The data scientist role was thrust into the limelight early this year when it was named 2016's "hottest job," and there's been considerable interest in the position ever since. Just recently, the White House singled data scientists out with a special appeal for help.
Those in the job can expect to earn a median base salary of roughly $116,840 -- if they have what it takes. But what is it like to be a data scientist? Read on to hear what three people currently on the front lines had to say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung Electronics has agreed to buy Viv Labs, an artificial intelligence startup created by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham.You may not have heard of Kittlaus, Cheyer or Brigham, but if you own an iPhone you've probably spoken with one of their creations, Siri. Apple bought their first startup, a spinoff from SRI International, in 2010. A couple of years later, they left to create Viv.Samsung's move into AI could be seen as a reaction to Google's launch of a new AI assistant on its Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones on Tuesday.Like Google Assistant, Viv is designed to answer natural language queries by integrating with a variety of web services. But where Google already has a range of in-house services -- Maps, Gmail, search -- from which to gather context, Viv aims to build an open ecosystem. Many of the useful functions will be delivered by third party developers, a model similar to the one Amazon.com is pursuing for its Echo devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
4chan, the wretched hive of scum and villainy that has caused more disruptions on the internet and in real life than any other single website, is in financial trouble and facing the harsh reality that success and traffic are useless without income.The site went live in 2003 when then-15-year-old Christopher "moot" Poole set it up as a copy of a Japanese board called 2chan. The site is the ultimate in bare bones. No login or account is required; everyone is anonymous. Poole, a fan of Japanese pop culture, wanted to create an American equivalent of 2chan, where people shared images of anime and manga.It rapidly grew beyond that, with the /b/ board, Random, becoming a hive of all sorts of insanity. For a while, it was the home base of the hacktivist group Anonymous. 4chan users became notorious for both good deeds and bad, both online and in the real world, resulting in profiles of the site by the Washington Post, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. A book has been written about Anonymous and its 4chan connection, and the site was even the subject of an MIT research paper (PDF). To read Continue reading
Google announced some cool consumer electronics devices at its San Francisco event yesterday hashtagged #MadeByGoogle: Google Home personal digital assistant, two new flagship phones under the new Pixel brand, Chromecast Ultra (capable of 4K video), Google Wi-Fi, and a VR headset for the Pixel phones. The usual sales channels—Verizon, Best Buy and Google Play—will distribute them.It sounds like the consumer electronics business, but it is not.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon has quietly released a good deal on its popular Kindle series of e-readers, but it's available only to Prime Members, or anyone who has an active 30-day free trial. For a limited time, Kindle's price sinks from $80 to $50, Kindle Paperwhite from $120 down to $90, and the Kindle Voyage drops from $200 to just $150. Which dovetails with the new "Prime Reading" benefit they just announced (See: "Prime Members Now Get Unlimited Reading On Any Device, Amazon Announces - Deal Alert" @ Techconnect.com). Kindle discounts applied during checkout.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hacker Guccifer 2.0 now claims to have hacked the Clinton Foundation, but the documents posted show Democratic campaign data from organizations already compromised.Guccifer 2.0, believed by some security experts to be a Russian team of hackers, posted several documents Tuesday that he claims to have taken from servers at the Clinton Foundation, the charity founded by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, husband of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.Earlier this year, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to have hacked both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and the new documents appear to be more of the same. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Historically, most non-networking professionals have considered the network to be the “pipes” or “plumbing” of the organization—something you needed, but low value.Over time, though, the network has steadily increased in value. In today’s digital era, where everything is connected and more applications and services are moving to the cloud, the network has increased significantly in value. It connects employees, customers and guests, and it is the last line of defense for securing the business.Because of the increased business value, how networks are managed must change. The legacy process of touching every device in every location is laborious and filled with errors. The 2016 ZK Research Network Purchase Intention Study showed that the highest cause (35 percent) of network downtime is due to human error from manual configuration. Traditional management is also very slow. Turning up a new location or even making simple changes often required a network engineer to be on site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yahoo has called a Reuters article about a secret email scanning program "misleading," and said no such system exists. On Tuesday, the Reuters article claimed that Yahoo had created the custom software program after receiving a classified U.S. government order. That software program is reportedly capable of scanning all incoming emails from Yahoo customers for information provided by U.S. intelligence officials.However, on Wednesday Yahoo disputed the report.“We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems," the company said in an email. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon has just announced one more compelling reason to consider a Prime membership -- "Prime Reading". As a Prime member, you now have unlimited access to over a thousand books, current issue magazines, comics, Kindle Singles, and more. With access from any device – including your phone, tablet, or Kindle – so you can read as much as you want, however you want, and whenever you want. Learn more about the new benefit and/or the other benefits of a Prime membership (free 2-day shipping, streaming movies & TV, unlimited music, photo storage, and more) at the Amazon Prime Home page. Prime memberships are $99/yr, but the 30-day free trial is typically where most people seem to start.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In order to encrypt some of the most important data stored on computers and servers, the Cerber ransomware now tries to kill processes associated with database servers.The goal for ransomware programs is to affect as many valuable files as possible in order to increase the chance that affected users will pay to have them restored. For consumers these files are things like personal photos, videos, documents and even game saves, but for businesses, its usually data stored in databases.The problem for hackers is that write access to database files can be blocked by the OS if they're already being used by other processes, which prevents the ransomware program from encrypting them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Organizations attempting to implement a world-class insider threat program have learned from experience what doesn't work well (see Part I of this post). As a result, they have a better sense of what they require to prevail in today's evolving insider threat landscape.There is an emerging consensus that any world-class insider threat program must have the following three core characteristics:1. Preventive: Organizations want more than just a threat detection system that tells them an attack has already taken place. They need an early-warning system that allows them to prevent insider threat events through a comprehensive threat assessment framework that leverages all available internal and external data and produces far fewer false negatives and positives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Reports of a secret Yahoo program to search through customers' incoming emails has spurred other tech companies to deny ever receiving a similar request from the U.S. government.The program, reportedly created last year through a classified U.S. order, involves Yahoo searching through hundreds of millions of user accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI.Other U.S. tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook, denied doing anything like it. Most also said they would challenge such a request in court.Privacy advocates said the government enlisting Yahoo to assist in email monitoring would be wrong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google unveiled a massive strategic shift on Tuesday, announcing that it is officially getting into the business of designing and releasing its own smartphones. The Pixel and Pixel XL, announced at a special event in San Francisco, are the company's first forays into that market after working with outside manufacturers for several years to produce its Nexus line of devices.
