Just over a year ago, two job applicants filed a lawsuit against Google. They claimed they were rejected because of their age. Both were over 40.A federal court in San Jose, Calif., is now being asked to decide whether many others who sought jobs at Google and were also rejected can join this case.On Wednesday, a motion for conditional certification of collective action status was filed. This motion, similar to a class action, seeks to include "all individuals who interviewed in-person for any software engineer, site reliability engineer, or systems engineer position with Google in the United States during the time period from August 13, 2010 through the present; were age 40 or older at the time of the interview; and were refused employment by Google."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Go to almost any meeting these days and you'll see a sea of laptops around the table and sometimes some iPads or other tablets. That lets people look up information, take notes, and do on-the-fly research during the meeting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
It’s been about a year since Chuck Robbins took over as CEO of Cisco. Following in the footsteps of John Chambers certainly could not have been easy. Chambers was perhaps the most visible, thought-leading CEO in all of technology. Also, he had been at the post for about 20 years, something rare in business today, and had reached quasi celebrity status.
When Robbins took the helm, many customers, analysts and investors asked me whether I thought Robbins would maintain the status quo or shake things up. I didn’t know Robbins all that well when he took the job. But Cisco had tremendous success during the Chambers tenure, so the natural assumption was Robbins wouldn’t do anything to disrupt what was already working. I thought he might make a few tweaks here and there, but I wasn’t expecting big changes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Businesses that want to get their files out of on-premises data centers and into the cloud now have a new option from Box. On Wednesday, the company launched Box Shuttle, which includes tools and consulting services to help businesses move potentially terabytes of data from legacy applications into the Box cloud.Box will work with customers to develop a migration plan for getting their data out of private data centers into its cloud service. It will help figure out what content customers should keep, archive and delete.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A database described by some as a "terrorism blacklist" has fallen into the hands of a white-hat hacker who may decide to make it accessible to the public online.The database, called World-Check, belongs to Thomson Reuters and is used by banks, governments and intelligence agencies to screen people for criminal ties and links to terrorism.Security researcher Chris Vickery claims to have obtained a 2014 copy of the database. He announced the details on Tuesday in a post on Reddit."No hacking was involved in my acquisition of this data," he wrote. "I would call it more of a leak than anything, although not directly from Thomson Reuters."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The lack of a traditional 3.5mm headphone jack may not be the only big design change Apple introduces when it rolls out the iPhone 7 later this year. According to sources, and most recently a report from analysts Cowen and Company (via Business Insider), the home button on the iPhone 7 will be like nothing Apple has ever shipped before.Specifically, the iPhone 7's home button may sit flush with the entire device itself and will not be able to be pressed down. Instead, Apple will incorporate Force Touch technology such that when a user taps the home button, it will trigger a series of vibrations that will mimic the feeling of a pressed button.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The first quarter of 2016 has seen a 20% increase in wireless LAN equipment sales compared to the same period a year ago, according to a study released by IHS Technology, which credited the proliferation of 802.11ac wireless gear for the uptick.While the $1.2 billion in total sales represents a quarter-on-quarter downturn of 14%, that’s merely a seasonal demand issue, said IHS. Yet the year-on-year sales increase has been accomplished with equipment prices remaining relatively flat.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Top 5 storage vendors shows massive shift to the cloud + Resold hard drives on eBay, Craigslist are often still ripe with leftover dataTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The lovefest between Microsoft and Salesforce.com continues, this time with a new connector for Outlook that links Salesforce connections to the Outlook contact and calendar manager.Microsoft made the announcement via the Office blog, noting that sales reps rely on two primary tools Customer Relational Management (CRM) and email. "Yet, CRM and email have traditionally been disconnected tools, and sales reps have had to spend valuable time toggling between these apps," the company noted.Manually adding contacts or calendar events from email to CRM or having to move back and forth between the two waste a lot of time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Vijay Tella has been neck deep in application integration technology for years, first as the SVP of engineering at TIBCO, the company that introduced the information bus, and then at Oracle, where he helped launch the company’s booming middleware platform. Today Tella is founder and CEO of Workato, a company that is putting integration tools directly into the hands of app users. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Tella to learn more about how he is trying to democratize the world of app integration.
