Getting cellular devices certified for carriers’ networks is an expensive, complicated process that’s even harder in the new field of IoT.Smartphone and tablet makers have been dealing with certification for years, spending as much as US$1 million on the process for just one device, GlobalData analyst Avi Greengart says. It’s gotten harder as carriers add new frequency bands.But at least phone makers have been through this before. When enterprises have new ideas about how to use the internet of things, and when manufacturers try to turn those ideas into reality, they're new to the process. Certification delays can hold up devices and IoT rollouts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft and Google don’t get along all that often, but they do agree on using Kubernetes for cloud container orchestration.Kubernetes is generally available for use with Azure Container Service, Microsoft’s managed cloud container hosting offering, as of Tuesday. ACS support for Kubernetes comes along with the service’s existing support for the Apache Mesos-based DC/OS and Docker Swarm.Containers provide an isolated, portable and consistent runtime for applications that’s particularly well-suited to deployment in a cloud environment. Orchestrators like Kubernetes help manage groups of containers. Many cloud providers like Microsoft offer services that help simplify the management of that whole system even further. ACS is one such service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uber Technologies scrambled on Monday to counter the sexism charges raised by a former employee, and said it would appoint former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to the panel that would investigate allegations by the engineer that the company mishandled her complaint of sexual harassment.The company, which did not release diversity data when asked by civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, also said Monday that 15.1 percent of its employees in engineering, product management, and scientist roles are women and this has not changed substantively in the last year.In an email to employees that was also circulated to media, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick wrote that he and Liane Hornsey, chief human resources officer, will be working to publish a broader diversity report for Uber in the coming months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hacker, purportedly from Iraq, defaced a site previously used by President Donald Trump for campaign fundraising. The “hack” occurred Sunday on the server, secure2.donaldjtrump.com. It was short-lived.A screenshot of the defacement was posted on the subreddit Hacking. The page displayed an anonymous man in a fedora above the message:
Hacked By Pro_Mast3r ~Attacker GovNothing Is ImpossiblePeace From Iraq
g33xter
Ars Technica reported the server was “behind Cloudflare’s content management and security platform, and does not appear to be directly linked from the Trump Pence campaign's home page. But it does appear to be an actual Trump campaign server.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to give cloud storage subscribers fairer contracts after intervention by the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority.Such cloud storage services are typically used to store photos, videos, music or digital copies of important documents.If the services shut down or vary their capacity or prices without notice, customers can lose their data, or be held hostage.The CMA asked the storage service providers to give adequate notice before closing, suspending or changing services, and to allow customers to cancel their contracts and receive a pro-rata refund if they didn't accept service changes.The regulator last year obtained similar undertakings from Google, Dropbox and five other cloud storage providers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Broadband internet has opened up almost unlimited possibilities for commerce, distance learning, civic participation, and knowledge sharing. But we are only scratching the surface of what's to come.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The smartphone in its current guise has been around for 10 years, and in that time it hasn’t changed form-factor much—a somewhat boring rectangular slab of plastic. Big deal.Ten years, however, are eons in tech life. Therefore one could ask just why haven’t smartphones morphed their shape in this decade of otherwise spectacular technological advancement? Have we really reached the pinnacle of communications tool design? More likely, a technical limitation.Samsung, though, is reportedly aiming to launch flexible devices soon, according to the Korea Herald. One of them is a “bendable Virtual Reality device with a flexible OLED display that can be bent to cover a user’s eyes completely,” for example, it says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekImage by RiverbedOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Ambra for DevelopersImage by ambraTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is targeting Indian startups with its cloud services, and has signed up more than 2,000 such customers in the country in the last 12 months, the company’s CEO Satya Nadella said Monday at an event for startups in Bangalore.A large opportunity ahead for the company is the large number of developers who are building their services around a biometric database, consisting of fingerprints and iris scans, which the country has created of over 1 billion of its people.Under a new program for the digital exchange of information, called India Stack, the government is offering the biometric system, called Aadhaar, as an authentication mechanism for a variety of services offered by the private sector.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Megaupload website founder Kim Dotcom and three associates were on Monday cleared by a court in New Zealand to be extradited to the U.S. where he faces a variety of charges including copyright infringement and racketeering.Holding that copyright infringement by digital online communication of copyright protected works to members of the public is not a criminal offense under New Zealand’s Copyright Act, the High Court found that a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement amounts to a bid to defraud, which is an extradition offense listed in the treaty between the U.S. and New Zealand.An earlier District Court judgment permitting the extradition was upheld by the High Court.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uber Technologies said Sunday it had ordered an urgent investigation after a former engineer triggered an uproar on social media, alleging sexual harassment, politics and discrimination at the ride-hailing company.In a blog post, Susan J. Fowler, who joined Uber in November 2015 and quit in December last year to join Stripe, alleged that her former manager in the company had said in messages over company chat that he was looking for women to have sex with.“It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR,” Fowler wrote in a blog post that created a storm online.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting pulled over by the cops can be stressful, especially if one of the cops is shouting, cursing and threatening to sic a 90-pound dog on a motorist to rip the *bleep* out of him. The Atlantic City cop was dropping f-bombs all over the place, doing so at least 10 times in a one-minute, 20-second video clip of the traffic stop incident which was posted on Facebook.I don’t see how you could help but be offended by the video. If not by the cop’s spewing of foul-language, then by the threats the officer made.
