We heart this hardwareWe love all our gear, from our desktop PCs to every last one of our high-tech gadgets, but some pieces of kit hold a very special place in our hearts. It can’t be helped. A component either fulfills its performance promise so spectacularly, or it perfectly satisfies a particular need, or we’re just plain attached to it out of well-worn habit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Like Google, Microsoft has been differentiating its products by adding machine learning features. In the case of Cortana, those features are speech recognition and language parsing. In the case of Bing, speech recognition and language parsing are joined by image recognition. Google’s underlying machine learning technology is TensorFlow. Microsoft’s is the Cognitive Toolkit. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Los Angeles is famous for its warm weather and movie stars. But what may not be as well known is that it's also one of the largest targets for cyber attacks in the world.The city's infrastructure in highways, water and power -- and all the data behind it -- supports 4 million residents in the nation's second largest city. The city also collects data about Los Angeles International Airport as well as about the largest shipping port in the western hemisphere, where 43% of imported goods enter the U.S. The city government is even responsible for data related to elections, including yesterday's national election.It's not difficult to see the enormity of the city's security challenge, which includes protecting the personal data of city workers and residents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The prospect of an army of robots marching in unison to launch an attack on an unsuspecting city belongs in the realm of science fiction—as do most images of menacing autonomous machines wreaking all kinds of havoc on civilization.That’s not to say robotics is free from security and safety threats, however. In fact, experts say the growing use of robots by companies such as manufacturers, retailers, healthcare institutions and other businesses can present a number of cyber risks.There are two primary issues related to security and robotics, says Michael Overly, a partner and information security attorney at law firm Foley & Lardner.First, these machines are generally integral to assembly line operations and other similar activities, Overly says. “An attack could literally bring a manufacturing or assembly plant to its knees,” he says. “We have seen this very outcome in a ransomware attack targeted at robotic assemblers in a plant in Mexico.” In that case, the ransomware locked up the specifications files from which the robots drew their operating parameters, he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President-elect Donald Trump realized early in his campaign that U.S. IT workers were angry over training foreign visa-holding replacements. He knew this anger was volcanic.Trump is the first major U.S. presidential candidate in this race -- or any previous presidential race -- to focus on the use of the H-1B visa to displace IT workers. He asked former Disney IT employees, upset over having to train foreign replacements, to speak at his rallies."The fact is that Americans are losing their jobs to foreigners," said Dena Moore, a former Disney IT worker at a Trump rally in Alabama in February. "I believe Mr. Trump is for Americans first."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Rumors of Moore's Law's demise have been slightly exaggerated. Advances in computing power, data analytics, the cloud and other technologies just keep marching on -- albeit a bit slower. But as enterprises become more data-driven, it's not the hardware or the infrastructure that's at issue. It's the fact that tech pros with skills relating to organizing, analyzing and securing that data are increasingly harder to find.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Your resume is an extension of you professionally, and to some extent personally, and because you only have one chance to create that best first impression on paper, make sure it counts in a big way. Before you actually get an interview, an employer has to value your resume enough to want to pick up the phone. Here are a few secrets to the making of an eye-catching project management resume that will get employers calling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Filling cybersecurity jobs is getting so hard managers need to think outside the box if they hope to fill critical positions, experts say.That means redefining jobs, training human resources departments to screen resumes differently, seeking latent talent already inside the organization, and hiring bright, motivated people who can grow into critical roles, according to an expert panel speaking at the recent Advanced Cyber Security Center conference in Boston.+More on Network World: Phishing scheme crimps El Paso for $3.2 million+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a shoppers’ delight and many retailers’ busiest time of the year. For Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which owns and operates Lord & Taylor, Saks 5th Avenue and several other brands, last year’s holiday rush turned out to be the perfect time to try out new web site features.
HBC uses a fairly typical Oracle WebLogic application server and an ecommerce platform named Blue Martini from RedPrairie. Basically the stack has been developed and refined over the years. It worked but it was “hard to deploy to, hard to change and … hard to upgrade,” said Matthew Pick, who manages an infrastructure engineering team at HBC and spoke about the company’s digital transformation at a conference hosted by cloud vendor Joyent earlier this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today and tomorrow only (11/9 & 11/10), Amazon Prime members (or those with a free trial: here you go) get Amazon Dash buttons for $0.99 instead of $4.99 when you use our code IDGDASH at checkout. Limit 3 buttons on the deal. And Amazon pays you a $4.99 credit after your first button push, so you sort of make money on this deal, don't you. Amazon Dash is a simple Wi-Fi connected gadget that lets you order your favorite things with just the push of a button. Keep it by your washing machine, your pet food, or in the bathroom closet. When you notice you're running low, just press the button and Amazon ships it right out. Each button gets tied to a specific product from Amazon's library of over 200 brands, in categories such as (click each category to see samples) household supplies, beverage & grocery, health & personal care, beauty products, pets, kids & baby, and more. Visit Amazon now, select up to 3 buttons and use IDGDASH to sink the price from $4.99/button to just $0.99. (Access this deal on Amazon)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this year, Microsoft made a splash at its Ignite conference for IT professionals when it announced that it has been racking cards of programmable chips together with servers in its cloud data centers.
