeners.StegIbiza is an algorithm for hiding information in a type of dance music known as Ibiza, which originates on the island by the same name in the western Mediterranean Sea. Ibiza music is characterized by its trance-like beat, and that's what Krzysztof Szczypiorski, a professor at Poland's Warsaw University of Technology, made use of.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're using a version of Linux based on the 4.6 series of the kernel, the software's lead maintainer has a message for you: It's time to upgrade.Greg Kroah-Hartman on Tuesday announced the arrival of Linux 4.6.7 and made it clear that it will be the last in the kernel's 4.6 series. Version 4.7.1 made its debut on Tuesday as well, and that's where the future lies, Kroah-Hartman said."This is the LAST 4.6.y kernel to be released," he wrote in the 4.6.7 announcement. "Please move to 4.7.1 now, you have been warned."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's no secret that Oracle's aggressive licensing tactics can be a source of considerable pain for its customers, and that's just where TmaxSoft is betting it has an edge. Not only does the company promise users of its Tibero database roughly half the license fees, it also uses a licensing model so transparent that it recently became the first to be verified by the Campaign for Clear Licensing.Tibero's price list is "a single page and very easy to understand," said Martin Thompson, chief agitator for CCL, when the verification was awarded late last year. "The prices and products are clearly set out, and there are no hidden extras that customers need to look out for.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is buying SGI in a $275 million deal that it hopes will give it a major boost in big-data analytics and high-performance computing.It's the latest surprise development at HPE, which has continued to make big changes since it was formed in the break-up of the old Hewlett-Packard last year.The deal to buy SGI, announced Thursday, fits with HPE's goal to expand its data analytics business. It will also make HPE a bigger player in high performance computing, a growing part of the server market. SGI has roughly 1,100 employees worldwide. On Thursday, it reported a net loss for its last fiscal year of $11 million, on revenue of $533 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is buying SGI in a $275 million deal that it hopes will give it a major boost in big-data analytics and high-performance computing.It's the latest surprise development at HPE, which has continued to make big changes since it was formed in the break-up of the old Hewlett-Packard last year.The deal to buy SGI, announced Thursday, fits with HPE's goal to expand its data analytics business. It will also make HPE a bigger player in high performance computing, a growing part of the server market. SGI has roughly 1,100 employees worldwide. On Thursday, it reported a net loss for its last fiscal year of $11 million, on revenue of $533 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A flaw in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used by Linux since late 2012 poses a serious threat to internet users, whether or not they use Linux directly.That's the key finding of a research study that's scheduled to be presented Wednesday at the USENIX Security Symposium in Austin, Texas.The TCP weakness, identified by researchers from the University of California at Riverside, enables attackers to hijack users’ internet communications completely remotely. It could be used to launch targeted attacks that track users’ online activity, forcibly terminate a communication, hijack a conversation between hosts or degrade the privacy guarantee of anonymity networks such as Tor, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A flaw in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used by Linux since late 2012 poses a serious threat to internet users, whether or not they use Linux directly.That's the key finding of a research study that's scheduled to be presented Wednesday at the USENIX Security Symposium in Austin, Texas.The TCP weakness, identified by researchers from the University of California at Riverside, enables attackers to hijack users’ internet communications completely remotely. It could be used to launch targeted attacks that track users’ online activity, forcibly terminate a communication, hijack a conversation between hosts or degrade the privacy guarantee of anonymity networks such as Tor, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Box has made no secret of its global ambitions, and on Wednesday it advanced them another step by announcing two new regional "Zones" in Canada and Australia."Our mission is to build out the most advanced social cloud," said Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of the California-based company, in an interview. "We want to make sure we can deliver no matter what your security, compliance or data-residency requirements."Different countries have established different requirements for the treatment and storage of data, resulting in a complex landscape for companies to navigate. Delivered through partnerships with Amazon Web Services and IBM Cloud, Box Zones essentially allows companies to store data in the location of their choice. When the paid feature was announced in April, the first non-U.S. Zones were in Germany, Ireland, Japan, and Singapore.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel is buying deep-learning startup Nervana Systems in a deal that could help it make up for lost ground in the increasingly hot area of artificial intelligence.Founded in 2014, California-based Nervana offers a hosted platform for deep learning that's optimized "from algorithms down to silicon" to solve machine-learning problems, the startup says.Businesses can use its Nervana cloud service to build and deploy applications that make use of deep learning, a branch of AI used for tasks like image recognition and uncovering patterns in large amounts of data.Also of interest to Intel, Nervana is developing a specialty processor, known as an ASIC, that's custom built for deep learning. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel is buying deep-learning startup Nervana Systems in a deal that could help it make up for lost ground in the increasingly hot area of artificial intelligence.Founded in 2014, California-based Nervana offers a hosted platform for deep learning that's optimized "from algorithms down to silicon" to solve machine-learning problems, the startup says.Businesses can use its Nervana cloud service to build and deploy applications that make use of deep learning, a branch of AI used for tasks like image recognition and uncovering patterns in large amounts of data.Also of interest to Intel, Nervana is developing a specialty processor, known as an ASIC, that's custom built for deep learning. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's plenty of lip service paid today to the importance of customer service, but a new study suggests brands are failing miserably at delivering it. Social media, it turns out, isn't making things any better.In any given year, more than 80 percent of consumers try to reach a brand, and for most of them, it's an exercise in frustration, according to new data from The Northridge Group. Fifty-five percent say they need to use two or more communication channels to contact a company or brand before an issue is resolved. In general, 44 percent of consumers say companies don't make it easy to contact them.As for social media, 77 percent of consumers say they use social channels to contact companies at least as much as they did a year ago, but one in five never even get a response, Northridge found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Katherine Noyes