Ideally, the ultimate output of big-data analysis can provide a company with a valuable competitive advantage. But those results aren’t getting much additional security, according to an IDG Enterprise study of big-data initiatives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
In a world of ubiquitous security cameras, most people know by now that some form of Big Brother – government or private – is watching them. But they are less likely to know that in some areas, he is also listening.While it is not yet widespread, audio surveillance is increasingly being used on parts of urban mass transit systems.That is the bad news, in the view of privacy advocates. But the good news is that public awareness can, at least in some cases, curtail it.This past week, following revelations that New Jersey Transit didn’t have policies governing storage and who had access to data from audio surveillance on some of its light-rail trains, the agency ended the program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been awarded $3 billion in a lawsuit it brought against Oracle five years ago over a now largely forgotten Intel processor.The two sides had been fighting over Oracle's decision to stop developing versions of its software for Intel's Itanium, a server chip that never found much success in the market. After the jury verdict Thursday, Oracle said it planned to appeal.It's Oracle's second big court loss in as many months. In May, a jury rejected Oracle's claim that Google infringed its copyright when it copied parts of Java into Android. Oracle was seeking nearly $9 billion in that case. It plans to appeal that outcome, too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Malware that secretly installs porn apps on your phone is infecting devices by the millions, becoming the world’s largest mobile Trojan.The malware, called "Hummer," is a family of Trojans that imitate Android apps before striking, according to Cheetah Mobile, a maker of security and utility apps.The company’s researchers have been tracking Hummer since 2014. It's been infecting more than 1 million devices per day, far outpacing other kinds of mobile Trojans, the company said in a post on Wednesday.India, Indonesia, Turkey, China and Mexico are the top five countries where the Trojan has been spreading the most, but it's also hit victims in the U.S. and Europe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Older networked flash cards from Eyefi will become the next IoT devices to effectively die in consumers’ hands when the company cuts off support for older models in September.Eyefi's cards store data like other SD cards but also include a Wi-Fi radio so users can send photos straight from a camera to their laptop or phone. When Eyefi's first card went on sale in 2007, it already had some of the qualities of what’s now called an IoT device: It was remarkably small and had no display but could connect to a local network or the Internet over the air.The products are also tied into a cloud-based service, which they usually rely on to get configured each time they’re used. Important functions of the device don’t work without a service that has to be maintained throughout the life of the product.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thanks to cloud and mobile applications, companies have eliminated tedious paper shuffling but this has created a new problem -- application fatigue. Enterprise software is cramming email inboxes with messages prompting workers to manage expense reports, purchase orders and other business processes. The very software designed to enhance your productivity is taking more of your time than was originally intended.The situation is especially challenging for managers who oversee hundreds or even thousands of workers. On a typical work day, VMware CIO Bask Iyer approves salary increases in Workday and IT requests in ServiceNow, signs off on procurement requests in Coupa and expenses in Concur. The demand on Iyer’s attention makes him feel like a clerk and has him longing for the days of signing paper approvals by hand. “It’s become so tedious that what we did 20 years ago was more efficient,” Iyer tells CIO.com.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Commenters have scoffed at Microsoft's backtracking from a widely-criticized practice to trick users into upgrading to Windows 10, arguing that it was nothing more than a public relations ploy employed when the free upgrade was just weeks from expiring."People have been complaining about GWX [Get Windows 10] since last October. To finally admit there's a problem 1 month before the end of the promotion (and it'll be another week before everyone has this update) is really sad," wrote someone identified as Rossco1337 on a Reddit thread Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft Monday announced that customers can now purchase a joint licensing agreement for its cloud-based Operations Management Suite and its on-premises Systems Center infrastructure manager.Packaging these separate but related management platforms will encourage customers to use public cloud resources and make it easier to manage hybrid clouds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Why Brexit could be a data management headache for US companies | Microsoft appears to be building a business app marketplace +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell has stopped selling Android devices as it steps away from slate-style tablets to focus on Windows 2-in-1 devices.The company isn't refreshing the Venue line of Android tablets, and will no longer offer the Android-based Wyse Cloud Connect, a thumb-size computer that can turn a display into a PC. Other Android devices were discontinued some time ago."The slate tablet market is over-saturated and is experiencing declining demand from consumers, so we’ve decided to discontinue the Android-based Venue tablet line," a Dell spokesman said in an e-mail.Though Dell has killed its Android devices, it made interesting products with the OS. One was the Venue 8 7000 tablet, which had an OLED screen and a 3D RealSense camera. Meanwhile, 2-in-1s can serve as both tablets and laptops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Watson might schedule your meetings someday if a partnership between IBM and Cisco Systems bears the fruit they’re hoping to grow.In the meantime, the companies hope to save