Emphasizing fashion over functionality, Google today announced the MODE interchangeable and colorful, silicon and leather smartwatch straps—a sign that Android Wear smartwatch growth will come from making Android Wear more fashionable.Early Android Wear smartwatches, circa 2014, such as the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch stressed functionality over style and form. These were prototypes to seed developers with a software platform they could use to begin to build apps and were for enthusiasts to begin to use and understand the smartwatch category.Many consumers, however, complained Android Wear watches didn’t match their expectations of what watches should look like. After all, a watch is a fashion statement first, a time piece second and app platform third. And so Android Wear watches began to subtly change, with Motorola’s Moto 360 winning praise for its round design over the Apple Watch and the round Huawei watch acting as Google’s de facto Nexus smartwatch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The United States isn’t as deeply unprepared for electromagnetic threats – either from space or man-made -- as it was a few years ago but a lot of work remains and awareness of the danger needs to be amped-up if the country wants to truly protect the electric grid.That was the general conclusion from a report by the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this that looked at federal efforts to address electromagnetic risks to the electric grid.+More on Network World: Threat or menace?: Gaging electromagnetic risks to the electric grid+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nearly 50 business leaders, including many enterprise IT company executives, have joined dozens of governors and educational system representatives in urging Congress to support the teaching of computer science in every K-12 school across the United States.
An open letter/petition, titled "Offer Computer Science in our public schools," had accumulated more than 1,000 signatures on Change.org as of Tuesday morning. The petition was launched by the CS Education Coalition in partnership with Code.org.
MORE: Top 25 computer science colleges, ranked by alumni earningsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bots are hot, hot, hot.Until they’re not, not, not.Unless you’ve been cut off from all media in a vain attempt to avoid the 2016 presidential campaign, you’re probably aware that bots are bright, new shiny things in the tech world.The idea behind “bot-mania” is that a conversation is often the best, most natural way for a program or service to communicate with a human. Instead of websites or apps, you can type or talk to the bot and get the answers or services you’re looking for.Sounds great right? And it is. Or at least it’s a great idea. Most of the time, anyway.Great bot expectations?
It turns out, as so often happens in the world of technology, the hype may be getting ahead of the reality, creating expectations that cannot currently, or perhaps ever, be fully met.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You’d think you’d hear about a hack that affects over seven million people … unless the company chooses to “cover it up.” Thankfully that is changing thanks to security researcher Troy Hunt, via Have I Been Pwned. Have I Been Pwned?
Scale-wise, it's a big breach. Lifeboat is listed in Have I Been Pwned’s top 10 breaches; it currently is ranked eighth with 7,089,395 compromised accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The technology industry has gone through several waves of innovation since the birth of computing. The industry kicked off with mainframes, which eventually gave way to client/server, which eventually evolved into branch office computing. Today, we are in the midst of the transition to a cloud-first world.Each of these waves brought with it new networking tools and technologies. The devices that we used to build local LANs were not the same ones we used to build WANs.This trend of requiring new tools is also true for the transition to the cloud. Organizations are rapidly shifting to Wi-Fi to enable mobile devices to connect to cloud services and embracing software-defined WANs (SD-WAN) to give the network the necessary levels of agility required to meet the demands of a cloud-first world. Unfortunately, most of these technologies have been built independent of one another, making management of the end-to-end network in a cloud-centric business very difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Clothes with embroidered electronics that can act as internet-connecting antennas or as health monitors are just around the corner.High-precision embroidered circuits have been woven into fabrics with 0.1mm accuracy in experiments. That kind of precision could allow in-clothing antennas to be matched perfectly to radio waves and for sensors to be incorporated into fabrics in such a way as to feel the same on skin as the base material, scientists from Ohio State University say.The revolutionary “functional textile” medium will be known as “e-textiles,” John Volakis, director of the ElectroScience Laboratory at Ohio State University, said in a news release. His team has developed the precise technique.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Extorting money from companies under the threat of launching distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against their online properties has proven lucrative for cybercriminals. So much so that one group has managed to earn over $100,000 without any evidence that it's even capable of mounting attacks.Since early March, hundreds of businesses have received threatening emails from a group calling itself the Armada Collective, asking to be paid between 10 and 50 bitcoins -- US$4,600 to $23,000 -- as a "protection fee" or face DDoS attacks exceeding 1Tbps.While many of them did not comply, some did; the group's bitcoin wallet address shows incoming payments of over $100,000 in total. Yet none of the companies who declined to pay the protection fee were attacked, website protection firm CloudFlare found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SWIFT, the international banking transactions network, has warned customers of "a number" of recent incidents in which criminals sent fraudulent messages through its system.The warning from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) suggests that a February attack on the Bangladesh Bank, in which thieves got away with US $81 million, was not an isolated incident.SWIFT is aware of malware that "aims to reduce financial institutions’ abilities" to find evidence of fraudulent transactions on their local systems, the organization said Tuesday. The malware has "no impact on SWIFT’s network or core messaging services," it added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
