Mobile security is a bit of a misnomer. Few of us can say we’ve been attacked by a piece of malware or have quarantined an actual virus. The odds are stacked against us. Mobile operators like Verizon and Sprint routinely scan for threats, and both Google Android and the Apple iPhone include multiple security measures on their devices, from fingerprint scanners to full encryption.Yet, there’s a sneaking suspicion that mobile security is a bigger concern. According to one HP report, 67 percent of employees in the U.S. now work remotely. We’re relying on phones more and more. We store sensitive business documents on them and use them to make purchases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Navigating the container ecosystem can be confusing. Deciding where to dip your toes is challenging for those stepping into container and microservices waters. Even those who have already ventured knee-deep still wade through many questions as they progress in their cloud native journey.
To help them guide them through the ecosystem, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently launched a Cloud Native Ambassadors program at its inaugural CloudNativeDay in Toronto.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“If anyone tells you they know the details of what 5G will deliver, walk the other way,” FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is now famously reported as saying in a June presentation made to the National Press Club. He meant, of course, that 5G is up in the air. No one knows for sure what it will end up being when it appears.Bets are on extremely high frequencies—pretty much what’s vacant in the spectrum—and the Internet of Things (IoT) will play a part in driving 5G.+ Also on Network World: 5 things you need to know about 5G +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fifty miles south of Boston, the Internet of Things is taking hold in the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts.It isn’t something you’d expect in this fishing and agricultural area. But thanks to INEX IoT Impact Labs, Dell and the companies’ many IoT partners, small and midsize enterprises here are discovering the power of IoT-enabled sensors and monitoring—and the data that comes from them.There’s a type of industrial revival taking place among those types of businesses—taking current infrastructure and renovating it with new technology, says Christopher Rezendes, founder of INEX. They’re recognizing how this technology can help them solve real business problems and do it without having to spend a lot of money.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel's RealSense computer vision platform has been lacking a low-powered way of recognizing what its depth-sensing cameras are seeing -- until now.The chip giant is buying Movidius, the designer of a range of system-on-chip products for accelerating computer vision processing.Movidius supplies chips to drone makers such as DJI and to thermal imaging company FLIR Systems, itself a supplier of DJI.Its chips help computers figure out what they are seeing through cameras like Intel's RealSense by breaking down the processing into a set of smaller tasks that they can execute in parallel.There are systems that already do this using GPUs, but those are relatively power-hungry, often consuming tens of watts. That's not a problem in fixed applications with access to mains electricity, or in cars, which have huge batteries and a way to recharge them. But in drones or other lightweight IoT devices, power consumption needs to be much lower.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past weeks since Gartner released its 2016 Magic Quadrant on Unified Communications (UC) there have been a slew of articles explaining, analyzing, extolling, celebrating and otherwise promoting the virtues of all things considered UC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With Ubuntu 16.04LTS (Xenial Xerus), Canonical has introduced incremental improvements to the popular server and cloud versions of its operating system, but if you were looking for exciting changes to desktop Ubuntu, this version isn’t it.
The 16.04 release is an iterative, not necessarily massive improvement. But this is an Long Term Service (LTS) version, which means that there’s a team working on keeping it solid for five years. So, into the next decade, 16.04 gets patched and fixed, as other versions continue to be released on a regular basis.
In this new release, Ubuntu further strays from the RedHat/SUSE/CentOS/Oracle school of software packaging by officially supporting an important new tool: Snap, a package manager.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. President Barack Obama said his country has had problems with cyber intrusions from Russia and other countries in the past, but aims to establish some norms of behavior rather than let the issue escalate as happened in arms races in the past.Obama’s statement on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China, after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, did not refer specifically to a recent hack of the Democratic National Committee of the Democratic Party that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing.Politically embarrassing emails from the breach were leaked ahead of the convention of the party, with many security experts holding that the hack had the backing of Russian intelligence services. Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released the emails but did not disclose their source. The U.S. government hasn’t blamed Russia for the incident.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Concerns at the Apache Software Foundation that the Apache OpenOffice project it hosts might be failing have prompted a debate about retiring the project, and triggered the resignation of at least one member of the project's management committee. The office productivity suite was once a key element of efforts to build an open source alternative to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop.Now its remaining developers struggle to keep on top of security issues in the code, and the ASF Board has asked the project's management committee to explain itself and propose a remedy, committee chair Dennis E. Hamilton said in an email to project contributors last week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Not everyone gets Labor Day off as a holiday, but that doesn’t mean the majority of people not working have literally gone on vacation. In the future, people scheduled to work on holidays and those with the days off but not the means to go on an exotic vacation, they can pick any day to explore wonders such as the Amazon rainforest or white beaches of the Caribbean. At least, that is what Expedia claimed; by using virtual and augmented reality, people won’t even need to leave home to explore some of the world’s wonders.If you really are not into the idea of a stay-at-home vacation, then VR and AR could also be used in a “try before you buy” vacation scenario. That tech might also be the answer to long-distance love affairs. Some futurists, such as Google’s Dr. Ray Kurweil, have predicted, “We will spend considerable time in virtual and augmented realities allowing us to visit with each other even if hundreds of miles apart. We’ll even be able to touch each other.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.SonyTM R10C on Site ScanKey features: Sony R10C on Site Scan is an all-in-one enterprise drone solution that delivers users in the construction, engineering and mining industries the most advanced commercial-grade camera available on the market. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you've got 2 hours to spare on Wednesday, Sept. 7 at 1PM EST, here's how to catch the live stream of the Tim Cook & Co., show revealing what's expected to be the iPhone 7, possibly a new Apple Watch and the latest on iOS 10. That is, if you haven't been invited to attend the event in person at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.
