Sanctions imposed by former President Obama on Russia for hacking during the U.S. election had an unintended side effect: they essentially barred U.S. tech firms from selling new IT products in the country.Part of last month's sanction order was designed to block U.S. companies from doing business with Russia’s Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, because of its suspected role in influencing last year’s election.But the FSB isn’t just an intelligence agency. It’s also a crucial regulator in Russia that clears new IT products, including smartphones and tablets, for sale in the country.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you’re the CEO of a company, here’s another threat you need to worry about: hackers trying to recruit your employees for insider-related crimes.Researchers at security firms RedOwl and IntSights have noticed growing activity from online black market dealers trying to recruit company employees for insider trading and cashing out stolen credit card numbers. These dealers are appearing on underground forums located on the dark web, which are accessible through Tor, a browser designed for anonymous web surfing, according to the researchers, who published their findings on Tuesday. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President Donald Trump may be seeking more cooperation from private businesses to shore up the defense of critical infrastructure that they control.The signing of an executive order on cybersecurity was canceled unexpectedly Tuesday, but a draft of the order was leaked to The Washington Post.In it, Trump calls for, “…economic and other incentives to: induce private sector owners and operators of the Nation’s critical infrastructure to maximize protective measures; invest in cyber enterprise risk management tools and services; and adopt best practices with respect to processes and technologies necessary for the increased sharing of and response to real-time cyber threat information.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced it will celebrate 50 years of the A.M. Turing Award -- dubbed the "Nobel Prize of Computing -- with a (tech) star-studded conference in San Francisco this summer.The two-day event, to be held June 23-24, will "explore how computing has evolved and where the field is headed," according to the ACM.MORE: Why there's no official Nobel Prize in ComputingACM, which boasts of nearly 100,000 computing professional and student members around the world, is calling the event the Celebration of 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award. If you can't attend in person, be aware that a live stream will be available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The one-time pad, familiar from a thousand spy novels, is still among the most secure possible ways to encode a message to keep it safe from prying eyes. A cipher based on truly random numbers, with the keys held only by the sending and receiving parties, is theoretically unbreakable.And thanks to the Raspberry Pi, your messages to the Glorious Motherland can be proof against western imperialist snooping – the Pi, according to an article by Nate Drake for Techradar, is a pretty good source of randomness, and can generate its own sequences of gibberish numbers, which you can print out using an Adafruit Printer and use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google quietly announced Tuesday that Gmail will stop supporting older versions of its Chrome browser soon, in a move that will put another nail in the coffins of Windows XP and Windows Vista.Users of Chrome version 53 and older editions of the browser could start being redirected to the basic HTML version of Gmail as early as December, the company said in a blog post. Starting next week, users who will be affected by the change will start seeing a banner at the top of Gmail telling them to upgrade to an up-to-date version of Google’s browser.The affected browser versions include Chrome v49, the last version of the software that supports XP and Vista. While Microsoft officially ended support for XP more than two and a half years ago, Gmail has continued to work with it. Vista Service Pack 2 will reach the end of its extended support period on April 11.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google quietly announced Tuesday that Gmail will stop supporting older versions of its Chrome browser soon, in a move that will put another nail in the coffins of Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Users of Chrome version 53 and older editions of the browser could start being redirected to the basic HTML version of Gmail as early as December, the company said in a blog post. Starting next week, users who will be affected by the change will start seeing a banner at the top of Gmail telling them to upgrade to an up-to-date version of Google’s browser.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Can a spam filter work even without reading the content of your messages?WhatsApp thinks so. Since last April, the messenger app has been successfully fighting spam abuse, even as it’s been using end-to-end encryption.That encryption means that no one -- not even WhatsApp -- can read the content of your messages, except for the recipient.More privacy, however, can raise issues about spam detection. If WhatsApp can’t scan your messages for suspicious content, say for advertisements peddling cheap Viagra, then how can it effectively filter them out?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As a pesky underdog, AMD challenged Intel in chip innovation until the mid-2000s. AMD churned out innovations like dual-core and 64-bit chips, which kept Intel on its toes.But some disastrous technological and management decisions cost AMD dearly, and over time, buyers began to consider its processors inferior to Intel's chips. Intel ran away with PC and server chip market share.AMD now is looking to rally its dwindling fan base with a series of Zen-based chips this year for desktops, servers, and laptops. The hyped-up Zen chips are expected to be good, and even Intel readily acknowledges the stiff competition coming its way.AMD promises that Zen chips will deliver a 40 percent improvement in instructions per cycle, an important metric for chip performance. That number is impressive, considering most chips based on a new architecture have typically boasted CPU improvements of up to 20 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Logitech Professional Presenter R800, with a brilliant green laser pointer, puts you in complete control of your presentation and makes it easy to direct your audience's attention to specific information from across the room - even on flat panel displays and in brightly lit rooms. To keep you focused on the crowd and not the clock, the Professional Presenter R800 provides an easy-to-set timer with silent, vibrating alerts. When you're moving around the room to engage your audience, at a range of up to 100 feet (30 meters), a reception - level indicator on the LCD keeps you from wandering too far. The intuitive slideshow controls help you find buttons easily by touch, and the compact design allows you to take it with you wherever you go. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Not to state the obvious, but the cloud has been growing in popularity over the past decade. However, contrary to much of the rhetoric I hear about today, the cloud is not going to kill of private data centers any time soon. The explosion in data has driven growth in both private data centers and public clouds.Underscoring that point is that almost all the IT leaders I speak to plan to do some kind of hybrid cloud where they leverage the strengths of both.The cloud is a new compute model, but what’s different about it from other compute paradigms before it is that it is highly network centric. Everyone loves the cloud. It’s great, it’s elastic and a bunch of other things. But it won’t provide the results companies are looking for without the right network underneath it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and a cybercrime investigator from Kaspersky Lab have reportedly been charged with treason for helping U.S. intelligence services.
