SAN FRANCISCO -- The ubiquitous cloud computing craze may not be long for this world if venture capitalist Peter Levine is right. The Andreessen Horowitz general partner said that as more computing capabilities move to so-called "edge" devices, including anything from driverless cars and drones to the boundless devices that make up the internet of things (IoT), the cloud will slowly evaporate."A large portion of computation that gets done in the cloud today will return to the edge," said Levine at the Wall Street Journal's CIO Network event here Tuesday.Levine said the driverless car, whose 200-plus CPUs effectively make it a "data center on wheels," is a prime example of an edge device whose computing capabilities must be self-contained. Levine said that an autonomous vehicle relying on the cloud foTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft formed Microsoft Philanthropies a little over a year ago with a plan to donate money, time, cloud computing services and software around the globe. In its first year, it has done a lot of that. Mary Snapp, corporate vice president of Microsoft Philanthropies, provided an update to the program's progress after its first year, and it's impressive. The company's contributions to various nonprofits and schools include donations worth $465 million to 71,000 organizations and more than $30 million in technology and cash donations to organizations serving refugees and displaced people. Plus, company employees raised $142 million for 19,000 nonprofits and schools. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yesterday Amazon Web Services had a bad day. And when AWS has a bad day, so do a lot of other sites.Vendor Apica is a website monitoring services that keeps a close eye on some of the top retail websites around the country. All in all, the retail website Apica tracks had trouble dealing with the elevated errors rates AWS reported in S3 starting around mid-day Eastern Time.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 5 Lessons from Amazon's S3 cloud blunder, and how to protect yourself from the next outage +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fave Raves is Network World’s annual roundup of the best products, as chosen by IT pros. Do you have a favorite enterprise IT product you can't live without? Tell us about it and we'll share your raves with our readers.Please send your submissions to Ann Bednarz at Network World ([email protected]) by Friday, March 17. Please note: Submissions must be received directly from IT professionals, not through a third party.Items to address:1. Please provide your name, title and employer.2. What's your favorite product? (vendor name and product name)3. Why do you like it?4. How has it helped you and/or your company?5. How many years have you worked in IT?6. What upcoming IT projects are you most excited about and why?7. Please include a picture of yourself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Any reform of a controversial U.S. law allowing the National Security Agency to spy on people overseas will likely focus on its impact on U.S. residents, without curbing its use elsewhere.Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires on Dec. 31, and some digital rights groups are calling on Congress to overhaul the law to protect the privacy of residents of both the U.S. and other countries. Congress will almost certainly extend the provision in some form. But a congressional hearing on Wednesday focused largely on the NSA's "inadvertent" collection of U.S. residents' data, with little time given to the privacy concerns of people overseas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is pulling the plug on its Wi-Fi service for Skype users, which let users buy Wi-Fi access in paid public hotspots for a reduced fee over what the hotspot owner would charge. The company has sent notice to its subscribers that the service will be discontinued at the end of this month and they should use up whatever credits they have.Originally called Skype WiFi and later rebranded as Microsoft WiFi, the service dates back to 2009 when Skype was still an independent company. Following the purchase by Microsoft, the service was restructured and rebranded several times before being integrated into Windows 10. However, a promised integration with Office 365 never happened. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pi-ning for more air timeImage by NASA / Mark GibbsOne of the most remarkable things about the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers (other than the devices themselves) is the incredible creativity they’ve stimulated. School kids, makers, scientists, engineers, you name it, are building the most amazing digital machines and in this first round up I’ve collected some of notable and exciting examples of what people are making. If you know of a project that should be included in my next round up, drop me a line, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Facebook and sign up for my newsletter!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yesterday, Google debuted YouTube TV, giving wannabe cord-cutters a reason to finally do so.The obstacle for over-the-top television (OTT) has been the lack of news, sports and live TV. Now, with YouTube TV, subscribers get live TV streaming of 44 channels, including ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, plus two add-on channels.YouTube beat Apple to the streaming TV punch, delivering a cable TV-like skinny bundle at a lower price of $35 per month. Apple has long been rumored to be interested in the disrupting the TV market, though it was reported that Apple walked away from negations about a year ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The first Windows Mixed Reality headsets will start shipping to developers later this month, as Microsoft works to distribute the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset to a handpicked group of software makers.Microsoft offered me an early look at one of its internal prototypes, which shared a number of similarities with Acer’s hardware in terms of design and overall feature set. It wasn’t identical to the final hardware, but was built to roughly illustrate some of the capabilities users should expect. Here are my first impressions.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yesterday afternoon, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant and prolonged outage that brought a number of popular websites and services down. While Amazon is more readily known for its online retail business, the company's cloud services division has quickly become a huge money maker for the Jeff Bezos-led company. What's more, AWS provides the backbone for many well-known sites, including Netflix and Quora."We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region,” Amazon said yesterday amidst a flurry of confusion and frustration.The problem was eventually resolved, but not before a number of services from Apple were affected. For a brief while yesterday, iOS users experienced difficulties accessing the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud backups, iWork and other cloud-based services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Given my interest in cybersecurity skills and training, I’m contacted by academic institutions, professional organizations and training companies with news about some type of cybersecurity education curriculum. This isn’t surprising given the global shortage of cybersecurity skills. In fact, new ESG research discloses that 45% of organizations report a “problematic shortage” of cybersecurity skills in 2017.Clearly we need more smart and well-prepared people to enter the cybersecurity ranks, but it’s important to note that most cybersecurity professionals don’t enter the workforce directly from college or training programs. According to research conducted in 2016 by ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), 78% of cybersecurity professionals follow a more indirect route. These folks start their careers as IT professionals and make their way into cybersecurity as their careers progress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules, passed two years, ago were a "mistake" that caused uncertainty for the broadband industry, the agency's new chairman said.The net neutrality rules, along with the FCC's decision to reclassify broadband as a regulated common carrier, "deviated" from the U.S. government's longstanding light-touch regulatory approach toward the internet, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.RELATED: The hidden cause of slow Internet and how to fix it
