Few things in life can be expressed in black and white terms. Sure, a light switch is either on or it's off; one baseball team wins the World Series each year and one doesn't; and every line of computer binary starts with either a one or a zero.Most of the time, though, our lives are full of gray areas, not absolutes. Brent crude almost never drops below $40 a barrel, but it did happen once and the chances of it happening again are greater than zero. There may be a 60 or 70 percent chance of rain tomorrow, but it's rarely 100 percent. And, sometimes, even the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.So why is it that security practitioners often treat their threat environment as if it's black or white, rather than a spectrum of possible states or probable outcomes — even when this binary view diminishes the quality of their comprehension and decision-making and thus jeopardizes their actual security?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Taotronics phone mount is easy to install and features a fully adjustable viewing angle, non-slip rubber grips and a one-button phone release mechanism. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews), where its list price of $15.99 has been discounted 22% to $12.49. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you’re doing an Internet of Things deployment, prepare for failure. That’s the overarching takeaway from a survey Cisco conducted of more than 1,800 IT leaders in the U.S. and U.K.Up to 60% of IoT projects that respondents started stalled at the proof of concept phase, Cisco found. Just 26% of respondents said they had what they considered a successful IoT deployment. So where do IoT projects go south?+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cisco: Secure IoT networks, not the devices +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my recent blogs, I have written about automation tying the network to other domains of IT, and how it’s a capability available today that you should start using.Machine learning is another hot topic. While the timeline is several years out for many machine learning applications in networking, it has the potential to be one of those rare technologies that comes along every few decades and fundamentally transforms how networks run.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Do you use Kodi, Popcorn Time, VLC or Stremio? Do you use subtitles while you watch? If so, then you need to update the platform as Check Point researchers revealed that not all subtitles are benign text files and hackers can remotely take control of any device running vulnerable software via malicious subtitles.The attack is not in the wild, since Check Point developed the proof of concept attack vector; however, with news of the attack vector and an estimated 200 million video players and streaming apps running vulnerable software, attackers might jump on the malicious subtitle wagon to gain remote access to victims’ systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While in Israel late last year, I caught up with Shaked Zin and Avi Shulman, co-founders of security company PureSec. PureSec was in a bit of a conundrum. It was doing important work but in a space that was still nascent: serverless computing. As such, it was having a hard time both articulating its value proposition and getting investors to understand and commit to their story.I found this conundrum interesting. Serverless computing is, after all, pretty high on the hype cycle. Ever since Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the notion of serverless via its Lambda offering a few years ago, all vendors have been rushing to commercialize their own serverless offering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This multi-functional camera lens kit works on most standard sized smartphones including the iPhone 7 (excluding Plus), and brings even more life to your photos with 180-degree fisheye, 0.65x wide angle and 10x macro lenses. It currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, and its list price of $20 has been reduced 35% to just $13. See the lens kit now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Decision making comes with its challenges as it’s part of a process of nurturing a variety of perspectives, usually by encouraging discussion and debate. However, when competing points of view are left unmanaged, it can easily – and without warning – digress into an unhealthy conflict. Proponents are often passionate about their views and become blind to certain, inconvenient, facts.Today, data has become a reliable arbiter for such debates. This is why business intelligence (BI) has emerged as crucial to the decision making process. BI provides actionable insights that are based on numbers. A growing number of organizations are recognizing its value. In 2016, 73 percent of businesses increased their analytics capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2016 consumers were exposed to a larger number of high profile data breaches than any year previously. According to the Breach Level Index, 1,792 data breaches led to almost 1.4 million data records being compromised worldwide, an increase of 86% compared to 2015. Identity theft was the leading type of data breach last year, accounting for 59% of all data breaches. These numbers have helped raise public awareness around the serious threats to personal data that exist in the modern era, and awareness is also growing for some of the solutions that businesses and individuals can use to minimize the risks from data breaches. But is it enough?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With information security being a major concern at all companies, successful security executives need to be equally comfortable in the boardroom and the server room. While being well-versed in traditional security duties, like developing incident response plans and knowing what technology will keep the bad guys at bay, is still essential, CISOs and CSOs also need to know how security factors into the business’ operations.Three skills that are essential for future leaders to master are being able to clearly articulate the importance of security to non-technical executives, show how security can help a company achieve its business goals and balance security with innovation. These skills are consistently mentioned by CEOs and CSOs when we’re discussing how business and security leaders can work better together.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“Data.” Ask senior management at any major organization to name their most critical business asset and they’ll likely respond with that one word.As such, developing a disaster recovery strategy – both for data backup and restoration – is a central part of planning for business continuity management at any organization. It is essential that your company and the vendors you work with can protect against data loss and ensure data integrity in the event of catastrophic failure – whether from an external event or human error.Think about this: What would you do if one of your trusted database administrators made a mistake that wiped out all of your databases in one fell swoop? Could your business recover?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I have heard it said many times that the cloud can solve all of our performance issues. There are two reasons why this claim is not necessarily true:
A misunderstanding of the difference between performance and scalability.
Performance remains application-dependent.
