The new BlackBerry KEYone smartphone, unveiled Saturday, is the first smartphone to carry the brand that doesn't come from BlackBerry.It will go on sale globally in April, said Nicolas Zibell, CEO of TCL Communication, the phone's manufacturer and licensee of the brand, at a launch event in Barcelona on the eve of Mobile World Congress.Like the BlackBerries of old, the KEYone has a physical keyboard with raised keys. A neat twist is that it also acts as a touchpad of sorts, and each letter can be used as a shortcut, with or without a modifier key, for 52 shortcuts in all.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM today said it would partner with Vermont Electric Power to create Utopus Insights to research develop and product intelligent analytic software for the energy industry.IBM said Utopus will bring to market a full-featured energy analytics platform, built for cloud (SaaS), on-premises and distributed Internet of Things (IoT) operation.+More on Network World: NASA embraces IBM’s Watson for future space, aerospace technology development+The platform will be built with open APIs that allow integration of third party tools and will include applications that enable best-in-class renewable forecasting, grid asset health and network risk analysis, and Distributed Energy Resource management, according to IBM Fellow, Dr. Chandu Visweswariah, who will be President and CEO of Utopus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Twitter video of a smoking iPhone 7 Plus has gone viral, prompting Apple to investigate.On Friday, Apple said that it was working with Brianna Olivas, who shared the video of her iPhone 7 Plus after it “blew up,” to try to find out the cause of the explosion. Olivas wrote that her rose gold iPhone 7 Plus, which she purchased from Sprint in January, “caught fire” while she was sleeping on Wednesday morning.Her boyfriend moved the iPhone from the bed to the dresser before going to the bathroom. When he came back, the iPhone was “steaming” and making a “squealing noise” so he tossed it in the bathroom. That’s when the iPhone 7 Plus “blew up and more smoke started coming out.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Most cryptography is theoretical research. When it is no longer theoretical, in practice it can become a harmful exploit.Google and Dutch research institute CWI proved that the SHA1 hash method, first introduced 20 years ago, could produce a duplicate hash from different documents using a technique that consumed significant computational resources: 6,500 years of CPU computation to complete the attack first phase and 110 years of GPU computation to complete the second phase. The exercise was computationally intensive but proved it is within the realm of possibility, especially compared to a brute force attack that would require 12 million GPU compute years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google's Project Zero team has disclosed a potential arbitrary code execution vulnerability in Internet Explorer because Microsoft has not acted within Google's 90-day disclosure deadline.This is the second flaw in Microsoft products made public by Google Project Zero since the Redmond giant decided to skip this month's Patch Tuesday and postpone its previously planned security fixes until March.Microsoft blamed the unprecedented decision to push back scheduled security updates by a month on a "last minute issue" that could have had an impact on customers, but the company hasn't clarified the nature of the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The new chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will seek a stay on privacy rules for broadband providers that the agency just passed in October.FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will ask for either a full commission vote on the stay before parts of the rules take effect next Thursday or he will instruct FCC staff to delay part of the rules pending a commission vote, a spokesman said Friday.The rules, passed when the FCC had a Democratic majority, require broadband providers to receive opt-in customer permission to share sensitive personal information, including web-browsing history, geolocation, and financial details, with third parties. Without the stay, the opt-in requirements were scheduled to take effect next week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The European edition of Cisco Live took place this week in Berlin, which is a fitting location given the amount of innovation happening in that city right now. If you ever find yourself in Berlin, be sure to check out Cisco’s Open Berlin innovation center where inventive start-ups are building and showcasing solutions that run on Cisco technology.
Innovation and digital transformation are linked together like Kirk and Spock. You can’t have one without the other. At this week’s event, Ruba Borno, Cisco vice president of growth initiatives and chief of staff for the office of the CEO, gave her first-ever keynote to a Cisco Live audience. Not surprisingly, she focused on digital transformation. However, unlike many keynotes I have seen, Borno didn’t just talk about digitization at a high level. Instead she was more prescriptive and gave the audience a guide on how to proceed with making the shift to a digital enterprise. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cybercrime is becoming more automated, organized and networked than ever before, according to the ThreatMetrix Cybercrime Report: Q4 2016.Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting online lenders and emerging financial services, says Vanita Pandey, vice president of strategy and product marketing, ThreatMetrix.[ Related: 8 tips to defend against online financial fraud threats ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2016, Samsung experienced the mother of all public relations nightmares after scores of Galaxy Note 7 owners reported that their new devices were prone to catching fire, and in some cases exploding. Samsung was ultimately forced to issue a worldwide recall for its well-reviewed phablet, costing the company billions in the process, not to mention a resulting black mark on the company's reputation.Flash forward to 2017 and we have an interesting story of a smartphone smoking, catching fire and melting. Only thing is, the story doesn't involve a Samsung device, but rather Apple's iPhone 7 Plus.In a video that has gone viral, we see the iPhone 7 Plus in question self-destructing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Now that SHA-1 has been broken it’s time for enterprises that have ignored its potential weakness for years to finally act, and it’s not that hard.
