Researchers from the University of Houston and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) say drivers are more distracted when they text than when they are being absent minded or are upset while behind the wheel.The researchers, who based their findings on a study of 59 volunteers/drivers, say a mechanism in the brain automatically corrects for jitter in a driver's arms and hands while steering -- as long as the driver is watching the road. Reading or sending texts while driving takes the driver's eyes off the road, and that's where things becomes unsafe.MORE: Cellphone use involved in more than 1 in 4 crashes | 25 real-life ways people have been hurt using their phonesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thread, an open wireless protocol for the Internet of things, is getting a boost from one of its biggest boosters, Google-owned Nest Labs.
An IPv6 networking protocol built on the 802.15.4 mesh networking standard, Thread is designed to connect hundreds of low-power devices to one other and to the cloud.
While the protocol is open, anyone wanting to build Thread-compatible devices had to roll their own software stack implementing it -- until now.
Late Wednesday, Nest published the source code for its implementation of the Thread protocol, OpenThread, on Github under a three-clause BSD license, allowing anyone to reuse, modify or redistribute it in source or binary form.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Conference calls are a big part of work life today — sometimes too big. Because we spend so much time in meetings, we want conference-calling systems that that launch quickly and work flawlessly so we can get the information we need and move on to other pressing matters. The capability to browse a post-meeting transcript or zoom through an audio recording would be big bonuses, especially for fastidious note-takers who don't always catch everything in real time.The good news is that the leading conference call services are full of features that take the sting out of group calls and online meetings. Standard features typically include audio recording capability, support for screen-sharing, automated transcripts (created by converting digital recordings into text), Web interfaces with hosting tools for managing calls and keeping track of participants, and 24/7 availability. Some services also offer personalized greetings to participants who dial in, customized hold music, operator assistance and a participant “dial-out” feature, where the service calls participants to bring them into the meeting (also referred to as "call me" functionality).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s Talos researchers discovered two vulnerabilities in 7-Zip, the popular open-source file archiver known for having a high compression ratio and option to password protect compressed files.Even if users hurry to download the newest 16.0 version of 7-Zip, in which the vulnerabilities are reportedly fixed, that doesn’t take care of many products that have used the old 7-Zip libraries and are still vulnerable. Unless vendors do some work, they are vulnerable and users of their products are as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell may be the largest tech company to ever go private, but it is by no means the only vendor that has decided it would be better off to pursue strategic options without the constant second guessing of public investors. To learn more about the trend, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked with Seth Boro, a Managing Partner at Private Equity firm Thoma Bravo, which has taken Riverbed, Dynatrace and other network companies private, and with Kevin Thompson, CEO of SolarWinds, a supplier of IT management tools that Thoma Bravo helped take private in a $4.5 billion deal last February. Below is the interview with Thompson from SolarWinds. Click here for the interview with Boro from Thoma Bravo.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla has asked a court that it should be provided information on a vulnerability in the Tor browser ahead of it being provided to a defendant in a lawsuit, as the browser is based in part on Firefox browser code.“At this point, no one (including us) outside the government knows what vulnerability was exploited and whether it resides in any of our code base,” wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla, in a blog post Wednesday.Mozilla is asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in the interest of Firefox users to ensure that the government must disclose the vulnerability to it before it is revealed to any other party, as any disclosure without advance notice to Mozilla will increase the likelihood that the exploit will become public before Mozilla can fix any associated vulnerability in Firefox.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is revamping the email editor in Outlook for Mac, providing new options for working with images and adding new fonts.The biggest change is the ability to resize and rotate images. If you insert a very large image, for instance, you'll soon be able to make it more reasonably-sized for email recipients.Users are also getting access to a broader set of fonts, font colors, bulleted lists and other formatting options.The changes will roll out in mid-May, Microsoft says, starting with people who are part of the Office Insider early release program. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two of the most risk averse industries are health care and financial services. Yesterday I wrote about how banks are increasingly using public IaaS cloud services. A new study this week finds that health care are warming to the cloud too.Two years ago HIMSS Analytics and Level 3 found that 22% of health care providers planned to use cloud for back-office functions. This year, the number more than doubled to 46.7%. Just over one in three respondents said they have some sort of patient engagement tools hosted in the cloud. Another popular use case for cloud was Health Information Exchanges.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Sunrise Calendar app will be sunsetting on Aug. 31, the team behind it announced in a blog post Wednesday. In the next few days, the app will no longer be available from the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.Users will have a few months to keep using it without support, before the company switches off the service at the end of August. This is happening because Microsoft acquired the company behind Sunrise last year and put its team to work on improving Outlook instead.According to the blog post, working on Outlook means the Sunrise team doesn't have time to support the app they created. They've been integrating popular features from Sunrise into different versions of Outlook, including a recently-released Calendar Apps feature on iOS and Android that lets users bring information from outside services into their Outlook calendar. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Android users can now get text translated in any app on their phone thanks to an update to Google Translate released Wednesday.The app now has a new Tap to Translate feature that lets people select text in one language, copy it, and with the tap of a button, see it in another language. It's designed to make it easier for folks to quickly get translations without having to go through a whole process of switching apps and pasting the text into Google Translate. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When it comes to smartphone tracking applications that help parents or employers to track the location of their children or perhaps monitor them by intercepting communications, few would argue the merits of such as system. But when those same kinds of apps are used to surreptitiously monitor employee activities, or the behavior of your wife or boyfriend, well, things get a little creepy and possibly illegal.+More on Network World: The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years+The watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this waded into the smartphone tracking app quagmire and found lots of contradictory information on the topic by looking at 40 smartphone tracking apps and analyzing their websites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Department of Homeland Security has issued an alert about a 6-year-old SAP vulnerability that’s still being exploited enough that DHS deems it worthy of special note.But the responsibility for being vulnerable lies with SAP users. “This is a responsibility that falls on SAP customers' information security teams, service providers and external audit firms,” according to an FAQ about the vulnerability that was put out by Onapsis, an SAP-security vendor.And the company is right. The fixes should have been applied by now, since SAP has issued them. SAP issued the following statement about the patches:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One day the inventorying of electronic equipment in the workplace could be accomplished through radio frequency (RF) noise detection rather than labelling and tagging. The concept is based on the fact that all electronics always emit distinct radio noise when they’re running.Those unique RF prints could be used instead of serial numbers or expensive, attached RFID identifying tags and could quickly ID the gear. Even gadgets of exactly the same model type appear unique when analyzed, say researchers (PDF).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ergonomics – they do a body goodImage by ThinkstockDo you work long hours on your computer? If so, we know the feeling and have identified a list of gadgets that you can use at your workstation, and which offer the necessary support and comfort as you work. While some may require making some adjustments or take some getting used to, your body will grow to love any of these devices -- in the form of reduced aches and pain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding insights in an ocean of data has become one of today's most pressing business challenges, and software vendors are rushing to help. The latest is Adobe, which has added a host of algorithms in its cloud services to help brands uncover patterns and put them to work.Adobe's Creative, Document and Marketing Cloud services already use data science to help brands hone their message to customers, and the algorithms announced Wednesday add more capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hello, zero-days. And yes, you should be busy patching them, but Adobe isn’t releasing one of the zero-day fixes for Flash Player until tomorrow (May 12)—even though it is currently being used in real-world attacks.Microsoft released 16 security bulletins, eight of which are rated critical for remote code execution (RCE) and includes a fix for zero-day.Put another way by Bobby Kuzma, CISSP, systems engineer at Core Security: “Another fun and delightful Patch Tuesday, with a number of vulnerabilities with exploits in the wild!”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. government is warning major corporations to check the configuration of their SAP software systems after a computer security company discovered at least 36 global enterprises were still vulnerable to a significant bug patched more than five years ago.The bug allows hackers to remotely gain full administrative access to SAP systems and affects at least 18 of the company's software systems, according to security vendor Onapsis.Using it, attackers can gain "complete control of the business information and processes on these systems, as well as potential access to other systems," the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a bulletin. It's only the third time this year the department has issued such a notice.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, the Network World and IDG.TV video crew was out in Las Vegas gathering interviews at the Interop 2016 event. We tallied up 10 interviews at the show, ranging in topics from networking to security to Wi-Fi. If you missed the show and want to get a sense of some of the companies and issues discussed, take a look below:
Cisco: How the Digital Network Architecture can help the network Cisco had a big presence at Interop (it was the first booth you saw when you entered the expo hall). We got a chance to speak with Jeff Reed, a Cisco SVP and one of the Internet keynoters. In the video, he explains a little bit more about what its Digital Network Architecture (DNA) can do for the future of the enterprise network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The basic tenets of successful vendor negotiation have changed little over the years. Yet the process remains difficult to master and, for CIOs in particular, is getting more complex.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Almost every company is using at least some cloud services today, and they’re not just using packaged SaaS apps, PaaS services and IaaS virtual machines. Websites and custom apps are built using application programming interfaces (API) for everything from mapping and messaging, to analytics, fraud detection and speech recognition.Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings often offer APIs that let you work with them through third-party apps and services, or even build your own. For example, more than 50 percent of Salesforce’s traffic — and revenue — comes through its APIs, rather than directly from its own Web-based service. For eBay, it’s 60 percent, and for Expedia it’s 90 percent. If you use Twilio for sending text messages for customer support or MasterCard fraud detection services, you’re relying on those APIs for your own key business processes. How do you measure and monitor them to find out if you’re getting an acceptable level of service?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here