The volume of data available to businesses is expected to reach 44 zettabytes by the year 2020. That’s a mind-boggling huge body of information, one that businesses can use to assess the effectiveness of marketing initiatives, to use as barometers for better performance, and to identify new optimization opportunities in all areas of operation.To make use of all that data, though, you need the right tools in place. And with the average salary for an experienced data analytics professional starting at $65,000 annually, smaller businesses may be at a disadvantage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Has the CIA ever spied on you? That’s a key question swirling around the WikiLeaks document dump that allegedly details the U.S. agency's secret hacking tools.
The documents themselves don't reveal much about who the CIA might have snooped on. But the agency certainly has the power to spy on foreigners outside the U.S., said Paul Pillar, a former deputy counterterrorism chief with the CIA.
That's its job after all: to collect foreign intelligence. But even so, the CIA is pretty selective with its targets. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mirantis is (or, as we will see, was) known as the pure play OpenStack vendor. The company focused on offering large organizations products and services that helped them leverage the open-source, OpenStack cloud computing platform to build their own clouds for internal or external use.Over time, however, there has been some doubt cast upon how much of a market opportunity there is for these sort of OpenStack service providers. The OpenStack ecosystem has been the source of much angst as consolidation, rationalization and unrealized hopes and dreams too their toll.Mirantis' 'evolution'
Mirantis was not immune from these impacts and last year announced its intention to move away from a pure-play OpenStack strategy and become an organization that helped its customers build infrastructure solutions based on a number of different platforms, OpenStack included. At the time, there were rumors that Mirantis wasn’t seeing the return customers it had hoped for and that most of its deals were one-time gigs that didn’t really allow it to build a recurring, sustainable business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s one of the most challenging ongoing conflicts in mobile technology: native apps vs. mobile websites. Is it better to develop apps for specific mobile operating systems like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android or instead turn to websites that are optimized for mobile browsing. Performance vs. flexibility
Traditionally, the tradeoff has been that native apps can do more and perform faster because they can be tied more directly to the mobile operating system and the device hardware. Mobile web apps, on the other hand, are typically easier to develop and more flexible. You can build an app once, and it runs reasonably well everywhere—rather than have to develop multiple versions for every mobile OS. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) Saturday claimed that hackers were trying to gain access to his personal and government-issued devices through bogus password-reset notifications.In a short flurry of Twitter messages, Sasse blamed the hacking attempts on his criticism of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, earlier in the week."Heads-up...I've been critical of Assange & WikiLeaks this week. So...big surprise: Am having multiple 'password reset' attempts right now," Sasse tweeted Saturday. The probing was hitting "basically every device, every platform, personal and govt," he added in a follow-up tweet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel has shifted its self-driving car efforts into high gear with a $15.3 billion deal to acquire computer vision and collision-avoidance company MobileEye.With the deal, announced Monday, Intel gets its hands on technology for machine learning, data analysis, localization and mapping for driver assistance systems and autonomous driving.Mobileye develops a full package of software and chips designed for use in autonomous cars.The deal is expected to close in nine months and calls for the combined global autonomous driving organization, which will consist of Mobileye and Intel's Automated Driving Group, to be headquartered in Israel and led by Amnon Shashua, Mobileye's co-Founder, chairman and CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ian Law, CIO of San Francisco International Airport (SFO), is constantly at the intersection of a variety of business challenges. The obvious: running the technology powering air travel, passenger safety and well-being. The not so obvious: working with retailers, ride-sharing name brands and government agencies to make sure all operations are running smoothly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
After Yahoo sells its operating business to Verizon Communications, Marissa Mayer step down as CEO from the holding company that remains, according to a regulatory document posted Monday.However, Mayer and Yahoo still have not yet announced whether she will move with the operating business to Verizon or take another position. When Yahoo announced the deal with Verizon last July, Mayer said she planned to stay with the company."For me personally, I’m planning to stay," she said then. "I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s that time of year again: Pi Day! Image by Flickr/kok_sexton Pi enthusiasts around the world wait each year for March 14 to celebrate the mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Check out our tried and true tips for celebrating Pi Day, and be sure to check out our past year’s coverage for even more ideas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
That was fast. Networking veteran Jonathan Davidson is re-joining Cisco a little less than a week after resigning as rival Juniper executive VP and general manager. Cisco/Jonathan Davidson
Davidson is joining Cisco’s Service Provider Business Unit and will report to Yvette Kanouff, the senior vice president and general manager that unit.+More on Network World: Cisco’s Jasper deal – one year, 18 million new IoT devices later, challenges remain+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Computing Research Association has recognized Carnegie Mellon University’s Carol Frieze as its 2017 A. Nico Habermann Award winner in recognition of her efforts to promote diversity in computer science.Frieze directs Women@SCS, a student/faculty organization fostering opportunities for women, and the student-run SCS4ALL initiative to bring more underrepresented groups into the computing field. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You know the telepresence robots that roll around offices with a camera, microphone and iPad attached in order to give remote users a way to participate “face-to-face” in meetings? It would be trippy if an attacker were able to take control of such a robot, but also entirely possible. Today, Rapid7 revealed three security flaws it discovered in the mobile conferencing device Double Telepresence Robot.
