Facebook and other tech companies in Silicon Valley are facing increasing pressure from its shuttle drivers to improve working conditions, amid concern about growing inequality in the area.Loop Transportation drivers, who transfer Facebook employees to and from the company’s Menlo Park, California campus, have reached an agreement with the contractor that, among other benefits, will increase their average pay to US$24.50 an hour from the current $18 an hour, International Brotherhood of Teamsters said Sunday.The agreement will have to first be submitted to Facebook for approval as the paying client. The company could not be immediately reached for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lenovo admitted to pre-loading the Superfish adware on some consumer PCs, and unhappy customers are now dragging the company to court on the matter.A proposed class-action suit was filed late last week against Lenovo and Superfish, which charges both companies with “fraudulent” business practices and of making Lenovo PCs vulnerable to malware and malicious attacks by pre-loading the adware.Plaintiff Jessica Bennett said her laptop was damaged as a result of Superfish, which was called “spyware” in court documents. She also accused Lenovo and Superfish of invading her privacy and making money by studying her Internet browsing habits.The lawsuit was filed after Lenovo admitted to pre-loading Superfish on some consumer PCs. The laptops affected by Superfish include non-ThinkPad models such as G Series, U Series, Y Series, Z Series, S Series, Flex, Miix, Yoga and E Series.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Box has acquired Airpost, a startup that helps enterprises detect and manage the use of cloud applications by their employees.Airpost, a two-year-old startup based in Toronto, announced the acquisition in a blog post on Friday. Box confirmed it has bought the company. Terms were not disclosed.Airpost will close operations on March 1. After that, customers won’t be able to use its product, founder and CEO Navid Nathoo said in an email message.But the concept seems sound: Airpost tells IT departments when employees start using cloud-based apps on their own and provides access controls and protections against potential vulnerabilities in those apps. The idea is to let employees keep using the apps they found and get the productivity they want, while keeping the enterprise secure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The Apple community is buzzing today over a report from 9-to-5 Mac that the iPhone and iPad maker will be holding its first public open beta for iOS next month.
This would be Apple's latest effort to do away with buggy releases for its mobile operating system. Early adopters of iOS 8 ran into various troubles, as did those early to download the first updates to that OS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A complex network of sensors, lasers and a cloud-based positioning system are part of a plan from Volvo Cars to have 100 self-driving cars on the road by 2017.Volvo’s project to put self-driving cars on the streets of Gothenburg is entering its second year. It aims to let ordinary people drive a car with an autopilot in normal traffic on public roads. On Thursday, Volvo gave some insights into the technology it will use to integrate self-driving cars into real traffic.“The key to success is combining sensors, computers and a chassis system in a clever way,” said Erik Coelingh, a technical specialist at Volvo.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple is in talks with iPhone screen maker Japan Display that could result in the construction of a new screen factory in Japan, Japanese media reported Friday.Apple would take on most of the ¥200 billion (US$1.6 billion) investment for the factory in Ishikawa Prefecture in central Japan, according to reports in Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun and Jiji Press, which did not name any sources.The plant in Hakusan City could begin operations in 2016, producing LCD panels for Apple and other manufacturers. But Apple is also in talks with other suppliers including Foxconn, and the situation is fluid, the reports said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today we’re taking a deep look into mindset of the network professional – his or her soul -- when it comes to breaking something and owning up to the mistake … or not.Posted to Reddit’s section that is devoted to networking: “Have you ever accidentally broken something then fixed it immediately to find your colleagues praising your skills even though it (was) your lack of skills? How do you react?”The inquisitor answers his own question:
“Generally speaking I've always let the peasants (end users) think I'm a wizard while I tell my boss what actually happened. What have you guys done in similar situations?”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lenovo’s been caught going a bit too far in its quest for bloatware money, and the results have put its users at risk. The company has been preloading Superfish, a "visual search" tool that includes adware that fakes the encryption certificates for every HTTPS-protected site you visit, on its PCs since at least the middle of 2014. Essentially, the software conducts a man-in-the-middle attack to fill the websites you visit with ads, and leaves you vulnerable to hackers in its wake.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Free security tools you should try
You can read all the sordid details here. This article is dedicated to helping you discover whether your Lenovo PC is infected with Superfish, and how to eradicate it if you are.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
9 far-out future display technologiesImage by Pawel GaulFor decades, there was exactly one way to look at electronically displayed text and images: the cathode ray tube. This hardworking, stalwart technology was the display of choice for everything, from radar systems in the 1940s all the way to desktop PCs in the 1990s, with millions of heavy, fragile cabinet TVs in between.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At the Strata big data conference yesterday, Microsoft let the world know its Azure Machine Learning offering was generally available to developers. This may come as a surprise. Microsoft? Isn't machine learning the province of Google or Facebook or innumerable hot startups?In truth, Microsoft has quietly built up its machine learning expertise over decades, transforming academic discoveries into product functionality along the way. Not many businesses can match Microsoft's deep bench of talent.[ See what hardware, software, development tools, and cloud services came out on top in the InfoWorld 2015 Technology of the Year Awards. | Download the entire list of winners in the handy Technology of the Year PDF. | Stay up on key Microsoft technologies with InfoWorld's Microsoft newsletter. ]