Two years after the agency passed its net neutrality rules "it has become evident that the FCC made a mistake," said Pai, a Republican. "Our new approach injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market. And uncertainty is the enemy of growth."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We don't hear much about John Dillinger-style bank robberies these days, with exciting police chases to the state lines. In 2015, there were 4,091 traditional bank robberies in the US, according to the FBI, with an average loss of less than $4,000 per incident. No customers or bank employees were killed in any of these robberies, though eight would-be robbers were killed.The clearance rate for traditional bank robberies is around 60 percent, while the proportion of criminals that escape could be even lower, if they commit more than one robbery -- the FBI currently has fewer than 500 people on its list of wanted and unidentified bank robbers. In most cases, the FBI has a picture of them, and a description, posted on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
InfoWorldI mentioned earlier that Visual Studio startup time has improved over the years. For large solutions with many projects, such as a 2-million-line-of-code C++/C# project with a dozen DLLs and other separate modules on which I used to work, the new lightweight solution load mechanism can help a lot, because the individual projects are loaded on demand instead of all at once. That can make the difference between an annoying five-minute wait at startup time and a barely noticeable five-second pause as you open a different project within the solution. Individual file loads have sped up as well and now usually open in less than a second—almost at Sublime Text speeds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The digital world is all about IP (internet protocol) addresses. Every device needs an IP in order to communicate on the internet or within a private network. Given there’s not enough public IP addresses out there for every internet-connected device (at least with IPv4), this little thing called NAT becomes extremely important. It stands for network address translation (NAT) and is a function provided by routers to enable multiple devices to access the internet via a single public IP address.Behind each public IP, there can be hundreds of devices with their own private IP addresses, thanks to NAT. And almost all equipment that provides the NAT function includes a firewall to protect the private IPs and devices from public IPs and devices on the internet. Other network services are also typically offered, like DHCP (dynamic host control protocol) to give out the private IP addresses to devices that connect to the local network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President Donald Trump promised Tuesday to crack down on offshore outsourcing, which he blamed for displacing some of the best American workers. He didn't say how he might do it, and didn't raise the H-1B visa issue, which he has previously blamed for enabling offshoring.But Trump aimed a fiery broadside at offshore outsourcing at an Oval Office ceremony concerning two bills, both aimed at encouraging more women to study and seek careers in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). His comments went well beyond the scope of the two bills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Think about how annoyed you get when you lose your cell signal, and you can see why Intel is pushing for advances in the next generation of networking, also known as 5G. Sure, the company stands to profit from making chips and networking equipment to support faster broadband. Consumers, too, stand to benefit from a future where more things in their lives are connected. To get there, though, we’re all going to need more bandwidth.At Mobile World Congress, Intel demonstrated several initiatives for developing 5G capabilities. Watching virtual reality’s often stuttery video can make people queasy, but Intel demonstrated how 5G could let you stream 8K VR content. The company also showed how self-driving cars will need a speedy 5G network to communicate with other cars and infrastructure so they can move safely.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With IT industry unemployment hovering at around 2.8 percent (as of Q3 2016) and organizations struggling to find talent, many companies find themselves with open, unfilled jobs. That's a problem not just for individual companies, but for the U.S. economy as a whole."Filling open jobs doesn't just help workers. It also helps companies and the broader economy. Every job that's open is money left on the table, in the form of lost productivity for employers and earnings in consumers' pockets. When more open jobs are filled with the right people, economic gains include greater business productivity and consumer spending, thanks to more people earning wages, then saving, investing and spending those wages," says Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist, Glassdoor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Once upon a time, the sign of credibility -- indeed, the mark of coming of age for a young man in my home country of New Zealand -- was buying his first car and being able to do an oil change on it himself. A rite of passage was for a father to teach his son how to perform routine maintenance on his vehicle, a skill passed down many generations.Fast-forward to today, however, and it is decidedly rare to find anyone who does their own oil changes. The fact of the matter is that it is a relatively messy and time-consuming task and one which isn't a particularly good use of time -- these days the thought seems to be, "Why do my own oil change when I can pay someone to do it and enjoy a long brunch with the time I save?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Did a toymaker ignore warnings about a data breach? That’s a key question swirling around Spiral Toys, a company behind a line of smart stuffed animals that security researchers worry can be easily hacked.On Tuesday, Spiral Toys said the breach, which affects 800,000 user accounts, only came to its attention last week on Feb. 22.The statement is raising eyebrows. One researcher named Victor Gevers began contacting the toymaker about the problem in late December, when he noticed that a company MongoDB database storing customer information was publicly exposed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here