Apple makes it easiest to watch its antics and revelations online if you're using an Apple device, whether it be an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Mac, though Apple also acknowledges the existence of Windows 10 users:
Requirements: Live streaming uses Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) technology. HLS requires an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with Safari on iOS 7.0 or later, a Mac with Safari 6.0.5 or later on OS X v10.8.5 or later, or a PC with Microsoft Edge on Windows 10. Streaming via Apple TV requires an Apple TV (2nd or 3rd generation) with software 6.2 or later or an Apple TV (4th generation).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Way back, in the mists of time, when we were all much younger and the world was a brighter, happier place — almost a year ago — I published a piece on Verizon’s impressively terrible e-mail service: Why Verizon's email service sucks and what to do about it. But wait! There’s more making it even suckier! Reader “D C”, commenting on the post a few days after publishing, noted that:
Verizon also blocks POP access from outside the US. So while I'm traveling, I'm not able to get my personal email. They disclose this nowhere on their site, nor do most of their support people seem to understand this policy. Pretty absurd.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the first part of this project I discussed the goal, to wit, to document and quantify how often my dog barks, and discussed the hardware I planned to use. One component I neglected to mention was the Edimax N150 Wi-Fi Nano USB Adapter which, after some experimentation, I discovered was a problem when the USB sound card was in an adjacent USB port because every sound sample I captured started with a burst of noise lasting 30 to 75 seconds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Not content with helping cure cancers and winning Jeopardy, Watson wants to get inside our heads and our homes, whispering instructions into our wireless headsets and helping us do our laundry.That's the message from IBM's global head of Watson IoT, Harriet Green, in a keynote speech here at IFA in Berlin.IBM will work with appliance maker Whirlpool, TV and camera company Panasonic, wireless headphone designer Bragi and Withings owner Nokia to add Watson's cognitive computing capabilities to their products, the company said.Those cognitive capabilities could help devices talk with one another, or with us.For example, a washing machine could tell a dryer what program to use for the clothes it has just washed, or tell its owner when to order more detergent. Computer vision techniques could help security cameras distinguish between friends and strangers or identify suspicious activity. And natural language processing and text-to-speech capabilities could let wireless headphones translate for us or read us instruction manuals when our hands are full.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sony is looking at taking the Xperia brand beyond smartphones and is showing off some prototype gadgets at the IFA trade show in Berlin.
It was keen to underline that not all of them might make it to manufacturing, but those on display were fully working prototypes with hardware and software stable enough that the company let a reporter test them out.Xperia Projector
Magdalena Petrova
Sony's Xperia Projector on show at IFA in Berlin on September 1, 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Perhaps you're old enough to remember when building interactive electronic devices involved breadboards, soldering irons and assembly code.Tell young people today that, though, and they won't believe you -- especially if they've used one of the educational electronics sets Sam Labs is showing at IFA in Berlin.The components in these sets are the same as you would find in beginners' electronics kits of the 1970s and 80s: lamps, photo sensors, pushbuttons, potentiometers, tilt switches and DC motors.The big difference is, there are no wires.Instead, the components are mounted on small plastic blocks each containing a USB-rechargeable battery and a Bluetooth module. This lets them talk to one another and to a host PC, phone or tablet running Sam Labs' visual programming app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2013, an unknown user accessed an email account on Hillary Clinton’s private email server through Tor, the anonymous web surfing tool, according to new FBI documents.On Friday, the FBI provided details on the possible breach in newly released files about its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was the U.S. secretary of state.The affected email account belonged to a member of Bill Clinton's staff. In January 2013, an unknown user managed to log in to the account and browse email folders and attachments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The latest in a string of hacks against retail point-of-sale systems has hit the operator of a cloud-based service with about 38,000 business clients.Montreal-based Lightspeed reported the breach on Thursday and said it affected a system that retailers can use from tablets, smartphones and other devices. The incident occurs as a growing number of retailers and hotels have been targeted by hackers, who typically install malware into the point-of-sale systems to steal credit card numbers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
"A series of tubes" is one of the most famous explanations of what makes the internet work, but it's also what many Europeans use to heat their homes. That's made room-by-room heating automation difficult -- until now.Heating systems in Europe typically circulate hot water from a boiler to radiators around the home, with the pump and boiler controlled by a central thermostat. Programmable timers can boost the temperature on winter evenings or lower it at night.Generally, though, such control is an all-or-nothing, whole-home affair, making it impossible to heat the living room only in the evening but warm the bathroom for a morning shower. Smart controllers like Nest and its European competitors Tado and Netatmo can't change that, as the series of tubes in most homes doesn't allow for independent control of different heating zones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here