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Category Archives for "Network World Wireless"

Trump administration is giving us a good lesson on Twitter security

Several recent incidents involving U.S. President Donald Trump's administration can teach users something about IT security -- particularly about Twitter and what not to do with it.It turns out that several White House-related Twitter accounts -- including the president's official account, @POTUS -- until recently were revealing sensitive information that hackers might be able to exploit.The problem revolves around the service’s password reset function. If the account holder doesn't take certain steps to secure it, Twitter exposes information that anyone with the right skills can use to uncover what email address -- in redacted form -- was used to secure a Twitter account.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud growth continues to boost Microsoft’s financials

Microsoft’s focus on the cloud continues to pay off. The tech titan showed growth across all its cloud-based businesses during the last quarter ended Dec. 31, including Office, Dynamics and Azure.Reporting financial results for its fiscal second quarter on Thursday, the company said its Commercial Cloud business is pulling in revenue at the rate of $14 billion per year. During the previous quarter, that rate was $13 billion.Azure growth was especially strong. Azure compute usage more than from a year earlier, and revenue from the business grew by 93 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alphabet earnings surge on mobile, YouTube

Alphabet reported significantly higher revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016 on the back of increased mobile and YouTube video advertising.Revenue in the last three months of the year jumped 22 percent from a year earlier, reaching $26.1 billion, while net income rose 8 percent to $5.3 billion.“2016 was simply a great year for us,” said Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google, in a conference call with analysts.The vast majority of the quarter's revenue, $22.4 billion, came from Google's advertising business, with $3.4 billion coming from other business segments such as hardware sales, the Google Play Store and Google's Cloud services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

U.S. companies spending millions to satisfy Europe’s GDPR

Ninety-two percent of U.S. multinational companies cited compliance with the looming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a top data protection priority, according to new research from PwC. Sixty-eight percent are earmarking between $1 million and $10 million on GDPR readiness and compliance efforts, with 9 percent expecting to spend over $10 million, says Jay Cline, PwC’s U.S. privacy leader.Cline says PwC ‘slatest survey showed that fear remains the biggest motivator for U.S. CIOs, who are “connecting the dots” after watching data breaches lead to lost revenues, regulatory fines and the erosion of consumer trust. “U.S. companies see the connection between doing privacy well and greater revenues and consumer trust,” says Cline, who surveyed 200 CIOs, CISOs and other C-suite executives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google wants to add AI to gadgets made using Raspberry Pi

Google wants to bring smarts to cool gadgets and devices made using Raspberry Pi 3 or Intel's Edison.The company is chasing makers with open-source tools needed to add artificial intelligence to consumer, industrial, and retail devices made using board computers.The plan may include machine-learning tools, which are central to AI. AI helps Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana answer questions, and also helps self-driving cars cruise the streets safely."We don't have any specifics to announce right now, but we're excited to keep sharing open-source machine learning tools with the community -- stay tuned for more this year," a Google spokesman said in an email.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nasuni CEO: ‘We’re going to liberate you from the bottleneck around your files’

When it comes to file systems, scale is the enemy, according to Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. And the best weapon in the battle for scale is the cloud. Nasuni claims to have developed the first cloud-native file system, delivering not only virtually unlimited scale in the cloud but rapid access to files from locations around the world. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

As Baby Boomers retire, the shortage of mainframe professionals grows more acute  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  For years we have been hearing about critical IT skills shortages. Companies just can’t find enough (or the right) people with expertise in mobility, cybersecurity, data storage, networking, cloud and other important areas.There’s one area, however, where the shortage is becoming acute, and affected companies that don’t act now might soon find themselves in a world of hurt. I’m talking about the business-critical discipline of mainframe stewardship.Experts have been warning about this for at least a decade, and the days of reckoning are here, driven largely by the fact that mainframe champions are retiring from the workforce in droves. People who started their IT careers in the 1970’s and 1980’s – when the mainframe was king – are now baby boomers at the end of their careers. The generations behind them took up different computing platforms, meaning there are few people to pass the mainframe torch to. By some estimates there will be more than 84,000 open positions in this field by 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gmail will block JavaScript attachments, a common source of malware

