With 18 white LED and 2 red LED, this headlamp from LE has 4 different lighting modes, including a red flashing mode. The beam distance is 20+ feet when it is on the brightest setting. Two loop buckles enable you to adjust both head-round band and the top band for maximum comfort. With this 58% off deal, its typical list price of $18.95 is now only $7.99 on Amazon, including 3 AAA batteries. See this deal now on Amazon. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft intends to run an AI Immersion Workshop in Seattle on May 9, a free pre-event to Microsoft Build developer conference.The workshop is a special opportunity for advanced developers looking to create the next generation of scalable, real-world intelligent apps that use the very latest AI and machine learning techniques.The workshop will feature hands-on tutorials using Microsoft and open-source technologies. Microsoft developers will be there, and the workshop is said to be an opportunity to connect with developers and data scientists working on Microsoft’s products and services, as well as to connect with industry peers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon’s voice-first assistant technology could be worth billions for the e-tailer in just a few years, says an investment bank quoted by Fox News last week. RBC Capital Markets says Alexa could trigger $10 billion in revenue for Amazon by 2020.This startling prediction comes alongside recent speculation that Alexa will be incorporated into smartphones sometime in 2017. That wrapping-in (if it were to include the voice element, rather than simply account management) would be part of a major second-generation update. It also means Amazon will compete with native telephony-supplied AI voice products such as Siri.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Northwestern University researchers have devised a Google Chrome browser extension that might just help you get your money's worth for in-flight Wi-Fi.The ScaleUp extension stems from research originally conducted using a Northwestern-developed tool called WiFly for testing Internet connection speeds for in-flight Wi_fi. The result of these tests was that "travelers are paying a lot of money and getting modem-like performance," said Fabian Bustamante, professor of computer science at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The second wave of 802.11ac Wi-Fi technology, primarily distinguished by new MIMO capabilities, bigger channels and the general ability to handle larger and denser groups of connections, is starting to make its way into enterprises.MU-MIMO is the piece that’s got everyone excited for wave 2 – it stands for multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output, meaning that access points use larger numbers of antennae that can be managed algorithmically to provide a more flexible distribution of wireless resources. In essence, these are smarter access points that are better able to handle large numbers of users at any given time, and feature more advanced ways to manage different kinds of wireless links.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No wonder people from Massachusetts get called that name we all find kind of amusing but I still shouldn’t print on this website for networking professionals.
The Massachusetts State Police posted the above photo to Facebook a few hours ago, along with this admonishment:
Soooo..... this just happened.
Trooper Paul Copponi just stopped this vehicle on the Massachusetts Turnpike in Weston. How little regard do you have to have for the lives and safety of your fellow citizens, not to mention your own life and safety, to do this?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's batch of security patches for March is one of the largest ever and includes fixes for several vulnerabilities that are publicly known and actively exploited.The company published 17 security bulletins covering 135 vulnerabilities in its own products and one separate bulletin for Flash Player, which has its security patches distributed through Windows Update. Nine bulletins are rated critical and nine are rated as important.The affected products include Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Office, Exchange, Skype for Business, Microsoft Lync, and Silverlight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Developers interested in extending the capabilities of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant have some more free tools in their arsenal, thanks to a program the company announced Wednesday.Developers with an active Alexa skill -- a service that expands the capabilities of the virtual assistant -- can apply for $100 in Amazon Web Services credits every month to help pay for what they’ve built. After that, they can receive up to $100 per month in additional credits if they incur usage charges for their skills.The credits are meant to build on AWS’s existing Free Tier, which offers developers a small bundle of free services every month, but charges them for any usage that goes over those low caps. According to a blog post by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, the move is supposed to make it free for developers to operate most Alexa skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Put aside the matter of Russian interference in our presidential election to instead consider this scenario: If Vladimir Putin ordered his government-employed hackers to plant spyware on your personal computer – stealing all your data and even recording your Skype calls – you would have no access to any legal remedy in the U.S. court system.
Preposterous, you say?
