This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. You know it's bad when a cyber crime wave makes victims out of U.S. police departments. Law enforcement agencies in at least seven states have been blackmailed by cyber attackers using ransomware. Data on departmental computers has been encrypted by malware and held hostage, with the demand that a ransom be paid in bitcoins. Unaccustomed to giving in to criminals, many of the agencies refused to pay and subsequently lost access to their information forever.Cyber criminals also have been targeting U.S. hospitals. In one high profile case, a California hospital lost access to its critical patient records for a week until a ransom worth about $17,000 was paid. Experts estimate this particular facility was losing as much as $100,000 a day in just one department because it wasn't able to perform CT scans without access to its data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has announced a veritable bonanza of new features for its OneNote note-taking software across multiple platforms, providing added functionality for people who rely on it to organize their thoughts. First and foremost, Microsoft made it easier to save online videos for later use inside OneNote. Users can now add a link to one of a handful of popular video services inside OneNote for Windows 10, Mac, and iOS, and Microsoft's software will automatically embed the linked video into the notebook for easy playback later. Users of Microsoft's note-taking software on the iPad can now rearrange audio recordings, images, text, shapes, and any other item on a page by touching and dragging them. To help with that, Microsoft added a lasso tool so that users can select groups of objects and move them around as one unit. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The CIA unearths some pretty interesting materials and this week it was touting the oldest once-classified documents in is collection.
The mostly cryptic documents, from 1917 and 1918 describe secret writing techniques are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Any documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA’s purview to declassify, the agency noted.
+More on Network World: The hot art in the CIA’s cool art collection+
The CIA website noted that one file outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another communication dated June 14, 1918 – written in French – discloses the formula the German’s used to produce invisible ink.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The traditional tablet may not be dying, but it’s increasingly being relegated to the low end of the market, according to an IDC report released Thursday. Users are migrating toward convertibles instead, and the vendors are following.IDC said worldwide tablet sales fell 14.7 percent to just 39.6 million units during the first quarter of 2016. Excluding some seasonal holiday upticks, tablet sales have generally declined from their all-time high in the fourth quarter of 2013, when worldwide sales reached 78.6 million units. IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani said traditional slate tablets still dominate the market with 87.6 percent of all units sold. Increasingly, though, they’ve become “synonymous with the low end of the market,” IDC said in its report. The firm said it believes the market for iPads will continue, but only as replacements, not as new customers purchasing an iPad for the first time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The MX Anywhere 2 from Logitech is designed to track accurately on virtually any surface you need it to -- from your desk, to an airplane seat, to even a piece of glass. Easy-Switch technology allows you to pair up to three Windows or Mac devices at the same time, and switch between them with the touch of the button. The sculpted shape supports your hand and is designed to feel comfortable for hours on end. And the MX 2 Anywhere charges quickly. A one-minute charge gets you an hour, and a full charge can last up to two months depending on usage. Over 300 reviewers give this unit an average of 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews), and with the 25% discount you can buy it now for $59.99. Learn more about the Logitech MX Anywhere 2 on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding the sweet spot for your sensors is a challenge in many IoT projects. Collect too little data, and there isn’t enough to act on. Collect too much data, and the costs might jeopardize your project. So, where is the sweet spot for your application? GoalA retail store chain was looking for an affordable retail analytics system. It needed to track people's movements to help improve the store layout and learn more about customers' shopping behavior. The solution had to be easy to deploy, be discreet and not require any changes from shoppers. The solution was designed on the fact that most shoppers would have mobile phones, which could be used as an approximate count for the number of people in the store and could also help track their movements as they moved from one Wi-Fi hotspot to another.A "People Sensor" was designed using the principle that mobile phones share their MAC address with Wi-Fi hotspots as part of the "handshake process" in order to obtain connectivity. ( MAC addresses are not associated with a specific individual or a mobile phone number, helping to preserve privacy. ) The sensor was built by modifying the firmware Continue reading
Tribe's armband cell phone holder regularly lists for $29.99, but with this 73% discount you can buy it now for just $7.98. It averages 4.5 stars out of 5 from over 4,700 people on Amazon (read reviews).
