More code, more projectsMaking big software and hardware projects open-source is an increasingly popular thing to do, whether you’re a big company, a small company, or even the government. Here’s a sampling of the latest major projects to hit the open-source realm. Enjoy.Facebook’s VoyagerImage by FacebookTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Someone hacked into my main server. I have a small organization, and the server was an old Apple Xserve 10.6.7 chosen because it’s not the usual host. Now it’s time to scratch security through obscurity off the list.So let’s do a rudimentary recover. Forensics will have to wait.I went to a hosting company to spin up httpd and mail. They’re already my registrar. Pretty big organization.And they don’t have 24/7 support.Since this happened on a Saturday, I was already in trouble. I chose one of their hosting plans. It costs a rudimentary $60 for a web server plus mail. It uses the famous CPanel hosting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Diamonds are among the most expensive gems in the world, but they could also serve as a building block for quantum computers.Because diamonds are structurally sound, researchers believe they could eliminate some of the challenges involved in making stable quantum computers.The potential of quantum computers is enormous -- they could bring massive gains in computational power and ultimately replace today's PCs and servers.But universal quantum computers are still decades away, partly because of the complexity involved in building such systems. Quantum computers are considered notoriously unstable, but researchers working on ways to resolve existing material, programming, and hardware challenges.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A newly discovered Microsoft patent hints that Microsoft is developing more personalized, "human-like" responses for Cortana, so she sounds less generic and speaks to the user directly using personal information.
The patent describes how user-specific information and contextual information is retrieved by querying a user profile database and one or more services, which generates a personalized greeting based on user-specific information, such as user inferences and interests, and the contextual information to generate the personalized greetings for presentation by the digital assistant on the client device. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Best Deals of the Week, October 31st - November 4thCheck out this roundup of the best deals on gadgets, gear and other cool stuff we have found this week, the week of October 24th. All items are highly rated, and dramatically discounted.43% off NETGEAR AC750 WiFi Range ExtenderBoost the range of your existing WiFi and create a stronger signal in hard-to-reach areas with a WiFi range extender like this one from Netgear, which is highly rated and currently discounted 43% on Amazon. . This compact AC750 wall-plug WiFi booster delivers AC dual band WiFi up to 750 Mbps, and is small and discreet, easily blending into your home decor. Well over 13,000 people have reviewed the AC750 on Amazon (read reviews) and have given it an average of 4 out of 5 stars. Right now its list price of $70 has been reduced to $40. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While certain areas of the Windows file structure may be off-limits to direct action — most notably, deleting files inside the C:\Windows (or %windir%) folder — that doesn’t mean that savvy Windows admins and power users can’t selectively prune excess or obsolete files. You just need the right tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Don't be surprised if hackers make their presence felt on U.S. Election Day. Distributed denial-of-service attacks and high-profile leaks are among the tactics they might use if they try to influence Tuesday's vote.
Cybersecurity experts stress it would be incredibly difficult to hack the U.S. election. The system itself is distributed across the country over thousands of voting jurisdictions, making it hard to tamper with on a wide scale.
But hackers could still attempt to sow chaos on Election Day in other ways. The tools and infrastructure to do so are already in place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For the past couple of weeks, the interwebs have been buzzing with talk that Microsoft and Apple have somehow switched positions in the tech world. The formerly staid folks in Redmond, so the theory goes, are now the cool technology innovators, while the once audacious corps in Cupertino has been reduced to milking existing cash cows.The idea got rolling in reaction to a provocative post by legendary entrepreneur Steve Blank, who compared Tim Cook’s regime as Apple’s designated caretaker following Steve Jobs to the long, slow decline at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer, Bill Gate’s designated replacement. And the meme took off with the dueling announcements of Microsoft’s slick new Surface Studio computer and Apple’s underwhelming update of its Macbook Pro laptop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When you travel between countries, the mobile operators that temporarily provide service to your phone need to communicate with your operator back home. This is done over a global interconnection network where most traffic still uses an ageing protocol, called SS7, that's known to be vulnerable to location tracking, eavesdropping, fraud, denial of service (DoS), SMS interception and other attacks.With the advance of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks, some roaming traffic is switching to a newer protocol, called Diameter, that's more secure than SS7 in theory, but which still allows for attacks if it's not deployed with additional security mechanisms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An interesting thing is going on in the application and infrastructure monitoring space. A ton of money is being poured into the various vendors in the market, and all of those vendors are rapidly morphing their platforms to provide holistic monitoring functionality. No longer is it just about application monitoring or infrastructure monitoring in isolation. What is de rigueur today is combined monitoring that provides the often-talked about “single pane of glass” across all of an organizations assets.+ Also on Network World: Infrastructure monitoring products: Users pinpoint the best and worst features +
It’s a fairly busy space—New Relic, DataDog, AppDynamics and a host of others compete. And to that list we must add Wavefront, a Silicon Valley company that recently scored an impressive $52 million by way of a Series B funding round. The company advises that their valuation increased four times compared to their Series A round—no down valuations for this player. It also scored top-shelf investors, existing investors Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures were joined by new investor Tenaya Capital and other equity holders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fine details are still murky, but news surfaced in the last day or two that Tesco Bank, a U.K.-based bank owned by the Tesco supermarket chain, suffered some sort of widespread fraud.
