The U.S. received 236,000 H-1B petitions for 85,000 visas available under the program's visa caps, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said Tuesday.The visas are being distributed via a lottery, which means only about one in every three petitions will be approved.The U.S. received 233,000 H-1B visa petitions last year, the previous record. The U.S. accepts visas on April 1 for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.If history is any guide, a majority of the demand for the visa is coming from IT services, offshore outsourcing firms.INSIDER: Network jobs are hot: Salaries expected to rise in 2016
Critics believe the high number of visas represents a form of "ballot box" stuffing by IT services firms in response to the lottery system. Applicants can apply for a visa for someone who is not an employee.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No-code and low-code mobile dev toolsWhile the great debate rages on between the various mobile development camps -- the pure HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 mobile Web faction, the native code purists, and the hybrid mobile app fans -- businesses still have to create and maintain mobile applications for their employees, business partners, and customers. The one conclusion that everyone seems to reach, eventually, is that there is no single panacea in this space. Each approach and toolset has its advantages and drawbacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A growing number of organizations are adding a new member to the C-suite—the chief risk officer (CRO)—and the rise of these executives is having a direct impact on the security programs at enterprises.“Corporate espionage, terrorism and cyber attacks are ratcheting up the need for senior executives who understand all aspects of risk management and security,” says Jeremy King, president of Benchmark Executive Search, a provider of technology executive search services.INSIDER 12 habits of successful tech CEO
“Many companies are finally awakening to how destructive security breaches of all types can be—from physical damage and real costs to reputation loss and customer recovery,” King says. “Previously siloed risk-management functions must be reinvented, strengthened, and funded more aggressively. Industry must re-evaluate its approach to risk management, and success will require unprecedented cooperation from board directors and those in the C-suite.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook says chatbots will change the way businesses communicate with their customers, but will businesses want to put their user communications in the hands of artificial intelligence?"They're a powerful tool but they're also a big risk," said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "A.I. can be a very powerful technology. Businesses are going to have to understand how to harness that power. There are reasons to be worried about it. Because we're giving chatbots the power to act on our behalf, they're taking on greater importance."Blau said he expects businesses will trust chatbots eventually, but that it will be a "measured adoption" since brands are always concerned about their perception in the marketplace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every day an army of business people heads out to offices, meetings and coffee shops, equipped with little more than a smartphone and a laptop. To get the job done, that laptop has to be secure enough to protect sensitive data, rugged enough to bounce around in a backpack, and with enough battery power and performance strength to get through a day of presentations, emails and online chats. All without busting the company budget.
Welcome to the world of mid-priced Windows laptops. According to Linn Huang, research director for devices & displays at IDC, today's typical business systems are far from the high-end, high-cost ultraportables and 2-in-1s that usually get media attention.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
PowerShell used as a tool in compound malware attacks is becoming more common, with 38% of all attacks seen by IT security vendor CarbonBlack and its partners involving the native Windows scripting language.
Ben Johnson
Its use is so common in enterprises for legitimate purposes that most security devices and personnel don’t regard it as a threat, says Ben Johnson, the chief security strategist at CarbonBlack.That makes it all the more effective as a component of attacks. Its scripts can run in memory only so it never creates a file on disk, Johnson says. “It creates less noise on the system,” so it’s less likely to draw attention to itself, he adds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Startup supporter Techstars has announced that entrepreneurs can now apply to be part of its 15-week IoT Accelerator at the Barclays Rise facility in New York City that starts in September. Applications are due by July 10.The mentorship-driven program will match 10 startups with Internet of Things experts from PwC, GE, Bosch, SAP and Verizon, according to Techstars. Of particular focus will be the Industrial Internet. The partner companies will offer engineering expertise, access to tech platforms and more.MORE: 10 Internet of Things companies to watch | Most Powerful Internet of Things CompaniesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The equivalent of about $20, or the cost of a large pizza, is the amount of cash British kids would accept in exchange for handing over their personal information, a study has found.IT solutions and managed service firm Logicalis found kids (aged 13-17) were “instinctively digital” and that they fully comprehended the value of their personal information. Not only were the young scoundrels completely au fait with how much their personally identifiable information (PII) was worth, they were quite happy to sell it—if it meant they didn’t have to work.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT favoritesWhen we asked IT pros about their favorite enterprise tech products, their picks included all kinds of hardware, software and cloud services. The common thread? Gear that saves time or money, increases IT agility or tightens security. Read on to find out what these 29 IT pros have to say, in their own words, about their tech favorites.SEE ALSO: 5 must-have network tools | Go-to storage and disaster recovery productsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Software-defined WAN promises a simplified, cost-effective way to manage multiple types of broadband Internet connections. While most enterprises today are only in the very early stages of piloting or implementing SD-WAN, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2019, 30% of enterprises will have deployed SD-WAN technology in their branches, up from less than 1% today. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
IT departments are playing second fiddle to operations people as enterprises tune up for the Internet of Things.
That’s one of the surprising findings from a survey of people involved in business IoT projects in the U.S. The survey, conducted last month by Technalysis Research, also revealed that monitoring employees is the No. 1 thing companies want to do with the widely hyped technology.