Rapid7 researcher Deral Heiland discovered three vulnerabilities: unauthenticated access to data, static user session management, and weak Bluetooth pairing. Two of three vulnerabilities disclosed to Double Robotics were patched in January, a really quick response considering the fixes were deployed about a week after the flaws were disclosed to the company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Spam is once again raising its ugly head as a chief way for attackers to grab protected data.IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence group said today that one of the key findings from its forthcoming Threat Intelligence Index for 2017 is that spam volume grew dramatically throughout 2016, bringing with its host of new malicious attachments harboring banking Trojans and ransomware.+More on Network World: IBM technology moves even closer to human speech recognition parity+“Attackers are not limited to a single set of tools, however. The ongoing expansion of domain name choices has added another instrument to the spammer’s toolbox: enticing recipients to click through to malicious sites, ultimately allowing attackers to infiltrate their networks,” wrote Ralf Iffert, Manager, X-Force Content Security in a blog about the spam findings. “More than 35% of the URLs found in spam sent in 2016 used traditional, generic top-level domains (gTLD) .com and .info. Surprisingly, over 20% of the URLs used the .ru country code top-level domain (ccTLD), helped mainly by the large number of spam emails containing the .ru ccTLD.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Following the recent revelations about the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's cyberespionage arsenal, software vendors reiterated their commitments to fix vulnerabilities in a timely manner and told users that many of the flaws described in the agency's leaked documents have been fixed.While these assurances are understandable from a public relations perspective, they don't really change anything, especially for companies and users that are the target of state-sponsored hackers. The software they use is not less safe, nor better protected, than it was before WikiLeaks published the 8,700-plus CIA documents last Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Omron 10 series wireless blood pressure monitor averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 4,450 customers (read reviews). With a regular list price of $99.99, this 48% off deal puts it at just $51.99. The bluetooth monitor is compatible with Omron's free iOS and Android apps. It features multi-color indicator lights which show if your readings is in the normal (green) or hypertension (orange) range. BP level bar displays how your reading compares to normal home blood pressure levels. An Easy-Wrap ComFit Cuff inflates around your entire arm to avoid incorrect cuff positioning. It automatically takes 3 consecutive readings one minute apart and displays the average, following guidelines set by the American Heart Association. An easy-to-read display with extra-large digits & backlight make results easier to read. The unit stores 200 readings in device or 100 each for 2 users, and operates with an included AC Adapter or 4 AA batteries. See the discounted Omron 10 series bluetooth blood pressure monitor on Amazon now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President Donald Trump's administration has signaled that it has no immediate plans to change the H-1B program. Critics are roiled. They wanted Trump to act before April 1, the day the U.S. accepts visa applications for the new year.But no one knows for sure. New rumors circulate that Trump will act, maybe next week, but the White House won't say.The IEEE-USA said Friday that Trump's inaction on the H-1B visa "will cost American jobs." The group now believes that action before April is unlikely, and that may be because of something Sean Spicer, the press secretary, said this week.Spicer was asked at a press briefing Wednesday if there was any plan to "revamp the H-1B program by April 1." Spicer said the president was focused on border security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There has never been a more pressing need to automate data center operations—including the network, storage, compute, and apps. End-to-end data center automation might be the fastest route to delivering the on-demand IT services needed in today’s digital economy. As such, no organization can afford to stumble as it develops and deploys comprehensive automation strategies. Let’s take a look at three of the most common mistakes organizations make as they seek to automate their environments: taking on too much, focusing too heavily on a specific tool, and letting a vendor dictate their strategy.Mistake 1: Trying to boil the ocean. Trying to do too much, too soon, is often a recipe for disaster. When it comes to automation, this approach frequently results in unmet expectations as well as management’s diminished confidence in IT’s ability to deliver.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Asynchronous vs synchronous. Dark disaster recovery vs. active architecture. Active/active vs. active/passive. No setup is objectively better or worse than another. The best one for you primarily depends on your level of tolerance for what happens when the server goes down.Security experts say how individual companies choose to save their data in anticipation of an outage depends on how long they can survive before the “lights” are turned back on. What level of availability does your company need? Is the face of your company an ecommerce site where even a few minutes offline can cost an astronomical sum? Will the cost of an active-active system outweigh the potential loss of business from an outage?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Technology entrepreneur Raven Zachary has seen things he has difficulty talking about.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft Windows may be the dominant player on the desktop, but the rapidly increasing open source software market—especially for admin and dev tools—clearly favors Linux. Not to mention the mobile market, where Android uses Linux variants. If you’re a developer on Windows, the drumbeat to get hip to Linux capabilities keeps getting louder.Over the years, Microsoft has introduced various workarounds for using Linux capabilities on Windows, such as PowerShell with SSH and Cygwin and MSYS. Running Linux inside a virtual machine is another option. But VMs consume a significant amount of resources and don’t provide a first-class Linux experience, as you can’t edit local files or get full access to local drives, for example.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here