It is unclear why the cops pulled over the young men, but one of the cops nuked out upon discovering the driver was using his phone to film them. One of the unidentified cops said, “Listen there’s two ways that this can go. Take that phone and stick it out of my face. I’m not gonna tell you again.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Give Orlando Magic forward Aaron Gordon and Intel credit for creativity: The NBA player employed an AscTec Neo drone as part of his NBA Slam Dunk Contest repertoire. Intel
Orlando Magic forward Aaron Gordon practices with Intel’s AscTec Neo drone ahead of the Slam Dunk Contest, as part of NBA All-Star 2017 festivities.
Unfortunately, it took the athletic player 4 attempts to grab a pass from the roughly 11-pound hexicopter and complete the dunk, and he wound up getting knocked out of the competition early.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the latest vendor to identify a faulty clocking component of its products that can cause them to crash and not recover.HPE joined Cisco and Juniper in identifying the problem, even going so far as to tap the widely-suspected Intel-based clock element as the cause.In a statement the company said:“To the best of our knowledge, our customers are not experiencing failures due to the Intel C2000 chip, which is deployed on a limited number of our products. We remain committed to assuring the highest quality experience from our solutions and are proactively working with Intel to mitigate any future risk and impact on our customers.”
Unlike Cisco and Juniper however, HPE did not identify its affected products nor offer any details as to what customers can do with them should the problem occur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The hotly anticipated Ryzen processors are expected to start rolling out in early March, but AMD's still pushing its older FX-series chips folks looking to build a budget gaming PC. Newegg and AMD just revealed a FX processor promotion that bundles a 6- or 8-core chip with the real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, the poster child for cutting-edge DirectX 12 technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAP's named-user licensing fees apply even to related applications that only offer users indirect visibility of SAP data, a U.K. judge ruled Thursday in a case pitting SAP against Diageo, the alcoholic beverage giant behind Smirnoff vodka and Guinness beer.The consequences could be far-reaching for businesses that have integrated their customer-facing systems with an SAP database, potentially leaving them liable for license fees for every customer that accesses their online store."If any SAP systems are being indirectly triggered, even if incidentally, and from anywhere in the world, then there are uncategorized and unpriced costs stacking up in the background," warned Robin Fry, a director at software licensing consultancy Cerno Professional Services, who has been following the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Android applications that allow millions of car owners to remotely locate and unlock their vehicles are missing security features that could prevent tampering by hackers.Researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab took seven of the most popular Android apps that accompany connected cars from various manufacturers and analyzed them from the perspective of a compromised Android device. The apps and manufacturers have not been named.The researchers looked at whether such apps use any of the available countermeasures that would make it hard for attackers to hijack them when the devices they're installed on are infected with malware. Other types of applications, such as banking apps, have such protections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Whether you realize it or not, you may already be using, rely upon, affiliated with, support or otherwise involved with data infrastructures. Granted what you or others generically refer to as infrastructure or the data center may, in fact, be the data infrastructure.
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Business, IT Information, Data and other Infrastructures
Business, IT Information, Data and other Infrastructures overview image Greg Schulz - Server StorageIO
Generally speaking, people tend to refer to infrastructure as those things that support what they are doing at work, at home, or in other aspects of their lives. For example, the roads and bridges that carry you over rivers or valleys when traveling in a vehicle are referred to as infrastructure. This is also the situation with IT systems and services where, depending on where you sit or use various services, anything below what you do may be considered infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. Mention “cybersecurity conference” and most people think of the annual RSA Conference, which was held last week. But halfway around the world, the annual CyberTech Tel Aviv event is building momentum as one of the largest gatherings of cybersecurity professionals in the world. This year, more than 10,000 people representing 67 countries amassed in Tel Aviv, and I had the privilege of being one of them.Israel is making a name for itself, and that name is Cyber Nation. A 2011 government resolution created the National Cyber Bureau as an advising body for the Prime Minister. The bureau’s main mission is to bolster Israel’s national cybersecurity defenses, but a secondary mission is to promote research and development in the cyber field and encourage the commercial cyber industry in Israel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a matter of years there will be about 20 billion connected devices on the planet. This is the internet of things (IoT), and financial services institution Visa today announced its intention to turn many of these into a way for you to pay.Speaking at today's opening of IBM's Watson IoT Centre in Munich, Germany - an enormous skyscraper with labs inside that will invite the company's many partners in IoT to take up residence - Visa's Jim McCarthy and IBM's Bret Greenstein laid out their vision.Think of what the plastic card in your wallet represents: it is a simple form factor that securely communicates a payment between the consumer and the retailer. But Greenstein suggested that its time may be up, as every object around us begins to have intelligence embedded within them, these could also be payment signifiers in some way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here