Workato founder and CEO Vijay TellaTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Avaya today released the 1.0 version of its Open Networking Adapter (ONA), a device the size of a deck of cards that plugs into any Ethernet-enabled machine and automatically connects it to a broader network while enforcing strict security policies on network traffic.Avaya’s ONA is a network edge device meant to usher in an era of connected devices to create an internet of things environment. The first use case Avaya is targeting with ONA is the health care industry with a custom software GUI for controlling the ONAs.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Top 5 Storage vendors shows a massive shift to the cloud | Why Brexit could cause major data privacy headaches for US companies + ONA is a small proxy device with two Ethernet inputs on each end. The aluminum casing holds a dual core CPU running Open vSwitch. It’s equipped with two-factor authentication so that when the device is on boarded for the first time there’s a key that’s shared between the ONA and a software defined networking (SDN) controller to verify it. The device doesn't store any data, so if it were stolen, it would be a brick without the 2FA connection. “It Continue reading
As the Wi-Fi Alliance starts certifying the latest gigabit-speed products to work together, users may not get as excited as they did for some earlier standards.On Wednesday, the industry group launched its certification program for IEEE 802.11ac Wave 2, a technology that’s been on the market for more than a year.Wave 2 can deliver up to 6.8Gbps (bits per second) and lets an access point talk to more than one device at a time. But due to issues like timing and wired backhaul, Wave 2 adoption has been relatively slow.The new technology builds on the first wave of 802.11ac, which started to emerge in 2013 and now makes up nearly three-quarters of the Wi-Fi market in terms of revenue. The new wave adds a few features with real advantages, at least for some users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple’s latest version of iOS is only available for developers right now, but we’ve already found plenty of reasons to get excited about iOS 10. The big features in iOS 10 are impressive: Photos has facial recognition, Messages gets an emoji overload, and Siri will be able to hail you a Lyft.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch
But iOS 10 is exciting not only because of the major makeovers. Apple’s upcoming mobile OS also has a lot of small, dare-we-say hidden surprises, too. Here are five of the best-kept secret features coming to your iPhone this fall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Florida man has accused Apple of infringing a 1992 patent on an “electronic reading device” that, in our view, looks nothing like the iPhone. He’s asking for $10 billion in damages. No, this isn’t an article from The Onion. It’s real life.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch
Thomas Ross included drawings of his device, a boxy rectangle with a screen and physical keyboard, in his court filing in Florida Southern District Court, which was obtained by The Telegraph. As you may recall, the original iPhone was the first smartphone without a physical keyboard. No matter, Ross says he was the first person “to have created a novel combination of media and communication tools.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The ancient Chinese military strategy guide The Art of War says that if you want to have a chance of prevailing in battle, you need to know your enemy. It’s good advice for the battlefield, and it's also good advice if you want to beat hackers in their constant attempts to take over your network.But in order to know these hackers you need to understand their motivations, and in many cases those motivations may not be what you expect. That's according to Dan Kaminski, the security expert who discovered a fundamental flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) protocol in 2008 and who discovered flaws in the widely used SSL protocol a year later. Kaminski is a frequent speaker at Black Hat Briefings, and now works as Chief Scientist at White Ops, a security firm specializing in detecting bot and malware fraud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The 2016 Olympics Games are already off to a rough start -- and we haven’t even seen opening ceremonies yet. Worries about the Zika virus, polluted competition waters, doping scandals and Rio’s precarious finances could mean a complicated time in August for the Summer Games.[ Related: Jumping hurdles on the road to Rio 2016: AOC's head of IT Anthony Soulsby ]One thing thing poised to go well: communication at Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport, Brazil’s biggest airport and how most people will get into the country for the games.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The infrastructure used by an Iranian cyberespionage group to control infected computers around the world has been hijacked by security researchers.Researchers from Palo Alto Networks came across the group's activities earlier this year, but found evidence that it has been operating since at least 2007. Its main tool is a custom malware program dubbed Infy, which was repeatedly improved over the years.The researchers have worked with domain registrars to seize the domains used by the attackers to control Infy-infected computers and to direct victims' traffic to a sinkhole server -- a server the researchers controlled.Control of the server was then transferred to the Shadowserver Foundation, an industry group that tracks botnets and works with ISPs and other parties to notify victims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Interesting news from Formation Data Systems, an enterprise storage vendor, around the launch of a new technology that should help IT departments eke out greater efficiencies from their existing storage assets. The new feature allows enterprises to recapture unused storage in their virtualized server environments.Fetchingly called Virtual Storage Recapture (VSR) this technology allows Formation customers to extend their FormationOne deployments beyond standard software-defined storage implementations to be able to utilize storage capacity that is “stranded” within most virtual servers and hypervisor clusters. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Smart appliances are supposed to be the next big thing. Analysts predict that it’s a multi-billion dollar market. Why aren’t we there yet? Security. It’s a challenge for both manufacturers and users.Once connected to the internet, IoT devices can do amazing things, but they also become vulnerable to hackers. There are two main reasons for this:
Limited resources: Low-cost IoT toolkits simplify the task of developing new smart devices. The downside of these devices is that they’re often too underpowered to run security software or communicate securely.
Lack of standards: Connected devices vary greatly in their security safeguards by manufacturer. If one device is hacked, it potentially compromises other devices on the same network.
Cloud-enabled security
Chime from Innovation Labs by AVG (the antivirus and online security company) protects smart appliances by ensuring network traffic is authorized only to approved websites and mobile apps. Chime is installed on Wi-Fi routers and uses an online directory to stay current with new malware and hacking threats. It applies security techniques originally developed for enterprise security to also protect connected devices:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Following an extended preview period, Amazon's Elastic File System is now generally available in three geographical regions, with more on the way.Originally announced last year, EFS is a fully managed elastic file storage service for deploying and scaling durable file systems in the Amazon Web Services cloud. It's currently available in the U.S. East (northern Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions, the company announced Wednesday.Customers can use EFS to create file systems that are accessible to multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances via the Network File System (NFS) protocol. They can also scale those systems up or down without needing to provision storage or throughput.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The numerous struggles businesses must go through to address the network needs of a branch have been well documented on this site and many others. The importance of the branch can’t be understated either. The branch is where the majority of workers reside today—81 percent of employees, according to a recent ZK Research survey. For many businesses, such as retailers and banks, the branch is the business, so curing branch woes needs to be a top priority for business and IT leaders.+ Also on Network World: Annual State of the Network survey results +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here