U.S. lawmakers are trying to stifle any hope that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden will receive a pardon. On Thursday, the House intelligence committee sent a letter to President Obama urging him to treat Snowden as a criminal.“Mr. Snowden is not a patriot. He is not a whistleblower,” the letter said.The letter was sent amid calls from tech leaders and liberal activists for Obama to pardon Snowden. The campaign, supported by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and celebrities including actor Daniel Radcliffe, argues that Snowden sparked an important debate about government mass surveillance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC) late Thursday issued an official recall of 1 million Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones.
Samsung had issued its own recall Sept. 2, but there was no formal recall in cooperation with the CPSC until now.
The recall is necessary because the Note 7 "presents such a fire hazard," Elliot Kaye, the CPSC chairman, said in a news conference.
Kaye said customers subject to the recall have two options: either to seek a replacement or a refund, "which is the choice of the customer and the customer alone."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Rejoice Linux fans; the OS will work on laptops with Intel's Kaby Lake chips.Three new models of Dell's slick XPS 13 Developer Edition will be available with Ubuntu OS and 7th Generation Core processors in the U.S. and Canada starting on Oct. 10.Prices for XPS 13 DE will start at US $949. Dell also announced the XPS 13 model with Kaby Lake and Windows 10, which will ship on Oct. 4 starting at $799.Dell didn't share details on what version of Ubuntu desktop OS will be preloaded. It officially supports Ubuntu 14.04 in existing laptops, but could pre-load version 16.04 on the new XPS 13 DE.Dell has remained committed to Linux while major PC vendors shift to Windows 10 on PCs. Intel made a major commitment to supporting Windows 10 with its new Kaby Lake chips but hasn't talked much about Linux support.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. Your company's senior executives are discussing cyber security and the possibility of suffering a data breach. The CEO read that if a company has valuable data, then a breach is statistically inevitable. Thankfully your company hasn't discovered a breach, but that means very little. FireEye says that a breach can go undetected for as long as 200 days. The worried CEO picks up the phone, calls you and asks, "Has our enterprise network been hacked?" He wants a definitive yes or no answer, right then and there. What do you tell him?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI may have paid a small fortune to unlock an iPhone 5c used by the San Bernardino shooter. But a security researcher has demonstrated a way to do it for less than US $100.
Sergei Skorobogatov at the University of Cambridge used a technique known as NAND mirroring to bypass the passcode retry limit on an iPhone 5c. Using store-bought equipment, he created copies of the phone’s flash memory to generate more tries to guess the passcode.
Skorobogatov detailed the whole process in a new paper that disputes the FBI’s assertion that the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone couldn’t be accessed with the NAND mirroring technique. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The cloud -- both on-premise and off-premise -- is transforming servers and data centers, and many companies are getting vendors to customize hardware for specific cloud-based workloads.Lenovo wants a bigger chunk of that market and is working toward offering custom-built converged servers targeted at specific tasks. The company is also looking for a larger opportunity with custom hardware for large-scale customers.Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon are designing their own servers for mega-data centers. These servers are designed to handle workloads specific to the company's requirements, like responding to search requests, or recognizing people in uploaded images.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft will soon pull the plug on older builds of its Windows 10 previews to again force testers to either abandon the program or update to the newest version.As the company released the latest beta of Windows 10 -- identified as build 14926 -- Microsoft's Insider spokeswoman reminded users that they would start to see on-screen expiration notices.Testers on the Fast "ring" of the Windows Insider program, who receive more builds at a faster clip than others, will begin seeing expiration notices today. "On October 1, these PCs will start rebooting every 3 hours and then on October 15, these PCs will stop booting all together [sic]," said software engineer Dona Sarkar in a post to a company blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The organization with the largest number of contributors to open-source projects over the past year on GitHub is, surprisingly, Microsoft, GitHub announced today.Fully 16,419 contributors affiliated with Microsoft worked on open-source GitHub projects during the past 12 months, GitHub said, ahead of 15,682 from Facebook, 14,059 from Docker and 12,841 from Angular.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: LinuxCon: Q&A with inventor of, um, Microsoft PowerShell + Open source-happy Microsoft joins Eclipse FoundationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stiff competition for talent and a limited pool of security specialists make information security staffing a perennial challenge. Complicating this is the fact that security has not yet adapted to its changing role as organizations digitize. Now more than ever, information security leaders need to understand the new business environment and adapt how they hire, compete for and manage talent for the digital era.+ Also on Network World: High-demand cybersecurity skill sets +Digitization is transforming organizations’ products, channels and operations. While this change comes with the potential for higher profit margins through enhanced efficiency, it also brings an increase in the number and variety of advanced threats, board oversight and regulatory compliance issues.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Southwest Airlines CIO Randy Sloan remained in the airline's Dallas headquarters for nearly 40 hours last in July, as he and his team scrambled to find the technical problems that grounded 2,300 flights. Hunkering down, checking IT systems and strategizing in office war rooms for hours isn't ideal for any employee, let alone the IT chief.