The phones are snazzy gizmos packed with some of the latest features that Google could come up with, like a new intelligent assistant and a high-quality camera. It feels like one of the best Android smartphones on the market and could be a serious contender to take on Apple's iPhone, especially for people looking to purchase a flagship smartphone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
WikiLeaks is promising to release secret documents relating to the U.S. election, at a time when there are already questions over whether Russian hackers are feeding the site information.WikiLeaks will publish the documents "every week for the next 10 weeks" and the topics include the U.S. election, war, arms, Google, and mass surveillance, site founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday in a press conference. All the U.S. election documents will be released before Nov. 8, when voters cast their ballots. The leaks pertain to "U.S. power factions and how they operate," Assange said. However, he denied deliberately trying to sabotage Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's election chances.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The venerable 105-year-old IBM may be a global company, but while it has operated important labs and offices overseas, its business units have always been headquartered in the U.S. Until December of last year, that is, when it opened the new global headquarters for the IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) unit in Munich, Germany. Now, faced with dramatically increasing global demand for Watson IoT solutions and services, Big Blue is doubling down on that investment.On Tuesday, IBM announced a $200 million investment in the Watson IoT headquarters, marking one of the company's largest investments in Europe in its history. The investment is part of the $3 billion IBM has earmarked to bring Watson cognitive computing to IoT. IBM says the move is a response to escalating demand from customers who are looking to transform their operations using a combination of IoT and artificial intelligence technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this year, Earthlink CEO Joe Eazor realized he needed a CIO to upgrade the company’s clunky legacy software and make its sales process more appealing to business customers browsing the website. Enter Jay Ferro, who led a digital transformation at the American Cancer Society (ACS) before joining EarthLink in July.Serving in a dual role as CIO and chief product officer, Ferro will also help develop and pitch peers on EarthLink’s managed network products, including a new software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's Windows 10 beat a retreat last month, losing user share for the first time since its debut more than a year ago.According to U.S. metrics vendor Net Applications, Windows 10 lost half a percentage point in user share during September, ending the month on 22.5% of all personal computers.Windows 10 powered 24.8% of all machines running Windows: The difference between the user share of all PCs and only those running Windows originated with the fact that Windows powered 91% of all personal computers, not 100%.September's decline was the first since Microsoft officially launched Windows 10 in July 2015, and the only since January 2015, months before when Microsoft offered only a preview to beta testers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The International Trade Commission (ITC) has opened a patent infringement investigation on SK hynix, the world's second largest memory chip manufacturer, based on claims that it infringed on six U.S. patents.Second only to Samsung in global market share for DRAM shipments, Hynix is also the world's fifth-largest semiconductor company. SK hynix memory is used by Apple in some MacBook and MacBook Pro computers and in its iPhones. The memory is also in Asus' Nexus 7 tablet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you want 5G, there’s a good chance you'll need a small cell nearby to deliver it. Putting up that cell may be hard because of a host of problems, but Nokia Bell Labs thinks it can solve some of them with drones and tiny solar panels.Nokia's F-Cell is an experimental LTE small cell that doesn't need any wires. It gets power from solar panels on its surface and communicates with the carrier's core network over a high-speed wireless connection. No one even needs to climb up on a roof to install it: The company recently delivered an F-Cell to the roof of one of its buildings in Sunnyvale, California, using a drone.F-Cells won’t start showing up everywhere tomorrow, but anything to speed up small-cell deployment could make a big difference when 5G starts going live in 2020. The next generation of cellular will probably require dense networks of small cells to deliver the gigabit speeds being promised, and carriers will face both legal and technical hurdles when they try to put them up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Medical device manufacturer Animas, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, is warning diabetic patients who use its OneTouch Ping insulin pumps about security issues that could allow hackers to deliver unauthorized doses of insulin.The vulnerabilities were discovered by Jay Radcliffe, a security researcher at Rapid7 who is a Type I diabetic and user of the pump. The flaws primarily stem from a lack of encryption in the communication between the device's two parts: the insulin pump itself and the meter-remote that monitors blood sugar levels and remotely tells the pump how much insulin to administer.The pump and the meter use a proprietary wireless management protocol through radio frequency communications that are not encrypted. This exposes the system to several attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here