The second largest car manufacturer in the world, Volkswagen Group, will use the open-source cloud computing platform OpenStack to build a private cloud that will host websites for its brands VW, Audi and Porsche, and be a platform for innovating automotive technology, the company announced today.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Mirantis beats out Red Hat for big VW OpenStack deal | Jeff Bezos to shareholders: At 10 years old, AWS is bigger than Amazon was and growing faster +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If encryption is something to be feared in the hands of terrorists, WhatsApp just delivered them a tool that will give the FBI nightmares much worse than the encryption on iPhones.
WhatsApp enlisted the help of Open Whisper Systems to implement the encryption, and according to that company’s blog, “This includes chats, group chats, attachments, voice notes, and voice calls across Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Nokia S40, Nokia S60, Blackberry, and BB10.”
This will likely drive law enforcement crazy, the FBI in particular, because it makes it impossible for WhatsApp to obey court orders to decrypt specified communications. Even if it wanted to comply, it couldn’t. The encryption is set up between the endpoints in the communication and WhatsApp just moves the traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the future, you may use aeroponic systems at home to bring in water mixed with nutrients. You'll use this water to grow vegetables, home-grown food that can cut your produce costs in half.Your commute to work may be on a covered, quasi-bike vehicle that uses battery power to assist the pedaling rider (who gets healthier from the effort).And the era of the large suburban homes will end. Why have multiple rooms for various purposes?"The cost of transformable furniture is much less than a mortgage," said David Rose, a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab and author of Enchanted Objects: Innovation, Design and the Future of Technology. Rose was at Tuesday's MIT "Connected Things" Enterprise Forum.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A report that highlights the vulnerabilities in medical devices and the risks they pose to patient health issued by Independent Security Evaluators comes at an opportune time as the past month has shown that hospitals are becoming targets for criminals.Ted Harrington, executive partner at Independent Security Evaluators said, "It’s a scary report in a lot of ways, but our hope is to organize an industry in recognizing these problems. We are trying to make an entire industry start changing, especially one that is very regulated and complex. The conversations need to start happening."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When the world was newImage by National Security AgencyToday, IT security is a deadly serious business. But in the early days of computing, the stakes were a bit lower. Maybe it's just that we're seeing it through a nostalgic lens, but the computer breaches in the '70s, '80s, and '90s just seemed a bit more ... fun? We spoke to some people who were there, who enjoyed reminiscing about a gentler era, whether they were the ones hacking or the ones being hacked.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security tools are getting more sophisticated. DevOps is bringing us automation in operations, and a more holistic way of looking at how we manage infrastructure. But all too often, we’re not doing basic things to improve security and reliability, like protecting against known vulnerabilities.Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 2016 Cyber Risk Report points out that “29 percent of all exploits samples discovered in 2015 continued to use a 2010 Stuxnet infection vector that has been patched twice.” It takes an average of 103 days for companies to patch known network and security vulnerabilities, according to a study vulnerability risk management vendor NopSec ran last year; that goes down to 97 days for healthcare providers and up to 176 days for financial services, banking and education organisations. That’s not taking into account misconfigurations, or lack of communication between different teams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Who really drives culture in your workplace? According to a study from The Workforce Institute at Kronos and the research and consultancy firm WorkplaceTrends.com, HR believes it does. So do managers and executives. So, too, do your employees.There's clearly a disagreement about who's in charge of creating, maintaining and supporting workplace culture, but there's one thing every group agrees on: Workplace culture is incredibly important. The disconnect, though, isn't just comical. Without understanding the who, what and why of workplace culture and how it affects engagement, retention and loyalty, organizations risk destroying it and losing out on top talent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Any time a company shares data or provides access to third-parties, it increases its vulnerability to unauthorized access or breach. So in today’s IT environment in which enterprises partner with multiple IT service providers, who in turn may have multiple subcontracters, cyber risks increase exponentially.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
For $21,999, I expected a little more from Microsoft’s new Surface Hub.Don’t get me wrong: the Hub's 84-inch 4K touchscreen, flanked by a pair of eye-height, 1080p cameras, videoconferencing, and full Windows 10 capabilities—all makes for one very impressive package, especially when it dominates one wall of a room. Heck, it practically is the wall. Mark Hachman
Microsoft’s Surface Hub is, in a word, enormous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adobe is working on an emergency patch for its Flash Player after attackers are reportedly exploiting a critical flaw.The vulnerability, CVE-2016-1019, affects Flash Player version 21.0.0.197 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, according to an advisory published on Tuesday.The flaw is being actively exploited on Windows XP and 7 systems running Flash Player versions 20.0.0.306 and earlier."Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," it said.A patch could be released as soon as Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To understand the context here readers need a bit of history. RedHat is, of course, a company that has been wildly successful commercializing open source software (in particular Linux). It is also a big part of the OpenStack open source cloud computing initiative. Mirantis is a company focused solely on helping companies move to OpenStack. These two parties were once upon a time best of friends with Red Hat making a significant investment early in Mirantis' life.
