Every once in a while, something in China that sounds like it came out of a dystopian movie catches my attention.China’s great surveillance machine seems to know no bounds. China has already cracked down on unauthorized VPN use. Last month, we learned that if you want toilet paper at one UNESCO World Heritage Site in China, then you must submit to facial recognition in order to be issued a strip of toilet paper. This time, we are looking at China requiring surveillance technology on public Wi-Fi and Chinese loan startups determining credit-worthiness by the model of smartphones used and if the battery runs low.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uber wants businesses to do away with shuttle buses for customers, and has launched a new service aimed at making it easier for companies to hail cars on other people’s behalf. Called Uber Central, the software lets users request cars even for people who don’t have accounts with the ride-hailing company.Here’s how it works: company employees who have access to the Uber Central console input a customer’s name and phone number, along with their pickup and drop-off address. After that, they can request a ride from Uber’s menu of services, or save the data as a draft for easier use later.The Uber Central dashboard, which is available worldwide, also lets employees track the status of rides. It’s built on top of Uber for Business, a version of the ride-hailing platform that has been built for use by companies rather than individuals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
PTC has assembled a robust portfolio of Internet of Things technologies that, when combined with the company’s history in digital 3D design and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools, makes for some interesting new ways to bridge the physical and digital worlds. To see how it all adds up, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Michael Campbell, Executive Vice President of PTC’s ThingWorx IoT platform. Campbell, who has been with PTC since 1995, has a background in 3D CAD and visualization, and ran the company’s CAD business for years when they started to think about the convergence of IoT and 3D and how it might all come together in augmented and virtual reality. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You know how on Star Trek doctors can diagnose what’s wrong with you just by waving a sparkly little salt shaker (no, really) over your body, or read your vital signs from a medical tricorder—a device that looks suspiciously like an old cassette recorder? Well, not surprisingly, it turns out that kind of medical technology would be tremendously valuable in the real world, and a pair of recent reports suggests we may be actually getting close to achieving it.Just like a Star Trek tricorder, only clunkier
First, the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize has been awarded for creating mobile devices that can non-invasively diagnose 13 medical conditions—and can be used by consumers without requiring professional help.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s been a long while since we’ve seen any meaningful update to Apple’s iMac line, but as the company revealed a few weeks ago, there are some new and exciting updates in the works.As Apple executives told a handful of journalists recently, the company is working on a brand-new iMac Pro model. And while the company didn’t provide any significant details, they did make a point of stressing that a touchscreen iMac is not in the works.“Touch doesn’t even register on the list of things pro users are interested in talking about,” Phil Schiller said. “They're interested in things like performance and storage and expandability.”Now comes word via Digitimes that Apple’s new iMac Pro models—which will still measure in at 21.5 and 27-inches—will feature “server grade” internals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Being little doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t important, but sometimes I get a bunch of little gadgets that do simple things that don’t warrant a fuller review/writeup. I save these for this type of post. Lots of little gadgets to help you along your journey in life. Let’s begin! Ventev
The Ventev Chargestand 3000c combines a portable battery, power cable (Lightning or Micro USB, depending on which option you choose) and mini-stand in one small package. When the battery is charged via USB, you can flip open the lid (like an old-school flip phone) and rest your smartphone on the tip of the power cable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. government today said it received 199,000 H-1B visa petitions for the upcoming 2018 fiscal year -- 37,000 less than in 2016.The government will issue 85,000 visas distributed via a computer-generated lottery. The winners will be able to use their visas at the start of the federal fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.[ Further reading: Hottest jobs, cities and industries for IT pay in 2017 ]
Industry analysts see President Donald Trump's actions and campaign rhetoric as having had an impact on the offshore outsourcing industry, which includes the largest users of H-1B visa workers. Firms considering shipping IT jobs overseas appear now to be more cautious than in recent years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Your employer wants to hire top salespeople and is counting on HR to deliver the best. There's the old-fashioned way: collect resumes, sort for keywords, check on social networks, get referrals and interview.But what about geotagging?Employers often have "top performer clubs" for their salespeople. Incentives for these top performers usually involve rewards such as trips to Hawaii, the Caribbean or Italy."That's fairly public knowledge," said Bertrand Dussert, vice president of Human Capital Management (HCM) transformation and thought leadership at Oracle. "You can assemble the known list of salespeople and compare it to geotagged tweets." (Clues can be found on the web. For instance, see this corporate blog post, Italy Awaits Adobe's Top Sales Performers).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mistakes can be costly. They also can be so painful they keep you from venturing any further ahead.Of course, that's true with almost anything tech-related, but IT managers will tell you that there are some common, and potentially damaging, pitfalls that anyone looking at a cloud migration should work to avoid.Migration mistakes can cost the enterprise money and time, and eliminate or reduce any expected increases in agility as well as speed and cost savings.Those stumbles and losses could cause business execs to back off from a bigger cloud migration. It also could cause execs to lose faith in their IT leaders."This is part of the learning curve," said Deepak Mohan, an analyst with IDC. "The negatives are attributed to the cloud and not to these mistakes that need to be corrected... If a company does not realize the cost savings and they fail to see the results they thought they'd get, the result is that there is a drop in faith and a lowering of confidence in your cloud strategy. And that will cause a slowdown in adoption."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Trivial matter?Image by Steve Traynor/IDGThe average user has around 26 to 55 applications downloaded to his smartphone device. Most likely, you have entertainment and gaming apps, a banking app, a few social media apps, fitness apps, and eCommerce apps to shop at your favorite stores.