Casual mobile virtual reality (VR) will eat the world when Google announces its Daydream VR platform with its six hardware partners in October. Within two years, millions of consumers will become accustomed to using augmented reality (AR) and VR, casually, like they use GPS and voice to text now because there will be a VR app for that—whatever that is. Extending VR into the mobile app ecosystem will produce VR use cases that haven’t dawned on the average consumer.+ Also on Network World: Google Daydream is a contrarian platform bet on mobile virtual reality +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The answer is almost certainly no, but …If you’ve been following the political news today, one joyously mocked aspect of Donald Trump’s latest Twitter rant early this morning has been that one of the tweets was apparently sent at 3:20 a.m.
I say apparently – despite the clearly visible 3:20 a.m. time-stamp – because Twitter time-stamps have been known to go haywire in the past, sometimes causing problems, such as when the bug made it appear that Alec Baldwin’s wife Hilaria had tweeted idle pleasantries during the June 2013 funeral of Sopranos star James Gandolfini. Hilaria had done no such thing, but erroneous reports to the contrary sparked by the bug caused her husband to blow a gasket.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I attended the Splunk user conference earlier this week (.Conf2016) and came away pretty impressed. Since I started watching Splunk years ago, the company climbed from a freemium log management and query tool for IT and security nerds to one of the leading security analytics and operations platform. Not surprisingly then, security now represents around 40% of Splunk’s revenue. Given the state of the cybersecurity market, Splunk wants to work with existing customers and get new ones to join in to build on this financial and market success.To that end, Splunk really highlighted three enhancements for its enterprise security product:1. An ecosystem and architecture for incident response. Splunk often acts as a security nexus for its customers, integrating disparate data into a common platform. It now wants to extend this position from analytics to incident response by building IR capabilities into its own software and extending this architecture to partners through APIs, workflows, and automation. Splunk calls this adaptive response. For now, Splunk doesn’t see itself as an IR automation and orchestration platform for complex enterprise environments (in fact Phantom and ServiceNow were both exhibiting at the event) but it does Continue reading
It’s a question of who controls your data – all of it. Think of all the data that say Apple, Google or Facebook or even your health care provider has collected on you and you wanted to remove it or move it elsewhere. It wouldn’t be easy.The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has issued a request for information about how much is too much or too little data portability and what are the implications?+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Outsourcing consultancy and research firm Information Services Group (ISG) this week unveiled a new research report to quantify the cost savings and productivity gains from automating IT services.The inaugural Automation Index shows improvements in productivity fueled by automation can more than double the cost savings typically derived from outsourcing IT. Total cost reduction ranged from 26 percent to 66 percent, depending on the service tower, with 14 to 28 percentage points of these savings directly attributable to automation, according to ISG. (The typical cost savings from labor arbitrage and process improvements alone range from 20 percent to 30 percent).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To protect users from cryptographic attacks that can compromise secure web connections, the popular Firefox browser will block access to HTTPS servers that use weak Diffie-Hellman keys.Diffie-Hellman is a key exchange protocol that is slowly replacing the widely used RSA key agreement for the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol. Unlike RSA, Diffie-Hellman can be used with TLS's ephemeral modes, which provide forward secrecy -- a property that prevents the decryption of previously captured traffic if the key is cracked at a later time.However, in May 2015 a team of researchers devised a downgrade attack that could compromise the encryption connection between browsers and servers if those servers supported DHE_EXPORT, a version of Diffie-Hellman key exchange imposed on exported cryptographic systems by the U.S. National Security Agency in the 1990s and which limited the key size to 512 bits. In May 2015 around 7 percent of websites on the internet were vulnerable to the attack, which was dubbed LogJam.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. Location, location, location! It turns out that mantra is not just for the real estate market. Location is a critical aspect of fog computing as well.Cisco introduced the notion of fog computing about two and a half years ago. (See Cisco unveils 'fog computing' to bridge clouds and the Internet of Things.) This distributed computing architecture addresses the challenge of backhauling a lot of raw data generated in the field –say from thousands or millions of IoT devices – to the cloud for analysis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The percentage of IT processed at in-house sites has remained steady at around 70 percent, but data points to a major shift to co-location and cloud for new workloads in the coming years.Half of senior IT execs expect the majority of their IT workloads to reside off-premise in the future, according to Uptime Institute’s sixth annual Data Center Industry Survey. Of those, 70 percent expect that shift to happen by 2020.+ Also on Network World: 10 tips for a successful cloud plan +It is hard to predict what percentage will go to public cloud, but a significant portion of those workloads will be shifting to co-location providers—companies that provide data center facilities and varying levels of operations management and support. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This highly rated splitter from Kinivo takes 5 HDMI inputs from your various devices, and outputs them to one HDMI connection. Ideal for TVs that just don't have that many HDMI inputs. 501BN will automatically switch to the currently active input source if there is only one active input. If there are multiple active inputs, you can simply select using the IR remote or using the selector button on the unit itself. Supports video up to 1080p and 3D as well. The item currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 9,000 customers (read reviews) and its list price of $59.99 is currently discounted 33% to $39.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stolen or weak remote desktop credentials are routinely used to infect point-of-sale systems with malware, but recently they've also become a common distribution method for file-encrypting ransomware.In March, researchers discovered a ransomware program dubbed Surprise that was being installed through stolen credentials for TeamViewer, a popular remote administration tool. But the trend had started long before that, with some ransomware variants being distributed through brute-force password guessing attacks against Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers since 2015.While this method of infection was initially used by relatively obscure ransomware programs, recently it has been adopted by an increasing number of cybercriminals, including those behind widespread ransomware programs such as Crysis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wi-Fi signals can be used to unobtrusively identify different people at a location, such as home. It promises to replace other forms of identification in those domestic environments, Chinese scientists say.The system works by identifying body shapes along with the unique way that individuals move in a room. Those characteristics influence Wi-Fi propagation, researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an claim. The Wi-Fi is affected by the people in the room, and that impact on the wireless access point can be detected and interpreted, they say.INSIDER: 5 ways to prepare for Internet of Things security threats
“Each person has specific influence patterns to the surrounding Wi-Fi signal while moving indoors, regarding their body shape characteristics and motion patterns,” the team writes in an abstract to their paper, published in August.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Computers can already recognize you in an image, but can they see a video or real-world objects and tell exactly what's going on?
