Hackers are trying to tarnish the U.S. Olympic team by releasing documents they claim show athletes including gymnast Simone Biles and tennis players Venus and Serena Williams used illegal substances during the Rio Games.The medical files, allegedly from the World Anti-Doping Agency, were posted Tuesday on a site bearing the name of the hacking group Fancy Bears. “Today we'd like to tell you about the U.S. Olympic team and their dirty methods to win,” said a message on the hackers' site.The World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed it had been hacked and blamed Fancy Bears, a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage team that is also known as APT 28 -- the very same group that may have recently breached the Democratic National Committee.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
People who are hoping to get their hands on some new Pokémon should be prepared to wait a while longer. John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic Labs, told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt that players should expect to see new creatures arrive in the game at events that bring players together, but only after the company has finished its long global rollout.
"The introduction of new Pokémon into the world, and having events where that might be showcased, those concepts go together really well," he said. "So, I think you can expect to see that happen in kind of a synchronized way going forward."
It's a move from the playbook that Niantic has developed running Ingress, the augmented reality game that it launched prior to Pokémon Go while it was a part of Google. Over the past several years, Niantic has hosted events for players of that game, which often host thousands of players. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The same Russian state-sponsored hackers that allegedly breached the Democratic National Committee may have also targeted the World Anti-Doping Agency.On Tuesday, the sports drug-testing agency blamed a recent breach of its network on a Russian hacking group known as APT 28 or Fancy Bear.The hackers gained access to the agency’s database and stole information about athletes including confidential medical data. Some of that data has already been publicly released, and the hackers have threatened to release more, the agency said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For more than a decade, Intel was driven by a "tick/tock" development model. The "tick" took place one year and was a manufacturing process shrink, from 45nm to 32nm, for example. The "tock," which took place one year later, was a whole new microarchitecture, such as Penryn to Nehalem.For about a decade, tick/tock worked well. Intel choked the life out of the insurgent AMD and dominated the x86 market for a long time—and still does. But the limitations of physics have caught up with the company, and ticks are becoming much harder to come by. As it is, Intel delayed the move to 10nm by adding a third generation of 14nm chips called Kaby Lake. The shrink to 10nm was planned for next year's Cannonlake processor. Now word is that might be delayed another year, with 10nm coming in 2018. And the next shrink, down to 7nm, won't take place until after 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) can be fraught with risks related to financial matters, company culture, personnel, IT systems integration and other areas.Security risks, both cyber and physical, certainly belong on the list of concerns. And with the ongoing shortage of professionals who are expert in various aspects of data protection—coupled with the seemingly endless stream of reports about data breaches and other security threats—this has become an even bigger concern for companies that are considering or in the midst of M&A deals.“Any M&A activity involves an assumption of risk,” says Ariel Silverstone, vice president of security strategy, privacy and trust at GoDaddy, a provider of domain name registrations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
iOS 10 is now available, and if you’re like us, you’re champing at the bit to start playing around with all of its fab new features. However, you may want to hold off just a bit, if you haven’t installed it already: Numerous users are reporting that installing iOS 10 over Wi-Fi is bricking their iPhones and iPads, rendering them useless and stuck in Recovery Mode until they are wiped with a factory reset.
The iOS 10 update just did this to ten of my @wsj colleagues' iPhones. Definitely stand by before upgrading. pic.twitter.com/Mv87cFkHSMTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has been offering public cloud services for several years now, but the company has continued to lag behind Amazon and Microsoft in customer growth. Under the leadership of VMware co-founder Diane Greene, who serves as the executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise, the tech titan has focused harder on forging partnerships and developing products to appeal to large customers. It has added a number of key customers under Greene's tenure, including Spotify. One such win is Evernote, which announced Tuesday it would be migrating its service away from its private data centers and to Google's public cloud. When Evernote was looking for a public cloud provider, the company was interested in not only the base level infrastructure available, but also high-level machine learning services and services for building machine learning-driven systems, said Anirban Kundu, Evernote's CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many would like to see famed whistleblower Edward Snowden face the music for releasing classified information from the NSA a few years back, but who knew his actions would wind up having an impact on the music world itself?A slew of Snowden-inspired songs emerged from the DIY set in the immediate wake of the leaks back in 2013. But 2016 is shaping up to be another big year with fresh material.The latest Snowden song comes courtesy of Peter Gabriel for the new Oliver Stone biopic featuring Joseph Gordon-Leveitt called "Snowden." Gabriel's song, "The Veil," plays during the end credits of the film, and basically tells the Snowden story, as the former Genesis band member sings about Snowden being a hero to some and a traitor to others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft released 14 security bulletins for September, seven of which are rated critical due to remote code execution flaws. Microsoft in all its wisdom didn’t regard all RCEs as critical. There’s also an “important rated” patch for a publicly disclosed flaw which Microsoft claims isn’t a zero-day being exploited. But at least a 10-year-old hole is finally being plugged.Next month marks a significant change as Microsoft says it intends roll out "servicing changes" that include bundled patches. Unless things change, not all Windows users will be able to pick and choose specific security updates starting in October.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“’Come to my office. You and I have something to talk about.’”That was the message John Marcante got from Vanguard’s then-chairman, Jack Brennan. It was a few months after Sept. 11, 2001. At the time, tragedy notwithstanding, Marcante was living his professional dream.Back then, he was leading all development for Vanguard’s institutional business. It was one of those jobs that many software-development pros view as the apex of their careers. The sales teams brought him to meet prospects. The client service teams wanted him out in front of valued clients, which included corporations and retirement plans.