Microsoft used a Linux conference of all places to announce the release of .NET Core 1.0 and ASP.NET Core 1.0, the open source, cross-platform version of its .NET Framework for building apps that can run on Mac and Linux. With the help of its recently acquired Xamarin, iOS and Android can also be supported.The announcement was made simultaneously at the Red Hat DevNation summit in San Francisco and on the MSDN blog. The release includes the .Net Core runtime, libraries and tools and the ASP.NET Core libraries. Microsoft also released Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions to create .NET Core projects, as well as Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Before you throw away that old hard drive, make sure you purge the memory clean. A new study has found that most users are accidentally giving up photos, social security numbers and financial data, by failing to properly delete the files on their recycled hard drives.
Blancco Technology Group, which specializes in data erasure, conducted the study by randomly buying 200 secondhand PC storage drives from eBay and Craigslist. Their goal was to see if the company could recover any of the old data saved inside.
In most cases, it could. 78 percent of the drives contained residual data that could be recovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems just cast a vote of confidence in one of the many technologies that might get your next IoT device online.On Tuesday, the company announced gateways between LoRaWAN low-power wireless networks and fatter pipes like Ethernet cables. The gateways can take in data from sensors and other small Internet of Things devices and send it back to an enterprise or cloud.This is Cisco’s first commercial foray into LPWANs (low power, wide area networks), a new generation of infrastructure designed for devices that are too small and power-constrained to use cellular.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
According to one IT professional posting on Reddit’s section for systems administrators, the best way to get an air-conditioning budget approved is to turn up the heat – literally -- on the right company executives. He writes:
After adding a second rack to our server room the portable A/C unit just couldn't hack it anymore. Ambient temperatures were regularly spiking above 30C (86F). I had to come in on weekends to open doors, move fans, etc.Since this is just the beginning of summer I know it's only going to get worse. We need a commercial A/C unit. The portable A/C we have exhausts above the drop ceiling, which just creates a blanket of hot air and compounds the issue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A U.S. senator has stalled an intelligence budget bill over concerns that it would expand surveillance while limiting oversight of it.Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has placed a hold on the 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act, saying the bill would allow the FBI, without a court order, to demand U.S. residents' email and Internet records from ISPs and other communications providers.The bill would allow the FBI to obtain new records through the controversial National Security Letter program, which allows the FBI to collect phone and financial records through administrative subpoenas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s a changing of the guard afoot in the storage industry, and it’s getting cloudy.Each quarter 451 Research Group surveys it members in its Voice of the Enterprise series. Late last year, the company’s research revealed a dramatic reshaping of the storage market both in terms of which vendors enterprises consider strategic storage partners and where their future storage will be housed.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Gartner says cloud will be the “default” application deployment option by 2020 | Deutsche Bank says one-third of finance apps will be in the cloud within 3 years +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Collaboration is an important thing in the free and open source software world. Individual contributors (often employed by or involved with competing companies or organizations) working together for the benefit of all.It’s a core principle. Without collaboration, none of the free software world works.And it’s not just essential from the practical point of view—of people working together to get concrete things accomplished. It’s also become a bit of a marketing buzz word. And something happened two weeks ago that I found rather annoying.Wait. Before I go any further, I should make something clear. I am a huge fan of the collaborative efforts of many companies in the Linux and greater open source world. Even competitors such as SUSE and Red Hat come together on a regular basis to work hand in hand to find ways to benefit their own companies, while at the same time helping their rival and the broader community. And they do so happily. Heck, I’ve even seen SUSE and Red Hat employees give presentations together at Linux conferences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The impact of the United Kingdom vote to withdraw from the European Union could have far-reaching consequences for international companies, which may need to rethink their data management policies.“As a part of the European Union, there is a general directive that all nations abide by a guide,” says Geeman Yip, CEO of cloud consultancy BitTitan. “Now that the UK is not a part of the EU, the previous baseline directives that were adopted will change.”Said another way: When the UK is part of the EU it has the same data sovereignty laws as other countries in the EU. When the UK breaks away, those laws could change. Companies operating in Europe may have to manage one set of data privacy laws for the UK and another for EU-member countries. The issue will impact both cloud and managed service providers who may need to offer additional options for customers to host data across Europe, and enterprise end users who may need to reconsider where their data is stored in Europe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone for the first time back in 2007, he boldly proclaimed that the device was a leapfrog product that would take competitors 5 years to catch up to. And, as it turns out, Jobs was right.With the release of the iPhone, many in the smarpthone market realized that they had to completely rethink the way they envisioned the smartphone experience. Specifically, Google (now Alphabet) completely retooled its Android mobile OS and, as Jobs predicted, Android began to give iOS a run for its money right around the 2012-2013 time frame.While the iPhone's chief competition these days comes from third-party manufacturers who make use of Android (Samsung, LG, HTC etc.), a recent report relays that Alphabet has plans to take on the iPhone directly with a Google branded phone of its own.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone back in 2007, he boldly proclaimed that the device was a leapfrog product that would take competitors five years to catch up to. As it turns out, Jobs was right.With the release of the iPhone, many in the smarpthone market realized they had to completely rethink the way they envisioned the smartphone experience. Specifically, Google (now Alphabet) completely retooled its Android mobile OS and, as Jobs predicted, Android began to give iOS a run for its money right around the 2012-2013 timeframe.While the iPhone's chief competition these days comes from third-party manufacturers that make use of Android (Samsung, LG, HTC etc.), a recent report relays that Alphabet plans to take on the iPhone directly with a Google branded phone of its own.