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iPhone 8 to boast wireless charging, analyst says

The iPhone 8, and whatever other new smartphones Apple debuts in 2017, are all expected to come with wireless charging capabilities, according to a prominent Apple watcher.MacRumors cites KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo's claims that three expected phones from Apple this year will all feature wireless charging. "Kuo said wireless charging increases the internal temperature of smartphones, so he expects the rumored iPhone 8 with an OLED display and glass casing to have a new 3D Touch module with 'additional graphite sheet lamination' in order to prevent the device from malfunctioning due to overheating," MacRumors states.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US chipmaker plans new factory in China

GlobalFoundries will open a new factory to make cheap wireless chips in Chengdu, China, next year.The chipmaker, once part of microprocessor designer AMD, also plans to expand production at existing fabrication plants in the U.S., Germany, and Singapore, it said Friday. It makes chips for AMD, IBM, Qualcomm, and Mediatek, among others.Beginning next year, the new fab in China, a joint venture with the municipality of Chengdu, will produce chips on 300-millimeter wafers using standard manufacturing techniques, the company said.Sometime in 2019, it will switch to a different manufacturing process, FD-SOI (fully depleted silicon on insulator), which GlobalFoundries calls 22FDX. That process is particularly suitable for the low-cost manufacture of the radio-frequency chips used in smartphones, cars, and the internet of things, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Artificial intuition will supersede artificial intelligence, experts say

Artificial intelligence (AI) is so last year, according to some experts.Scientists at MIT this week claimed a breakthrough in how human intuition can be added to algorithms. And in a separate, unrelated report, Deloitte Consulting is chastising the business community for not comprehending fully that new, cognitive computing technology should be exploited.“Artificial intelligence is only the beginning,” researchers write in a Deloitte University Press article about Deloitte's February study.+ Also on Network World: Using artificial intelligence to teach computers to see + “Advanced cognitive analytics” is just one of the “fast-evolving” technologies businesses need to get a handle on, they say. A kind of artificial intuition and cognition through algorithms is one part of that machine intelligence (MI). Notably, it’s not AI. MI is more cognitive and mimics humans, the firm explains, while AI is simply a subset of MI.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple’s iCloud saved deleted browser records, security company finds

Apple’s iCloud appears to have been holding on to users’ deleted internet browsing histories, including records over a year old.Moscow-based forensics firm Elcomsoft noticed it was able to pull supposedly deleted Safari browser histories from iCloud accounts, such as the date and time the site was visited and when the record was deleted.“In fact, we were able to access records dated more than one year back,” wrote Elcomsoft’s CEO Vladimir Katalov in a Thursday blog post.Users can set iCloud to store their browsing history so that it's available from all connected devices. The researchers found that when a user deletes that history, iCloud doesn't actually erase it but keeps it in a format invisible to the user.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What cyberinsurance gotchas companies must be ready for

Insurance challengesImage by ThinkstockBusinesses shelled out $2 billion in cyber insurance premiums in 2015 but current projections show that astronomical growth rates will result in a market of over $20 billion by 2025. The single biggest challenge faced by insurance companies today is the lack of actuarial data on cyber attacks which makes pricing these cyber insurance policies very difficult. As a result, insurance companies are increasingly resorting to other methods to assist them in more accurately pricing these policies which is good news for them but which will result in a number of challenges for businesses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can the FTC save the IoT?

Nobody in the IT industry would argue that the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming more secure. Pretty much the opposite.But not for lack of effort. There have been multiple, ongoing initiatives over the past decade, both public and private. There have been dire warnings, publication of various standards and best practices, technology improvements, legislation to encourage threat information sharing and exhortations from government agencies, congressional committees, security firms and conference speakers.Unfortunately, none of them has worked very well so far.In spite of some of the best minds and technology improvements in the world focused on it, most of the IoT’s billions and billions of connected devices remain catastrophically insecure, lacking what experts call the most basic “security hygiene.” The flaws include hard-coded credentials, simple and default user names and passwords and the lack of any way to patch or update exploitable vulnerabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle settling with ex-worker over alleged fiddling of cloud accounts