That’s the law, according to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which yesterday upheld a lower court decision denying even a day in court to an American citizen who moved here from Ethiopia 30 years ago and was victimized by that country’s government in the exact fashion described above.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has charged four people, including two Russian state intelligence agents, for their involvement in a massive hack of Yahoo that affected half a billion accounts.In September, Yahoo said hackers had managed to steal personal data on more than 500 million users during an attack in late 2014. The stolen data included names, email addresses, telephone numbers and hashed passwords. Blame for the attack was put on a "state-sponsored" group.On Wednesday, the FBI said that group was the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, and it identified agents Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin as leaders of the attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The personal identifying information (PII)—names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, employers and job titles—for 33,698,126 Americans has been leaked online.The data, a 52.2GB CSV file, came from a commercial corporate database. Security researcher Troy Hunt determined that the breach came from NetProspex, a service provided by Dun & Bradstreet, which ironically was named as a 2017 world’s most ethical company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Through this Saturday, sink the 16GB Fire Tablet bundle's already discounted price to just $59.99 using the code FIREBUNDLE at checkout -- a significant deal considering its typical $107.97 value. The bundle includes the latest 16GB Fire 7" Tablet with special offers ($69.99), Amazon cover ($24.99), and Nupro screen protector ($12.99). Amazon's newest Fire tablet features a rich 7" IPS display and a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor. Integrated Alexa service lets you ask away with a button press. Enjoy millions of movies, TV shows, songs, Kindle e-books, apps and games, and enjoy them uninterrupted with Fire's long lasting 7-hour battery. See this deal on Amazon before it expires by adding to cart and applying FIREBUNDLE at checkout. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAP has added some new capabilities to SAP Vora, its in-memory distributed computing system based on Apache Spark and Hadoop.
Version 1.3 of Vora includes a number of new distributed, in-memory data-processing engines, including ones for time-series data, graph data and schema-less JSON data, that accelerate complex processing.
Common uses for the graph engine might be analyzing social graphs or supply chain graphs, said Ken Tsai, SAP's head of product marketing for database and data management.
One application that would benefit from the new time-series engine is looking for patterns of electricity consumption in smart metering data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An appeals court has barred an Ethiopian-born U.S. citizen from filing a civil suit against the African country, which allegedly infected his computer with spyware and monitored his communications.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that foreign states are immune from suit in a U.S. court unless an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) applies.The person, who is referred to in court documents by the pseudonym Kidane, was born in Ethiopia and lived there for 30 years before seeking asylum in the U.S. He lives in Maryland.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wind River, an IoT software division of Intel, wants to help industrial users bring their legacy machine-to-machine systems into the age of open source and cloud computing.On Tuesday, it introduced software to virtualize industrial applications at the edge of the network, letting enterprises gradually migrate from older M2M technology to modern systems that give them more flexibility.The platform, called Wind River Titanium Control, runs on commodity Xeon hardware and uses widely adopted cloud platforms such as OpenStack and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). The company has validated hardware systems from major manufacturers to run Titanium Control and pre-validated virtual network applications through its Titanium Cloud Ecosystem, begun in 2014. Titanium Control is targeted at industries like manufacturing, energy and health care.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a massive data dump last week, Wikileaks released thousands upon thousands of highly secretive and sensitive CIA documents which detail the extent of the government agency's spying tools. Aside from interesting tidbits regarding the CIA attempting to eavesdrop on targets via Samsung HDTVs, the leaked documents also reference the CIA's efforts to hack into iOS devices.In fact, the CIA even has a specialized team devoted entirely towards coming up with security exploits for iOS devices, and in particular the iPhone. Even though the iPhone only accounts for less than 15% of global smartphone marketshare, Apple's iconic smartphone attracts a disproportionate amount of attention because it's proven to be quite popular among "social, political, diplomatic and business elites."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yes, the Blizzard of 2017 on the east coast did foil our plan to stream our inaugural Pi Day Challenge live on Facebook and YouTube (we recorded it on Monday instead), but it did not kill our creativity. I submit the Pi Day driveway snow art display. Bob Brown/NetworkWorld
Pi Day snow art featuring artist exhausted from shovelingTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While Google Hangouts is making a shift to serve enterprise users, it won’t be vanishing for consumers.Last week, the company announced that it would be splitting the chat and videoconferencing service into Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, which raised questions about what would happen for those people who still use it in their personal lives.Consumers will still be able to access Hangouts using their personal Google accounts. Hangouts will still appear in the Gmail sidebar on the desktop, even after it splits into Chat and Meet, according to Scott Johnston, director of product management for Hangouts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Customers who have Reserved Instance contracts with Amazon Web Services will be able to subdivide some of their Linux and Unix virtual machine instances while maintaining their capacity discounts, thanks to pricing changes announced Monday.Reserved Instances allow customers to lock themselves into paying AWS for a certain amount of compute capacity with the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in exchange for a discount off its list price. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft today postponed the retirement of the security bulletins that for nearly two decades have described in detail the month's slate of vulnerabilities and accompanying patches.The bulletins' last stand was originally scheduled for January, with a replacement process ready to step in Feb. 14. Rather than a set of bulletins, Microsoft was to provide a searchable database of support documents dubbed the "Security Updates Guide" or SUG.But just hours before February's security updates were to be released, Microsoft announced that it was postponing the entire collection to March 14, citing "a last-minute issue" that might impact some customers. The Redmond, Wash. company never spelled out exactly what led it to decide on the unprecedented delay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here