Starting Feb. 13, Google will no longer allow JavaScript attachments on its Gmail service, killing one of the main methods of malware distribution over the past two years.Users will no longer be able to attach .JS files to emails in Gmail, regardless of whether they attach them directly or they include them in archives like .gz, .bz2, .zip or .tgz. For those rare cases when such files need to be shared via email, users can upload them to a storage service like Google Drive and then share the link.The .JS file extension will be added an existing list of other banned file attachments that includes: .ADE, .ADP, .BAT, .CHM, .CMD, .COM, .CPL, .EXE, .HTA, .INS, .ISP, .JAR, .JSE, .LIB, .LNK, .MDE, .MSC, .MSP, .MST, .PIF, .SCR, .SCT, .SHB, .SYS, .VB, .VBE, .VBS, .VXD, .WSC, .WSF and .WSH. Most of these file types have long been abused by cybercriminals to send malware via email.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Seagate’s roadmap includes 14TB, 16TB hard drives within 18 months

Seagate is getting closer to reaching its goal of making 20TB hard drives by 2020.Over the next 18 months, the company plans to ship 14TB and 16TB hard drives, company executives said on an earnings call this week.Seagate's hard drive capacity today tops out at 10TB. A 12TB drive based on helium technology is being tested, and the feedback is positive, said Stephen Luczo, the company's CEO.The demand for high-capacity drives is mostly in enterprises and for consumers who can afford the drives. The drives are mostly used in NAS configurations and storage arrays.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wine 2.0 brings MS Office 2013 compatibility to Linux

This week, Wine—the project that allows you to run many Microsoft Windows applications on non-Windows platforms—hit a rather huge milestone: version 2.0. From the Wine 2.0 release notes:  “This release represents over a year of development effort and around 6,600 individual changes. The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013 and the 64-bit support on macOS.”  I’ll be honest. The Mac OS tidbit isn’t all that interesting to me. But the support for Microsoft Office 2013 is, almost certainly, of interest to a number of people. (I don’t use it personally, but I know plenty of organizations that do.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Commuting Chelsea Manning’s Sentence Was Just and Proper

Before leaving office, President Barack Obama commuted the sentence of former Army soldier Chelsea (Bradley) Manning.  At the time, Manning was serving a sentence of 35 years for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks in 2010.  This material was subsequently published by WikiLeaks, embarrassing the US government and exposing several previously undocumented war crimes that took place in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The President’s decision to commute Manning’s sentence was extremely controversial.  The verdict was made over the objection of Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, while other military and government officials quickly criticized Obama’s pronouncement.   Just today, President Trump referred to Manning as an “ungrateful traitor” who should have never been released from prison on Twitter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence was just and proper

Before leaving office, President Barack Obama commuted the sentence of former Army soldier Chelsea (Bradley) Manning. At the time, Manning was serving a sentence of 35 years for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks in 2010. This material was subsequently published by WikiLeaks, embarrassing the U.S. government and exposing several previously undocumented war crimes that took place in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The President’s decision to commute Manning’s sentence was extremely controversial.  The verdict was made over the objection of Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, while other military and government officials quickly criticized Obama’s pronouncement.   Just today, President Trump on Twitter referred to Manning as an “ungrateful traitor” who should have never been released from prison.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Digital disrupts traditional outsourcing market in 2016

The traditional IT and business process outsourcing market declined 25 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 compared to the same period last year, producing a total of $9.6 billion in total contract value, according to data from Information Services Group (ISG). The value of traditional infrastructure, applications, and business process deals in the fourth quarter was down eight percent over the previous quarter, according to ISG.[ Related: Outsourcing trends to watch in 2017 ]“These results, we believe, reflect uneven global demand,” says John Keppel, partner and president of North EMEA and Asia for ISG. “The traditional sourcing sector is in the midst of a structural change, as more and more services move to the cloud and many service providers try to adapt their business and sales models to meet these changing market conditions.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 of the most anticipated smartphones for 2017

