Google Assistant will be available soon on Android TVs, with plans to offer the voice-activated personal assistant on car infotainment systems and smartwatches as well.The technology will feature in the coming months, starting with the Nvidia Shield, on Android TVs in the U.S. running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or Android 7.0 Nougat. Some of the devices expected to ship with Google Assistant are the AirTV Player, Sharp Aquos, Sony Bravia and Xiaomi Mi Box, Sascha Prueter, director of Android TV at Google and Gummi Hafsteinsson, product lead for Google Assistant, wrote in a post on Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Perhaps the coolest thing about IBM’s 9th “Five Innovations that will Help Change our Lives within Five Years” predictions is that none of them sound like science fiction.“With advances in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, we aim to invent a new generation of scientific instruments that will make the complex invisible systems in our world today visible over the next five years,” said Dario Gil, vice president of science & solutions at IBM Research in a statement.+More on Network World: IBM says soon you won't need passwords; mind reading will be routine; the so-called digital divide will cease to exist and junk mail will become important+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft wants a go-to Chromebook competitor, and it may be getting one in upcoming Windows 10 PCs with ARM chips.Those Windows 10 laptops and tablets could look something like Samsung's latest Chromebook Pro and Plus announced at CES. The attractive 2-in-1s have 12.3-inch screens and are targeted at those who do most of their computing online.In a way, Samsung's new Chromebooks share some features with new Windows PCs announced at CES. They have cool features like 2400 x 1600 pixel touchscreens and USB-C ports, which are also in the latest Windows 2-in-1s with Intel's Kaby Lake chips.While Google plots a Chromebook attack on Windows 10, Microsoft could be using Chromebooks as a blueprint for its "cellular PCs," or thin and light laptops that are always connected to the Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Department of Labor has filed a lawsuit against Google, with the company's ability to win government contracts at risk.The agency is seeking what it calls "routine" information about wages and the company's equal opportunity program. The agency filed a lawsuit with its Office of Administrative Law Judges to gain access to the information, it announced Wednesday.Google, as a federal contractor, is required to provide the data as part of a compliance check by the agency's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), according to the Department of Labor. The inquiry is focused on Google's compliance with equal employment laws, the agency said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Powerbeats3 packs up to 12 hours of battery life in a single charge. And with Fast Fuel technology, a 5-minute charge gives you 1 hour of playback. Sweat and water resistance provides trusted durability, and dual-driver acoustics deliver dynamic sound to power your workout. These highly rated wireless earphones typically list for $199.99, but with this deal you save $50. The discount will be magically applied when you add it to your cart. Get them for $149.99 on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Originally posted on the Puppet blog, and republished here with Puppet's permission.In technology, we get used to the idea that change is coming at us all the time, faster and faster. Or at least, we should get used to that idea, and even more important, we should prepare ourselves, our teams and our entire organizations for that rapid pace of change.
That's why we created The CIO's Guide to DevOps: to help executives responsible for IT navigate the recent wave of change, dubbed digital transformation. Now that digital technology drives everything, every company, nonprofit, university and government agency that wants to stay relevant must become really good at developing and delivering software quickly, with great agility. That need is what's driving adoption of DevOps principles and practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The closure of a major online marketplace for paid distributed denial-of-service attacks appears to have done little to slow down the illegal activity.In late October, HackForums.net shut down its "Server Stress Testing" section, amid concerns that hackers were peddling DDoS-for-hire services through the site for as little as US$10 a month.According to security experts, the section was the largest open marketplace for paid DDoS attacks -- a notorious hacking technique that can disrupt access to internet services or websites. But since the section's closure, the attacks remain rampant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued an alert that Toshiba on Wednesday has greatly expanded its recall of laptop computer battery packs due to burn and fire hazards.More specifically, these are Panasonic lithium-ion battery packs that have been found susceptible to overheating in 41 models of the Toshiba Satellite laptop, which runs Windows. The firm has received five reports of the battery pack overheating and melting, including one additional report since the first recall announcement; no injuries have been reported.MORE: Samsung Note7's phenomenal flame-out timelineTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This full-fledged, easy-to-tote first aid softpack is designed to save time and frustration in the midst of an emergency. It's compact and portable, but contains 299 physician-recommended supplies. Among the items neatly organized inside the zippered kit is a first aid guide, vinyl gloves, bandages, cold compress, gauze pads, trauma pad, cotton-tipped applicators, first aid tape roll, antiseptics and all three common OTC pain medications. The kit is currently a #1 best seller on Amazon, averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 280 customers, and its typical list price of $26.74 has been reduced 56% to just $11.69. Click over to Amazon to see this deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple CEO Tim Cook declared the PC dead in a famous 2015 interview. Apparently, he's wrong, and the PC market will live another day.Gartner is projecting annual PC shipments to return to growth in 2018, ending a historic skid that started in 2012, the year Microsoft released Windows 8.The growth in 2018 will be minor. Gartner is projecting shipments of laptops, hybrids, and desktops to be around 272 million in 2018, growing from 266 million in 2017. PC shipments in 2016 were 268 million, according to the research firm.There were a few bright spots in the PC market over the last few years, including the fourth quarter of 2014, when Gartner said shipments grew by 1 percent. But on an annual basis, PC shipments have been dropping and hit double-digit declines in 2015, the year Microsoft released Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Get your Gadget On!Image by IDG / Network WorldIt's time once again for the International CES, the world's largest consumer electronics trade show. Thousands of people will flock to Las Vegas to see the latest gizmos, gadgets, TVs, computers, smartphones, robots and other devices meant to make our lives easier. Here's a sneak peek at some of the products on display at the show.