Joe Belfiore, the executive previously leading the Windows Phone charge (or what there was of it), has returned to Microsoft after a year-long trip around the world. And his new mission is to put more ads in Windows 10. About a year ago, Belfiore announced he was taking a one-year sabbatical to sail around the world with his kids in a program called Semester At Sea, an educational cruise program run by the University of Virginia. The cruise went around the world, making stops at every continent except Antarctica. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not advocate a position that is particular to the author’s employer and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.With cybersecurity threats on the rise, companies are increasingly taking advantage of cybersecurity insurance. And while cyber insurance can be worth it, it’ll cost you. Last year, U.S. insurers earned $1B in cyber premiums. You can minimize your premiums by showing your insurance company you’re actively mitigating cyber risks, which is a win-win: lower your risk and secure a more cost-effective insurance plan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Users have praised the performance of Apple's A10 Fusion chip in the iPhone 7, but its underlying graphics architecture may not be so new after all.The GPU in the iPhone 7 uses a custom version of the PowerVR GT7600 GPU, which is based on the same graphics processor architecture as in last year's iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, according to an analysis by The Linley Group, which specializes in semiconductors.Apple has claimed that the A10 Fusion CPU is two times faster than its predecessor, the A9, and the GPU about 50 percent faster.Benchmarking has revealed a mixed bag for A10 Fusion GPU's performance, according to the analyst firm. Some benchmarks supported Apple's GPU performance gain claims, and others fell way off. But the high levels of GPU performance are only temporary.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Saudi Arabia's government agencies were hit with a cyberattack that security researchers are blaming on a worm-like malware that can wipe computer systems, destroying data.Several government bodies and vital installations suffered the attack, disrupting their servers, the country's Saudi Press Agency said on Thursday. The transportation sector was among the agencies hit by an actor from outside the country, the press agency said.Security firms say the attack involved malware called Shamoon or Disttrack that was previously found targeting a Saudi Arabian oil company four years ago. That attack disabled 30,000 computers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
According to the 2016 State of Compliance survey conducted by data management and integration provider Liaison Technologies, one-quarter of top executives are unclear who in their organization is responsible for compliance. And nearly half (47 percent) of respondents to the survey of 479 senior and C-level executives said they don't know which compliance standards apply to their organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Mozilla's Firefox backed further from the brink last month, and Mac owners continued to abandon Apple's Safari, new data released today showed.Also, last month, Microsoft lost another 23 million Internet Explorer and Edge users.According to analytics vendor Net Applications, Firefox's user share -- an estimate of the proportion of all personal computer users who ran that browser -- climbed eight-tenths of a percentage point last month to finish at 11.9%, its highest mark since December 2015. In the last three months, Firefox has regained 4.2 points, recovering from a near-death experience when in August it recorded a user share of just 7.7%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
LAS VEGAS -- Executives at the American Heart Association are betting that the cures for heart disease, stroke and diabetes lie in the cloud.The heart association (AHA), a nonprofit organization that funds research on heart disease and promotes public health policies, is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to set up a cloud-based system where scientists from around the world can store, share and analyze research data.Making that data available in the cloud could accelerate research and lead to a cure for cardiovascular disease, which is the top cause of death worldwide. American Heart Association
Nancy Brown is CEO of the American Heart Association.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the big stories in security over the past year has been the rise of devastating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that have hit sites and organizations like DNS provider Dyn, the BBC and the website of security journalist Brian Krebs.Amazon Web Services is trying to help protect its customers with a new service aimed at mitigating DDoS impacts. It's called Shield, and the free entry-level tier is enabled by default for all web applications running on AWS, starting on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Imagine that you’re Linksys – you’ve been in the home wireless space for decades, even before the term Wi-Fi was created. You’ve been bought and sold a few times to a bunch of different companies (including Cisco), but you’re still plugging away, creating new wireless routers for home users. Then along comes a wave of new products with wireless mesh capabilities, fancy mobile device apps and a whole bunch of media love. You want to just get up and scream, “Hey, new kids! Get off my damn lawn!”OK, maybe that last metaphor is a stretch – Linksys is not the old guy yelling at the millennials, but this company is still considered one of the major players in the home Wi-Fi space, even if they don’t have a bunch of tiny, shiny new mesh units to speak of (at least yet). Their latest Wi-Fi router is the WRT3200ACM AC3200 MU-MIMO Gigabit Wi-Fi Router, and we were lucky enough to take it out for a spin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Got innovation?The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week announced a program it hopes will get the world’s deep-thinkers to collaborate and explore emerging science and technology for advanced applications.+More on Network World: 20 years ago: Hot sci/tech images from 1996+The agency is proposing an online community known as Gamifying the Search for Strategic Surprise (GS3) that would “apply a unique combination of online game and social media technologies and techniques to engage a large number of experts and deep thinkers in a shared analytic process to rapidly identify, understand, and expand upon the potential implications and applications of emerging science and technology. The program will also develop a mechanism to identify and quickly fund research opportunities that emerge from this collaborative process,” DARPA stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Paying respectsImage by Network World staffThe worlds of networking, computing, science and inventions have lost pioneering and influential figures in 2016, from those who brought us networked email to the earliest PCs to movie icons. Here’s our modest tribute to these innovators worth remembering. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A friend I respect a great deal once told me that using Latin makes you sound smart. So, here I go, consciously throwing the term horror vacui your way.
