Apple would be making a mistake slowing down the cadence of major upgrades to its iPhone, said a pair of analysts today, who argued that the company should instead try to speed up the pace.Their comments were sparked by a Nikkei Asian Review report last week that asserted Apple was shifting to a three-year interval between significant iPhone upgrades. The business paper's proof was thin: That the upcoming iPhone 7 will "look almost identical to the current iPhone 6."If accurate, Apple would abandon its two-year rhythm that debuted a form factor change in even years, followed by nearly identical models that retained the exterior look in odd years, designated with an "S" appended to the label.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I read of Docker’s announcement June 6, about a new security vetting online tool for its containers. Yes, it’s a step forward. But it’s not Docker’s.Last week, I received a briefing and did a proof-of-concept test on another SaaS container-checking tool, Black Duck’s Security Checker. Hmmmm. Docker’s tool quacks like a Black Duck.After some quick queries, I confirmed that these tools are indeed the same.The short of it is this: there are two SaaS front ends pointing to the same tool—Black Duck’s Hub product, which vets, among other things, Docker containers. You get three free tests at Black Duck. However, at Docker, it’s FREE-AS-IN-BEER until Aug. 1, 2016. You pick. It’s subscription-only afterwards, unless the model changes. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you remember back in 2012 when LinkedIn was hacked? Around 6.5 million user passwords were posted on a Russian blog. There was a mandatory password reset for affected users, and LinkedIn released a statement advising people to enable two-step verification and use stronger passwords.Four years later, and the passwords of 117 million accounts were compromised.Worryingly, this came to light only when a hacker put them up for sale, offering data from 167 million accounts in total. If you haven’t changed your LinkedIn password since 2012, you could be at risk. Tech savvy is no protection, as evidenced by the fact that a hacker group used the LinkedIn password dump to hack Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google, Facebook, Yahoo and industry and civil rights groups have opposed legislation that would extend the categories of Internet records that the U.S. government can collect without court approval through administrative orders known as National Security Letters.The companies and groups have pointed out in a letter to senators that the new provisions would expand the types of records, known as Electronic Communication Transactional Records (ECTRs), which the Federal Bureau of Investigation can obtain using the NSLs.The ECTRs would include a variety of online information, such as IP addresses, routing and transmission information, session data, a person's browsing history, email metadata, location information, and the exact date and time a person signs in or out of a particular online account.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you think overclocking is something that only hardcore PC enthusiasts can get into, think again. At Computex in Taipei last week I got the chance to try overclocking Intel's latest processor, the 10-core Broadwell-E chip, and it was a lot of fun.Thanks to Intel's XTU (Extreme Tuning Utility) overclocking app, doing some basic overclocking was easy. But beware: If you're the type of person who likes a challenge and enjoys tinkering with computers, it can get addictive fast.Overclocking is the process of running a processor and other components faster than their rated speed. It's done to get more performance for heavy-duty applications like gaming and video processing, and there's even a competitive side to it, with international rankings and competitions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Thermacell Mosquito Repellent Lantern effectively repels mosquitoes and other biting insects in a 15 x 15-foot zone. It has no open flames, operates on a single butane cartidge, and is perfect for a deck, porch or campsite. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon and is currently discounted to $34.90. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The late Muhammad Ali was not only a champion fighter and cultural figure, but also no slouch in the advertising ring.
Ali sold pizzas, car batteries and even roach spray ("I can whup anything on two legs but even me, the greatest, needs help beating things with six legs...")
While many have used Ali's image or voice in their ads, including Apple (Think Different commercial) and Gatorade, I'm not aware of Ali hawking much in the way of technology. One exception was this 2004 IBM Super Bowl ad during which the company pushes Linux and open source computing, something it had been behind since the late 1990s. The ad features a young boy (depicted as "Linux" in related IBM ads) soaking up vintage video of Ali boasting "I shook up the world!" and then sitting face-to-face with the boxer, who urges the kid to "shake things up" and "shake up the world."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With college graduations now behind students, many young people might already have secured jobs even before they crossed the stage with their degrees in hand. With these fresh-faced employees on the payroll, now businesses must make sure their security habits are in line with today’s policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
From PCs to servers, Intel is trying to redesign the way computers operate. We've already seen how PCs are changing, with 2-in-1 hybrids and tiny Compute Sticks, but some of the chip maker's groundbreaking technologies will initially appear in servers.The PC market is in decline, and the chipmaker has cut unprofitable products like smartphone chips. Intel is redirecting more resources to develop server and data-center products, which are already money makers for the company. Intel is also focusing on markets like the Internet of Things, memory, silicon photonics, and FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), all of which have ties to the fast-growing data center business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over a million workers suffered back injuries last year, costing U.S. firms over $70 billion. A single incident can cost a firm over $6,000. Why are there so many back injuries? How can IoT help reduce injuries and expenses?The demand to work faster often causes bad lifting habits. Couple this with bad operations design, and you can see why there are so many back injuries. The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) recommends ergonomic equipment and workflow design to reduce the physical demands on workers. To begin with, it helps to know which activities and equipment cause the most injuries to workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The June batch of Android security patches addresses nearly two dozen vulnerabilities in system drivers for various hardware components from several chipset makers.
The largest number of critical and high severity flaws were patched in the Qualcomm video driver, sound driver, GPU driver, Wi-Fi driver, and camera driver. Some of these privilege escalation vulnerabilities could allow malicious applications to execute malicious code in the kernel leading to a permanent device compromise.