Researchers are trying to make computer video recognition a reality, and they are using some image recognition techniques to make that happen.
Researchers in and outside of Google are making progress in video recognition, but there are also challenges to overcome, Rajat Monga, engineering director of TensorFlow for Google's Brain team, said during a question-and-answer session on Quora this week.
The benefits of video recognition are enormous. For example, a computer will be able to identify a person's activities, an event, or a location. Video recognition will also make self-driving cars more viable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
See how businesses are using robots to advance their trades Image by Martyn Williams The RoboBusiness conference in San Jose is all about creating business advantages through the use of robotic helpers. Case in point: the Navii shopping assistant from Fellow Robotics, that can greet customers, ask them if they need help, and then guide them to the item they need. Navii will be working in 11 Lowe’s stores around the San Francisco Bay area beginning this fall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A judge in Texas has fixed for Friday the hearing in a suit filed by four state attorneys general against a decision by the U.S. to transfer by month end oversight of some key internet technical functions to a multistakeholder body.The attorneys general of Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada and Texas filed late Wednesday a suit asking the federal court for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction on the proposed transfer of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.ICANN, under contract with the Department of Commerce, administers the IANA functions, which include responsibility for the coordination of the DNS (Domain Name System) root, IP addressing, and other internet protocol resources. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency within the Commerce Department, said last month it will go ahead with its plan to transfer supervision of the IANA functions to a multistakeholder body on Oct. 1, in line with a plan first announced in March 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting more doneImage by Adam Patrick MurrayNone of us like wasting time when we’re trying to get stuff done. Every second spent shuffling around open windows or navigating menus is precious time not spent achieving your goals. Fortunately, Microsoft stuffed Windows with all sorts of secretly powerful tools, as we’ve covered in-depth in both 17 obscure Windows tools and tricks too powerful to overlook and 15 simple, secret Windows tips and tricks designed to save you time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With more than 9 million sold, the Raspberry Pi is a popular as well as low-cost way to get started hacking hardware. But occasionally, something goes wrong.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
iOS 10 has turned your iPhone’s screen into a new hub for widgets—just swipe left on the lock page or home screen to check it out. But what even are widgets? Just think of them as app extensions or glances that offer you quick, digestible information without you having to actually open a single app. You can even see your widgets without unlocking your iPhone, making it either really convenient or potentially invasive.Widgets are perfect for checking the weather, your calendar, and the battery percentages on your connected devices. But widgets are also great for performing common tasks with as few taps as possible, like calling your best friend or Shazaming a song at a coffeeshop. The level of information and functionality varies, so you really have to try them out and see what works best for you. Here’s a few tips on how to get started with widgets in iOS 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’ll bet that somewhere, perhaps at home and most likely at work, you’ve got some old hardware lying around. What to do with it? It still works but what’s it running? Windows XP? Vista? Windows 7 Starter or Home Basic?Yep, you’re stuck on some old version of Windows but moving that machine up to a newer version of Windows could be tricky ‘cause one or more of those old graphics cards and printer drivers have probably have fallen out of the update cycle. Even if those subsystems are still available, you’ll still have a problem as the newer OSs' are pretty much guaranteed to suck the life out of old processors with the result that performance and therefore usability will be marginal at best. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Aside from a completely new form factor, Apple’s 2017 iPhone -- a device that will reportedly be called the iPhone 8 – will also employ some interesting new materials. According to a new research report from reputed analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is planning to use a glass casing on its next-gen iPhone model.Kuo’s report, per MacRumors, adds that the iPhone 8’s glass casing will be strengthened by a stainless steel frame, at least on the higher-end models.
Metal frame can be stainless steel or aluminum, with former more likely for high-end models. As all-glass casing is not possible at present given technological bottlenecks, a metal frame surrounding the edge is necessary for reinforced structure design. As stainless steel has a better look than aluminum and costs more, we expect only high-end new iPhone models to come with a stainless steel frame next year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wednesday was a big day for goggles in my life: I spent the afternoon at Harvard University's Innovation Labs, where hundreds of people tried on the latest virtual and augmented reality headsets, then I watched the Boston Red Sox on TV that night as they donned ski goggles meant to keep champagne from spraying into their eyes as they awkwardly celebrated winning the American League East title despite blowing a game to the Yankees in the bottom of the 9th inning.Coincidentally, the Red Sox baseball team was among the exhibitors showing off their virtual reality application, which enables fans to step into the batting cage to get a feel for what it's like to be up close to David Ortiz while he's hitting or David Price while he's pitching. The Sox offer their Samsung Gear VR experience both at Fenway Park and at community events, such as this Hubweek event that took place at Harvard Innovation Lab.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here