Horror vacui is a concept originally from Aristotle that, according to Porter, Park and Daston, “By the thirteenth century, scholastic writers were beginning to attribute to nature … a kind of force by which nature resists allowing a vacuum to form.”
Something of this character seems to be happening as people rush to fill the void of no official news about the current business challenges Avaya faces. In absence of any real information, a narrative has evolved in the past several weeks that has not been positive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just as the internet changed everything, a new revolution known as the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to produce even greater disruption. Primarily because IoT sensors will be utilized everywhere—in hospitals to monitor medical devices, in factories to supervise operations, in buildings for controlling temperature and lighting, etc. Data from these sensors will be used for operations management, predictive maintenance and much more. Meanwhile, all of these applications are typically integrated with an enterprise’s IT infrastructure. As such, they are introducing a variety of new security challenges.+ Also on Network World: DDoS attacks using IoT devices follow The Manchurian Candidate model +
Just like in current IT environments, there is no security silver bullet that can protect IoT devices from every possible cyber threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Oral-B Floss Action rechargeable electric toothbrush features a dentist-inspired round head and MicroPulse bristles for a superior interdental clean. The specialized bristles are designed to reach deep between teeth and remove more plaque than a regular manual toothbrush. A Visible Pressure Sensor on the PRO 5000 lights up to alert you when you are brushing too hard, which may cause harm. Download the Oral-B App on your smartphone and use Bluetooth technology to get real-time feedback while you clean for improved brushing habits. The highly rated brush lists for $160, but it's currently discounted 53% off to $75 on Amazon, where you'll also find an additional $15 off coupon that will be applied at checkout. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One year ago, 14 people were killed and 22 injured by a husband-and-wife pair of domestic terrorists who attacked a training session of government employees in San Bernardino, Calif. Although the perpetrators were killed in a gun battle with law enforcement within hours of the attack, the FBI’s interest in one terrorist’s iPhone precipitated a public standoff with Apple that captured its own share of national headlines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fact that Amazon Web Services announced three new machine learning services this week shouldn’t come as a surprise. Machine learning, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing are hot buzzwords for cloud vendors and the world was waiting to see how AWS would address it at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
What may be surprising is how Amazon is positioning these new machine learning tools.
+MORE AT NETOWRK WORLD: A peek inside Amazon’s cloud – from global scale to custom silicon | Cool tech at AWS re:Invent +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. Every CISO knows it’s not enough to just use prevention tools to try to keep attackers out of the network. CISOs must have the mindset of “they will get in” and plan accordingly with detection tools.According to Gartner, the average time before a breach is detected is more than 200 days, and too often the breach is detected by an outside organization such as a credit card processor or a law enforcement agency. These facts are simply indefensible when a CISO is called before the Board of Directors to discuss preparedness for cyber incidents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's possible to transmit life-threatening signals to implanted medical devices with no prior knowledge of how the devices work, researchers in Belgium and the U.K. have demonstrated.By intercepting and reverse-engineering the signals exchanged between a heart pacemaker-defibrillator and its programmer, the researchers found they could steal patient information, flatten the device's battery, or send malicious messages to the pacemaker. The attacks they developed can be performed from up to five meters away using standard equipment -- but more sophisticated antennas could increase this distance by tens or hundreds of times, they said."The consequences of these attacks can be fatal for patients as these messages can contain commands to deliver a shock or to disable a therapy," the researchers wrote in a new paper examining the security of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), which monitor heart rhythm and can deliver either low-power electrical signals to the heart, like a pacemaker, or stronger ones, like a defibrillator, to shock the heart back to a normal rhythm. They will present their findings at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in Los Angeles next week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What are the leading causes of storage bottlenecks? They include mismanagement of virtual storage, applications with insufficient or the wrong type of storage, and poor storage design. Let’s explore these further.1. Mismanagement of virtual storageIf you’re not monitoring your IT infrastructure, carving up your storage array or subsystem between numerous virtual machines (VMs) can be challenging. That’s because you have no visibility to the flow of traffic. Allocating your VMs to a logical unit number (LUN) without data to guide you is like building a highway without doing a traffic study to assess traffic volume at different times of the day and week. How would you know how many lanes are required to accommodate the traffic?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Perfect for emergencies, traveling or for anyone who spends time outdoors, the WakaWaka Power+ is a rugged, ultraefficient solar flashlight and charger designed to help people plug into the sun for power and light. It has full battery life after about 12 hours in the sun or 4 hours charged from a wall outlet. From there, the WakaWaka Power+ can get you out of a jam by completely charging your smartphone or USB device in about two hours. And the brilliant Dutch designed Power+ flashlight generates up to 150 hours of bright light whenever you need it. It averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, where its list price of $79 has been reduced 27% to $57.99. See the discounted Power+ solar light and charger on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here