Oracle has informed a federal court that it is settling a lawsuit in which a former employee had charged that she had been terminated from her job for refusing to go along with accounting principles that she did not consider lawful.In a joint submission Wednesday to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, lawyers for Oracle and the former employee Svetlana Blackburn asked for the vacation of a case management conference scheduled for Thursday, while submitting a notice of settlement to notify the court “that the lawsuit has been settled in principle, and to request thirty (30) days in which to file a dismissal.”The lawsuit had drawn interest amid concern that companies could be dressing up their cloud revenue in a highly competitive environment. Gartner, for example, warned in December 2015, that “assessing vendor cloud revenue claims has become more challenging, with many vendors' IT-related businesses being complicated and nuanced.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zingbox launhces IoT protection for business

Zingbox, a cloud-based, internet-of-things security startup, is coming out with its first product that it says can tell good IoT behavior from bad and sends alerts when it finds activity outside the norm.Called Guardian, the solution consists of a virtual appliance that gathers and processes network traffic data and sends it to the Zingbox cloud, where it is analyzed for anomalies. When they are found, it can send alerts to security staff or intervene automatically via integration with firewalls, says May Wang, a founder of the company and its CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Zingbox launches IoT protection for business

Zingbox, a cloud-based, internet-of-things security startup, is coming out with its first product that it says can tell good IoT behavior from bad and sends alerts when it finds activity outside the norm. Called Guardian, the solution consists of a virtual appliance that gathers and processes network traffic data and sends it to the Zingbox cloud, where it is analyzed for anomalies. When they are found, it can send alerts to security staff or intervene automatically via integration with firewalls, says May Wang, a founder of the company and its CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Low-power IoT networks go global with a satellite backbone

Inmarsat says it’s built a global IoT network by combining land-based low-power networks with its mesh of communications satellites, bringing data connections to things like cattle in Australia and reservoirs in Malaysia.The system will combine global reach with one of an emerging class of networks designed for small, low-power devices like sensors. With cellular-or-better range but slower speeds than LTE, these networks can be an economical way to connect widely dispersed devices that use small amounts of data.The land networks that link to Inmarsat’s satellites will use LoRaWAN, a technology that enterprises can roll out on their own, including at sites that mobile operators don’t serve. Multiple vendors make equipment for LoRaWAN, which is based on a specification from the LoRa Alliance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s next for open-source Spark?

Boston -- A conference focused on a single open source project sounds like the sort of event that will feature a lone keynote speaker speaking to maybe 100 interested parties in a lecture hall at a local college. Spark Summit East was very much the opposite.A total of 1,503 people watched the five keynote speakers in a cavernous ballroom at the Hynes Convention Center lay out the future of Spark, the big data processing engine originally developed at the University of California – Berkeley by Matei Zaharia. Spark underlies huge data-driven applications being used by major players like Salesforce, Facebook, IBM and many others, helping organize, analyze, and surface specific grains of sand from beach-sized databases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US idea to collect travelers’ passwords alarms privacy experts

To better vet foreign travelers, the U.S. might demand that some visa applicants hand over the passwords to their social media accounts, a proposal that’s alarming privacy experts.“If they don’t want to give us the information, then they don’t come,” said John Kelly, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday.Kelly mentioned the proposal in a congressional hearing when he was asked what his department was doing to look at visa applicants’ social media activity.He said it was “very hard to truly vet” the visa applicants from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the Trump administration's travel ban, which is now in legal limbo. Many of the countries are failed states with little internal infrastructure, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rackspace is cuting 6% of its workforce

Via a blog post by CEO Taylor Rhodes, Texas-based cloud computing company Rackspace announced that it is cutting about 6% of its workforce in areas that have seen slowed growth in recent years.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Rackspace will stay alive in cloud: Stop competing with Amazon, start partnering +Rhodes says the cuts will primarily be focused on the company’s corporate administrative expenses and management, and that the company’s “front-line” support staff and product teams will be least impacted by the layoffs. Rackspace did not provide additional details about where the cuts will come from, saying only they are in areas “where the workforce has grown more rapidly than the revenue.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In the Labs: Connected vehicles in Ohio, artificial intelligence in Illinois and Massachusetts

