IBM is trying to remove some of the complications related to image recognition with new tools to automate critical machine learning tasks.A major update of the company's PowerAI tools has a feature called AI Vision, an auto tuner that makes it easy to identify and classify pictures. It will also speed up image recognition by breaking down tasks over multiple clusters.AI Vision plays a big role in automating machine learning by creating a tuned model, said Sumit Gupta, vice president of machine learning.The software abstracts machine learning, and developers don't need knowledge of low-level access to frameworks to tune, train, and deploy image recognition models. It's much like programming a game to take advantage of GPUs without deep knowledge of low-level APIs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With up to 250 hours of battery life, G602 redefines the laws of wireless gaming. From the pinpoint accuracy of the exclusive Delta Zero sensor technology to the extra high durability primary switches, you can count on G602 to dominate boss after boss. The Logitech G602 gaming mouse averages 4.3 out of 5 stars from over 2,000 reviewers on Amazon (see reviews), where their typical list price of $79.99 has been reduced to $39.99. See the deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Developers will have an easier time scaling their applications to meet global needs with a database product Microsoft updated on Wednesday. Called Cosmos DB, the service lets developers store data that can be replicated across any of the company’s 34 Azure public cloud regions.Cosmos is an expansion of DocumentDB, a managed NoSQL database service that Microsoft launched in 2015. Its key innovation is a feature that lets developers pick between five consistency models that range from "strong" to "eventual" consistency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Share this story: IT folks, we hope you'll pass this guide on to your users to help them learn the Excel 2016 ropes.Simple Sharing with the desktop version of ExcelTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Business chat has come into its own, with Microsoft debuting its Teams system for Office 365 in March and Google promising to deliver Hangouts Chat for G Suite later this year. What had been a market owned by niche technology companies—Slack for its Slack for Teams and Atlassian for its HipChat—suddenly became an arena for the 800-pound gorillas of office software, Microsoft and Google, as they each seek to own the whole collaboration and communications experience within an enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Forrester Research recently released its report naming Sungard AS, Bluelock, IBM and iland as the top disaster recovery-as-a-service companies.With enterprises expecting their network up at all times, backup and recovery are key to keeping things running smoothly with no downtime. With ransomware waiting to pounce the minute a user clicks on a link, companies rely on network recovery in a matter of minutes not days.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You might think the perfect job is one that fits your skills, comes with the right salary and offers you the best benefits, but the evaluation doesn't end there. There's one more thing to consider, and that's whether or not you'll fit in with the company culture, which can differ greatly among companies.But you don't have to wait until you've gone through onboarding to parse out the company culture, according to Tom Gimbel, founder and CEO of LaSalle Network, a professional staffing and recruitment firm. If you ask the right questionas during the interview process and keep an eye out for certain signs, you'll be able to tell if you're a good cultural fit before you sign the offer. Here are a few things to consider if you're trying to determine company culture during the interview process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Branch sites are ideal places to make networking simpler and less expensive. There's often little or no IT expertise there, and it's harder to justify costs because only a fraction of a company's business happens at a given branch.Yet the rise of software-defined WANs and branch offices, designed to scale back the expense and complexity of far-flung networks, has left some parts of the problem unsolved, according to SD-WAN startup Versa Networks.For one thing, replacing branch appliances for each function with applications running on one system may raise software compatibility issues that are even more complicated than wiring up several boxes. Also, swapping out private WAN links for lower-priced internet service can open branches up to some new security threats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Check Point is investing heavily in educating IT pros about the cloud, not only to promote their own cloud security products but to give potential customers the skills they’ll need to keep their jobs as their employers move more and more resources to public cloud providers. Check Point
“We try to explain how to be relevant in the cloud,” says Itai Greenberg, head of cloud security for Check Point.A lot of old-school IT security workers need to learn about how cloud infrastructure works, the terminology used, the interconnections between cloud and corporate owned networks and the ins and outs of APIs, among other skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this week at its GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia announced a new video analytics platform, Metropolis, that promises to make cities safer and smarter and should eventually bring game-changing capabilities to other industries.The heart of Metropolis is deep learning enabled by Nvidia’s range of GPUs that provide the necessary horsepower for artificial intelligence to be performed on every video stream.+ Also on Network World: Smart city tech growing in the U.S. +
The GPU Technology Conference is the right place to show off advancements in something like video analytics, as it has become the flagship event to showcase how GPUs can literally change the world by enabling AI to do some things smarter and faster than people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After John Oliver urged viewers of HBO’s Last Week Tonight to fight for net neutrality (again), even simplified the process for leaving comments by having a new URL, gofccyourself.com, redirect to the point where a person needs only to click “Express” to leave a comment, people were not able to submit comments because the site turned to molasses.The FCC blamed (pdf) the problem on “multiple” DDoS attacks. “These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Risk scores seem all the rage right now. Executives want to know what their risk is. The constant stream over the past few years of high profile breaches and the resulting class action lawsuits, negative PR, loss in share price, cybersecurity insurance pay-out refusals, and even termination of liable executives has made this an urgent priority. The problem is we haven’t really developed a good way to measure risk.Most risk score approaches are restricted by a very simple limitation: They are not vendor agnostic or universal. The solution used to calculate risk is limited by the data it collects, which can vary widely. What is the risk score composed of? More important, what doesn’t it capture? One vendor will include only network and system vulnerabilities, another bundles application vulnerabilities into the mix, and yet another adds user behaviour. Agreeing on the “right” mix still eludes us with no real authoritative standards that define what should be included. Every scoring methodology is subjective, which is surely a sign of how inherently unscientific the entire approach is.