The coworking and open-workspace revolutions are upon us.Many modern offices have already switched to open-plan concepts, and dedicated coworking spaces continue to become more and more popular. The general idea is to move office workers from their fixed cubicles to more open environments, to encourage interaction and collaboration. And coworking spaces let employees work from their locations of choice.Today, the sight of workers moving around throughout the day with their laptops is common, and they often huddle with different groups. But how can employees remain both productive and secure in such environments? Here are some basics for anyone who's new to an open office or cowork space.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the years since Lean first revolutionized the manufacturing sector, the basic principles have also shown benefits in other industries and other departments, most notably within technology. But new research emphasizes the major impact Lean can have not just in your IT departments, but across your entire organization.The ultimate goal and guiding principle of Lean is creating perfect value for customers through a perfect value creation process with zero waste. In the day-to-day implementations of Lean, that translates to creating more value with fewer resources and inefficiencies.Perfect value
Organizations that have implemented Lean are seeing this principle become a reality, according to the Lean Business Report 2016 research from visual product delivery solutions company LeanKit, which surveyed 3,000 executives, consultants and team members between September and November 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Motivation is your best accessory with Fitbit Alta-a customizable fitness tracker designed to fit your personal style . Stay motivated by tracking all-day activity like steps, distance, calories burned and active minutes, and get credit for your workouts with Smart Track automatic exercise recognition. At night, track your sleep and set a silent alarm to wake better and get your best rest. No matter where you're headed, the easy-to-read OLED screen keeps your goals in focus with stats, time, and call or text notifications on display. And with accessory wristbands in metal, leather and sport, help you find the right style for every occasion. Wear fitness your way with Fitbit Alta. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Samsung Electronics and its backers in the industry in a design patent dispute with Apple, when in a 8-0 decision it said that “the term 'article of manufacture' is broad enough to embrace both a product sold to a consumer and a component of that product, whether sold separately or not.”But the top court has left a lot unsaid, including by not providing guidance to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on how the damages Samsung has to pay Apple for the infringement of smartphone design patents will have to be calculated. That could also delay for a long time the resolution of the patent dispute between Apple and Samsung, which has already dragged on for a number of years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Depending up on how loosely I define "enterprise technology vendor," I'd say about a third of the 2017 Glassdoor Best Places to Work in the U.S. list consists of companies that supply IT professionals and those they support.Facebook (hey, they sell Workplace collaboration tools) is all the way up to #2, rising from #5 last year, and Google (#4), system integrator World Wide Technology (#5) and Adobe (#9) are all among the top 10. Consulting firm Bain & Co., is #1 for the third time since 2012, and replaces Airbnb as top dog this time around in the 9th annual rankings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Privacy groups in the U.S. and seven European countries will ask consumer protection agencies to investigate the maker of two internet-connected toys for violations of laws designed to protect children's privacy.The complaints are scheduled to be filed Tuesday against Genesis Toys, maker of the My Friend Cayla and I-Que Intelligence Robot toys, and Nuance Communications, the provider of voice-recognition software for the products.The complaints, to be filed in the U.S., France, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Norway, may be only the beginning of actions taken by consumer and privacy groups targeting a lucrative slice of the internet of things market, the so-called internet of toys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google's YouTube have agreed to share with one another identifying digital information of violent terror content that they find on their platforms.When they remove "violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images" from their platforms, the companies will include in a shared industry database the hashes, or unique digital fingerprints, of the content.Other participants can use the shared hashes to help identify matching content on their hosted consumer platforms, review against their respective policies and definitions, and remove the content when appropriate, according to a statement by the companies on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon began counting down to Black Friday 2016 with tons of tech deals in early November, and now that Black Friday (Nov. 25) and Cyber Monday (Nov. 28) have passed, the online retailer is still counting down. Now it's on to the Amazon 12 Days of Deals, playing off the 12 days of Christmas theme.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today only, if you bundle together Amazon's Fire Tablet and Tap, you'll save $80 on the two. The bundle includes the Fire Tablet with 7" Display, Wi-Fi, and 16 GB of storage, and Amazon Tap, the Alexa-Enabled Portable Bluetooth Speaker. With the Fire tablet from Amazon you can enjoy millions of movies, TV shows, songs, Kindle e-books, apps and games. It features a rich 7" IPS display and 1.3 GHz quad-core processor. Available in four colors. Amazon's portable Tap device uses the Alexa Voice Service when connected to Wi-Fi or a mobile hotspot to play music, read the news, provide weather reports, automate your home, and even order a pizza. Provides up to 9 hours of playback and comes with a charging cradle. Bought separately right now you'd pay $199.98, but buy them together today and pay just $119.98 for both. See the discounted bundle on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I spent last week in Las Vegas, along with 32,000 of my closest friends—or at least, with 32,000 other cloud computing devotees attending Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference. Packed to the gills, the event had the excited hum of a fast-growing industry confident it was riding the wave of technical disruption toward market dominance.But amidst all the mechanical bulls, massive EDM dance parties, TV show premieres—not to mention all of the geeky, deep-dive technical sessions that form the backbone of the show—Amazon’s two main keynote sessions made it clear that the company doesn’t merely plan to ride that wave; it figures to own it outright. