Microsoft had planned to release a Windows 10 update to the company's beta testers today, but the build got loose prematurely, ending up on some users' PCs late Tuesday.After Microsoft realized that build 14342 had escaped its confines, it continued to push it to customers."Some #WindowsInsiders have reported getting PC build 14342. We were staging this for tomorrow and looks like it published too far," tweeted Gabriel Aul, engineering general manager for Microsoft's operating systems group late Tuesday.A few minutes later, Aul added, "I think we'll just keep pushing out, but it may not be fully staged yet."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The recent standoff between Apple and the FBI over the agency’s demand that the company provide a way to unlock the iPhone of a dead terrorist, was "resolved" when the FBI “bought a tool,” according to Director James Comey.But that, of course, didn’t resolve the fundamental, ongoing conflict between the government's need for digital surveillance capabilities to assist with law enforcement and national security on one side, and the American commitment to personal privacy on the other.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hacker with alleged connections to members of the Syrian Electronic Army appeared in a Virginia court Tuesday to face charges of participating in an extortion scheme that threatened victims to delete or sell data from compromised computers. Peter Romar, who was detained by German authorities on a provisional arrest warrant on behalf of the U.S., had been earlier charged by a criminal complaint unsealed on March 22. The Syrian national, also known as Pierre Romar, was residing in Waltershausen in Germany.He is alleged to have worked with Firas Dardar from Homs, Syria, on the extortion scheme.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce.com was having an outage in some locations on Tuesday, prompting the company’s CEO to apologize to users on Twitter.The cloud applications company said on its website that the over 12 hours disruption was the result of a database failure on the NA14 instance, which introduced a file integrity issue in the NA14 database.The outage had not been apparently resolved by late evening.Salesforce customers are grouped together in instances, which typically consist of servers and other infrastructure that provide the company's service to a set of the company’s customers.The NA14 instance is in North America by most accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Verizon and local police departments along the east coast have been tracking a series of seemingly deliberate fiber cuts that have been robbing consumers of cable, phone and Internet services.+More on Network World: Ethernet: Are there worlds left to conquer?+The number and the precision of some the cuts leads police and others to believe they are related to the now weeks long strike between some 40,000 Verizon workers represented by the Communications Workers of America and management. The workers went on strike April 13 primarily impacting Verizon’s wireline business, in nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States plus Washington, D.C.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NASA’s planet hunting space telescope Kepler added a record 1,284 confirmed planets to its already impressive discoveries of extraterrestrial worlds.
This batch of planets is the largest single account of new planets since Kepler launched in 2009 and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets realized by the space telescope so far to more than 2,300.
NASA: Kepler's most excellent space discoveries
"Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA. "This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Here's a brief look at three academic research projects that explore existing and future uses of wireless networking technology:Smaller RFID tags
North Carolina State University researchers have come up with ways to create passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that are not only 25% smaller but also cheaper than typical tags. The no-longer-secret-sauce: The tags don't need to convert AC radio signals from a reader into DC in order to respond to the transmitter.These AC-only RFID tags are the work of Paul Franzon, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State, and Ph.D. students Wenxu Zhao and Kirti Bhanushali.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the early 1930s Congress chartered a dozen federal loan banks across the country to help smaller banks provide liquidity for home loans. Today, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago holds $70.7 billion in assets. And Eric Gieger, vice president of IT operations for the bank runs this financial institution from the cloud.Just a few years ago it would have been rare to see financial institutions operating in the public IaaS cloud, but recently there have been more examples. Last year at Amazon’s re:Invent conference Capital One’s CIO Rob Alexander described how the bank is using Amazon’s cloud to host some of the company’s newest applications. Capital One and the FHLB of Chicago show that even the most risk-averse organizations are beginning to embrace public cloud computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After a tumultuous time period of executive transition, questions about whether the company would be taken private or sold, and debate about the future of its public cloud plans, managed hosting and cloud provider Rackspace made a big pivot last year.The company has always prided itself on “Fanatical Support,” meaning that it will help customers use its infrastructure services. Last year it did what would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago though: It began offering that fanatical support for other cloud providers too.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: IDC's pick for the best cloud consultant is... | Geeky ways to celebrate Friday the 13th +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The digital business era has brought about many changes to IT. One of the biggest evolutions is the acceptance and usage of the cloud.Cloud computing’s path is similar to the one virtualization traveled about a decade ago. Early on, virtualization was used in labs and for non-mission-critical workloads. But as the technology matured and organizations became comfortable with it, usage exploded.The same thing is happening with cloud, and over the next few years, the industry will see more and more applications and services moved to the cloud. Hybrid Cloud: The time for adoption is upon us
For most organizations, however, migrating to the cloud is no simple thing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Perhaps you noticed the story last week about an economics professor whose math scribblings prior to takeoff from Philadelphia so alarmed a paranoid ninny sitting next to him that she reported the “suspicious behavior” in a note passed to an American Airlines flight attendant. You know, as in math means terrorist so flight delayed two hours.