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has released an update for the malware scanning engine bundled with most of its Windows security products in order to fix a highly critical vulnerability that could allow attackers to hack computers.The vulnerability was discovered by Google Project Zero researchers Tavis Ormandy and Natalie Silvanovich on Saturday and was serious enough for Microsoft to create and release a patch by Monday. This was an unusually fast response for the company, which typically releases security updates on the second Tuesday of every month and rarely breaks out of that cycle.Ormandy announced Saturday on Twitter that he and his colleague found a "crazy bad" vulnerability in Windows and described it as "the worst Windows remote code execution in recent memory."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lexar's microSD-to-Lightning reader makes it easy to move all your favorite content to & from your iOS device on the go. So whether you’re offloading stunning action photos from that sporting event, or dramatic video from your drone, or if you just want a simple solution to back up or move around your files while mobile -- it’s got you covered. With its small footprint, you can put it in your pocket and go. And the Lightning connector fits with most iOS cases, providing simple plug-and-play functionality. An optional app from the app store allows you to back up files when connected to your device for greater peace of mind. Lexar's microSD to Lightning reader averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, where its typical list price of $24.99 has been reduced a generous 40%, for now, to just $14.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the course of researching a marketing campaign aimed at IT professionals, I have interviewed dozens of such workers over the past year. Some are middle-aged; some are very young. I’ve talked to men and women in all parts of the country who worked at large and small firms.One thing that struck me is that I have not met a single one who was relaxed. They are all stressed and have no time. They are tortured souls who are constantly checking their phones. They live their lives on the edge of disaster.Perhaps this isn’t true across the board. A 2016 survey from TEKsystems showed that IT workers were less stressed than a few years ago. Yet even in that survey, the workers’ job satisfaction was low with less than one half agreeing that they were doing the most satisfying work of their careers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When I’m asked to explain what’s happening with enterprise cybersecurity technology, I often use an analogy from the business software market in the 1990s. Back then, application vendors tended to specialize in one area—PeopleSoft owned HR, Baan offered manufacturing apps, JD Edwards played in finance, etc. Around 1995, companies began replacing these departmental applications with enterprise-class ERP solutions from Oracle and SAP. The objective? Centralize all business data into a common repository that could anchor the business and be updated and used for various departmental functions and business processes in real time. + Also on Network World: Cybersecurity companies to watch +
Yes, the ERP journey was a bit painful, but the transition resulted in a steady increase in business productivity, enhanced efficiency and better decision making.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud security startup RedLock comes out of stealth mode today with a service that helps defend business resources that reside in pubic clouds, gives customers visibility into how these resources are being used and stores records of that activity for auditing and forensics.+More on Network World: FBI/IC3: Vile $5B business e-mail scam continues to breed+ RedLock
Because virtual machines, application instances and workloads change rapidly it’s hard to get a good picture of what’s going on within cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, says RedLock’s CEO Varun Badwhar. “It’s hard to manually monitor and control,” he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The security space is one area where there are a massive number of vendors all offering to solve particular discrete problems. That is all well and good if you have a singular, discrete problem to solve, but what happens if you’re looking for a solution that covers the totality of your needs?Signal Science wants to be the answer to that question, the company offers a web protection product that covers cloud, physical and containerized infrastructure and provides security prioritization based on where applications are targeted. Signal Sciences claims Under Armour, Etsy, Yelp and Shutterstock as customers.+ Also on Network World: What to ask when selecting application security solutions +
The company is making a dual announcement today. The first about its platform overall; the second is some fundraising news. Since fundraising is often seen as a validation of the product story, I’ll cover off the money side of things first. Signal Sciences has raised a $15 million Series B funding round led by Charles River Ventures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Staples has hired its first chief information security officer (CISO), a key new member of the office supply giant's team that combines traditional IT and digital transformation. Staples
New Staples CISO Brett Wahlin
CISO Brett Wahlin, who will report to the company's CTO, will be responsible for enterprise-wide information, product and data security during a time in which Staples looks to expand its delivery business. His responsibilities extend into areas such as connected devices (think Amazon Echo/Google Home digital assistant competition in the office), fraud and loss prevention. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Linux Foundation announced a new software project under its Hyperledger open consortium aimed at creating a collaboration tool for building blockchain business networks -- or smart contracts -- and their deployment across a distributed ledger.The new project, called Hyperleder Composer, is a modeling language based on JavaScript and with REST API support, that allows non-developers and developers to model their business network. The language also supports modeling of relationships and data validation rules.For example, all blockchain business networks share certain elements, such as assets, participants, identities, transactions, and registries. With existing blockchain or distributed ledger technologies, it can be difficult for organizations to take a blockchain business use case and map the concepts into running code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here