“That was a really cool job,” says Marcante, now CIO of Vanguard, “and I was in love with it.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Verizon has been busy building a diverse Internet of Things (IoT) portfolio that includes sensors used on farms as well as on city streets.On Monday, the wireless carrier announced it is buying Sensity Systems for an undisclosed sum.Sensity, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has focused on using energy-efficient LED lighting to help cities build an IoT platform on city streetlights. The platform can include the use of various sensors on a streetlight pole to monitor weather and city services ranging from parking to public safety.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're camping, hunting, cycling, or even starting a generator in a power outage at night, a headlamp gives you a convenient hands-free light source, and this one from Black Diamond is capable of emitting a powerful 130 lumens of light, with several modes of operation -- low, high, strobe and a red LED mode for preservation of night vision. Power Tap technology allows you to quickly cycle through light modes with just a tap on the light housing vs. a switch or button press. The unit is also IPX4 splash resistant. Averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars from nearly 900 people (read reviews), its typical list price of $39.95 has been reduced to $29.88. See the discounted Black Diamond headlamp now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the Apple iPhone 7 and 7 Plus now officially old news before they are even available, it's on to iPhone 8.At least according to so many headlines:*Fortune: "Many looking past iPhone 7 to next year's iPhone 8"*MacRumors: "Apple still working to perfect wireless charging technology for 'iPhone 8'"*NBC News: "Should you wait... for the iPhone 8?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
How often do you receive an email message with a footer like this:
The contents are not to be disclosed to anyone other than the addressee. Unauthorised recipients must preserve this confidentiality and should please advise the sender immediately of any error in transmission.
This gem of pseudo-legal nonsense is from a message that I did not solicit and is the work of eDigitalResearch.com at the behest of ”The Expedia Customer Experience Team." At some point, someone in either or both organizations must have thought this footer was necessary which is curious because the serious, weighty, highly private content in the message was a customer satisfaction survey addressed to me. Was this, you might be wondering, a very personalized survey with, perhaps, sensitive, personal data included? Nope, and here, at the very slight risk of their dogs of law snapping at me, is the message that had the above footer appended:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung Electronics’ woes mounted Friday with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission urging consumers to power down and stop charging or using their Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, after reports of the overheating and bursting of the lithium-ion battery in the device in some cases.
The statement by the CPSC comes a day after the Federal Aviation Administration advised passengers not to turn on, charge or stow away their devices in checked baggage when on board aircraft. Three airlines in Australia, including Qantas, its unit Jetstar and Virgin Australia, have also prohibited their passengers from using or charging the Galaxy Note 7 during flight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but a new imaging system from MIT can see right through the cover and read the book while it's still closed.That's thanks primarily to terahertz radiation, the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and infrared light, and the tiny gaps of air between the pages of any closed book.Terahertz radiation can distinguish between ink and blank paper in a way that X-rays can’t, and it also offers much better depth resolution than ultrasound does. The prototype new system developed by researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech uses a standard terahertz camera to emit ultrashort bursts of radiation and then measure how long it takes for that radiation to be reflected back. An algorithm then gauges the distance to each of the book's individual pages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple began taking pre-orders for its iPhone 7 and 7 Plus earlier today, and not surprisingly, some models quickly exhausted their supplies, leaving customers with weeks to wait.The scramble to order an iPhone began at midnight PT, 3 a.m. ET, when Apple and U.S. carriers opened the doors to their online sales sites.By business hours, Apple's iPhone 7 Plus in Jet Black -- a new, highly-polished finish -- faced a delay in shipping that stretched into November, with the smaller iPhone 7 Jet Black reporting a shipping delay of 3 to 4 weeks. The matte black iPhone 7 Plus was also in demand, with shipping dates out two to three weeks. However, other colors of both the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were still available for pre-ordering with Sept. 16 arrival dates.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The signs were there at the Raspberry Pi’s launch. The debut of the beloved little card-computer was marked by overwhelming demand, so much so that the Raspberry Pi Foundation, “punch-drunk” at the response, had to suspend orders temporarily.Now, more than four years after the fact, 10 million Raspberry Pis have been sold and the demand shows no signs of slowing down. It represents orders of magnitude more success than project founder Eben Upton anticipated.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Ultimate guide to Raspberry Pi operating systems, Part 3 | 10 more fascinating things to do with a Raspberry Pi +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Texas-born Christian Hascheck teaches computer science in Vienna, Austria when not working on his own projects, which include a novel grading system. In 2012, he won $500 worth of Apple gift cards for a funny sysadmin story about ferreting out a not terribly sophisticated rogue Wi-Fi operation.Then the move aboard. He tells the story on his blog:
Since then I have repeatedly tried to use or sell (the cards) but since I'm not currently living in the US it wasn't possible for me.My last attempt to sell them was via reddit. I know there are a lot of scammers out there, so I thought Bitcoin would be the right choice since the scammer can't just reclaim their money after I gave them the card codes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Department of Energy says the $40 million it is investing in nearly two dozen multi-year projects will result in exascale computing systems that perform calculations on data 50 to 100 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers.The DoE Exascale Computing Project says such high-performance computing systems can make at least a billion billion calculations per second, and will be used to process data for applications such as energy security, economic security, scientific discovery, healthcare and climate/environmental science. The U.S. is shooting to attain such powerful systems by the mid-2020s and China is aiming for 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here