employees from some of the meaningless tasks they have to carry out just to work with their colleagues.IBM’s Verge email platform and Connections collaboration suite are a good match for Cisco products like the Spark messaging app and WebEx conferencing service, so the two vendors have found ways to integrate them, company officials say. All this will happen in the cloud. They’ll demonstrate the first examples next month at the Cisco Live conference.The collaboration could have particular value for enterprise Apple users. Both IBM and Cisco have partnerships with Apple for enterprise applications and communications on the company's devices. Details on that aspect of the IBM-Cisco partnership will come later, they said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When I set out to spend 30 days living entirely in a Linux terminal, I knew there was a distinct possibility I would fail utterly. I mean, 30 days? No GUI software? No Xorg? Just describing it sounds like torture.And torture it was. Mostly. Some moments, though, were pretty damned amazing. Not amazing enough to help me reach my 30-day goal, mind you. I fell short—only making it to day 10.The Lesson of the Shell
What did my “10 Days in sHell” teach me? First and foremost, it reminded me that being left out is no fun. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Congress has a small window of time to stop proposed changes in federal court rules that will expand the FBI's authority to hack into computers during criminal investigations, a senator said Thursday.The rule changes allowing expanded FBI searches of computers, approved by the Supreme Court in April, go into effect in December unless Congress votes against them, and getting Congress to move in a contentious election year will be difficult, said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a critic of the changes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past year the number of machines hit by ransomware that encrypts all or part of the hard drive is five-and-a-half times what it was the year before, according to Kaspersky Lab.The number in 2014-2015 was 131,111 compared to 718,536 in 2015-2016, according to the company’s report Ransomware in 2014-2016.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Finally reason to hope in fight against ransomware | 5 things to know about ransomware +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
LizardStresser, the DDoS malware for Linux systems written by the infamous Lizard Squad attacker group, was used over the past year to create over 100 botnets, some built almost exclusively from compromised Internet-of-Things devices.LizardStresser has two components: A client that runs on hacked Linux-based machines and a server used by attackers to control the clients. It can launch several types of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, execute shell commands and propagate to other systems over the telnet protocol by trying default or hard-coded credentials.The code for LizardStresser was published online in early 2015, giving less-skilled attackers an easy way to build new DDoS botnets of their own. The number of unique LizardStresser command-and-control servers has steadily increased since then, especially this year, reaching over 100 by June, according to researchers from DDoS mitigation provider Arbor Networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You won't necessarily be able to use Amazon Prime Day on July 12 as an excuse to avoid family, like some do with Black Friday, but Amazon is promising that you'll get to choose from 100,000 great online shopping deals.
The second annual Amazon Prime Day is available only to those who have subscribed to Amazon Prime, which gets you free shipping, access to entertainment content and more for $99 a year (though you can also go the free trial route if you just want to dip in for Amazon Prime Day).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the PC upgrade cycle slows down, HP is making a new devices-and-services pitch in an effort to revive sales. HP's device-as-a-service program, announced Thursday, gives companies the option of buying PCs, support and services via a monthly charge instead of paying for everything upfront.With many businesses waiting five or six years to upgrade PCs, the new plan could push users to refresh hardware at a faster pace. The offering is similar to the software-as-a-service model popularized by software companies. It's like renting a PC and paying in installments, but with added benefits. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Large IT modernization projects often failImage by ThinkstockAccording to the 2011 Institute for Defense Analysis report, business transformation projects are routinely “over budget, behind schedule, and have not met performance expectations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mass implementation of Trojan viruses, introduced in the chip manufacturing process, will be responsible for allowing attackers and others to obtain leaky data and to control processes from IoT devices and beyond, a German security expert says.Christof Parr, who is head of embedded security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, has obtained special grant funding to explore the controversial subject, the university says in a release.Hardware Trojans, or backdoors, could be “integrated into the devices by the manufacturers from the outset, or included during chip manufacturing,” the university says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT professionals aged 18 to 34 are much more optimistic than their elders that "big data" analysis will fundamentally change how business is conducted in the next few years, according to an IDG Enterprise survey.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Joshua Jacobs, a senior security systems administrator, was once told by a hiring manager that when looking at his resume, he assumed Jacobs was "just another sys admin," but after interviewing him, he realized he was much more than that. That's when Jacobs knew it was time to work on his resume. We heard Jacobs plight and teamed him up with Andrew Ysasi, president of Admovio and executive director of Kent Record Management, who took on the task of reformatting Jacobs' resume to reflect his impressive background and skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)