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Tuesday dubbed "Buy American, Hire American" that calls for sweeping reform of the H-1B visa process.Its centerpiece is the replacement of the H-1B lottery with a system that distributes visas on the basis of wages, skills and education."We want to switch away from a random lottery system, in which it's weighted toward the lowest wage workers, towards a system that prioritizes higher skilled, higher paid workers," said a senior administration official, in a background briefing to reporters on the condition that officials not be identified.Such an H-1B reform "would make it much more difficult to use it to replace American workers," the administration official said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks are becoming a more common attack method used by hackers. These attacks take advantage of the trust a website has for a user’s input and browser. The victim is tricked into performing a specific action they were not intending to do on a legitimate website; where they are authenticated to.CSRF attacks will use the identity and privileges that the victim has on the website to impersonate them and perform malicious activity or transactions. Attackers will attempt to take advantage of users who have login cookies stored in their browsers. Ecommerce sites that send cookies to store user authentication data are vulnerable to this attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As if getting venture funding themselves isn't exciting enough for open source-oriented startups, seeing an open source-focused company like Deis get snapped up by Microsoft must be a thrill as well.While it would be more thrilling, perhaps, if Microsoft disclosed how much it paid, I'm sure those in the startup world and their backers have ways of finding out that information. Not that the acquisition path is necessarily the exit route that all of these startups envision for themselves, but such money can obviously talk.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google will pay 438 million rubles (US$7.8 million) and agreed to give owners of Android smartphones in Russia new ways to change the default apps, in an antitrust settlement with the country's Federal Antimonopoly Service.The settlement, announced Monday, ends a nearly two-year investigation by FAS into Google's control of the Android operating system. FAS had accused Google of abusing its monopoly position in mobile app stores serving the Android operating system. The fine amounts to 9 percent of Google's revenue in Russia in 2014, plus inflation, according to TASS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When it comes to iPhone 8 (or iPhone X) scuttlebutt, there are rumors, and then there are leaks. This has been a big week for leaks...LEAKY IPHONE 8
Renders, schematics or whatever you want to call them were circulating wildly among Apple rumor mongerers and watchers this week. Appropriately enough, one such schematic surfaced on a site called /Leaks, and shows an iPhone with a vertical dual-camera set-up and a home button on the back, and a very comprehensive display on the front.MacRumors cautions that it's very hard to say how legit the schematic is, and that if it is for real, it could well be any of numerous prototypes that Apple engineers have tested.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple's iPhone design has rough remained unchanged since the company introduced its larger-screened iPhone 6 lineup in 2014. Sure, there have been slight aesthetic changes -- such as the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack -- but the overall look and feel of the iPhone is arguably outdated.Not to fear, the release of Apple's iPhone 8 is poised to change all that. Based on a number of leaks from reputable sources with solid track records, it's widely believed that the iPhone 8 will feature an edge to edge 5.8-inch OLED display. Of course, this begs the question: what happens to the home button, Touch ID and the iPhone's front facing camera?Well, Apple has reportedly been working on methods for embedding all of the above into the display itself. Far more than conjecture, Apple has filed a number of patents detailing technologies and manufacturing processes to allow for embedding items like a Touch ID sensor into a display. Of course, the road a patented technology must take before it appears in a shipping product is often fraught with hurdles, something Apple is currently dealing with right now.To read this article in full or to leave a Continue reading
Friday’s release of suspected NSA spying tools is bad news for companies running Windows Server. The cyberweapons, which are now publicly available, can easily hack older versions of the OS. The Shadow Brokers, a mysterious hacking group, leaked the files online, setting off worries that cybercriminals will incorporate them in their own hacks. “This leak basically puts nation-state tools into the hands of anyone who wants them,” said Matthew Hickey, the director of security provider Hacker House.He’s been among the researchers looking over the files and has found they contain about 20 different Windows-based exploits -- four of which appear to leverage previously unknown software vulnerabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As it turns out, Apple's car ambitions haven't been completely shuttered. While Apple may have scaled back its research and development efforts with respect to developing and manufacturing its own car -- a herculean goal to say the least -- it appears that the company is still interested in developing proprietary self-driving software.According to Business Insider, a new entry on California's DMV website indicates that Apple was recently granted a permit that grants it permission to test drive autonomous vehicles on public roads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft this week began blocking Windows 7 and 8.1 PCs equipped with the very newest processors from receiving security updates, making good on a policy it announced but did not implement last year.But the company also refused to provide security fixes to Windows 7 systems that were powered by AMD's "Carrizo" CPUs, an architecture that was supposed to continue receiving patches.The decree that led to the update bans, whether allowable or not under Microsoft's new policy, was revealed in January 2016, when the company said making Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 run on the latest processors was "challenging." Microsoft then ruled that Windows 10 would be the only supported edition on seventh-generation and later CPUs and simultaneously dictated a substantial shortening of support of both editions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has an event planned for May 2 believed to be focused on the education market, which has long been an Apple stronghold. It’s likely new hardware will be introduced, and some Microsoft watchers believe it will be the launch for a Windows Cloud device.Windows Cloud is rumored to be Microsoft’s answer to Google Chromebooks. It’s essentially the old Windows RT OS that failed spectacularly a few years back, except now it’s built on Windows 10 and runs apps only from the Windows Store, both Win32 apps and Universal Windows Platform Apps. RT flopped mostly because there were no apps for it and developers didn’t rush out to make any apps for it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here