Tribe's band is designed for activity. It's water-resistant, ultra-light, and made of high quality neoprene so it can flex, twist and bend without stretching or losing its shape. It features a key holder, as well as a reflective strip for increased outdoor visibility. Your touchscreen remains fully functional and accessible through the band's plastic cover. The armband accommodates just about any arm size from 8 to 16-inches. Phone support as follows: Apple iPhone SE, 6/6S (4.7"), 5/5s/5c, Samsung S4, S3, S2, HTC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Digital transformation has become a top-of-mind initiative for CIOs and business leaders for almost all companies in all verticals. It’s no wonder, as a recent ZK Research study found that digital organizations are 26 percent more profitable than their digitally immature peers.Another interesting data point is that by 2019, 65 percent of workers will use a mobile device first for business purposes. Going digital means shifting to a mobile-first strategy.Becoming a mobile-first organization is more than just building a bunch of standalone mobile applications that customers or workers can use. The process of switching between applications on a desktop is inconvenient, but most users manage. On a mobile device, having to constantly flip between applications while trying to remember data or cut and paste data is inefficient and can make users less productive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft and Google each this week increased incentives offered for joining their cloud platforms, highlighting the aggressive nature of this battle for market share.It’s not uncommon for cloud computing providers to offer free services. In the IaaS market all the big providers have free service tiers that allow customers to test their products before paying for them. The expanded freebies announced this week by these vendors goes beyond that though.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Free cloud storage options | How to store all your photos in the cloud for free +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Developers from hundreds of companies have included access tokens for their Slack accounts in public projects on GitHub, putting their teams' internal chats and other data at risk.Slack has become one of the most popular collaboration and internal communication tools used by companies because of its versatility. The platform's API allows users to develop bots that can receive commands or post content from external services directly in Slack channels, making it easy to automate various tasks.Many developers post the code for their Slack bots -- some of which are small personal projects -- on GitHub, but fail to remove the bots' access tokens. Some developers even include private tokens associated with their own accounts in the code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I just read a Bloomberg article proclaiming that Symantec cut its quarterly revenue forecast and announcing that CEO Michael Brown will step down. Unfortunately for Symantec, the company has had a revolving door of chief executives—four different individuals since 2008, and now onward to a fifth.When Symantec went through a similar CEO transition in 2014, I posted a blog to suggest what I would do as its next CEO, but surprisingly my phone never rang. Nevertheless, I reviewed my two-year-old recommendations this morning and many of Symantec’s issues back then still need fixing. Given this, allow me to review and update my CEO action plan for Symantec:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
5 things containers need to win the enterpriseImage by PexelsContainer technology like Docker and CoreOS is growing in popularity as companies to realize the benefits of the flexible service and application delivery platform they offer. But the technology is not without its challenges in the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
During the past nine months, an Nvidia engineering team built a self-driving car with one camera, one Drive-PX embedded computer and only 72 hours of training data. Nvidia published an academic preprint of the results of the DAVE2 project entitled End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars on arXiv.org hosted by the Cornell Research Library.The Nvidia project called DAVE2 is named after a 10-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project known as DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE). Although neural networks and autonomous vehicles seem like a just-invented-now technology, researchers such as Google’s Geoffrey Hinton, Facebook’s Yann Lecune and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio have collaboratively researched this branch of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. And the DARPA DAVE project application of neural network-based autonomous vehicles was preceded by the ALVINN project developed at Carnegie Mellon in 1989. What has changed is GPUs have made building on their research economically feasible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new USB stick computer uses Google's machine-learning software to give drones and robots the equivalent of a human eye, and add new smarts to cameras.Movidius’ Fathom Neural Compute Stick isn't your conventional PC. It is instead designed to analyze pixels and provide the right context for images.Fathom provides the much-needed horsepower for devices like drones, robots and cameras to run computer vision applications like image recognition. These devices alone typically don't have the ability to run computer vision applications.Fathom uses an embedded version of Google's TensorFlow machine learning software for vision processing. The device can be plugged into the USB port of a device or a developer board like Raspberry Pi, which in turn can power a drone or robot. It needs a 64-bit Linux OS and 50MB of hard drive space.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thus far, in my journey to interview the leaders of every major Linux distribution, I’ve talked with the people behind Ubuntu, elementary, Fedora and openSUSE. This time around, I talk with Martin Wimpress—the man behind Ubuntu MATE.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The global smartphone market saw its first year-on-year decline in the first quarter of this year, with both Samsung Electronics and Apple shipping fewer phones, according to a research firm.Global smartphone shipments fell 3 percent annually to 334.6 million from 345 million units in the first quarter of 2015, Strategy Analytics said late Wednesday.It attributed the decline to slowing smartphone growth because of increasing saturation in major markets like China and consumer caution about the future of the world economy.Apple reported Tuesday that the number of smartphones it sold worldwide fell by 16 percent to 51.2 million units in its fiscal second quarter ended March 26. The company saw a 26 percent year-on-year decline in revenue from Greater China, its second largest market. The revenue drop in mainland China was less at 11 percentTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM is expanding its flash storage lineup to power cloud data centers that carry out so-called cognitive computing.The company’s newest FlashSystem arrays, introduced Wednesday, combine its fast and relatively affordable FlashCore technology with a scale-out architecture designed to be easy to expand.Cognitive computing, which IBM defines as real-time data analysis for immediate, automated decision-making, is at the heart of much of IBM’s current technology push for enterprises and service providers. Its Watson technology is the star of the show but only the most visible part of what the company is doing in this space. An example of cognitive computing is a mobile operator analyzing information about phone call quality to make decisions on the fly about changes in the network, said Andy Walls, an IBM Fellow and CTO for flash systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has posted what it calls “a major build” of Windows 10, with significant new features scheduled for the Anniversary Update due this summer. The news has been detailed by Gabe Aul, vice president of the engineering systems team in the Windows group.Microsoft posted Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14328 for both PC and Mobile to the Windows Insiders Fast ring, which gets more rapid updates than Insider, and thus isn’t for everyone. You’re getting builds hot off the compiler, so to speak, which means they are liable to be buggier. This is for true testers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's new business communication product is finally coming to the Mac after the company launched it for PC users last year.The company announced the first technical preview of Skype for Business for Mac on Tuesday morning, giving users of Apple computers an easy way to connect to meetings they have scheduled through Microsoft's professional audio and videoconferencing software. When users sign into the app, they'll see their Skype for Business meetings for the current day and the following one, and be able to easily join them to discuss whatever business things they want to with the other people invited.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Later today, Apple will announce downbeat results from the first quarter of 2016, nearly three dozen financial analysts bet today.According to Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who formerly blogged about Apple for Fortune but left the magazine earlier this month to kick off his own Apple 3.0 subscription-based site, all 11 independent and 19 institutional analysts pegged rare year-over-year declines in Apple's revenue and a fall in unit sales of its iPhone and iPad lines. Most of the 30 analysts also bet that Mac sales would also slip from the same quarter of 2015.Elmer-DeWitt has been collecting and averaging financial analysts' forecasts for years, and continued the chore on his new site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here