Pragmatic approachImage by ThinkstockData and document security with today’s mobile workforce can be a difficult challenge. This is not a “one-size-fits-all” problem; one needs to weigh the risks to ensure that you are operating within a tolerable risk level or the opposite in which you put significant controls around devices, hamper productivity for no benefit. Take a pragmatic approach – you want the ability to clearly and justly answer the organization's question of, “Why is this security measure necessary?” As security leaders, we want to allow your teams to move as fast as possible and not deploy a policy or technology because someone touts it as the best way to do something. Security vendor Conga provides these tips for that healthy balance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft’s latest Windows Insider build 14965 is showing a "virtual touchpad" feature that could replace the mouse—or in any case, make life easier for Windows tablet users. It puts a touchpad on your tablet screen, so you can use that instead of a mouse whenever you connect your device to a larger display.Features that pop up in builds don't always make it to final versions, of course, but this feature is intriguing. From the sounds of it, first-time setup is fairly easy. When a tablet, such as the Surface Pro 4, is connected to an external display, open the Action Center and tap on the Project Quick Action tile. This will extend the Windows desktop to the external display. Next, long-press the taskbar on your tablet. When it appears select Show touchpad button.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this week, Donald Trump shocked pollsters and political pundits across the country after winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Despite an incredibly close race, Trump managed to win the election after over-performing in a number of key battleground states, such as Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania. Consequently, Trump received more than the needed 270 electoral votes even though Hillary Clinton received more votes in the popular vote.Taking a step back, it would be a gross understatement to call this year's election divisive. Trump is nothing if not controversial, and his recent victory has generated a tremendous amount of backlash and fear on the left and an equal amount of applause on the right.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a perfect example of how public wireless networks can be dangerous for privacy and security, an Israeli hacker showed that he could have taken over the free Wi-Fi network of an entire city.On his way home from work one day, Amihai Neiderman, the head of research at Israeli cybersecurity firm Equus Technologies, spotted a wireless hotspot that he hadn't seen before. What made it unusual was that it was in an area with no buildings.It turned out that the hotspot he saw, advertised as "FREE_TLV," was part of the citywide free Wi-Fi network set up by the local administration of Tel Aviv, Israel. This made Neiderman wonder: How secure is it?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Daydream mobile virtual reality experience proves critics who call VR a fad wrong. Google’s new platform will attract many new apps and experiences and create new business models.
Daydream VR combined with the Pixel hardware’s powerful performance and thoughtful design of the headset will create a market of hundreds of millions of VR-capable phones. The Pixel is expensive, but the relentlessly declining price performance of mobile components will quickly bring affordability into alignment with consumers’ budgets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Walmart is gearing up for Black Friday 2016 with deals featuring brand names like Apple and HP and products ranging from drones to iPhones to big HDTVs.Black Friday watchers such as BFads and Best Black Friday have been tracking new ads closely and we've been watching them closely.The retailer will open stores on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24), with online deals will start just after midnight on Thanksgiving. Sensitive to possible criticism of having people working on the holiday, Walmart points out that store associates will be served dinner and receive a 25% discount on goods.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The first real slew of Black Friday 2016 Apple product deals has been revealed courtesy of a Target ad leak, while Sears and Kmart will also lure shoppers with some cut-rate electronics prices over the Thanksgiving weekend.
Black Friday watchers such as BFads and Best Black Friday have been tracking new ads closely and we've been watching them closely...
Black Friday deals this year are getting more and more complicated as retailers stretch the shopping holiday across November. Target, for example, is offering an early access window that ends Nov. 10 for items such as Apple TV systems at 25% off, with in-store shoppers required to use the company’s Cartwheel app to score deals. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yahoo said investigators were looking into the possibility that some people within the company knew at the time about the late 2014 theft of information of at least 500 million user accounts.Law enforcement authorities on Monday also “began sharing certain data that they indicated was provided by a hacker who claimed the information was Yahoo user account data,” the company said in a regulatory filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Yahoo said it would “analyze and investigate the hacker’s claim.” It isn't clear if this data is from the 2014 hack or from another breach.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When President-elect Donald Trump officially takes office, he’ll inherit a powerful U.S. surveillance apparatus, including the National Security Agency, that’s already been accused of trampling over privacy rights.
This has some legal experts worried, but like almost every other aspect of a Trump presidency, there are more questions than clarity over what exactly he plans to do.
Over the course of his presidential campaign, Trump has only offered snapshots on his views about various U.S. privacy matters, but they suggest a pro-government surveillance stance.
For instance, Trump showed support for the NSA’s bulk telephone data collection, which ended last year. “I err on the side of security,” he said at the time. And on Apple's refusal to provide the FBI access to an iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter: the public should boycott the company until it complies, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Be prepared for the unexpected emergency with this 100-piece 1st aid kit from TripWorthy that is lightweight, small and durable so you can take it wherever you go. Ideal for hiking, camping, hunting or anywhere you may travel. This #1 Best Selling item on Amazon averages 4.8 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 500 people (88% rate 5 stars: read reviews) and its typical list price of $35 has been reduced to $20. See it on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's vision for the country's economy-driving technology industry is largely a blank canvas, and when he's dipped his toe into IT issues, he's made people nervous.
Trump's campaign was dominated by debates over illegal immigration, lost manufacturing jobs, and character issues. Silicon Valley firms largely opposed Trump, and one of his signature issues, rewriting free trade deals between the U.S. and other nations, likely will hurt U.S tech companies' ability to sell products overseas.