The bank’s CEO, Benny Higgins, told Radio 4 that around 40,000 of the bank’s 7 million accounts had seen “some sort of suspicious transactions.” Of those, around 20,000 customers have actually lost money from their bank accounts. In the interview, the CEO told the BBC he was “very hopeful” that customers would be refunded the lost funds. What he didn’t say is that I am sure he is also “very hopeful” that once this all washes up he and his IT team will still have jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Architects have a new reason to pick up Microsoft's HoloLens, after the launch of an app aimed at helping them explore 3D models of buildings.Trimble launched its SketchUp Viewer app for Microsoft's headset on Monday, which will allow people to use the HoloLens's augmented reality capabilities for viewing models created in SketchUp. The app will have two modes: one that allows people to view a scaled-down version of the model using the HoloLens, and another that allows them to view what a building modeled in SketchUp would look like from the inside.Deploying a HoloLens with SketchUp Viewer will cost businesses a pretty penny. The app costs US$1,500, on top of the HoloLens's whopping $3,000 price tag. Still, it's a new and different way for people to visualize models in a way they couldn't before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SNL over the weekend took advantage of super cool guest host Benedict Cumberbatch to star in a spoof ad about the next great toilet that's based on Apple's famous 1984 Macintosh computer commercial.Why exactly SNL decided to reach back for this classic commercial as inspiration for fresh fun poking at Apple isn't clear, but maybe Apple's latest drawn-out product introduction (MacBook Pros) put someone there over the edge. See the original ad and the SNL spoof below.MORE: Most memorable SNL tech skits and bitsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Containers have become a major fixture of modern application development. Companies are turning to the technology because it helps them more easily create portable, scalable applications that can work in a wide variety of environments, including the public cloud.Microsoft is aiming to further capitalize on that trend with a set of updates announced Monday for its public cloud platform.Azure Container Service, Microsoft’s cloud-optimized container-hosting offering, now supports orchestration using the Kubernetes open-source platform. On top of that, Microsoft has upgraded the service to use DC/OS 1.8.4, which brings improvements like built-in job scheduling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Legacy network and application management tools are significantly underpowered for today’s digital organizations. These old-school tools operate with a “bottoms-up” view of the IT environment, with each element having its own management tool.Gathering insights from these discrete platforms is very difficult, as it requires a tremendous amount of manual data collection, aggregation and analytics. If Spock happened to be the lead engineer, this might be fine, but assuming no one in the IT department went to the Vulcan Science Academy, it’s likely that most organizations struggle with this model.The big weakness of bottoms-up management is that it gives no real view of the end-user experience. It might be helpful in understanding if a certain element is down, but there’s no way to correlate that to the actual performance of an application, which is what the user is seeing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hacker armed with a US$25 PCMCIA card can, within a few minutes, change the vote totals on an aging electronic voting machine that is now in limited use in 13 U.S. states, a cybersecurity vendor has demonstrated.The hack by security vendor Cylance, which released a video of it Friday, caught the attention of noted National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, but other critics of e-voting security dismissed the vulnerability as nothing new.The Cylance hack demonstrated a theoretical vulnerability described in research going back a decade, the company noted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A virtual private network is a secure tunnel between two or more computers on the internet, allowing them to access each other as if on a local network. In the past, VPNs were mainly used by companies to securely link remote branches together or connect roaming employees to the office network, but today they're an important service for consumers too, protecting them from attacks when they connect to public wireless networks. Given their importance, here's what you need to know about VPNs:VPNs are good for your privacy and securityOpen wireless networks pose a serious risk to users, because attackers sitting on the same networks can use various techniques to sniff web traffic and even hijack accounts on websites that don't use the HTTPS security protocol. In addition, some Wi-Fi network operators intentionally inject ads into web traffic, and these could lead to unwanted tracking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the reason's behind Microsoft's recent resurgence has been the company's somewhat surprising and ongoing commitment towards making their own hardware. This new strategy was on full display two weeks ago when the company introduced the Surface Studio, a 28-in. desktop/tablet hybrid that left many tech observers beyond impressed.While Microsoft's foray into the world of hardware began with Steve Ballmer at the helm, the company's hardware strategy was kicked up a notch once Satya Nadella assumed CEO duties in February of 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google just released a new self-contained version of Android Auto that runs on an Android smartphone without a specially equipped head unit. The term “head unit” is auto industry jargon for car stereo or infotainment system. Android Auto 2.0 locks the smartphone and changes the user interface (UI) controls to voice and large icons that the driver can interact within about the time that it takes to change a radio station. It is the safest way to drive and use a smartphone to because it reduces driver distraction.
In 2015, 2,357 more people died in traffic accidents due to distracted driving after a five-decade trend of declining fatalities, according to the Department of Transportation. Though everyone condemns texting, selecting playlists and checking Facebook Messenger while driving, most succumb to the temptation of smartphone notifications while driving and cannot resist looking at their smartphone screens—which for some, are fatally long looks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With report after report about tablet sales falling, it might not come as a surprise that retailers such as HP, Staples and Costco are slashing prices on these slimmed down computers for Black Friday 2016, along with plenty of other tech products.
Black Friday watchers such as BFads and Best Black Friday have been tracking new ads closely.HP's Black Friday deals
HP's Black Friday deals, which kick in online on Thanksgiving Day, also focus on laptops, desktops (for work and gaming) and monitors, with a few speakers and other accessories thrown in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here