Hewlett Packard Enterprise is turning to lights and lasers in thin fiber optics as a way to move data at blazing speeds between computers, replacing thicker and slower copper wires.A motherboard with an optical module, shown by HPE at its recent Discover show, could transfer data at a staggering 1.2 terabits per second. That's enough for the transfer of a full day's worth of HD video in one second.The data transfer speed is much quicker than any existing networking and connector technology based on copper wires today. It could replace copper Ethernet cables that are widely used in data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. The Bay Club Company is an operator of private clubs that blend fitness, swimming and tennis. Today the company has 24 clubs across California, but it's growth path could potentially double that by the end of 2017. The Bay Club's expansion strategy includes acquiring smaller clubs and bringing them into the portfolio.IT director Mark Street is charged with bringing the acquired clubs into the Bay Club network as quickly as possible. That connection is essential in order for the club, from a technology point of view, to begin operating and feeling like a Bay Club. Street says it would take 60 to 90 days to bring a new club onto the traditional corporate backbone, but his goal is to be able to fully integrate a new club within a week to help The Bay Club and its members benefit from the new acquisition faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Robots have already invaded the operating room in some hospitals, but in Belgium they will soon be taking on the potentially more difficult task -- for robots, at least -- of greeting patients and giving them directions.The Citadelle regional hospital in Liège and the Damiaan general hospital in Ostend will be working with Zora Robotics to test patients' reactions to robot receptionists in the coming months.Zora already has experience programming the diminutive humanoid robot Nao to act as a chatty companion for the elderly, offering it as a form of therapy for those with dementia.Now the Belgian company is working with Nao's newer, bigger sibling, Pepper. Both were developed by French robotics company Aldebaran, now owned by Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft surprised everyone Monday when it announced plans to acquire LinkedIn for more than $26 billion. But it wasn't the only suitor: Salesforce wanted in, too. The San Francisco-based software-as-a-service vendor was interested in LinkedIn primarily for its recruiting business, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Recode on Thursday. The company gave LinkedIn a "solid look" but was unable to match Microsoft's huge offer.Salesforce's interest makes sense: information from the business-focused social network could have proved useful to people working with Salesforce products. Microsoft has similar ambitions for LinkedIn, which it sees as a potential boon to its Dynamics CRM and Office offerings in particular. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet of Things is as much about computing as it is about the "things" themselves, and that's why Samsung Electronics is buying Joyent.At first glance, a maker of smartphones, home appliances and wearables doesn’t seem like it would need a cloud computing company. But so-called smart objects rely on a lot of number-crunching behind the scenes. A connected security camera can't handle all its video storage and image analysis by itself, for example, and that's where cloud services come in.The real money in IoT will be in the services more than the devices themselves, research firm Gartner says. It’s not entirely up to Samsung to deliver services its devices, but the company sees an opportunity there.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A 20-year-old Estonia man has pleaded guilty to stealing data on more than 1,300 U.S. military and government personnel and providing it to the Islamic State.Ferizi’s goal was to “incite terrorist attacks,” the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.Ferizi once led a hacking group called Kosova Hacker’s Security, or KHS, which claims to have defaced over 20,000 websites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.According to some estimates, attackers have infiltrated 96% of all networks, so you need to detect and stop them before they have time to escalate privileges, find valuable assets and steal data. The good news is an attack doesn’t end with an infection or a take-over of an endpoint; that is where it begins. From there an attack is highly active, and the attacker can be identified and stopped if you know how to find them. These five strategies will help.* Search for the telltale signs of a breach. Look for port scans, excessive failed log-ins and other types of reconnaissance as an attacker tries to map out your network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI needs to get a better handle on accuracy and privacy issues its facial recognition technology has brought to the law enforcement community.
Congressional watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this week said the current FBI use of face recognition technology “raises potential concerns regarding both the effectiveness of the technology in aiding law enforcement investigations and the protection of privacy and individual civil liberties.”