On May 15, 2016, the company that runs Revolv (a smart-home hub) will be intentionally bricking (for all intents and purposes) every single Revolv hub device ever sold—by killing the server the device depends upon and not providing any ability to self-host that service.The company that’s shutting off this service and bricking these (not cheap) devices? Google. Essentially. Revolve was acquired by Nest. Nest was acquired by Google. Google then changed to Alphabet and made Nest one of the companies owned by Alphabet. So, in a nutshell, Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you've been thinking about outsourcing some of the housework to robots, then this deal might be for you. The highly rated Roomba 880 is currently discounted by $105 on Amazon. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 1,300 people, with 70% rating it a perfect 5 stars (read reviews). With a regular price of $699.99, it can be purchased now for $594.99. Not exactly cheap, but this unit comes fully loaded to get the job done right:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ethernet switches and wireless LANs are just two ways to get on the same network in most enterprises, so it makes sense to manage them together if you can.Wi-Fi grew up as a separate realm from wired networks, with different monitoring and management tools, but these worlds have started to collide in the past few years. Among other things, wireless specialist Aruba added Ethernet switches to its architecture and Meraki took administration of both network components into the cloud. Rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems snapped up both of those companies.Now Dell has gotten into the game, not by acquisition but through a partnership with WLAN vendor Aerohive Networks. On Tuesday, the two companies are introducing a unified management tool called HiveManager NG.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dropbox has a futuristic vision for how its users will be able to share massive files and have quick access to them on their computers, without their hard drives overflowing.The cloud storage company announced a new initiative at its Open conference in London on Tuesday called Project Infinite. It's a push to create a new Dropbox interface that allows users to see all of the files they've stored in the cloud in their computer's file explorer without requiring them to keep local copies of each document, image, spreadsheet or other file. With Project Infinite, users will be able to manage their files in the cloud by moving them around inside the Mac OS X Finder or Windows File Explorer, just like they would any local files that are taking up space on their hard drives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four years ago tensions between OpenStack and Amazon Web Services were at a high. The open source cloud computing platform was being developed as an alternative to AWS’s and members of the community spoke despairingly about the public cloud behemoth.
Fast-forward to today, and the relationship between these two cloud platforms seems quite undefined.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In March 2000, Avanade was created as a joint venture of Microsoft and Accenture to help companies build the client-server architectures that have powered IT for years. While the Seattle-based company still handles bread-and-butter infrastructure integration, today it is squarely focused on helping clients move to the cloud and engineer their digital transformation initiatives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The contact center outsourcing industry has always been subject to greater provider churn than other areas of IT and business process services. Historically around a quarter to a third of call center deals up for renewal are terminated every year compared to just fifteen percent of non-voice contracts.[ Related: 8 tips for choosing the right contact center for your business ]But that termination rate has risen dramatically in recent years. Over the last two years, more than half of customers with end-of-term call center contracts decided not to renew their vendor relationships, according to recent research by outsourcing consultancy Everest Group, funded in part by business process and IT outsourcing provider TELUS International.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s no secret that publishers despise ad blocker add-ons in web browsers. It is, after all, costing them revenue, and they have a right to make money. But there are different ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and one method isn’t working out very well.Some sites, such as our sister site Computerworld.com, will pop up a window politely asking you to disable the ad blocker and then let you continue on to the content. Others, however, flat out lock you out of the content until the ad blocker is disabled. And those sites are losing traffic. The question is how much of that loss can be attributed to the ad blocker blockade.The U.K. tech news site The Stack has looked at several sites that shut you out if an ad blocker is enabled, and it found virtually all of them are losing readers at a steady rate. It looked at both U.S. and European publishers, such as German publisher Axel Springer, publisher of the popular Bild newspaper and website, City AM financial news, Forbes and Wired. All of those sites denied users access to content until they whitelisted the site or disabled their Continue reading
Attackers are using two known exploits to silently install ransomware on older Android devices when their owners browse to websites that load malicious advertisements.Web-based attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in browsers or their plug-ins to install malware are common on Windows computers, but not on Android, where the application security model is stronger.But researchers from Blue Coat Systems detected the new Android drive-by download attack recently when one of their test devices -- a Samsung tablet running CyanogenMod 10.1 based on Android 4.2.2 -- became infected with ransomware after visiting a Web page that displayed a malicious ad.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Panama Papers should be a wake-up call to every CEO, COO, CTO and CIO in every company.Yes, it’s good that alleged malfeasance by governments and big institutions came to light. However, it’s also clear that many companies simply take for granted that their confidential information will remain confidential. This includes data that’s shared within the company, as well as information that’s shared with trusted external partners, such as law firms, financial advisors and consultants. We’re talking everything from instant messages to emails, from documents to databases, from passwords to billing records.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The biggest claim to fame for startup Helium, an Internet of Things company that started in 2013, has been perhaps co-founder Shawn Fanning.Fanning, of course, is the serial entrepreneur who developed Napster and started other companies. But Helium is making a name for itself by expanding from its software beginnings to usher companies into IoT with sensors, software and cloud services. Its goal is to improve company productivity by putting the streams of data collected from sensors to action.Helium is releasing new sensors, applications and development tools as it builds out a comprehensive product line. The company's latest product is a new sensor called Helium Green, which can monitor temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, motion, and light.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here