IoT straddles IT and operational technology, two disciplines that for decades have lived side by side without much interaction. Operations people handle things like lights, locks, and machine tools, while IT folks buy the computers and run them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're in the market for a full featured power strip with surge-protection, this model from Tripp Lite may be worth reviewing, especially given the current 50% discount. The TLP608RUSBB averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from nearly 600 customers (browse reviews). With a list price of $54, you can purchase now via Amazon for just $27.12.The strip is mountable, and its 6 outlets are rotatable, so it can be placed anywhere and each cord is conveniently free to run in its own direction. Also convenient is its 8 foot long cord and 2 built-in USB charging ports. The most critical spec though may be the AC surge protection which guards against voltage spikes, and comes backed by a lifetime warranty and $50,000 Ultimate Lifetime Insurance for any connected components damaged by a power surge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI today said it was offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information leading to the recovery of seven Andy Warhol paintings stolen from the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri.+More on Network World: Want a meteorite? Christie’s set to auction unique space rocks+The collection, which has been owned by the Springfield Art Museum since 1985, is set number 31 of the Campbell’s Soup I collection and is valued at approximately $500,000. Each painting in the screen print collection measures 37 inches high by 24.5 inches wide and framed in white frames, the FBI stated. The FBI says that seven of 10 Andy Warhol paintings Campbell’s Soup I collection, made in 1968, were taken.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For April 2016 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released 13 security bulletins with six being rated as critical for remote code execution flaws and the patch for Badlock being among those rated only as important.CriticalMS16-037 is the cumulative fix for Internet Explorer. While most of the vulnerabilities being patched have not been publicly disclosed, the DLL loading RCE bug has been.MS16-038 is the monthly cumulative security update for Microsoft’s Edge browser to stop attackers from achieving RCE when a user visits a specially crafted webpage via Edge. The patch modifies how Edge handles objects in memory as well as ensures cross-domain policies are properly enforced.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Countries around the world from Estonian and Ukraine to China, Russia, and the US have been the target of DDoS attacks, many of which are politically motivated. Criminals aren't necessarily looking to steal data or other assets as much as they are intending to make a very powerful statement.According to Nexusguard’s Q4 2015 threat report, attacks on Turkey skyrocketed ten-fold to more than 30,000 events per day, surpassing the thousands of attacks on other popular targets like China and the U.S. The attacks, targeting Turkish IP addresses, contributed to a big increase in DNS attacks, outweighing other popular NTP and CHARGEN methods by 183 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At US$15, the Quark Microcontroller Developer Kit D2000 is perhaps the least expensive computer Intel has ever shipped.The single-board computer has all the components mashed onto a tiny circuit board. It can be used to develop gadgets, wearables, home automation products, industrial equipment and other Internet of Things products.Developers could also use the computer to hook up sensors for temperature, light, sound, weather and distance to devices.The developer board is now available from Mouser Electronics. It will also be available from Avnet, according to Intel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Verizon Ventures says that while consumer Internet of Things startups were all the rage in 2014 and continue to be popular among investors, enterprise IoT newcomers have become even hotter properties among venture capitalists over the past two years, with enterprise IoT investment expected to double or triple that of consumer IoT in 2016.Verizon’s investment arm has been among those outfits targeting enterprise IoT, with investments in startups such as Filament and Veniam, which focus on industrial networks and connected vehicles, respectively.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s good to be an Internet of Things startup these days. Cisco forked over $1.4B for IoT platform provider Jasper in February. Nokia Growth Partners has raised a $350 million IoT-focused investment fund. And IoT startups are pulling in tens of millions in venture funding.Verizon, in its new “State of the Market: Internet of Things 2016” report, states that its venture arm estimates that while consumer-oriented IoT firms pulled in 15% more funding than enterprise-focused ones in 2014, it is enterprise IoT startups that are now raking in the big bucks. Verizon Ventures says enterprise IoT startups attracted 75% more funding than consumer IoT upstarts last year and that enterprise IoT startups are expected to grab 2 to 3 times as much funding as their consumer counterparts this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Despite recent advancements and improved parallelism in multi-core CPU performance, there is still a big challenge to be solved relating to the scale-out of cloud applications.Put simply, Linux application performance scales poorly as CPU core count increases. This is commonly experienced as typical Linux applications can be expected to see a 1.5X performance improvement for a 2-core CPU, but the scale quickly plateaus after that, with 4 core performance only improving around 2.5X. The performance further degrades as core counts rise. Given that, along with Intel’s announcement that its Xeon chips have up to 22 cores, scaling performance efficiently across cores is extremely important.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service, the Congress, and private electronic tax-filing vendors aren't doing enough to protect the personal information of taxpayers, senators said Tuesday.The IRS needs to step up its cyberecurity efforts, said members of the Senate Finance Committee, citing two recent data breaches at the agency, along with 94 open cybersecurity recommendations from the Government Accountability Office."Hackers and crooks, including many working for foreign crime syndicates, are jumping at every opportunity they have to steal hard-earned money and sensitive personal data from U.S. taxpayers," Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said during a hearing. "In my view, taxpayers have been failed by the agencies, the companies, and the policymakers here in Congress they rely on to protect them."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here