Meanwhile, digital rights groups say they expect Trump to call for expanded government surveillance programs to fight terrorism and fewer protections for privacy. And a Trump administration will likely work to gut net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission passed only last year, although repealing the rules won't be easy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wide area network (WAN) decision-making today generally centers on Internet Protocol (IP)-based services. But many organizations are still running older networking services in various parts of the enterprise, limiting their ability to take advantage of new intelligent features and applications.IP services provide a rich and automated feature set that has been widely deployed and which enable automation and business agility. Among the key enterprise benefits:
Flexibility to forward traffic directly among any of your MPLS VPN-connected sites
Revolutionary programmability with software-defined networking (SDN) over IP
With IP-over-Ethernet in the last mile you can easily increase or decrease access speeds
IP-based cellular links can provide a primary or a backup last-mile link
Unseen bottlenecksTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Madison County, Indiana, population of about 130,000, was the victim of a ransomware attack last week. Government workers without working computers were thrown back in the past to pen and paper, confusion abounds, and county commissioners unanimously voted to pay the ransom.Indiana State Police Capt. Dave Bursten told WTHR, “It's like when I came on in the 80s - we're doing everything with pencil and paper.”“We cannot query old information to bring up prior reports or prior court records,” Madison County Sheriff Scott Mellinger told Fox59. “If we want to bring somebody’s record up for something in the future, let’s say for somebody that has been arrested or somebody who is even in jail then we cannot look up information that would help us at a hearing. On the sheriff’s office side, we cannot book people into jail using the computers. We are using pencil and paper like the old days.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Most election prediction shops and public polls in recent days foresaw Republican Donald Trump losing the U.S. presidential race to Democrat Hillary Clinton.They got it wrong, bigly. And the failed predictions could cast doubts on some hot technology sectors, including big data and customer relationship management.Not so fast, say some data experts. The problem with the polls and with forecasters like FiveThirtyEight may have more to do with data collection than data crunching, they say.Data analysis worked well in the Moneyball model for the Oakland Athletics, but baseball stats are different than election polling, said CRM analyst Denis Pombriant, founder of Beagle Research Group. Statisticians have been collecting "highly reliable" baseball data for more than a century, while polling data is more squishy, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hardly a day goes by that there isn't news of another vulnerability, another attack, another patch — and often the biggest, baddest of its kind.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
IBM has released an experimental program developers can use to embed Watson cognitive intelligence features in all manner of IoT systems from robots and drones to sensors and avatars.IBM says the platform, called Project Intu lets Project Intu offers developers easily build cognitive or basically machine learning skills into a wide variety of operating systems – from Raspberry PI to MacOS, Windows to Linux devices. Devices using Intu can “interact more naturally with users, triggering different emotions and behaviors and creating more meaningful and immersive experience for users. Developers can simplify and integrate Watson services, such as Conversation, speech-to-text, Language and Visual Recognition, with the capabilities of the “device” to, in essence, act out the interaction with the user,” IBM stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The traditional update to a major product release is a service pack, which is mostly bug fixes and maybe a few new features. But Microsoft is doing something a little different with the release of "Feature Pack 1" for SharePoint 2016. + Also on Network World: Nov 2016 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft released 14 security updates, 6 rated critical +
Microsoft released SharePoint Server 2016 in May, along with mobile apps for iOS and Android shortly thereafter. Mobile access was one of the major emphasis points in SharePoint 2016, along with hybrid cloud support and Office 365 support. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's been a lot of talk about engagement in the workplace -- whether or not employees are happy and satisfied, and what that means for their work performance. In a two-year study of the American Workplace, Gallup found that as much as 70 percent of the U.S. workforce is not engaged at work. This isn't a recent trend, either. The report indicates that over the past 15 years, engagement has consistently held under 33 percent.Engagement is often tied to company culture -- the idea being that providing the right perks and environment for your workers will boost engagement. But the stats suggest that the past few years of focusing on company culture hasn't done much to boost engagement. That's why Aye Moah, chief of product at Boomerang, a company focused on productivity software, suggests backing off company culture and focusing on the "employee experience."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) with the creation at the end of September of a new AI and Research Group. This newly formed group brings together Microsoft's research organization and more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on AI and is now the fourth major division in the company, on par with the Windows, Office and Cloud divisions.The job of the AI and Research Group will be to work on four overarching initiatives:
Harnessing AI through agents such as Cortana, the company's digital personal assistant
Infusing AI into Skype, Office 365 and every other Microsoft application
Making cognitive capabilities such as vision and speech and machine analytics available to external developers
Using Azure to build a powerful AI supercomputer in the cloud to provide "AI as a Service”
[ Get ready for the bot revolution]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Most discussions about cybersecurity tend to go right to technology, and these days they usually start with the words “next generation” as in next-generation firewalls, IPS, endpoint security, etc. I get it, since innovative technology is sexy, but it’s important to realize that skilled cybersecurity professionals anchor cybersecurity best practices. We depend on actual people to configure controls, sort through data minutiae to detect problems, and remediate issues in a timely manner.+ Also on Network World: Recruiting and retaining cybersecurity talent +
Since these folks protect all our digital assets daily, it’s only natural that we’d be curious as to how they are doing. To measure these feelings, ESG teamed up with the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and conducted a survey of 437 global cybersecurity professionals. This project resulted in a recently published research report. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here