Twitter noticed and this morning the hashtag #PassesNoteToFlightAttendant produced much merriment. Here’s a sampling, the first of which would have blown that ninny’s mind:
There’s plenty more if this kind of thing amuses you.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The database landscape is much more diverse than it once was, thanks in large part to big data, and on Tuesday, one of today's newer contenders unveiled an upcoming release featuring a major boost in security.Version 9 of MarkLogic's namesake NoSQL database will be available at the end of this year, and one of its key new features is the inclusion of Cryptsoft’s KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) technology.MarkLogic has placed its bets on companies' need to integrate data from dispersed enterprise silos -- a task that has often required the use of so-called ETL tools to extract, transform and load data into a traditional relational database. Aiming to offer an alternative approach, MarkLogic's technology combines the flexibility, scalability, and agility of NoSQL with enterprise-hardened features like government-grade security and high availability, it says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAP isn't necessarily known for its design chops or world-class user experience, but the enterprise software giant hopes its new partnership with Apple can change that. "We felt that a partnership with Apple can take that to the next level, both with Apple's expertise in design, but also the ability to optimize those designs natively on iOS devices," says Sam Yen, SAP's chief design officer.Apple and SAP began exploring potential partnerships more than a year ago, according to Yen, and their respective CEOs met in late 2015 to start to formalize the deal. The goal of the pact is to rethink the entire mobile enterprise experience, according to Yen. Apple's iOS is widely used in enterprise, and "76 percent of all global business transactions are done on SAP systems," according to Yen, so it was a "no brainer" for the two companies to combine their strengths.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A user group for enterprise IT managers is taking on software-defined networking, calling for new technologies they say would better serve enterprise needs.On Tuesday, the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) announced initiatives behind four technologies that it says would help enterprises build and run their networks better.There’s no shortage of platforms and protocols for software-defined infrastructure, including things like OpenFlow, OpenStack and ONOS (Open Network Operating System). But they were developed around the needs of vendors and service providers more than of enterprises, ONUG founder Nick Lippis said. His group wants to push along a few more pieces that aren’t there yet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What is a ‘fringe’ device in IT?
For some, it’s a gadget everyone has forgotten about — a printer in a corner office, an Android tablet in a public area used to schedule conference rooms. A fringe device can also be one that’s common enough to be used in the office yet not so common that everyone is carrying one around or has one hooked up to the Wi-Fi every day.
As with any security concern, many of these devices are overlooked. There might be security policies and software used to track and monitor iPads and Dell laptops, but what about the old HP printer used at the receptionist’s desk? In a hospital, it might be a patient monitoring device. In a more technical shop, it could be a new smartphone running an alternate operating system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.K.'s National Crime Agency (NCA) failed in its attempt to use what critics described as a legal backdoor to force a suspected hacker to provide the decryption key for data on multiple devices.Lauri Love, 31, was arrested by U.K. authorities in 2013 under suspicion of hacking into computers belonging to multiple U.S. government agencies including NASA, the FBI, the Federal Reserve, and the Army.Love is the subject of separate indictments in courts in New Jersey, New York, and Virginia and faces extradition to the U.S. An extradition hearing is scheduled for the end of June.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking to address a substantial shortfall in the government’s major weapon for defending against cyber attacks, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) said it has added a new intrusion prevention security service to the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS)— also known as Einstein 3A.In a Privacy Impact Assessment, the DHS said the intrusion prevention, a Web Content Filtering system, provides protection at the application layer for web traffic by blocking access to suspicious websites, preventing malware from running on systems and networks, and detecting and blocking phishing attempts as well as malicious web content. This service will be added to the existing E3A intrusion prevention security services that are already in place, the DHS stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is expanding the global footprint of its cloud platform to South Korea, and it has officially launched its previously announced data center in Canada, the company announced Tuesday. In South Korea, Microsoft's cloud will be getting two new regions, including one in Seoul. They're aimed at serving both customers of the company's Azure cloud platform, and also its other services, including Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online. Customers also now have full use of two Microsoft Azure regions in Canada, located in Quebec City and Toronto. This announcement is part of Microsoft's ongoing plan to expand the geographic reach of its cloud computing platform. The expansion serves a pair of purposes: meeting the data sovereignty needs of customers, and making it faster for people to access Microsoft's cloud. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Next week, Google will show its love for independent software developers by giving them an exclusive first-look at new technologies and early and free access to new hardware at the ninth annual Google I/O conference. Here are a couple of educated guesses at free hardware, which developers call SWAG (something we all get), attendees will take home.Early access hardware giveaways
The past is a good predictor of the future. Looking back at earlier I/O shows, Google wanted to give their loyal developers a head start developing for strategic new platforms and bestowed upon them the newest hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Congress should limit the ability of the FBI and other agencies to search for information about U.S. residents in a database of foreign terrorism communications collected by the National Security Agency, privacy advocates say.The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act, which allows the NSA to collect foreign Internet communications, expires in late 2017, and Congress should require that the communications of U.S. residents swept up in the controversial Prism and Upstream programs be protected with court-ordered warrants, privacy advocates told a Senate committee Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here