Big hitsSince the malware museum opened its virtual doors in February, its collection of de-fanged DOS-based malware from the 80s and 90s has attracted nearly 1 million views. (Read the full story.) Here are the museum’s most downloaded viruses:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ah, the edifying trip to the museum. Basking in the Dutch masters. Pondering Warhol’s soup cans. Watching a pixelated marijuana leaf unfold on your screen…
Wait. What?
The latter work (COFFSHOP.COM, artist unknown, if you’re keeping score) can be found at the Malware Museum, the brainchild of F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen.
The museum, part of the Internet Archive, houses DOS viruses from the 1980s and 1990s. Visitors can watch malware’s on-screen manifestations at the website and can even download emulations to their PCs. The viruses have long since been defanged.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.AppFolio Property ManagerKey features: offers enhanced functionality for mobile devices and is designed for the modern manager, enabling full access to the same features available through AppFolio’s cloud-based property management software. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security company Symantec is to acquire Web security provider Blue Coat for US$4.65 billion in cash in a deal that will broaden the portfolio of security technologies the combined company can offer customers as they move to the cloud.The deal, which is expected to be closed by the third quarter, will also see Greg Clark, CEO of Blue Coat, taking over as CEO of Symantec and joining its board at the the closing of the transaction. Symantec, well-known for its anti-virus software, has been looking out for a new CEO since April after it was announced that its CEO Michael Brown was stepping down, following poor financial results. Ajei Gopal was appointed as interim president and chief operating officer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If a UK startup has its way, then you will hand over full access to your social media accounts – “including entire conversation threads and private messages” – so it can be scraped and analyzed to help potential landlords and employers decide if you are a risk worth taking.Why in the world would you agree to such a thing? Score Assured co-founder Steve Thornhill told The Washington Post, “People will give up their privacy to get something they want.”The company launched “Tenant Assured” so landlords can decide if you would be a good tenant. It uses an algorithm to “deep dive” into your social media accounts and give landlords “insights into five main personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Apple released the iPhone 6s, it included a great new Siri feature which enables users to activate the intelligent assistant via voice. Dubbed 'Hey Siri', the feature is particularly convenient because the iPhone 6s' M9 motion coprocessor is 'always listening' and thereby lets users use 'Hey Siri' even when the device isn't connected to a power source.Recently, Stacey Gleeson of Australia used the 'Hey Siri' feature to successfully call an ambulance while she was tending to her daughter Giana who had stopped breathing."I picked her up and sat down with her on the floor,” Gleeson said in an interview. “And as I checked her airways, I looked over and remembered my phone.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Logitech Bluetooth Audio Adapter for Bluetooth StreamingTake just about any traditional set of speakers and make them Bluetooth enabled for streaming audio wirelessly from your favorite device. Currently discounted 30% to $28.HDMI Female to Female High Speed Gold Plated AdapterThis straightforward adapter couples two HDMI cables together for extended length. Currently discounted 46% to $6 for a pack of two.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It pays to look deeply, and I didn’t. I apologize. Some days, I make mistakes. Further education says Black Duck Software’s Security Checker and the Docker Cloud Security Scanning tool aren’t the same thing. Both check vulnerabilities with the CVE database—in a quest to match inflated Docker container problems—and rate containers based on the severity of vulnerabilities and the number found.These two tools (and there are others) are designed to load and parse Docker images and run a manifest against CVEs. Here’s where things largely diverge. Note also that there are other container security tools available, and I’ll get to them in a subsequent blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2010, two entrepreneurs in Boston came up with the idea of turning shipping containers into miniature plantations, and Freight Farms was born.The company’s Leafy Green Machines, outfitted with LED lights and humidity-controlled ventilation systems, provide an ideal growing climate for up to 500 heads of lettuce per week, not to mention other crops such as herbs and micro-greens.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The Most Powerful Internet of Things Companies +Since day one, the containers have been connected to the Internet so they can be monitored and managed remotely. “We’re able to improve the value of the container without customers even knowing it,” says Kyle Seaman, director of farm technology. Freight Farms remotely monitors crop production for each of its roughly 80 farms. Software updates are pushed to the Leafy Green Machines to more efficiently manage the crops, such as by adjusting temperature, humidity and lighting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's every marketer's goal to reach customers in the right place, at the right time, and with the right message, but the online world doesn't make that easy. A new tool announced Thursday uses machine learning to help.Called Lithium Reach, it aims to eliminate some of the guesswork inherent in marketers' jobs by recommending the best social content and the best time to publish it.The average consumer brand today has 55 social media accounts and nearly 45 employees managing them, according to Lithium Technologies, which acquired social-influence ranking site Klout back in 2014. The new Reach tool puts Klout's machine-learning algorithms to work in the hopes of making that process easier.