Southwest Airlines CIO Randy Sloan.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 5,500 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 28% discount you can buy it now for $86.50 (See it on Amazon). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you are a federal Chief Information Security Officers – or even if you are not, you face some serious trials just to do your difficult job.Federal agencies in particular lack clarity on how to ensure that their CISOs have adequate authority to effectively carry out their duties in the face of numerous challenges, a report out this week form the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office stated.+More on Network World: The 7 most common challenges to cloud computing+The GAO said that 13 of the 24 agencies it reviewed – including the Departments of Defense, Commerce Energy, Justice and State-- for its report “had not fully defined the role of their CISO in accordance with these requirements. For example, these agencies did not always identify a role for the CISO in ensuring that security controls are periodically tested; procedures are in place for detecting, reporting, and responding to security incidents; or contingency plans and procedures for agency information systems are in place. Thus, CISOs' ability to effectively oversee these agencies' information security activities can be limited,” the GAO stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With each head of cattle costing more than $2,000, care for the herd is important. Tracking individual cows moving over large areas is challenging, though, especially when they all look alike. Harsh farming conditions and limited budgets add to the technical hurdles.Cattle Traxx, which recently exhibited its system at TechCrunch Disrupt, has an answer. Livestock monitoring that includes an IoT solution of ruggedized sensors, LoRaWAN mesh networking, geofencing and cloud-based analytics.Solution design
SensorsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies will now be able to cryptographically validate the identity of Chrome OS devices connecting to their networks and verify that those devices conform to their security policies.On Thursday, Google announced a new feature and administration API called Verified Access. The API relies on digital certificates stored in the hardware-based Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) present in every Chrome OS device to certify that the security state of those devices has not been altered.Many organizations have access controls in place to ensure that only authorized users are allowed to access sensitive resources and they do so from enterprise-managed devices conforming to their security policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This short video from the Conan O'Brien late night TV show depicts exactly what everyone thought the moment they saw Apple reveal its $269 wireless AirPods during its iPhone 7 announcements last week.
MORE: Bring on the iPhone 7 parody videosTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are many factors to consider when a technology vendor decides to pull the trigger on an acquisition. Things such as impact to channel, customer reaction, product rationalization and other issues must be thought out.However, sometimes an acquisition seems to be a great fit and the decision is “black and white,” meaning it’s crystal clear with no shades of grey. This appears to have been the case for Extreme Networks, which earlier this week scooped up the wireless LAN (WLAN) business from Zebra Technologies for $55 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Elastic is the commercial vendor that sits behind the Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash and Beats open source projects. Elasticsearch was created back in 2010 by Shay Banon, co-founder and CTO of the Elastic company, and is built upon the Apache Lucene information retrieval project. All of the different projects focus on taking structured and unstructured data and delivering search, logging and analytics on top of it.Since that time, its commercial products—Elastic Stack, X-Pack and Elastic Cloud—have seen over 70 million cumulative downloads.Elastic has been smart about making strategic acquisitions. It acquired visualization vendor Kibana, and a year or so ago it acquired Norwegian company Found, which was commercializing Elasticsearch and offering it as a service on top of Amazon Web Services. This strategy appears to have worked, and it is interesting to look at the graph below that tracks the relative exposure of Elasticsearch and one of the competitive offerings, Splunk.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Identity and access management (IAM) has always been a heavy burden for large organizations. Why? Multiple folks across companies – business people, software developers, IT operations, human resources, security, compliance auditors, etc. – play some role across the IAM spectrum.As a result of this IAM group hug, technology decisions tend to be made tactically without any central oversight or integrated strategy but this behavior may be changing. According to ESG research, 49% of large organizations claim they now have a formal enterprise-wide strategy in which IAM technology decisions are managed by central IT (note: I am an ESG employee). In other words, someone in IT is now responsible and accountable for all IAM technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Identity and access management (IAM) has always been a heavy burden for large organizations. Why? Multiple folks across companies—business people, software developers, IT operations, human resources, security, compliance auditors, etc.— play some role across the IAM spectrum.As a result of this IAM group hug, technology decisions tend to be made tactically without any central oversight or integrated strategy. But this behavior may be changing. According to ESG research, 49 percent of large organizations claim they now have a formal enterprise-wide strategy in which IAM technology decisions are managed by central IT. In other words, someone in IT is now responsible and accountable for all IAM technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Asana is making it easier for users to adapt its work-tracking software to more than just task management.The company announced Thursday that it's launching support for creating custom fields inside the product, so that it's possible for people to use the same service they rely on for tracking work tasks to also manage other things. So, a recruiting team could use custom fields to track a candidate's name, status, interview times and more.The custom fields feature was first announced last year at an Asana press event. It's an important part of how the company plans to expand its product to reach not only its current user base, but also businesses with more complicated and customized workflows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here