Tracking the scores, progress and behavior of millions of players around the globe playing an online game is no laughing matter, according to T.J. Wagner, an executive producer and creative director for World of Tanks publisher Wargaming West, who spoke to Network World last week at PAX East.World of Tanks is a multiplayer-only online wargame, which features two teams of players duking it out in a vast array of mid-20th Century armored vehicles. Players gain access to more powerful tanks and better equipment by playing matches and, if they find the rate of advancement too slow for their taste, by paying real cash for in-game currency that can be used to purchase premium account status and new tanks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
According to a 2014 HP report, titled “Internet of Things Research Study,” 70 percent of the most commonly used Internet of Things (IoT) devices contain vulnerabilities involving password security, permissions and encryption. “While the Internet of Things will connect and unify countless objects and systems, it also presents a significant challenge in fending off the adversary given the expanded attack surface,” said Mike Armistead, vice president and general manager, Fortify, Enterprise Security Products, HP, in response to the report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four out of five retailers don’t meet payment card security standardsIt’s no surprise that so many data breaches involve the disclosure of credit card numbers: 80 percent of retailers failed to meet the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) in a Verizon survey of 5,000 businesses worldwide, Reuters reports. In all the data breaches that Verizon studied, the company involved was not compliant at the time of the incident.The inventor of credit default swaps is new CEO of bitcoin trading companyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A group of U.S. senators has revived an effort to require major online retailers to collect sales tax from shoppers.The nine senators on Tuesday reintroduced legislation that would allow states to collect sales taxes—more than 9 percent in a handful of states—from large Internet sellers with no operations in the states collecting the taxes.The Marketplace Fairness Act is similar to legislation that was introduced but failed to pass in the past two sessions of Congress. A version of the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 69-27 in May 2013, but the House of Representatives failed to act on it.Lawmakers have tried for more than a decade to pass an Internet sales tax. Supporters of an online sales tax say local businesses are at a disadvantage because they have to collect sales taxes, while online retailers, in many cases, do not.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook’s Open Compute Project struts its stuffThe Open Compute Project kicks off its annual Silicon Valley summit on Tuesday, where vendors and customers will show their latest designs for low cost data center hardware. Facebook started the project about three years ago to wrestle some control away from the big vendors and collaborate on open designs that white-box manufacturers can compete to implement. Microsoft, Intel, Canonical and Goldman Sachs will all give updates on what they’ve been building this past year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Matthew Rothenberg created a new website in early February, he let about two dozen people know about it through an unlikely medium: postcards.The unorthodox method was fitting for an unorthodox website called Unindexed. It was the latest project from Rothenberg, a 35-year-old based in Brooklyn, who has created a portfolio of interactive web installations and performance art projects around technology.Unindexed is no more. The website was coded to erase itself once Google added it to its search index. It lasted a little over three weeks, disappearing forever on Feb. 24.Rothenberg has done stints as head of product for Flickr and Bitly but for the last couple of years has focused on consulting and his art-technology side projects. His goal for Unindexed was to create a site where people could post comments safe in the knowledge that no record of those posts would ever exist again. It was also coded to prevent Google from caching it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Among the many other exciting diversions for those of a nerdy bent at the PAX East 2015 gaming convention in Boston this past weekend, there was a LAN party. And as you might expect, it wasn’t your average hastily erected LAN, with computers situated around a couple cheap consumer switches nestled between boxes of pizza.No, the LAN party at PAX East featured fully 420 gaming machines, set out in endless rows on long rectangular tables, and stations for more than 300 computers brought in by conference-goers. The setup was provisioned and managed by LANFest, a non-profit organization sponsored by Intel to raise money for charity via sponsorship of big LAN parties.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An amateur-radio satellite called $50SAT/MO-76 marked its 15-month earth-orbiting anniversary last month.Now, you might not think that's a particularly big deal. Satellites stay up longer than that (or don't) all the time.Well, the big deal about $50SAT is that it's a self-built kit. And it's still up there—although possibly only just. Unfortunately, it is now experiencing some premature battery deteriorating caused orbit decay, says Michael Kirkart, a member of the team that built the bird.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple event Monday holds promise of more news on WatchApple enthusiasts will be tuning into the live-stream of the company’s “Spring forward” event on Monday. It’s expected to reveal more details about the Apple Watch, as well as information about pricing and sales plans. The event is a long-awaited dropping of a second shoe into the wearables market: last week’s Mobile World Congress provided a venue for competitive launches, but the landscape wasn’t complete without a clear picture of Apple’s offering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I recently had the chance to sit down with Rob Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch Networks to get his insight on whats hot with SDN for 2015. The interview can be seen on my youtube channel, OpenNetworking.TV here, and you can also view the transcript below:
