The question occurs: What will happen if I cancel Verizon’s “Non-Published Service,” which for a ridiculously unjustifiable fee of $5.25 a month keeps my landline unlisted and my time at home almost entirely uninterrupted by scammers and robocalls.If I cancel this alleged “service,” will Verizon really punish me by publishing my number – unlisted now for 10 years – against my will and even if I first ask politely that they not do so?I know what you’re thinking: Of course, they will, they’re not only a cold-hearted corporation, they’re a carrier, for crying out loud. I, too, figure they will treat me like a shop owner who refuses to pay protection money: “Nice quiet dinnertimes you have going there; would be a shame if something happened to them.” But you never know for sure until you ask, right?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is expected to announce plans to repeal the agency's 2015 net neutrality rules on Wednesday.Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, will likely announce a plan to reverse course on the 2-year-old regulations and end the agency's classification of broadband as a regulated, common-carrier service. In a Wednesday speech, Pai will reportedly announce that he is scheduling a vote for the FCC's May 18 meeting to begin the process of repealing the rules.Pai has called the net neutrality rules a mistake that "injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market." President Donald Trump, who appointed Pai as the FCC's chairman, has also criticized the regulations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With workplace cyberattacks on the rise, industry experts are pressing businesses to train their workers to be more vigilant than ever to protect passwords and sensitive data and to recognize threats.“It is imperative for organizations of all sizes to instill among employees the critical role they play in keeping their workplace safe and secure,” said Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, a group that promotes education on the safe and secure use of the internet. The group's members include such major technology companies as Cisco, Facebook, Google, Intel and Microsoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The open source Docker initiative has been nothing if not entertaining. Epic levels of intrigue, dastardly deeds and positioning seems to be the order of the day.Of particular interest is what the Docker ecosystem is doing, particularly how the third-party solution players deftly promise loyalty to Docker Inc. but also position themselves for survival in the increasingly likely eventuality that Docker (the company) will, in Silicon Valley parlance, eat their lunch.+ Also on Network World: Finding and protecting the crown jewels +
One interesting area is that of security as it relates to containerized applications. One vendor doing good work in the space is Twistlock. Twistlock describes itself as the industry’s first enterprise security suite for containers. Twistlock's technology addresses risks on the host and within the application of the container. In doing so, it gives enterprises the ability to consistently enforce security policies, monitor and audit activity, and identify and isolate threats in a container or cluster of containers. Twistlock's stated mission is to provide a full, enterprise-grade security stack for containers so organizations can confidently adopt and maximize the benefits of containers in their production environment.To read this article in full or to leave a Continue reading
There are two times you might have to talk to your organization’s board of directors about security: before a breach and after. Be sure you’ve had the former before you need to have the latter.The board of directors, whose duty it is to run the company in the long-term interest of the owners, needs to know you’ve taken prudent steps to protect the organization’s digital assets. That should mean the board wants to talk with you, the CISO, to learn firsthand what your department is doing to mitigate information security threats.+ Also on Network World: How to survive in the CISO hot seat +
Board members want a high-level picture of the threat landscape and a checklist of the measures you’ve taken and policies you’ve adopted to protect the organization. Your job is to provide the board with perspective and not necessarily details. A scorecard or checklist can be an effective visual and a good starting point for a discussion of the organization’s security measures. It lets you provide a high-level overview, and it gives you a road map for diving into details if the board asks for more information.To read this article in full or to Continue reading
A group of networking engineers and vendors is making progress toward an API that would help enterprises merge SD-WANs from different vendors.The Open SD-WAN Exchange (OSE) initiative was launched last year by the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) to solve a shortcoming of software-defined wide-area networks: They often can't talk to each other. On Tuesday at the ONUG Spring 2017 conference in San Francisco, OSE will make public the work it's done so far.SD-WANs control links to branch offices and remote sites with software, which ultimately should eliminate proprietary hardware and dedicated routing schemes. They also allow companies to use regular broadband connections instead of more expensive MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Buying decisionsImage by ThinkstockThere are many factors to consider when making an application security purchasing decision, and the pressure is on organizations now more than ever to improve their security risk management preparedness. In fact, more than 80 percent of security attacks target software applications, with application vulnerabilities as the No.1 cyber-attack target. Organizations need a comprehensive application security toolkit to stay secure throughout the product lifecycle, and need to address key questions that can help them determine the right tools to address security risks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s a good time to be a CISO. In a market where analysts say there are over 1 million unfilled job openings, and with demand expected to rise to 6 million globally by 2019 -- according to the Palo Alto Research Center, if you do a good job other opportunities are sure to follow.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Ecommerce competition is heating up globally, with giants Amazon, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent and eBay all vying for bigger stakes in the market. Retail sales are expected to surpass $27 trillion by 2020, and ecommerce is expected to account for more than $4 trillion of that figure.One key area that is becoming the next battleground for these companies is payments. Payments may seem to be an inherent part of ecommerce platforms that facilitates the checkout process. However, the boom of financial technology (fintech) has made payments a major segment in financial services, creating major opportunities for these businesses to tap into wider markets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today you'll see the price drop an extra 42% on Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. Experience total freedom of choice in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands, the ultimate military shooter set in a massive open world setting. The Santa Blanca drug cartel has transformed the beautiful South American country of