The arrests of Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of the computer incidents investigation team at Kaspersky, and Sergei Mikhailov, the deputy head of the Information Security Center at the FSB, happened in early December and were reported in the Russian media last week.
Since then, the arrest of a third FSB officer named Dmitry Dokuchayev, who also worked for the agency's Information Security Center, came to light, and the investigation is said to have targeted even more people.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing has become common in enterprise IT, and the hype around it remains as adoption soars. Research by IDG shows that 70 percent of enterprises currently use at least one cloud application, and in 2018, organizations with cloud-only IT infrastructure will become the majority.The global market for cloud services was worth $148 billion in 2016, according to Synergy Research Group, and it is growing by 25 percent annually. Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone reached $3.23 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2016, while Microsoft Azure, the second-largest cloud provider, announced Thursday that revenue has nearly doubled in the past year, giving it an annual run rate of $14 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Powered by advanced Dolby technology, these 7.1 surround sound headphones position you in the center of an immersive 360-degree sound field. They let you hear every detail in every direction, just as the game developer intended. Enemy fire. Sirens. Your opponent’s footsteps. When you hear what you can’t see, you win. The headset averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,400 reviewers on Amazon (see reviews), where their typical list price of $45.75 has been reduced to $39.99. See the deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s the beginning of a new year, and like many of you, I find this is a great time to jump-start my resolve to accomplish more and better—whether that means de-cluttering my desk, better managing my inbox or taking a hike to re-focus.Of course, making a New Year’s resolution to improve productivity can be extremely beneficial in the workplace, as well. We all know employee productivity is essential for driving revenue, but the U.S. Department of Labor reported in August that labor productivity growth in the non-farm business sector is lower now than during any of the previous 10 business cycles.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has rolled out a second release of its Tetration Analytics package with features such as a smaller footprint and a cloud service that will go a long way toward making the system alluring to more data center customers.Announced in June of last year, Cisco’s Tetration Analytics is a turnkey analytics package that gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data and machine learning.Tetration software sensors support Linux and Windows server hosts, while hardware sensors are embedded in Cisco network switch ASICS: Nexus 9200, Nexus 9300-EX and Nexus 9500-EX, to collect flow data at line rate from all the ports. Per Cisco once in place, the Tetration platform learns its enterprise environment and any policies IT has in place. From there it can learn which applications are dependent on each other throughout their data center and into the cloud. It can monitor server behavior patterns and group servers more efficiently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Indian outsourcing companies deliver services ranging from software coding to running business processes for customers in the U.S., Europe and other countries by taking advantage of low-cost, highly-skilled staff on their home turf.These companies also sometimes send people to deliver services onsite to customers.This time-tested model, backed by state-of-the-art facilities in India, could now be challenged by President Donald Trump's plan to bring jobs back to the U.S. North America accounted for 62 percent of fourth quarter revenue for Infosys, one of India’s key outsourcers. + ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD 5 tech battles facing Trump +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
WASHINGTON -- Social media heavyweights like Facebook and YouTube have been working with the U.S. government and other international partners as they look to take a more active role in combating terrorist propaganda and other extremist messages that have gained traction online.Officials from the popular social network and YouTube parent Google addressed the issue here at a recent tech policy conference, where they described efforts to go beyond simply removing extremist content, and actually engaging in counter-messaging programs to present alternative narratives to those advanced by groups like ISIS."We're really focused on utilizing the strength that comes out of YouTube to push back on these messages," said Alexandria Walden, Google's counsel on free expression and human rights. "We know the power of our platform, and so we know that the best way to counter messages of hate and violence is to promote messages that push back against that, that push back against the hate and extremism and xenophobia around the world."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Marking a major step forward for artificial intelligence (AI), Libratus, an AI developed by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), has resoundingly beaten four of the best heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em poker players in the world in a marathon, 20-day competition.After 20 days and a collective 120,000 hands played, Libratus closed out the competition Monday leading the pros by a collective $1,766,250 in chips."I'm just impressed with the quality of poker Libratus plays," pro player Jason Les, a specialist in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em like the other three players, said at a press conference yesterday morning. "They made algorithms that play this game better than us. We make a living trying to find vulnerabilities in strategies. That's what we do every day when we play heads-up no-limit. We tried everything we could and it was just too strong."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
During his campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump called the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules a "top-down power grab," leading many observers to expect a quick repeal.Trump's presidency is still in its infancy and it's unclear what his administration will do about the hot-button issue.It's difficult to determine what direction the unpredictable Trump administration will take, said Nathan White, senior legislative manager at Access Now, a digital rights group."The world is a very complicated place right now," he said. "I don't think we can get too far out front and predict the future."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here