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The technology industry's e-waste problem isn't expected to go away anytime soon, but IBM just made a discovery that could help. Researchers there have discovered a new recycling process that can turn the polycarbonates used to make smartphones and CDs into a nontoxic plastic that's safe and strong enough for medical use.Polycarbonates are found not just in smartphones and CDs but also LED screens, Blu-ray players, eyeglass lenses, kitchen utensils, and household storage gear. Unfortunately, they're known to leach BPA as they decompose over time, and there's considerable concern about the effects of that chemical on the brain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This whole “tech-companies-think-big-with-plans-to-build-entire-cities” thing is getting out of hand.Earlier this year, I reported on (OK, ridiculed) Google’s silliest moonshot, a plan by Google's parent company, Alphabet, to create Project Sidewalk, a city with hundreds of thousands of residents, intended to act as a proving ground for new technology. I asked “what could possibly go wrong” with a plan like that? I was thinking, well, just about everything.+ Also on Network World: Google’s biggest, craziest ‘moonshot’ yet+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Supply chain management is the ultimate back office function. It doesn’t receive as much attention as websites, marketing technology and app development. Yet improving the supply chain yields major bottom line benefits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
After months of embracing malware-like tricks so nasty that some fearful Windows 7 users felt forced to disable updates completely, Microsoft is backing off its sneaky Windows 10 upgrade tactics and reverting to an interface that is far clearer and doesn’t violate user trust.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After a year on the market, Microsoft’s Sway presentation software has received features available to paying customers.Office 365 subscribers will be able to lock their Sway presentations with passwords, load them up with more multimedia content, and conceal the software they used to make them with an update that Microsoft announced Tuesday.That last feature will be an important change for users who don’t want to have a big banner at the end of their presentations saying they were made with Microsoft Sway. This change means that the presentation software will be more useful for creating shareable, public-facing documents that are either presented live or published to the web.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The biggest challenge cellular mobile phones introduce for 911 is location accuracy—especially during an emergency call. The problem is a global one, inherited with any wireless technology. Getting the location wrong directly impacts the level of safety provided to citizens, as routing the call to the most appropriate Public Safety Answer Position (PSAP) specifically relies on this critical piece of data.Can you find me now?
Many of us don't stop and think how our mobile devices determine where we are on the planet, and most of us will assume GPS plays a significant role in providing that answer. While GPS remains an important piece of the location puzzle, quite often it is not the answer by itself. Fundamentally, there are three sources for location information used by cellular phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Attackers have compromised more than 25,000 digital video recorders and CCTV cameras and are using them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.One such attack, recently observed by researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, targeted the website of one of the company's customers: a small bricks-and-mortar jewelry shop.The attack flooded the website with about 50,000 HTTP requests per second at its peak, targeting what specialists call the application layer, or layer 7. These attacks can easily cripple a small website because the infrastructure typically provisioned for such websites can handle only a few hundred or thousand connections at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco today said it would make its fifth acquisition of the year by acquiring cyber security provider CloudLock for $293 million.The move should bolster Cisco’s overarching cloud security offerings and the CloudLock team will join Cisco’s Networking and Security Business Group under Senior Vice President and General Manager David Goeckeler, Cisco stated.+More on Network World: Cisco: IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte level in 2016+In a blog post announcing the deal, Cisco’s Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Business Development, said: “CloudLock specializes in Cloud Access Security Broker, or CASB, technology and helps organizations move faster to the cloud. CloudLock delivers cloud security to help track and manage user behavior and sensitive data in SaaS applications, such as Office365, Google Drive, and Salesforce. Enterprise IT can then enforce a granular security policy within these cloud applications. For example, CloudLock can help protect data and enforce access rules when an employee tries to access sensitive data stored in a SaaS application from an unprotected device, in a defined geography, at a specific time of the day – essentially, ‘security anywhere, anytime’ for content in the cloud. CloudLock extends these security controls to the IaaS and PaaS Continue reading
European Union rules for electronic signatures change on Friday to make a clear distinction between the identity of the person signing, and that of the authority guaranteeing the integrity of the data, but the technology needs to be still simpler, vendors say.The new rules are intended to simplify the process of electronically signing contracts between businesses, or between businesses and persons, and across international borders where different and often incompatible electronic signature rules apply today.But while the new rules will simplify the legal environment, today's technical environment makes it too difficult to create and securely manage digital identities, according to the Cloud Signature Consortium.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. data centers have used about the same amount of energy annually over the past five years or so, despite substantial growth in the sector, according to a new report published by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.In the Berkeley Lab’s previous analysis, which was presented to Congress in 2008, it was found that energy usage by data centers was quadrupling every decade – an unsurprising figure given the explosive overall growth in the sector. Data centers in the U.S. consumed 70 billion kilowatt-hours in 2014, the researchers estimated.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows 10’s biggest controversies + HPE's CTO is leaving amid more change at the companyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here