[Art Fewell] Welcome to OpenNetworking TV, this is the CatchUp. I'm your host, Art Fewell. Today we are going to be catching up with another one of the founding fathers of the SDN movement, I hope that's a fitting description, Rob Sherwood of Big Switch Networks. Rob would you mind sharing a little of your background?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some people who use uTorrent, the popular BitTorrent client, are up in arms over the presence of cryptocurrency mining software on their computers which they say was installed without their permission.The mining software, made by the company Epic Scale, started appearing for some people earlier this week after they updated to the latest version of uTorrent, a program made by BitTorrent for downloading files. In forums online, users have likened the software to bloatware, as it taxes their computer processor without their consent. Cryptocurrency mining software is used to release bitcoins and other digital currencies by having computers persistently perform complex mathematical calculations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ATLANTA -- A self-described security "amateur" discovered hundreds of Internet-connected devices ranging from cameras to industrial control systems that were connected to the Internet without even basic password protection -- meaning they could be easily turned on and off or otherwise manipulated with a single click of a mouse."You would be amazed [what] you could find," Espen Sandli, a journalist at the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, told the Computer Assisted Reporting conference Thursday. "The project was made from people who had no idea about data security at the start."MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 most powerful Internet of Things companies
They began by searching for basic security cameras, such as finding and taking control of a surveillance camera inside a nightclub. After that, they graduated to finding compromised control systems at military installations and railroads. In one case, they found a security company's list of clients and passwords in the clear online. In another, they could have accessed who was allowed to enter or leave a military building. Another device on the open Internet could have allowed them to switch off a railway fire-alarm system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A broad range of companies at Mobile World Congress this week have teamed up to improve smartphone security and offer better software integration for Internet-of-things deployments.The conference in Barcelona covered a wide range of topics, but for enterprises the most important issues were IoT and how enterprise resources can be made available on smartphones without sacrificing security.Here are some of the trends and announcements from this year that will have an impact on enterprise mobility:IoT can be more tightly integrated with business processesTo make data from connected sensors more useful, IoT platform vendors are joining forces with software companies to open the door for better integration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Florence Hudson, Twitter
Florence Hudson, Internet2 CINO
Florence Hudson, most recently IBM's director of Internet of Things Business, has been named Senior VP and Chief Innovation Officer for computer network consortium Internet2.
Internet2 had been on the hunt for a CINO since October.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Visa and MasterCard are jumping on the mobile payments bandwagon in Africa, a region where consumers are ahead of their counterparts in other parts of the world.Both financial powerhouses announced their expansion plans, which include partnerships with mobile money service providers, at Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona.The African mobile money market is very attractive. The continent has a large population of people who do not have traditional bank accounts, especially in rural areas. It has also has experienced an explosion of mobile money services as operators and banks compete for customers.The increase in mobile money services has also been fueled by the rapid uptake of mobile phones on the continent, which for many people are their only Internet access devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bill targeting data brokers rises from the deadTheir last try failed to pass in 2014, but four U.S. senators have brought back legislation to rein in the data broker business. The law would allow consumers to see and correct personal information held by data brokers, and let them put a halt to having their information shared or sold for marketing purposes. The Data Broker Accountability and Transparency Act, introduced Thursday, is needed because data brokers are a “shadow industry of surreptitious data collection that has amassed covert dossiers on hundreds of millions of Americans,” Sen. Edward Markey said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To reach more Chinese consumers, Amazon.com has opened an imported goods store on an Alibaba Group site.The new store will officially launch next month on Alibaba’s Tmall.com site, and will function as a pilot project, Amazon said Friday.Amazon already has its own e-commerce site geared for the country, but its share of China’s online retail market is only 0.8 percent, according to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International.Alibaba, in contrast, controls three quarters of the market through its Tmall and Taobao Marketplace sites, and has 265 million monthly active users.The Chinese market is fiercely competitive, as Amazon is not only competing against Alibaba, but also scores of other smaller e-commerce providers routinely offering promotional deals on products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Supporters of the Islamic extremist group known as ISIS operated at least 46,000 Twitter accounts at the end of last year, a new study says, underscoring the challenge facing social networks as they become powerful tools for propaganda and recruitment.The accounts were in use between September and December, and while not all were active at the same time, the estimate is a conservative one. The actual number could be as high as 70,000, according to the study, which was commissioned by Google Ideas and published by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., this week said it had created a Cisco Archive that promises to document and preserve the networking giant’s impact on the industry and Internet.+More on Network World: What network technology is going to shake up your WAN?+In a blog post, Paula Jabloner the first Director of the newly established Cisco Archive wrote about one of the more significant events the Archive will preserve: “It was 1989. Kirk Lougheed of Cisco and Yakov Rekhter of IBM were having lunch in a meeting hall cafeteria at an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) conference. They wrote a new routing protocol that became RFC (Request for Comment) 1105, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), known to many as the “Two Napkin Protocol” — in reference to the napkins they used to capture their thoughts.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has launched a new auto insurance site in the U.S. designed to simplify for consumers the process of shopping for policies.Google Compare Auto Insurance, launched Thursday, is a free site that prompts users to enter the typical sorts of questions for getting an auto quote, like information about the car, the person’s driving history and location. Do that, and then Google spits back a bunch of quotes and coverage details from different providers. From there, Google can link users with the provider of their choice by phone or website, to complete a purchase.People can also access the service through a regular Google search for “car insurance.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here