Performance versus scalability
The terms performance and scalability are sometimes used interchangeably, but in actuality they have very distinct differences. The important distinction between the terms is that performance is a measure of a data point, such as the response time of a request, the amount of CPU or memory that a request needs, etc. Scalability, on the other hand, measures your application’s ability to maintain its performance as load increases. In other words, if you can service a single request in 500ms, can you service 1000 requests at 500ms each or does the response time degrade as your load increases?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Imagine you wake up one morning, assuming everything is as you left it the night before. But overnight, attackers with a quantum computer capable of breaking current cryptography standards have targeted millions of people and stolen their personal data.Experts have estimated that a commercial quantum computer capable of breaking the cryptography we rely on today will be available by 2026. In fact, IEEE Spectrum reported last year that a quantum computer is close to cracking RSA encryption.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A couple of weeks ago someone asked me to define the term digital transformation. I didn’t want to give a long technical answer, so instead I gave the one word answer of “speed.” In the digital era, market leaders will be defined by which organization can adapt to market trends the fastest. This means the whole company must move with speed—business leaders need to make decisions fast, employees need to adapt to new processes quickly, and the IT department must make changes to the infrastructure with speed.+ Also on Network World: Automation: Disrupt or be disrupted +
However, IT moving faster does not mean trying to execute the same manual processes 10 percent faster, as that would just lead to more errors. Nor does it mean throwing more people at the problem by adding to the IT staff. IT in the digital era means a complete re-think of operations with automation at the heart of the strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Tour de France pro cycling race is one of the oldest and most prestigious annual sporting events in the world. Each year about 200 cyclists compete during most of July in a race that crosses some 2,200 miles of varied terrain in France.The first Tour de France was in 1903. Back then it attracted mostly local competitors and spectators. Coverage and prestige of the event expanded with each consecutive era of newspapers, radio, and television. However, we now live in the digital era. Fans don’t want to just watch a sport; they want to engage with it, and they expect more control and interaction.Professional sports are increasingly embracing digital technology to enhance the fan experience. This includes data-enhanced viewing, live streaming, video on demand, second-screen apps, gamification, and social media interaction. This technology is becoming a critical component of sports marketing necessary to attract fans, athletes, sponsors, and broadcasters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you work in the tech industry in the Bay Area, toting a MacBook Air laptop is practically a requirement. For several years now, they’ve been standard equipment for tech workers, entrepreneurs and seemingly everyone else in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.Armadas of the silvery machines, often individualized with colorful stickers for tech startups and rock bands, festoon co-working spaces and coffee shops from Santa Cruz to Petaluma. They’re light enough that techies typically carry them from meeting to meeting opened, casually dangling from a corner—it’s a wonder hundreds of them are damaged every day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When it comes to security and the iris recognition technology used in its flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone, Samsung touted, “The patterns in your irises are unique to you and are virtually impossible to replicate, meaning iris authentication is one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked and the contents private.”But the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) made a mockery of Samsung’s “virtually impossible to replicate” claims, easily defeating the iris recognition system used in the new Galaxy S8 with nothing more than a camera, a printer, and a contact lens.Not only can the iris authentication system be broken to unlock an S8, the same trick could allow an attacker to access the victim’s mobile wallet. Just last week, Samsung Pay tweeted a short iris scan video ad along with, “Every eye is unique. Now you can use yours to make purchases with Samsung Pay.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enterprise software, where hopes and dreams go to die. And where new employees are unceremoniously pulled into a new reality—that the tools they use in their day-to-day lives as consumers are a world apart from the tools they’re expected to use in their working lives.But whereas it used to be a case of employees simply putting up and shutting up, increasingly employees are powerful advocates and potential change-makers—and organizations need to be ready to respond to their needs with tools that aren’t so abysmal to use.+ Also on Network World: A mobile-first strategy improves employee productivity, study finds +
Of course, the traditional enterprise vendors, such as Oracle and SAP, realize this change is coming and are trying their hardest to deliver more user-friendly interactions. But as Clayton Christensen explained in his seminal book, The innovator’s Dilemma, this isn’t such an easy change to effect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the early days of the cloud, a decade or so ago, the conversations were generally parsed in terms of it being a zero-sum game. Either the cloud would win or on-premises would. Either public cloud would crush private cloud or the other way round. And if the public cloud were to win, then it would be a fight to the death between Google, Microsoft and Amazon.But we’ve all gotten a little more nuanced since then, and most people accept that some kind of hybrid offering will likely be the default for the vast majority of organizations into the future. With a few exception, most organizations will take a little bit of this, add it to a little bit of that, and throw in some of that stuff for good measure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java.Gosling revealed his new employer on his Facebook page with the words: "It's time for a change. I'm leaving Boeing Defense (nee Liquid Robotics), with many fond memories. Today I start a new Adventure at Amazon Web Services."He gave his title at AWS as "distinguished engineer" in an update to his LinkedIn profile. Of his work there, he would only say that he would be "wandering around."Gosling began work on what would later become Java in the early 1990s, while working at Sun Microsystems, and continued its development until the company's April 2009 acquisition by Oracle. He left a year later, frustrated that his role had been reduced to that of an evangelist for Java, with the engineering decisions concerning it taken elsewhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here