The most common use of the hash function is in securing SSL and TLS connections, and to get rid of SHA-1 in that use is to utilize browsers and servers that don’t support it. Depending on the size of an organization, this isn’t onerous, says Paul Ducklin, a senior security advisor at Sophos. (See his excellent description of the problem with SHA-1 and other hashing algorithms.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For months, a bug in Cloudflare's content optimization systems exposed sensitive information sent by users to websites that use the company's content delivery network. The data included passwords, session cookies, authentication tokens and even private messages.Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy for millions of websites, including those of major internet services and Fortune 500 companies, for which it provides security and content optimization services behind the scenes. As part of that process, the company's systems modify HTML pages as they pass through its servers in order to rewrite HTTP links to HTTPS, hide certain content from bots, obfuscate email addresses, enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google today announced that it is the first IaaS public cloud provider to run the newest version of Intel’s chips, named Skylake.The news comes just months after Google and Intel announced a partnership in November 2016 to co-engineer new processors for the company’s cloud platform.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Battle of the IaaS cloud: Amazon Web Services versus Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform+Skylake is the code-name for the next-generation silicon beyond Intel’s Broadwell processors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With mobile operators' marketing departments already throwing around claims about their 5G services, the United Nations is weighing in with its definition of what qualifies a network as next-generation.Verizon Wireless will begin delivering "5G" service to select users in 11 U.S. cities in mid-2017, even though some places don't yet have access to 4G. And at the Mobile World Congress 2017 trade show in Barcelona, companies including Intel, Qualcomm and Ericsson will be promoting their moves towards 5G.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A security analytics approach that exploits the unique strengths of Bayesian networks, machine learning and rules-based systems—while also compensating for or eliminating their individual weaknesses—leads to powerful solutions that are effective across a wide array of security missions.
Despite the drawbacks of security analytics approaches I described in part 1 of this series, it's possible to build such solutions today, giving users a way to rapidly identify their highest-priority security threats at very large scale without being deluged with false-positive alerts or being forced to hire an army of extra analysts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Linux Foundation announced yesterday that it had combined open source ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project into ONAP, the Open Networking Automation Platform, with the aim of helping users automate network service delivery, design, and service through a unified standard.Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said that ONAP should be a boon to enterprise IT departments, thanks to improved speed and flexibility.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: FCC rolls back net neutrality ISP transparency rules + Brocade's Ruckus Wi-Fi business finds a buyerTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ransomware criminals chatting up victims, offering to delay deadlines, showing how to obtain Bitcoin, dispensing the kind of customer support that consumers lust for from their cable and mobile plan providers, PC and software makers?What's not to love?Finnish security vendor F-Secure yesterday released 34 pages of transcripts from the group chat used by the crafters of the Spora ransomware family. The back-and-forth not only put a spotlight on the gang's customer support chops, but, said a company security advisor, illustrated the intertwining of Bitcoin and extortion malware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dwindling budgets, the changing nature of crime and the contemporary demands of communities are forcing police across the country to reevaluate their approach to law enforcement. Adding data-driven insights to their traditional policing expertise could provide a solution. It has already found a home in numerous areas of policing, from fraud detection to the identification of crime hotspots, and is transforming methods of policing from reactive to preventative."We strive to be more preventative," Detective Chief Superintendent of West Midlands Police Andy Hill told the audience at the Reform Big Data in Government Conference on Tuesday. "That isn't a new concept for policing. If we look back to Sir Robert Peel's 1829 Principles of Policing, it's number one on that list and then it recurs again down at number nine [the final entry on the list]."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of Slack's greatest appeals is that it's so extensible. While its main purpose is group collaboration, add-on apps can do everything from answer questions about business analytics to offer project updates from tools like Jira and Trello.Step 3: Host the R API remotelyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Many prognosticators have pronounced privacy a pipe dream. With the mountains of personal information on social networks and the lack of security awareness by many users, cybercriminals have more than a snowball’s chance to grab anyone’s identity.However, there are new ideas for counteracting identity theft that would take into account a person’s physical attributes to add another layer of security. The idea of using a fingerprint reader to log on to a smartphone isn't new, but the latest wrinkle is to incorporate the pressure with which that finger types on the phone.More than 41 million Americans have had their identities stolen, and millions more have had their personally identifiable information (PII) placed at risk through a data breach, according to a Bankrate.com survey of 1,000 adults conducted last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here