It's become an annual tradition that we await tech companies to debut the latest smartphone hardware. Smartphone rumors fly every year as experts and consumers  speculate about the features they think -- and hope -- will be included in their favorite devices.And if it's time for an upgrade, there are plenty of new exciting smartphone features that your old device probably doesn't offer. Whether you want more screen real estate, a waterproof smartphone or a fresh new design, you'll want to keep an eye on these five smartphones.iPhone 8 Apple Once released, the iPhone 8 will mark the 10th anniversary of the popular Apple smartphone and industry experts anticipate a completely redesigned iPhone. MacWorld reports a possible return to stainless steel, an all-glass design, a curved OLED display, new color options, wireless charging, a foldable design and a third, smaller model of the iPhone 8.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chrome, Firefox start warning users when websites use insecure HTTP logins

The war on insecure webpages has begun, and Mozilla fired the first shot.Recently, Mozilla rolled out Firefox 51 to its mainstream user base. With the new release comes an insecure warning on any page that offers a login form over an HTTP connection instead of HTTPS. Chrome plans to follow suit with version 56, expected to be released to mainstream users on Tuesday, January 31, as Ars Technica first pointed out.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 6 simple tricks for protecting your passwords HTTP uses an open, unencrypted connection between you and the website you’re visiting that could be intercepted by anyone monitoring traffic between you and the site. For that reason, it’s never a good idea to share login or credit card information over an HTTP connection. Most major sites offer the encrypted version—HTTPS—but every now and then you’ll come across a site that doesn’t.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s trade TPP move a setback for cloud computing

WASHINGTON -- On the heels of the news that President Trump has removed the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade deal that he blasted as a candidate, experts warned of the fallout for cloud-computing companies that have been advocating for policies to break down digital trade barriers that restrict the flow of data traffic across international boundaries.Here at the annual State of the Net tech policy conference, the news was met with disappointment by a panel of experts, who said that the provisions of the TPP governing the activities of tech companies would have been an important step toward establishing international norms for trade in the digital age.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Face-off: Oracle vs. CA for identity management

Employees come and go, or switch departments, so IT managers seek an automated way to give (or deny) them access privileges to corporate systems. Two of the top software products for identity and access management (IAM) are Oracle Identity Manager and CA Identity Manager, according to IT Central Station, an online community where IT professionals review enterprise products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

IDG Contributor Network: Thales Data Threat Report: Security spending up, but so are breaches

It’s interesting seeing how much money technology vendors spend on surveys that (at least most often) justify their own existence. It would be easy to be cynical about them, but beyond the self-serving aspects of it all, the data these surveys generate is interesting as a general “state of the nation” assessment.A good case in point is Thales' new Data Threat Report (pdf). Thales is a huge vendor that employs over 60,000 people across 56 countries. With multibillion euro revenue, it makes sense for the company to increase the perception that it is a thought leader in its field. And Thales' field is a big one. It is a systems integrator, equipment supplier and service provider in the aerospace, transport, defense and security markets. A major part of the company's offering lies around cybersecurity. This report is, therefore, very much in its wheelhouse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 8 likely to feature ‘wraparound’ display design

It's no secret that Apple's iPhone design is in need of a refresh. While there's certainly nothing wrong with the current form factor, the iPhone's industrial design has largely remained unchanged since Apple released the iPhone 6 back in 2014. That's quite a long time for a smartphone market that tends to move at warp speed.What's more, with 2016 marking the first year that iPhone sales experienced a decline, there's a strong case to be made that iPhone owners are more eager than ever before for something a little bit fresher.Not to fear, Apple's 2017 iPhone -- a device that will reportedly be dubbed the iPhone 8 -- may finally introduce a brand new design. Over the past few months, there have been a deluge of rumors all pointing towards an iPhone 8 featuring an edge to edge OLED display with extremely minimal bezels. What's more, some reports claim that all of the iPhone's front-facing sensors, including Touch ID, will somehow be embedded into the display itself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pity the sad fools tasked with buying a DCIM system

The purpose of dramatic tragedy is to teach us to avoid misfortune by showing a negative example.With that in mind, I introduce our tragic hero. Let’s call him Jim.Jim is a vice president of data center operations for a bank. He’s been tasked with finding a replacement for the company’s legacy data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool set, which ran into a dead end for support and updates.Jim manages a half-dozen data centers of various ages and design. The motley portfolio is the product of acquisitions and shifting management strategies over the past decade. Some of the sites are underutilized, others are coming up against capacity constraints, while still others are running on borrowed time and would likely require significant updates if anybody dared to evaluate them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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