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hyper-connectivity is the way of the future. The world is going to become more electronic, and CEOs are banking on digital technology to grow their revenue.To make that a reality, IT services need to be involved, said Helen Huntley, a Gartner research vice president, speaking at Gartner’s Tech Growth and Innovation Conference in Los Angeles earlier this week.It calls for having a kind of device or digital mesh that produces hyper-connectivity for everyone. That, coupled with vast swaths of data and smart machines, will be a principal “strategic technology change” we’ll see, she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1980, the final episode of one my favorite TV shows, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, aired. In “Who Speaks for Earth?” Sagan summarized the mess that has become humanity and the impending doom that will befall Earth if things do not change. The episode also provides alternatives to that behavior and offers a way to save Earth but begs the big question of who actually speaks for Earth to enable the behavior change.This is not unlike what’s happening in the data center today. It’s been well documented on this site and others that the data center is currently a mess. Data centers are built on repeatable building blocks, but configuration is still done manually. In Cosmos, Sagan gave the planet only a minuscule percentage chance of surviving if humans didn’t change their ways. Similarly, organizations must change the way they operate data centers if they are to make it in an increasingly digital world where speed is everything. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
CompTIA, an industry group, said about 96,000 IT jobs were lost last month across all industries, not just the technology sector. That figure includes the impact of the approximately 37,000 telecommunications jobs sidelined by the Verizon strike, which was settled this month. But it was a rough month, by some estimates.Analysts have been generally cautious this year about IT hiring trends. Although the unemployment rate for IT professionals is about half the national average of 4.7%, said CompTIA, some analysts use terms ranging from "modest" to "pre-recession" to describe IT hiring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The CISO is a precarious job. Research studies indicate that CISOs typically survive just 18 months to two years in a job which is increasingly complex and multi-skilled.After all, information security is no longer solely about managing firewalls and patch management, but rather a varied role encompassing business and technical skills. Add into that continual issues around funding, reporting lines, governance and a lack of support from the board and you can see why the role is not to be taken lightly.Indeed, Deloitte says that the CISO today must have four ‘faces’; the strategist, the adviser, the guardian (protecting business assets by understanding the threat landscape and maintaining security programs) and the technologist.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Chromebook is already an ultra-secure computer straight out of the box. Since it doesn’t run a traditional operating system and takes advantage of various Google-powered security measures, Chrome OS is well-guarded against all the miscreants lurking out there on the Web.But you can always do more, particularly if you want to minimize traces of your Internet wanderings, or prevent your every online action from contributing to an advertising profile.You may share a Chromebook with others or desire a setup that’s impervious to the latest security threats. Perhaps it’s time for a little de-Googling in your life, as the Mountain View giant can collect a lot of information about you.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Top techie companiesFortune is out with its latest list of the Fortune 500 for 2016 and tech companies appear frequently throughout the rankings. While the top tech company on the list likely isn’t a surprise, it is interesting to note that only two tech company broke the Top 10 largest publicly-traded companies based on full-year revenue last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few years ago VMware and OpenStack were foes. Oh, how times have changed.This week VMware is out with the 2.5 release of its VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO). The virtualization giant continues to make it easier to run the open source cloud management tools on top of VMware virtualized infrastructure.+MORE FROM NETWORK WORLD: OpenStack Foundation Director on why open source clouds should be the basis of your data center | How VMware aims to distinguish itself in the cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Theater of the absurdImage by REUTERS/Mario AnzuoniThe term "security theater" was coined to describe the array of security measures at U.S. airports -- taking off shoes, patting down children and the elderly -- that project an image of toughness without making commercial aviation any safer. But the man who came up with the phrase is famous cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier, and it could just as easily apply to a number of common tech security measures. We talked to an array of tech experts to discover what security technologies are often just for show.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Blockchain has been touted by venture capitalists, technophiles and pundits as the Next Big Thing in computer science. The reality, however, is that the digital ledger software at the heart of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has a long way to go before it gains mainstream adoption.That was a key takeaway from a blockchain panel at last month’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Noting that blockchain enables parties to ferry financial transactions, contracts and other digital records over the Internet, MIT professor Christian Catalini asked the panel about potential enterprise applications for the technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here