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The terms digital, speed and agility all go hand in hand. In the digital era, companies need to make decisions and implement them quickly. This has put new pressures on the IT department to responder faster than ever before. To accomplish that, IT needs to be agile, which is why there has been such heavy investment in things such as containers, the cloud, virtualization and other technologies that make the infrastructure more dynamic. The drive to be more agile has been the primary force behind the shift to software-defined networks (SDN). SDNs increase dynamism through programmability, orchestration and network virtualization at a network level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We experimented and tinkered with numerous bots that are available for Slack, the cloud messaging service meant mainly for business. (You can still use Slack for non-work reasons, particularly under the service’s free option.) Here are 10 that could be most helpful working alongside your Slack team.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
What the Linux world can expect in 2017Image by ThinkstockLast year I made a set of predictions of events that I thought would happen in the tech world (focused primarily on Linux and free software). I was mostly right. This has emboldened me to make another set of predictions for 2017. I have no inside knowledge on any of these—I am basing this entirely on the twin scientific principles of star maths and wishy thinking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Wyse 5060 Thin ClientImage by DellTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Flash-backRemember when the web pages were static and boring. And then along came Macromedia Flash. All of a sudden web pages were jumping and hopping with animation delivered by Flash. The multimedia platform has been on a long, slow decline over the past five years, but Flash remains embedded in many of the Internet’s most popular web sites. Here’s a look at some of the key events in the life of Flash. (Read the full story of Flash's demise.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Seven years ago, Steve Jobs launched the once-popular Abode Flash into a long, slow death spiral when he announced that Flash would not be installed on any of his cutting-edge products, particularly the iPad and iPhone. Jobs argued that Flash was slow, cumbersome, battery intensive, incompatible with touch-screens, and had massive security issues.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Have you ever handed your phone over to someone you didn’t know so that he or she could verify data you have saved in an app? A minister and his wife did and their story is a disturbing cautionary tale as to why you shouldn’t hand your phone over to anyone.The following information comes from a lawsuit (pdf) against Toyota and a specific dealership as well as a Dallas Morning News report.Pastor Tim Gautreaux and his wife, Claire, were interested in buying a Prius from Texas Toyota of Grapevine. They had taken the dealership’s advice and used an app to get pre-approved for financing via Capital One Financial Corporation. An internet car salesman claimed he needed to show the pre-approved financing information in the app to his manager. The pastor unlocked his phone and handed it over.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What could possibly be creepier than a government organization (such as the NSA) having nearly unlimited access to your private, personal information (including access to your webcam)? Turns out, the answer is: when it gets turned into a video game. And it appears, they have done this. On Dec. 1, 2016, Wikileaks released a collection of documents relating to the German parliament inquiry of the cooperation between the German foreign intelligence agency (the BND) and the United States’ NSA. One particular document (pdf) within that collection caught my attention. It appears to be a report from an official at the European Cryptologic Center (ECC) from April 13, 2012, detailing how they can improve usage of Xkeyscore (XKS) to collect information about people. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new software development technique promises to end destructive exploits from hackers. The concept is to continually, and repeatedly, rearrange the program’s code while it’s running—and do it very quickly. Doing that shuts down the hacker’s “window of opportunity” because he doesn’t know where to find bugs to hit with his poisonous attack. The scrambling occurs over milliseconds.Code reuse attacks are the kind of harmful exploits that can be stopped dead in their tracks, researchers say in an article on Columbia University’s website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two researchers claim to have found a way to bypass the activation lock feature in iOS that's supposed to prevent anyone from using an iPhone or iPad marked as lost by its owner.The first report came Sunday from an Indian security researcher named Hemanth Joseph, who started investigating possible bypasses after being confronted with a locked iPad he acquired from eBay.The activation lock gets enabled automatically when users turn on the Find My iPhone feature via iCloud. It links the device to their Apple IDs and prevents anyone else from accessing the device without entering the associated password.One of the few things allowed from the activation lock screen is connecting the device to a Wi-Fi network, including manually configuring one. Hemanth had the idea of trying to crash the service that enforces the lock screen by entering very long strings of characters in the WPA2-Enterprise username and password fields.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here