Protect, power and connect Mom's tech with products from Griffin. Get 20% off anything you find at Griffin.com with this Mom's day code applied at checkout: LUVURMOM. This site-wide Mother's Day promotion runs for a limited time and is good for Griffin tech products in categories such as (click a category to see more) Cases, Power, Cables, In-car, Wearables Accessories, Stands & Mounts, Audio, Stylus & Keyboards, Toys, and more. Visit Griffin and get your shopping done now while there's still time. Don't forget the code LUVURMOM should be applied at checkout for 20% off your order.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The infographic below provides good, entertaining definitions of the terms white hat, grey hat and black hat hackers courtesy of Exigent Networks. As the infographic explains, there are some, well, grey areas between categories—for example, there is sometimes a fine line between grey hats and black hats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Having a full understanding of end user experience has been theorized in IT circles for decades but has remained as elusive as the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth. Some people claim to have seen it, but no one really knows for sure.Last year, an innovative startup, Nyansa, came to market with a new approach to end-user management. Its Voyance product continuously collects data, analyzes it and correlates every end user transaction across the wired and wireless networks and provides insights and actionable recommendations that can be taken to improve application performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What happens when you take a couple of very seasoned co-founders, investment from some high-profile investors, and an uber-dominant existing vendor? Well, in Wasabi’s case, you get some pretty outlandish claims. But before we got on to that, let’s look at the who and what for Wasabi.Wasabi is a cloud storage company founded by Jeff Flowers and David Friend. Those names might ring a bell, since they’ve started, built and sold five previous technology companies. Most recently they co-founded backup company Carbonite and previously founded Pilot Software.RELATED: Engineering firm uses cloud storage to speed file loads, and then unplugs its MPLS net
These two can’t seem to stop themselves, and for their latest idea, they’ve already raised a ton of cash—$8.5 million to date with key investors, including Bill Sahlman, Harvard Business School marketing prof and angel investor; Desh Deshpande, who donated $100 million to MIT for the Deshpande Center; Ron Skates, former CEO of Data General; Jeff Parker, founder of CCBN; and Howard Cox from Greylock Partners.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s easy to criticize Wikipedia for a lot of things. Besides being the source of many a plagiarized term paper, its crowd-sourced nature also means it’s occasionally subject to internecine warfare and political infighting over articles.Wikipedia the largest general reference on the net
But now Turkey has blocked the self-described “largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,” under a vague law that allows the country to “block access to individual web pages or entire sites for the protection of public order, national security or the well being of the public,” according to The Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Smartphone cameras are about to get even better.Peyman Milanfar, a Google software engineer who had worked in the computational photography group, posted a lengthy analysis about using a smartphone camera to shoot nighttime photos with the same quality of an expensive DSLR.Milanfar’s post chronicles his quest for high-quality nighttime images taken with a smartphone. DSLR cameras do well in this application, but smartphone cameras struggle. A DSLR can take good quality photos at night because it has a very large sensor that collects more light. The Nikon D500 DSLR boasts a 20.9 million pixel sensor with a pixel size of 4.2µm. The D500 sensor is enormous compared to the top ranked Google Pixel phone’s sensor with 12.3 million pixels that are 1.55µm. It also has a large, adjustable and precise lens that captures and focuses more light from the field of view on the sensor, reducing visual distortion, compared to the Pixel’s constrained, fixed camera lens assembly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook is so proud of its algorithms, it conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads.The Australian (paywall) got its hands on a 23-page Facebook document, dated in 2017, marked as “Confidential: Internal Only,” and authored by two Australian Facebook executives, Andy Sinn and David Fernandez. While no screenshots were included, the report allegedly explained how Facebook could analyze posts, photos and interactions to help determine the emotional states of 6.4 million “high schoolers,” “tertiary” (college) students and “young Australians and New Zealander ... in the workforce.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook is so proud of its algorithms that it conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads.The Australian (paywall) got its hands on a 23-page Facebook document, dated in 2017, marked as “Confidential: Internal Only,” and authored by two Australian Facebook executives, Andy Sinn and David Fernandez. While no screenshots were included, the report allegedly explained how Facebook could analyze posts, photos and interactions to help determine the emotional states of 6.4 million “high schoolers,” “tertiary” (college) students and “young Australians and New Zealanders ... in the workforce.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. National Security Agency is now suggesting government departments and businesses buy smartphones secured using virtualization, a technology it currently requires only on tablets and laptopsThe change comes about with the arrival of the first virtualization-based smartphone security system on the U.S. Commercial Solutions for Classified list.CSFC is a program developed by the NSA to help U.S. government agencies and the businesses that serve them to quickly build layered secure systems from approved components.An HTC A9 smartphone security-hardened by Cog Systems using its D4 virtualization platform is now on that list, alongside devices without virtualization from Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, and BlackBerry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You can pick up Amazon Echo for far below list price, if you're comfortable buying refurbished. Which you can be -- certified refurbished products are tested and certified to look and work like new, and come with warranties. Amazon Echo is a hands-free speaker you control with your voice. Echo connects to the Alexa Voice Service to play music, provide information, news, sports scores, weather, and more—instantly. All you have to do is ask. Echo has seven microphones and beam forming technology so it can hear you from across the room—even while music is playing. Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with 360° immersive sound. When you want to use Echo, just say the wake word “Alexa” and Echo responds instantly. If you have more than one Echo or Echo Dot, Alexa responds intelligently from the Echo you're closest to with ESP (Echo Spatial Perception). Echo's typical list price is $179.99, and certified refurbished models list for $164.99. But right now with this deal Amazon has further discounted them to $134.99. See the certified refurbished Amazon Echo on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's been many years since I regularly used Ubuntu. Back in "ye olden times" I would consider myself one of the most outspoken advocates for Canonical's Linux distribution—often proclaiming the (near) perfection of Ubuntu—but those times have long since faded into the mist. Nowadays, I use Ubuntu only when there is a good reason to review a new release—which has happened less and less. And even in those cases, I tend to use it sparingly. There were many reasons for that change. Mostly it boiled down to a general disagreement with the direction Ubuntu was taking.+ Also on Network World: Lessons learned from the failure of Ubuntu Touch +