The chips, called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), can be reconfigured after being deployed to optimize them for particular applications such as networking and machine learning.
Now, Microsoft is investing in tools that would allow customers to program the FPGAs, said Scott Guthrie, the executive vice president in charge of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise division, during a talk at the Structure conference in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Modular and open-source are now the watchwords for network infrastructure, whether you’re delivering internet connections or VR cat videos.On Tuesday at the Structure 2016 conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced its most powerful modular data-center switch yet, and AT&T gave an update on its huge migration from dedicated servers to a software-based architecture.Once the same kind of hardware can do different things in a network, everyone gets more freedom to accomplish what needs to get done.That’s true for Facebook, which built on its own switch innovations and software stack in the new Backpack switch, and for AT&T, which says enterprises can now order and turn on services in 90 seconds instead of 90 days. Agility is also the key selling point for cloud companies like Google, which hopes its customers can ignore hardware altogether in a few years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has patched 68 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Edge, Internet Explorer and SQL Server, two of which have already been exploited by attackers and three that have been publicly disclosed.The patches are covered in 14 security bulletins, one dedicated to Adobe Flash Player which is upgraded through Windows Update in Windows 10 and 8.1. Six of the bulletins are rated critical and eight are rated important.Administrators should prioritize the Windows patches in the MS16-135 bulletin, because they address a zero-day vulnerability that's already being exploited by a group of attackers known in the security industry as Fancy Bear, APT28 or Strontium.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the changing rules of business and the competitive environment, businesses need a high performance network today – and for tomorrow. Many, though, are still operating separate voice and data networks that limit flexibility and inhibit agility.Carriers such as AT&T have long digitized voice traffic over their long-haul networks. On the AT&T network, the volume of data traffic exceeded voice traffic in 2000 as the Internet transformation took hold and businesses increasingly looked to data networks to handle voice, video, telepresence and other sophisticated applications such as virtual white boards.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft today patched a Windows vulnerability that was disclosed just over a week ago by researchers from Alphabet Inc.'s Google.In one of several security updates -- 14 to be exact -- Microsoft fixed the bug in the Windows kernel drivers that Google security engineers had revealed on Oct. 31, 10 days after notifying Microsoft of the vulnerability.Microsoft credited Neel Mehta and Billy Leonard of Google's Threat Analysis Group for reporting the flaw. Last week, the two said that because the vulnerability was being actively exploited, a disclose-within-seven-days policy applied.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The malware behind last month's massive distributed denial-of-service attack in the U.S. appears to be losing its potency. Ironically, hackers are to blame for diluting its power. The malware known as Mirai -- which is now available on the internet -- has become a bit too popular in the hacking community, according to security firm Flashpoint.Competing hackers have all been trying to take advantage of Mirai to launch new DDoS attacks. To do so, that means infecting the poorly secured internet-connected devices, such as surveillance cameras, baby monitors, and DVRs, that the malware was designed to exploit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google infrastructure czar Urs Hölzle is focused on a cloud future where customers don't think about the infrastructure underlying all of the workloads they're running.In his view, one of the key advantages of the cloud is that customers can get the benefits of new hardware without having to completely rework their software."So that means you can have a million customers who move to that new hardware platform, not knowing they did," he said Tuesday at the Structure Conference in San Francisco. "Which means that you can really insert this new technology in a much faster cycle than you could if you did the same thing on-premises."That means companies can get quick, seamless improvements to performance, as opposed to an on-premises deployment. When operating their own data centers, companies must take the time to evaluate new hardware, and take the time to roll it out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're looking for a ton of portable storage at a rock bottom price, you may want to consider this deal currently available on Amazon. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars from nearly 6,200 people (read reviews), this Western Digital external hard drive features fast USB 3.0 connectivity, is compatible with both PC and Mac, has optional 256-bit AES hardware encryption, automatic cloud backup, and comes with a 3-year warranty. List price is $119.99 but with the current 26% discount you can buy it now for $89 (See it on Amazon). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google, Amazon, and Facebook can magically recognize images and voices, thanks to superfast servers equipped with GPUs in their mega data centers.But not all companies can afford that level of resources for deep learning, so they turn to cloud services, where servers in remote data centers do the heavy lifting.Microsoft has made such cloud services trendy with Azure and is one of the few companies offering remote servers with GPUs, which excel in machine-learning tasks. But Azure uses older Nvidia GPUs, and it now has competition from Nimbix, which offers a cloud service with faster GPUs based on the Nvidia's latest Pascal architecture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
South Korean investigators on Tuesday raided the offices of Samsung Electronics, as part of a probe into alleged political corruption at the highest levels of that country’s government.The administration of President Park Guen-hye – who is South Korea’s first female president, and the daughter of former President Park Chung-hee – has been rocked by allegations of influence peddling centered on a mysterious figure said to have influenced policy decisions in exchange for cash.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Samsung apologizes for the exploding Note7 with a full-page ad | Phenomenal Note7 Phablet Flame-out Timeline +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here