Bolivia into a perilous narco-state, leading to lawlessness, fear, and rampant violence. With their corrosive influence growing, the cartel plagues the citizens of Bolivia but all hope is not lost. The Ghosts, an elite US Special Forces team, are tasked to combat the cartel and save the country from collapse. See the discounted Ghost Recon Wildlands on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle is hiring people for a "new startup organization" inside its North America operation that will focus on key technology trends, including cloud computing, internet of things, artificial Intelligence, and augmented and virtual reality.The Solution Engineering organization the company is setting up will consist of Solution Engineering Centers in Reston, Virginia and Denver, Colorado.The database and enterprise software company has previously indicated its interest in investing in some of these technology areas like machine learning and analytics.It announced in September last year that it was investing in intelligent cloud applications, called Adaptive Intelligent Applications, “that automatically offer individualized recommended actions and streamline the tasks of business users such as human resource or finance professionals.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The moment Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was dreading has arrived: Microsoft is wielding LinkedIn against Salesforce in the battle for the CRM market. Starting Tuesday, salespeople will get LinkedIn Sales Navigator data alongside other information in the Dynamics 365 Sales dashboard.Users who have both systems will see information from LinkedIn profiles inside the lead, contact, account and opportunity pages of Dynamics 365 Sales. Dynamics and LinkedIn Sales Navigator will sync their information every day so that LinkedIn’s system is up to date on activity from Microsoft’s CRM and vice versa.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Microsoft asked customers last week for feedback on the portal that just replaced the decades-long practice of delivering detailed security bulletins, it got an earful from unhappy users."Hate hate hate the new security bulletin format. HATE," emphasized Janelle 322 in a support forum where Microsoft urged customers to post thoughts on the change. "I now have to manually transcribe this information to my spreadsheet to disseminate to my customers. You have just added 8 hours to my workload. Thanks for nothing."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.We’re in an era in which pre-packaged exploit services make it possible for the average Joe, with no technological experience or prowess, to launch intricate attacks on our environments. So, what can be done? Patching operating systems and applications is a surefire way to block some attacks. But you need to do more than blast out auto updates.Here are seven patch management best practices that take your organization’s cybersecurity to the next level:#1 Use a proper discovery service
You can’t secure what you don’t know about. The only way to know if a breach or vulnerability exists is to employ broad discovery capabilities. A proper discovery service entails a combination of active and passive discovery features and the ability to identify physical, virtual and on and off premise systems that access your network. Developing this current inventory of production systems, including everything from IP addresses, OS types and versions and physical locations, helps keep your patch management efforts up to date, and it’s important to inventory your network on a regular basis. If one computer Continue reading
Recently, SAS issued a rather plaintive call for enterprises to limit the number of open source projects they use to a somewhat arbitrary percentage. That seems a rather obvious attempt to protest the rise of the open source R programming language for data science and analysis in a market where SAS has been dominant. But there is a good point hidden in the bluster: Using open source responsibly means knowing what you’re using so you can track and maintain it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
One of the most common use cases for public IaaS cloud computing is storage and that’s for good reason: Instead of buying hardware and managing it, users simply upload data to the cloud and pay for how much they put there.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Battle of the clouds: AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform | Interactive map of public cloud regions around the world +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD is giving a demonstration of the brute force of its upcoming Vega GPU, showing its ability to handle 4K and 8K graphics.The company is showing off its next-generation Radeon Pro professional graphics card based on the Vega GPU at the NAB show in the Las Vegas this week.One demonstration has the Vega GPU handling 8K video processing in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017. The other focuses on 4K post-processing with Radeon ProRender, which renders high-end graphics.The NAB show is targeted at the TV and film industry, in which 8K is a growing trend. AMD has been wooing the industry to adopt its GPUs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When you think about the digital future, you probably think about self-driving cars, disruptors like Uber and Airbnb, and artificial intelligence. What you probably do not think about, however, is factories.Despite their outwardly staid appearance, the industrial and manufacturing industries have been at the forefront of the practical application of technology and automation for decades. This evolution has culminated in what is called Industry 4.0—a vision of the smart factory and the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT).And, I believe, it may be a blueprint for the future of IT across all industries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The main goal of the column has always focused on gizmos and gadgets, but on occasion I still discover some non-gizmo goodies – aka software or apps. So here are two quick apps that have spent some time on my phone and computer:Moodelizer: If you’ve always wanted to add a soundtrack to your mobile phone videos, but didn’t want to take the time to grab some royalty-free music and open up a video editor after the fact, Moodelizer should help. Think of this app like an Instagram filter, but for audio. The app provides you with a selection of audio clips, with names like “Arcade, Sitcom, Horror, Bride, Cartoon, etc.” A box that takes up the majority of the screen lets you film from either of the phone’s camera (rear camera or ‘selfie’ camera). When you choose your audio style, a button inside the box lets you choose different zones within the camera frame – when you move around, you get a different sound as part of the “soundtrack”. You can rehearse what you want to do, or you can tap a button and start recording.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, Continue reading
BeatsX wireless in-ear headphones are currently discounted 20% on Amazon. BeatsX features Fast Fuel charging (5 mins of charge = 2 mins of playback), multiple tips for a personalized fit, and seamless setup & connection with iOS devices via class 1 Bluetooth. The public list price of $149.95 on Amazon will be reduced to $119.99 when you add the item to your cart. See the discounted BeatsX wireless in-ear headphones now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here