+ More on Network World: Quick look: Cisco Tetration Analytics | Cisco platform lets IT rein-in disruptive data center operations, security, applications +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Day 1 of my "I'm a ridiculous person who is going to use nothing but a Linux terminal for 30 days" experiment is complete. And it was not an easy day. Not bad. Just... challenging.The day started as I expected it to. I fired up a terminal window and made it full screen and launched tmux—a terminal multiplexer. (I'm keeping a traditional desktop environment running in the background for a few days as a safety net while I get things working just right.)For those new to the concept of a terminal multiplexer, think of it like a tiled window manager (multiple windows arranged in a non-overlapping fashion)—only just for terminals. That way you can have multiple shell sessions (and multiple applications) running at the same time within the same terminal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enterprises interested in tapping container technology now have a brand-new option for managing it: ContainerX, a multitenant container-as-a-service platform for both Linux and Windows.Launched into beta last November by a team of engineers from Microsoft, VMware and Citrix, the service became generally available in both free and paid versions on Thursday. Promising an all-in-one platform for orchestration, compute, network, and storage management, it provides a single "pane of glass" for all of an enterprise's containers, whether they're running on Linux or Windows, bare metal or virtual machine, public or private cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Residents of Baltimore who dialed 911 were unable to reach emergency dispatchers for more than two hours Tuesday evening and Verizon is laying the blame on a call-routing error.From the Baltimore Sun:
Officials at Verizon — the service provider for the city's 911 system — said the phone company received an automated alert at 7:48 p.m. reporting that 911 calls were failing. Verizon spokesman John O'Malley said the company eventually determined that emergency calls were mistakenly routed to an empty back-up call center in the city.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This 128GB Supersonic Boost XT flash drive from Patriot is built to be fast and rugged. It supports USB 3.0 and transfers data at speeds up of up to 150MG/Sec, making it ideal for large files. It's durable rubberized exterior helps protect against shock and provides water resistance, so it travels safely wherever you take it. The unit is plug and play, and supports most major operating systems, so you can count on ease of use as well. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 700 people (73% rate it 5 stars: read reviews). With the current 26% discount, its regular list price of $44.40 has been reduced to $32.99. See the Supersonic Boost XT 128GB Flash drive on Amazon to learn more and review buying options.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intelligent computers that can make decisions like humans may someday be on Hewlett Packard Enterprise's product roadmap.The company has been showing off a prototype computer designed to emulate the way the brain makes calculations. It's based on a new architecture that could define how future computers work.The brain can be seen as an extremely power-efficient biological computer. Brains take in a lot of data related to sights, sounds and smell, which they have to process in parallel without lagging, in terms of computation speed.HPE's ultimate goal is to create computer chips that can compute quickly and make decisions based on probabilities and associations, much like how the brain operates. The chips will use learning models and algorithms to deliver approximate results that can be used in decision-making.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is extending blockchain technology with a new set of tools designed to make it possible to build a new ecosystem of enterprise applications on top of it.On Wednesday, the company unveiled Project Bletchley, its term for a pair of tools to expand the potential uses of blockchains. It plans to get more utility out of the distributed ledger technology by using the new secure middleware.The first tool, known as "Cryptlets," is a set of services that let companies bring in data from outside a blockchain system without breaking the security of that system. Cryptlets can be written in any programming language and run within a secure, trusted container.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI has fallen short on assessing the privacy risks and accuracy of a huge facial recognition database used by several law enforcement agencies, a government auditor has said.A new report, released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office Wednesday, shows the FBI's use of facial recognition technology is "far greater" than previously understood, said Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who requested the GAO report.The FBI's Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS), which allows law enforcement agencies to search a database of more than 30 million photos of 16.9 million people, raises serious privacy concerns, Franken added in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nothing says "I vaguely appreciate you in a professional manner" quite like a Starbucks gift card. It's great for coworkers because Starbucks cafes are everywhere, and you don't actually have to spend time thinking about a personalized gift, or how you might go about giving the gift of actually good coffee.Starbucks and Microsoft are capitalizing on that with the launch Wednesday of an Outlook add-in that lets users easily send those ubiquitous gift cards to one another in an email. Users have to install the add-in, then connect to a Starbucks account, which they also need. After that, they can pull up a sidebar that makes it easy to add a gift card to future emails.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hiring a diverse workforce is proven to positively impact a company's bottom line and improve performance. But diversity, inclusion and equal representation also are increasingly factors job seekers consider when they're looking for employment. In other words, diversity and inclusion all the way up to the board level makes you a more attractive workplace."We started to see a trend emerge among our job seeker users who wanted to learn about particular hiring companies' diversity, inclusion and representation statistics and information. More and more candidates have this as one of their criteria when they're researching potential companies -- and we see that for every 10 job seekers on our site, six to seven of them are women. What that says to us is that employers who emphasize diversity at all levels, but especially at the more public-facing C-levels and at the board level, have a greater competitive advantage for about 60 to 70 percent of job seekers," says Anthony VanHorne, CEO of job search and culture matching site CareerLabs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wi-Fi calling is becoming commonplace.AT&T announced Wednesday it will support calling over a Wi-Fi network from the LG G4 phone, with other Android devices to follow.Wi-Fi calls recently became available to customers using iPhones and other iOS 9.3 devices on all four major U.S. carriers, which includes AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. That iOS update first became available March 21.Wi-Fi calling is ideal for places were there is limited or no cell coverage. Many indoor spaces don't provide good cellular connections, so Wi-Fi calling is a suitable alternative. Travelers abroad can reduce roaming costs by using Wi-Fi calling as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking upImage by Reuters/Lucy NicholsonA boy samples the Vuzix iWear video headphones, which are billed as the equivalent to a 125 inch screen.RELATED: 47 must-see PC gaming gems revealed at E3 2016: Watch every trailerTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last summer, I wrote an article series called "Kicking Google out of my life." It was an attempt to remove all Google services entirely from my daily usage for 30 days—a surprisingly daunting challenge for someone who had become deeply dependent on Google. I was mostly successful. I chronicled my experience—detailing how I approached replacing Google services with non-Google variants—and in the end, my life was better for it.Did I return to Google for a few things (such as YouTube and G+)? You bet I did. But my heavy reliance on a single company finally came to an end, and I learned a great deal (both about available alternatives and my own personal preferences) in the process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here