I wasn't a fan of their in-house developed desktop environment (Unity). I didn't like how slow it was. I didn't like how buggy it was. I didn't like how un-customizable it was. I guess it would be fair to say, "I didn't like it." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I have avoided the steady drumbeat of bad news surrounding Windows Phone because after a while it gets repetitive and morbid, but this one makes it abundantly clear it’s time to draw a sheet over Microsoft’s mobile phone business. For its third fiscal quarter of 2016, ended March 31, Microsoft reported sales of just $5 million. It didn’t actually say it that way, though. For its 10-Q financial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft simply said "Phone revenue declined $730 million."And if you look at the same quarterly report from one year ago, it reported sales of $735 million. So, do the math. Just two years ago, its phone hardware revenue was $1.397 billion. That’s a collapse if ever I saw one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Greg Downer, senior IT director at Oshkosh Corp., a manufacturer of specialty heavy vehicles in Oshkosh, Wisc., wishes he could tip the balance of on-premises vs. cloud more in the direction of the cloud, which currently accounts for only about 20% of his application footprint. However, as a contractor for the Department of Defense, his company is beholden to strict data requirements, including where data is stored."Cloud offerings have helped us deploy faster and reduce our data center infrastructure, but the main reason we don't do more in the cloud is because of strict DoD contract requirements for specific types of data," he says.In Computerworld's Tech Forecast 2017 survey of 196 IT managers and leaders, 79% of respondents said they have a cloud project underway or planned, and 58% of those using some type of cloud-based system gave their efforts an A or B in terms of delivering business value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a company that was finally doing business on the web. Its developers were exhausted after spending years learning about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery, and dealing with all the various browsers the company’s silly partners and customers wanted to use instead of the company’s Gold Standard, Internet Explorer 6.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
An employee gets stopped over the weekend for a DUI. Unbeknownst to him once his name hits the police’s public database, his employer will know about it soon after – whether the conviction has any impact on the employee’s job performance or not.That is just one scenario in which enterprises are checking up on their employees to make sure their private lives don’t impact the companies bottom lines. It is not uncommon for companies to do background checks on prospective employees, but some businesses are carrying that through while employees still punch the clock.Security company Endera explained that employers want to know if an employee is on a criminal watchlist, is booked or arrested, loses a key certificate, is in financial distress or is involved in a lawsuit. An employee roster is loaded into the continuous monitoring system, and that system provides 24/7 scanning of thousands of external data sources. The employer receives real-time, secure alerts for further investigation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Jeffrey Scolaro, an attorney at Daley Mohan Groble PC in Chicago and a member of Legal Services Link, answers questions about employment contracts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
With so many features, where do you start?Image by Ryan Whitwam/IDGSamsung has packed a crazy amount of features into the Galaxy S8 and S8+. It's nowhere near the insane level of software bloat we have seen in some past Samsung devices, but there are a great many options to explore here. You could tap through menus for hour after hour, hoping to stumble upon all the cool stuff the phone can do. Or you could read this guide to learn all about the best tips and settings to make the most of your new Galaxy S8.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The recent growth in the cyber insurance market is already improving cybersecurity in some industry segments, and has the potential to do more -- if the industry is able to address its data problem.One area where cyber insurance has already made an impact is in the retail space, said David White, founder and COO at Axio Global, a cyber risk company.After the 2013 Target breach, it became very difficult for retailers to get a decent price for cyber insurance unless they had completely switched over to end-to-end encryption, or had a definite plan in place for doing that.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Perhaps new research that found more iPhone buyers opting for legacy models over the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus will give Apple a little nudge to make sure there's really incentive to buy the forthcoming iPhone 8 (or iPhone X) instead of going with the 7 or 7 Plus later this year.Not that Apple necessarily is going to take any cues from research outfits like Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, but anything to ensure that the next flagship iPhones aren't dull is worth at least pointing out...IPHONE 8 BATTERY LIFE
Battery life is far from a glamorous topic, but really, what's more important in terms of an iPhone upgrade for most users? As Apple Insider reports, citing the relentless KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple could be planning to use a logic board format that will allow for more space in the iPhone 8 chassis, and that could mean room for a more powerful and longer lasting battery. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In an effort to keep up with the times, Merriam-Webster every year adds hundreds of new words to its dictionary. After all, the language we use on a day-to-day basis is always evolving. Just this past February, for example, Merriam-Webster announced that it added more than 1,000 new words to the dictionary, including some newbies from the tech world such as net neutrality, abandonware, binge-watch and photobomb.And just a few days ago, Merriam-Webster added the word Sheeple to its online dictionary, defining it as "people who are docile, compliant, or easily influenced." Or in other words, "people likened to sheep."
Wake up!'Sheeple' is in the dictionary now. https://t.co/pbXVADEoBmTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here