Similar high-risk flaws were fixed in the Broadcom Wi-Fi driver, NVIDIA camera driver, and MediaTek power management driver. These vulnerabilities can give regular applications access to privileges or system settings that they shouldn't have. In some cases, the flaws allow kernel code execution, but only if the attacker compromises a different service first to communicate with the vulnerable driver.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There is one inevitable real-world reality when it comes to virtual reality: you need high-end gear. It’s no accident that VR headsets like Oculus Rift and Vive are taking off this year because both Nvidia and AMD are launching very powerful video cards that can generate the realistic graphics needed to make VR work. There are more low-cost VR alternatives, such as Google Cardboard and Samsung’s Gear VR, but they don’t give the same experience as Oculus and Vive. However, Microsoft Research may have come up with a workaround that can lower the barrier to entry for VR systems and make underpowered devices viable VR platforms.FlashBack is a new system from Microsoft Research that eliminates real-time frame rendering and instead relies on cached, pre-rendered frames that are displayed based on the user’s actions. According to a research paper just published (PDF), the system provides eight times improved frame rate, 97 times less energy consumption and a 15-fold latency reduction in mobile devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Vendor lock-in is dead. Proprietary specifications are dead. Closed vendor ecosystems are dead. Today’s networks are increasingly defined on de facto and de jour open standards—call it open source, call it open APIs, call it whatever you want. It’s all about openness and collaboration. Vendor consortia are open, as are the many partnerships and pairings between standards-defining organizations.It’s about time, and it’s all good.The power of open source and open standards
In May, I attended TM Forum Live, the big telecommunications management conference in Nice, France, produced by the TM Forum. Once a bastion of operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) for carriers, TM Forum is all about digital transformation and open standards. More than two dozen multivendor interoperability and proof-of-concept demonstrations—which the conference calls “Catalysts”—showed off the power of open source and open standards. But that was only the start.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has taken a big step toward helping employees stay on track with the launch of a new app called Planner.It's a Web-based tool for Office 365 subscribers designed to let them easily lay out plans for projects and business objectives and then share them with other people. After creating a plan, users can create and assign tasks, share files and update their colleagues on the status of key to-dos.Planner appears to be a response to the likes of Trello and Asana -- startups that have built their businesses on making it easier for other companies to improve their employees' productivity. Microsoft has positioned Office 365 as a key part of a users' productivity workflow, and this app is supposed to make it easier for them to stay on track and effectively collaborate with colleagues. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For those unfamiliar with LiveCode, it is a visual software development environment (and corresponding language). Think Hypercard—the the Hypermedia authoring tool/development environment that shipped with every old Macintosh. Then make the language more powerful. Make the interface usable for experienced developers. And allow it to build Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS and HTML5 applications—while running on Linux, Windows or MacOS.That is, in a nutshell, LiveCode. Oh, and it's open source under the GPLv3 and available right up on GitHub—a fact I rather like.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Now, this is interesting.Ping Identity is a well-known identity vendor. Basically, Ping handles authentication, single sign-on (SSO) and other identity-related functions that large organizations have. The company competes with vendors such as OneLogin and Okta. So, what is it doing investing in a formerly stealthy blockchain vendor?It seems Ping sees blockchain as a potential disruptor for identity session management. It's so excited about it that it is spending some of its hard-earned cash to invest in Swrlds, a new platform that is creating the "hashgraph," a distributed consensus platform. Swrlds sees itself as solving some of the limitations that are inherent in blockchain. Swrlds contends that it delivers the three legs of the consensus stool: fairness, distributed trust and resilience to Denial of Service attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Temporary jobs are on the rise. According to research from CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Specialist Intl., nearly three million people are employed in a temporary job with a projected 173,478 additional temp jobs expected to open up from 2016 to 2018. The study found that 47 percent of companies plan to hire temporary or contract workers in 2016, and just under 60 percent of that group also plan to consider transitioning temporary workers to permanent employees at some point. Tech jobs are at the forefront of temporary work, with computer service representatives, computer user support specialists, software developers and application developers expected to see the most growth in contract jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
A petition launched Friday asks the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to investigate Microsoft's aggressive moves to convince and cajole users into upgrading to Windows 10.The request was launched on Change.org, a popular online petition website, and by early Monday had garnered more than 470 signatures.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Microsoft blows trust and credibility with forced upgrade +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security researcher Ken Munro of Pen Test Partners hacked the Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). He discovered several vulnerabilities, including being able to disable the anti-theft alarm from a laptop.U.S. drivers may be unfamiliar with the vehicle. Had Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-In Hybrid sales started in 2013 as originally proposed, it would have been the first plug-in hybrid SUV available in the U.S. But it didn't. The 2017 model is expected to hit showrooms late this fall, with an estimated $42,000 as a base price. In the UK, it is the “bestselling hybrid.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services reported a multi-hour service disruption to core features of its IaaS public cloud in Sydney, Australia over the weekend.It’s one of the highest-profile hiccups the cloud provider has had in recent months.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Father’s Day 2016 gift ideas for the techie Dad +According to the Amazon Web Services’ Service Health Dashboard, the company’s virtual machine service named Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) began experiencing connectivity issues at 10:47 PM PDT Saturday, which was 3:47 PM on Sunday in Sydney. The issue was finally resolved more than 12 hours later by 4:50 AM local Sydney time. AWS said a single Availability Zone within the region lost power (AWS regions are each made up of at least two or more Availability Zones). AWS said by 1 AM local Sydney time about 80% of the EC2 and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) instances that had been impacted were resolved. A handful of other ancillary services were almost impacted in the region.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here