Oracle plans to sue whistleblower Svetlana Blackburn for malicious prosecution, the company said Thursday.On Wednesday, Blackburn -- a senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business -- said in a lawsuit she was terminated from her job for refusing to go along with cloud-computing accounting principles she considered unlawful.Blackburn alleges that upper management was trying to fit "square data into round holes" in a bid to boost the financial reports for Oracle's cloud services business that would be "paraded" before company leaders and investors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As part of my research for the Network World Father’s Day 2016 gift idea slideshow, several companies sent along gadgets for me to try out. While some products made the guide, some didn’t – not because they aren’t good, but because I wanted to pick only one device per vendor. Ventev
For example, I chose the Ventev PowerCell 3015+ charger for the guide, but they also sent me some other cool devices. The Desktop Charging Hub (model s500, $50 - See it on Amazon) is a combination device that will help you recharge a phone, a tablet and at least one other USB device. The circular unit also has two 10-amp outlets, for powering additional devices (like your computer, monitor or perhaps other accessories for your desk). The Charging Hub comes with a 5-foot power cord for optimal desktop placement, and two grooves for resting your tablet and/or phone. It should help clean up an area if you do a lot of recharging.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you want to get under Diane Bryant’s skin these days, just ask her about GPUs.
The head of Intel’s powerful data center group was at Computex in Taipei this week, in part to explain how the company's latest Xeon Phi processor is a good fit for machine learning.
Machine learning is the process by which companies like Google and Facebook train software to get better at performing AI tasks including computer vision and understanding natural language. It’s key to improving all kinds of online services: Google said recently that it's rethinking everything it does around machine learning.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The third time could be the charm for Intel and its Thunderbolt technology. A year after introducing Thunderbolt 3 at Computex 2015, Intel is finally starting to see success with its high-speed external I/O—enough that even doubters might agree it’s winning.You needn’t look far for signs that Thunderbolt 3 will succeed where its two predecessors failed dismally on the PC. This year’s top-tier laptops from HP and Dell, as well models from MSI, Asus, Razer, and Acer, all prominently feature Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Almost all of the high-profile laptops of the last few months have prominently featured Thunderbolt 3 ports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The health care industry provides an alluring target for malicious hackers. Personal health information has a much longer shelf life than financial information, making it a major draw for identity thieves. But a new and more troubling threat has arisen: the potential disruption of critical hospital systems by cybercriminals.With a diverse array of digital systems, hospitals have evolved into complex technology operations. Yet they remain singularly ill-prepared to defend against attacks, in part because the multiplicity of systems forms a wider surface area to attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pulling ransomware out of …Image by ThinkstockRansomware quite often targets businesses (for example hospitals) rather than individuals. Corporations have more valuable data and more money for ransom (ransom increases from roughly $500 per computer to $15,000 for the entire enterprise). Cyphort has examined different variants of ransomware to help users get an idea of what might be coming down the Internet pipeline. So keep an eye out for these characteristics before your network is taken hostage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
"Beware those bearing gifts" is the ancient phrase that dates back a few thousand years. It referred to the wooden horse that was used to dupe the folks of Troy into allowing the Greeks into their city.Well, don’t trust the horse today, either.Freebies are just as likely to be accompanied by trickery now as they’ve ever been, according to scientists who’ve been studying the willingness to communicate confidential information.Presents “greatly increased the likelihood of participants giving away their password,” psychologists from the University of Luxembourg say their research has revealed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Japan's Mouse Computer has developed add-on biometric sensors that will bring Windows Hello to any PC running Windows 10.
Windows Hello is Microsoft's biometric security system. It allows users to dump passwords for facial or fingerprint recognition, but only on PCs that have the correct hardware.
Many new PCs do, but generations of older machines that can run Windows 10 don't have the infrared camera or fingerprint sensors that are required. That's where the new add-on peripherals come in.