Activity on the tech labs front is happening faster than we can get to it these days, so here are a few "in case you missed it" items...$45M for Transportation Research Center The state of Ohio, JobsOhio and the Ohio State University are putting $45 million into an expansion of the Transportation Research Center's (TRC) 540-acre Smart Mobility Advanced Research and Test (SMART) Center in the Columbus area. Research will focus both on connected and driverless vehicles within this section of the 4,500-acre TRC expanse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

After Ryzen, AMD has no immediate plan to purge its other PC chips

An AMD Athlon or Sempron chip may not drum as much excitement as Ryzen, but loyalty has helped those brands stick around for more than a decade.So what happens to those and other PC processors, like the A-series and FX, when AMD's new Ryzen chips start flooding the market in March? AMD has said the first high-end desktop Ryzen chips will ship in March.For now, AMD plans to make no changes to its lineup of existing chips, a company spokesman said.Instead, the chips will be regrouped to focus on price-sensitive PC buyers.Ryzen-based PCs are expected to be priced at a premium, competing with Intel's top gaming CPUs. The FX chips will not go away once Ryzen arrives, and will be targeted toward budget gamers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T, IBM, Nokia join to make IoT systems safer

Some big players in security and the internet of things, including AT&T and Nokia, are joining forces to solve problems that they say make IoT vulnerable in many areas.The IoT Cybersecurity Alliance, formed Wednesday, also includes IBM, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, and mobile security company Trustonic. The group said it won’t set standards but will conduct research, educate consumers and businesses, and influence standards and policies.As IoT technologies take shape, there’s a danger of new vulnerabilities being created in several areas. Consumer devices have been in the security spotlight thanks to incidents like the DDoS attacks last year that turned poorly secured set-top boxes and DVRs into botnets. But the potential weaknesses are much broader, spanning the network, cloud, and application layers, the new group said in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Is your IT infrastructure healthy?

From my experience, if you look at 200 or so companies, you’ll find approximately 10 with enterprise tool sets for infrastructure management, six with middle-of-the-road packages, and four with home-grown solutions. That’s 20 total, just 10 percent. To make matters worse, the enterprise tool sets tend to be difficult to install and use, so system admins fail to use them as much as they should.Based on my observations, most businesses do not have a good read on the health of their IT infrastructure. They need a cost-effective, practical solution to monitor their IT environment so they can manage it more efficiently.Preventing Murphy’s Law IT infrastructure management tools can help to prevent slowdowns and downtime, thus help you to avoid the firefights that occur when Murphy’s Law strikes. That, of course, should be a priority. After all, when you have three people hunting down a problem for a week, each spending perhaps 10 hours on the problem, you waste 30 working hours.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner: Algorithm-based technology patents are raging

Algorithms are hot – so hot that Gartner is saying that by 2019, 250,000 patent applications will be filed that include claims for algorithms, a tenfold increase from five years ago.Gartner wrote that according to a worldwide search on analytics vendor Aulive, nearly 17,000 patents applied for in 2015 mentioned "algorithm" in the title or description, versus 570 in 2000. Including those mentioning "algorithm" anywhere in the document, there were more than 100,000 applications last year versus 28,000 five years ago.At this pace, and considering the rising interest in protecting algorithmic intellectual property, by 2020 there could be nearly half a million patent applications mentioning "algorithm," and more than 25,000 patent applications for algorithms themselves, Gartner stated. Of the top 40 organizations patenting the most algorithms the past five years, 33 are Chinese businesses and universities – IBM is the only western tech company on the list at No. 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft launches new Azure intellectual property protections

Microsoft wants to help its cloud customers feel better protected from intellectual property lawsuit threats. To that end, the company is launching a new feature that’s designed to give them additional shielding.The Azure IP Advantage program (the IP stands for intellectual property) provides a trio of benefits. First, Microsoft will indemnify all Azure customers from intellectual property infringement claims resulting from their use of Azure products, including open source components.Second, the company will allow customers that meet a set of criteria access to a "patent pick" program, which will allow them to transfer one Microsoft patent from a list of 10,000 to help them with defending against an infringement suit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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