And then things soured, to the point where Red Hat started telling customers that it didn't support its own Linux distribution, RHEL, on Mirantis' flavor of OpenStack. There was lots of back and forth, and lots of minutiae around the move, but essentially it indicated, very publicly, that Red Hat and Mirantis' bromance was finished forever.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An alternate method for infecting computers with ransomware signals a shift in tactics by cybercriminals that could put businesses at greater risk, according to Symantec.A type of ransomware called Samsam has been infecting organizations but is not installed in the usual way."Samsam is another variant in a growing number of variants of ransomware, but what sets it apart from other ransomware is how it reaches its intended targets by way of unpatched server-side software," Symantec wrote.The perpetrators behind Samsam use a legitimate penetration tool called Jexboss to exploit servers running Red Hat's JBoss enterprise application server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook-owned WhatsApp has strengthened the encryption of its widely used instant messaging app, a development that in theory makes it harder for law enforcement to gain access to communications.WhatsApp's founders said Tuesday that the application now implements end-to-end encryption, which means only authorized users can decrypt messages."The idea is simple: when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat that you send that message to," Jan Koum and Brian Acton wrote in a blog post. "No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Sigfox low-power IoT network is due for an expansion that may not be game-changing in practical terms but will certainly look good on a map.Sigfox announced a deal on Tuesday with a partner that will build a network across Australia and New Zealand using the French company's technology. That's a visible win for a vendor competing to connect small Internet of Things devices like sensors and meters around the world.Several vendors and industry groups are pushing technologies for networking small, far-flung objects that may need to run on a single battery for years. These LPWANs (low-power wide-area networks) don't push a lot of data through the air but are more efficient than the cellular infrastructure that talks to smartphones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As a somewhat frequent traveler, I’ve been in enough hotels to realize that entertainment options are not as good as the ones you get at your home. You end up watching the local version of news for whatever city you’re in, or, if you’re lucky, something good is on either HBO or Showtime as you’re drifting off to sleep.If you have to be stuck in your room for a longer period of time, it’s likely that you end up watching Netflix or Amazon Prime streaming on your computer, but you usually need to position the notebook (or tablet if you’re one of THOSE people) near a power source/cord so that the battery doesn’t run out after the third episode of “House of Cards” finishes).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a letter to shareholders, Amazon.com founder, CEO and Chairman of the board sounds like a proud father talking about the success of the moonshot project that launched the company into being a powerhouse of the cloud computing market.Amazon Web Services is on pace to earn $10 billion in revenue this year, he notes. “AWS is bigger than Amazon.com was at 10 years old, growing at a faster rate,” he adds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The myth about how Amazon's cloud started that just will not die | Happy 10th birthday AWS +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nvidia's fastest GPU yet, the new Tesla P100, will be available in servers next year, the company said.Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cray and IBM will start taking orders for servers with the Tesla P100 in the fourth quarter of this year, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said during a keynote at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California.The servers will start shipping in the first quarter of next year, Huang said Tuesday.The GPU will also ship to companies designing hyperscale servers in-house and then to outsourced manufacturing shops. It will be available for in-house "cloud servers" by the end of the year, Huang said.Nvidia is targeting the GPUs at deep-learning systems, in which algorithms aid in the correlation and classification of data. These systems could help self-driving cars, robots and drones identify objects. The goal is to accelerate the learning time of such systems so the accuracy of results improves over time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google Calendar users now have the ability to add reminders from their desktop browsers that will follow them around to other Google services, thanks to a feature the company introduced Tuesday.
People can now set reminders in other services like Google Now, Keep and Inbox, and have them show up in their calendar, informing them of what they have to do during the day. Reminders are meant to help people take care of what they need to do, and will follow users around at the top of their calendar until completed. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today, Underwriters Laboratory announced the UL CyberSecurity Assurance Program. I won’t call it an oxymoron, but I’m deeply worried about it. While I have faith in UL, I’m not sure if they realize the breadth and depth of what they’re getting into.UL is the reason there are only small holes in appliances and CE gear. Why? So an average toddler can’t stick something inside and become electrocuted. UL helps product vendors have liability insurance within sane ranges. They promulgate standards that vendors are responsible to adhere to for insurance sake. Test labs do the rest, ensuring that First Article Samples (and then, perhaps subsequent production samples) of products adhere to a bevy of standards—all designed to make products safer but at least insurable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here