There's a USB camera unit and a tiny USB fingerprint reader. Both will bring Windows Hello to Windows 10 PCs, said Microsoft this week at the Computex trade show in Taipei.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The worldwide server market saw a year-on-year revenue slump of 3.6 percent in the first quarter to US$12.4 billion, after a winning streak of seven quarters of growth, IDC said Wednesday.The slowdown in the market, which also witnessed shipments of servers drop by 3 percent year-on-year to 2.2 million units, is largely put down to an end in the enterprise refresh cycle and what is described as a “pause” in investments in hyperscale server deployments.Those investments are expected to be back in the second half of this year with a pick up in expenditure on servers for existing data centers and the roll out of new ones.The slowdown in the server market in the first quarter has not affected key players uniformly. Hewlett Packard Enterprise retained its top position, with revenue of $3.3 billion and a 26.7 percent share of market revenue, after a year on-year growth of 3.5 percent. Dell and IBM retained their number two and three spots respectively, but with year-on-year decline in revenue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business has complained to a federal court that she was terminated from her job because she refused to go along with accounting principles she considered unlawful.In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Svetlana Blackburn says her superiors instructed her “to add millions of dollars in accruals to financial reports, with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers, an act that Plaintiff warned was improper and suspect accounting.” The former employee is said to have warned her supervisor she would blow the whistle if ordered to continue in the same manner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Logitech's K400 Wireless Keyboard for internet-enabled TVs is designed to be compact, comfortable, quiet, and easy to use from the comfort of your couch. It features a familiar key layout and a large 3.5-inch touchpad. A 33-foot range makes for a trouble free connection even in large rooms, and its battery is strong, lasting up to a year and a half without needing a charge, even with 2 hours of typing per day. The keyboard averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 860 customers (read reviews). It's regular list price of $39.99 has been reduced by 25% to just $29.99. See the discounted K400 wireless keyboard now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The upgrade cycle for PCs has slowed down drastically, now extending to nearly six years, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said on Wednesday."[The] replacement cycle for the PC has extended," Krzanich said. "Four years was the average, now it has moved to about five to six years."Intel needs to ramp up its efforts and release the right innovations so people are motivated to upgrade PCs quickly and easily, Krzanich said at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York."Right now, it's easier to move your phone to a new phone than your PC to a new PC," he said. "We've got to go fix some of those things."PC upgrades have slowed because current operating systems can run well on older Intel-based PCs. Five years ago, Intel shipped Core processors code-named Sandy Bridge, and they can capably run Microsoft's Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”That Groucho Marx quote illustrates why it’s difficult for computers to understand humans. When programming for computers to understand humans, one must account for vagueness, ambiguity and uncertainty to distil the meaning of human language.Facebook announced today that it can now do that with Deep Text, a deep learning-based text-understanding engine running a neural network that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands of posts per second—and in more than 20 languages.Consumers interacting with computers
Consumers regularly interact with computers trained with machine-learning techniques that understand human language. Ask Siri for the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, and Siri will give you a list of restaurants. Or ask Google how many people live in Lisle, Illinois, and Google will reply with the answer from the U.S. census. These intelligent systems parse the question like school children, using syntax to diagram a sentence and then answer the question with structured data sets: the list of restaurants labeled San Francisco and Japanese or the quantity of people labeled Lisle, IL, in the census database.To Continue reading
Rochester Institute of Technology
Vicki Hanson, a distinguished professor of Computing at RIT, now adds President of ACM to her resume
Against a backdrop of an IT industry pushing hard to more fairly represent women in leadership positions, the Association for Computing Machinery has announced that an all-female board has been elected to head up the society.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just as the month was about to end, Microsoft announced the release of the May 2016 Update for HoloLens, the first major software update to the virtual reality (VR) headset it's developing since it offered the developer edition.Considering it's been just two months since the Developer Kit and first wave of devices went out at the Build 2016 conference, Microsoft sure has added quite a bit to this update. The company also announced it was shipping headsets to a second wave of developer applicants.The full list of additions and changes to the May 2016 Update for HoloLens is rather lengthy, so we've boiled it down for you:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The digital transformation train may have already left the station, but for companies with legacy mainframe applications, it's not always clear how to get on board. On Wednesday, IBM announced an acquisition that could help.The PC giant will acquire Israel-based EZSource, it said, in the hopes of helping developers "quickly and easily understand and change mainframe code."EZSource offers a visual dashboard that's designed to ease the process of modernizing applications. Essentially, it exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can focus their efforts accordingly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is giving iPhone users another way to find their misplaced devices -- by searching the Web for it. Soon, when iPhone or Android users enter "I lost my phone" at Google.com, the search engine will respond with options that will allow them to ring the device, or locate it on a map. Right now, users can already get access to that functionality through Google's My Account feature, which serves as the nexus for people to understand and access the information connected to their Google account.Unlike Apple's Find my iPhone, Google's phone location feature isn't capable of locking an iPhone or remotely erasing it. Still, it may be a useful feature for someone who have misplaced his phone and just wants to figure out where it is.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Storage giant EMC today dipped its toe into the hot application container market, taking aim at one of the unresolved areas in this burgeoning technology: storage.EMC announced libStorage, which the company describes as an open-source, platform-agnostic storage provisioning and orchestration framework for containers.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: A guide to container networking + libStorage is a client that sits atop a storage array that can talk to container management platforms, allowing that storage system to interact with containers. EMC posted the code for libStorage on GitHub and made it available as a free download.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Triggered NetFlow: A Woland-Santuka Pro-Tip
Vivek Santuka, CCIE #17621, is a consulting systems engineer at Cisco Systems who focuses on ISE for Cisco’s largest customers around the world. He and I devised, tested and deployed the methodology discussed in this blog entry, which we like to call “Triggered NetFlow.”NetFlow is an incredibly useful and under-valued security tool. Essentially, it is similar to a phone bill. A phone bill does not include recordings of all the conversations you have had in their entirety; it is a summary record of all calls sent and received.Cisco routers and switches support NetFlow, sending a “record” of each packet that has been routed, including the ports and other very usable information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’ve written about Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) a few times, as I think this model is a strong fit for today’s IT cocktail made up of mobile applications, public cloud infrastructure and pervasive security threats. What is an SDP? The model is really based upon the “black cloud” concept coming out of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) where network access and connections are allowed on a “need-to-know” basis. Similarly, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) refers to SDPs as “on-demand, dynamically-provisioned, air gapped networks.”Several vendors, including Cryptzone and Vidder, actively market SDP offerings. In addition, Google’s BeyondCorp is a homegrown SDP project that Google has made public and highly visible. While these efforts clearly fall under the SDP category, I viewed the SDP model a bit more broadly. SDP is clearly associated with numerous innovations and initiatives of the past, including next-generation firewalls, network access control (NAC) and even 802.1X, so there are plenty of SDP-like solutions from vendors such as Cisco, HP (Aruba) and Pulse Secure (formerly part of Juniper). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here