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services recently announced a new Managed Services product for its public cloud that aims to ease migration of legacy enterprise applications to that cloud.AWS Managed Services is a series of infrastructure operations management tools meant to provide ongoing management, support, monitoring and security of an AWS cloud environment. It’s delivered jointly by AWS employees and certified AWS partners and is meant to serve AWS’s largest clients who are planning to migrate workloads to Amazon’s public cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 10 Must-watch IaaS cloud trends for 2017 | Why Azure’s chief believes Microsoft is in prime position in IaaS +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security vendor Kaspersky Lab has updated its antivirus products to fix an issue that exposed users to traffic interception attacks.The problem was found by Google vulnerability researcher Tavis Ormandy in the SSL/TLS traffic inspection feature that Kaspersky Anti-Virus uses to detect potential threats hidden inside encrypted connections.Like other endpoint security products, Kaspersky Anti-Virus installs a self-signed root CA certificate on computers and uses it to issue "leaf," or interception, certificates for all HTTPS-enabled websites accessed by users. This allows the product to decrypt and then re-encrypt connections between local browsers and remote servers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is usually used to launch new hardware—from laptops to mobile phones, from Wi-Fi routers to connected toasters.One thing it doesn’t see much of is the launch of software products. But that is what we’re seeing today with the launch of Kuzzle, a new backend platform that sees itself as the route to “seamless software development across all devices, services and platforms.”That’s a pretty lofty claim (OK, a very lofty one), especially since Kuzzle goes up against a range of tools: Salesforce’s platform, pure mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) solutions like Kinvey, as well as mobile development platforms. So, what is Kuzzle about, and what gives it the confidence to claim differentiation?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I spend a reasonable amount of time formally or informally consulting to large organizations about their technology choices. These engagements can be as simple as a quick discussion over a coffee or a long-term consulting gig. In either case, vendors seek to leverage the fact that, as an independent observer of the technology space, I can give a broader take on what is going on and what that means for their particular technology requirements.Often technology practitioners within a large organization simply don’t have the time or bandwidth to look broadly, and while they may be deeply aware of what their own particular technology supplier does, they lack a more industry-wide perspective.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
TCL Communication has big plans for BlackBerry, even though it's a brand that's been written off by many.The China-based electronics company recently acquired rights to design, manufacture and sell smartphones under the BlackBerry name with BlackBerry's security and service software installed. The deal puts TCL in the driver's seat on hardware and the first phone under the new deal was previewed on Wednesday.While still in the final stages of development, the new handset sports the physical keyboard that propelled BlackBerry to the top of the smartphone market in the 2000s and is the first to combine that keyboard with the Android operating system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sticking with your promisesImage by ThinkstockLike anyone else, security experts set up resolutions they hope to conquer in the new year. Now the question will remain, will they be able to follow through on them or -- like that diet people promised to hold to – will they go back to the same old habits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Central processing units (CPUs) from vendors such as Intel and to a lesser extent AMD have been staples in the data center for decades. Both companies have done an outstanding job making CPUs faster and containing more cores so businesses can run computationally intensive processes on them. However, digital technologies such as deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are driving the need for a new model of computing beyond the capabilities of CPUs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
How many years have we been hearing about the dangers of leaving MongoDB instances unprotected? In December 2015, Shodan creator John Matherly warned that there were 684.8 TB of data exposed due to publicly accessible MongoDB instances. Yet there are still people don’t who bother to learn how to lock it down and so now a hacker is targeting and erasing those MongoDB installations, replacing the data with a ransom demand.Security researcher Victor Gevers, aka @0xDUDE and co-founder of the GDI Foundation, has personally been notifying owners of exposed MongoDB for years. But near the end of 2016, he came across an open MongoDB server that had the database contents replaced with a ransom note.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel has a disastrous history with smartphones. It fumbled a chance to be in Apple's first iPhone, and then quit making its Atom smartphone chip to focus on modems.
But the company is now set to ship a groundbreaking modem that will deliver data transfer rates many times faster than most wired internet connections.
The chipmaker will start shipping its first 5G modem for testing in the second half this year. Beyond mobile devices, the modem could also be used in autonomous cars, servers, base stations, networking equipment, drones, robots, and other internet-of-things devices.
In name, 5G is the successor to 4G in today's mobile devices, but it's significantly faster and more versatile. It will combine multiple wireless high-speed and low-bandwidth technologies and enable communications across an array of spectrum bands. New 5G networks are expected to be deployed starting in 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here