Machine learning -- getting a system to teach itself from lots of data rather than simply following preset rules -- actually powers the Microsoft software you use everyday. Machine learning has infiltrated Microsoft products from Bing to Office to Windows 8 to Xbox games. Its flashiest vehicle may be the futuristic Skype Translator, which handles two-way voice conversations in different languages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP has joined the disaggregation party through two partnerships that will produce a branded white box switch capable of running multiple network operating systems.HP has expanded a relationship with Accton Technology to offer two new switches initially, and more later this year. The switches will be low-cost, software-independent white box hardware targeted at Web scale data centers supporting cloud, mobile, social media and big data workloads.Under a second arrangement, HP will offer Cumulus Networks’ Cumulus Linux network operating system on the Accton switches. Cumulus Linux runs on a variety of white box and branded switching hardware based on merchant silicon, and is intended to make the software side of networking hardware independent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Paranoid tablet users, rejoice. The first units of the secure Blackphone tablet will be demonstrated at the upcoming Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona early next month.The tablet will be the second product from SGP Technologies, which makes the privacy-centric Blackphone smartphone. A pre-release version of the tablet will be shown at the booth of Graphite Software, which has written a special interface for the device to run sensitive applications.SGP is planning a press conference at MWC where it will probably announce the tablet. A Blackphone spokesman declined to share details on the tablet launch or the press conference. However, a Graphite Software executive said the tablet would be announced at MWC and would be on display at Blackphone’s booth as well as Graphite’s.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sony will invest more money in the PlayStation as it fights to return to a profit, and could reportedly exit from selling smartphones and TVs.Sony will pump extra cash into its games and network services division in a bid to attract more users to the PlayStation and its PlayStation Network of online games. The company has sold 18.5 million PlayStation 4s since they went on sale in late 2013, of which 4.1 million were sold in the 2014 holiday season.Sony will also provide more funding for the division that makes image sensors for devices including the iPhone 6. That cash will go towards researching new technologies and increasing production.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM’s new man in charge of the cloud business is moving fast.“What I’m focusing on is speed,” said Robert LeBlanc, the new senior vice president for IBM Cloud. “Because the market continues to change, we have to get things to market quickly and then iterate.”LeBlanc is in a key spot at IBM: the company’s cloud-related technologies enjoyed a whopping 60 percent growth to $7 billion in 2014. The growth came much sooner than expected, and that’s critical in the midst of the company’s ongoing struggle to shift focus from low-margin hardware to the new paradigm of cloud computing.That struggle was evident in IBM’s financial results for 2014. The fourth quarter brought yet another decline in sales—it was the 11th consecutive quarter to do so—and profit targets for 2015 were down as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To say that University of Cambridge deployed disparate and diverse data storage and data center infrastructure would be a vast understatement. In a 2013 IT review, data center manager Ian Tasker and his team discovered almost 200 servers across the University's 120 departments. These installations ranged from single servers housed in closets to larger rooms containing 20 to 30 servers, but all contributing to a major drain on power and cooling resources, as well as creating one heck of a management headache."Our IT review is a periodic way for us to look at how we're carrying out the responsibilities of IT, and how to best align IT with the work of the university. What we found was everything was fragmented and each department was doing their own thing when it came to provisioning, storage and management. Where we had a small number of racks, they weren't powered or cooled efficiently, and that was our other mission: to reduce our carbon footprint as a university by about 34 percent by the year 2020," Tasker says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Qualcomm is planting the seeds for 4K video and faster LTE speeds in more affordable smartphones with its new Snapdragon 620 and 618 processors, which will reach devices in the second half of this year.The new chips could be in smartphones priced at US$300 and above, and some performance and 4K features are being cascaded from the Snapdragon 810 chip, which goes into premium smartphones priced above $500.Previous Snapdragon 600 series chips have appeared in a few handsets and phablets from HTC, Samsung and LG. Amazon’s Fire TV also uses a Snapdragon 600 chip and is able to deliver full high-definition video to TV sets.The new 600 series chips are built to support Android and Windows, said Tim McDonough , vice president of marketing at the company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New regulations, competition and product diversity are likely to help boost digital financial services across the eight West African Economic and Monetary Union countries.Making financial services available and affordable to all segments of the population, especially those excluded by income level, political instability, gender, location, or education, has been a major topic over the past few years in Africa.The availability of financial services to those who historically not had access to them—so-called financial inclusion—is essential for widespread economic growth, according to the African Development Bank (ADF). However, Africa has been lagging behind other continents in this area, with less than one out of four adults holding an account at a formal financial institution, according to an ADF report, “Financial Inclusion in Africa.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The future of storage may not be in storage itself, but in the intelligence to manage it.Major storage vendors and startups alike are now pushing software-defined systems spanning anything from a set of arrays to a whole enterprise. On Tuesday, IBM placed a big bet on this trend, announcing the first product in a portfolio called IBM Spectrum Storage and saying it will invest $1 billion in storage software over the next five years.The strategy will see IBM offer its traditional storage systems in software form so customers can choose to buy them as appliance, software or service. The first Spectrum Storage product out of the gate is IBM Spectrum Accelerate, software that’s based on the company’s own XIV high-end storage appliance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The MacBook Air's battery life is legendary. Colleagues who drive MacBook Airs claim they can get all-day battery life, and that no similarly sized PC can do the same. But now we have a real contender: The Dell XPS 13. Time to test those claims.Before we dig in, it's important to note that there's no single test that can compare PC and MacBook battery life directly. We have to arrive at comparable numbers through reasoned use of similar tests. I'll also be discussing other reviewers' tests to help paint a more detailed picture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With a free Chip & PIN card reader, Swedish mobile payments company iZettle is lowering the threshold for small companies to start accepting card payments.The Card Reader Lite, released Tuesday, connects to tablets or smartphones via an audio cable and it is meant to lower the cost barriers small merchants face when setting up their businesses, iZettle said.Startup costs weren’t that high to begin with though. Businesses only pay €49 (about US$55) for iZettle’s wireless Bluetooth card reader, which it will continue to offer, and similar readers from competing services such as Payleven and SumUp cost only a little more at €79.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here