ZeroLemon describes their ToughJuice power bank as the world's toughest external battery pack, with 30000mAh capacity and a rugged anti-shock exterior. With enough juice to get you up and running again and again on a single charge, ToughJuice provides up to ten charges to a smartphone, two charges to a tablet or multiple charges to nearly any other device. It features four USB ports (1 QuickCharge 2.0 port, with legacy 5V/2A support and 3 Ports for 1A charging) but more importantly it features USB-C/Type-C Compatibility: the USB-C/Type-C port makes the battery pack compatible with the new MacBook, charging at 5V/2.5A and other USB-C powered devices. The device averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 200 people (read reviews), and its list price is currently discounted to $69.99. See the discounted ZeroLemon ToughJuice power bank now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past two years, Google has pressured developers to patch security issues in more than 275,000 Android apps hosted on its official app store. In many cases this was done under the threat of blocking future updates to the insecure apps.Since 2014, Google has been scanning apps published on Google Play for known vulnerabilities as part of its App Security Improvement (ASI) program. Whenever a known security issue is found in an application, the developer receives an alert via email and through the Google Play Developer Console.When it started, the program only scanned apps for embedded Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials, which was a common problem at the time. The exposure of AWS credentials can lead to serious compromises of the cloud servers used by apps to store user data and content.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Organizations can be pretty darn strategic when it comes to timing bad news announcements, typically after the market closes...on Fridays...of long weekends.I can't say whether Samsung has purposely timed its press conference to explain the cause of the Galaxy Note7 fires and explosions for a Monday morning (10AM Korea Standard Time) in Seoul, South Korea knowing that many in the US will be otherwise distracted at that time (8pm Eastern Standard Time on Sunday) by the NFL's AFC Championship Game. After all, American football is down on the list of popular sports in Korea after soccer and baseball, and the company might just want to get its press conference over first thing during the week in Seoul.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new bill in Congress would give foreign students who graduate from U.S. schools priority in getting an H-1B visa.The legislation also "explicitly prohibits" the replacement of American workers by visa holders.This bill, the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, was announced Thursday by its co-sponsors, U.S. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), longtime allies on H-1B reform. Grassley is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which gives this bill an immediate leg up in the legislative process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
China intends to develop a prototype of an exascale supercomputer by the end of 2017, tweaking an exascale delivery date that's already well ahead of the U.S. The timing of the announcement, reported by an official government news service, raised the possibility it was a message to President-elect Donald Trump.China's announcement comes the same week Trump takes office. The Trump administration is bringing a lot of uncertainty to supercomputing research, which is heavily dependent on government funding."The exascale race is also a publicity and mindshare race," said Steve Conway, a high-performance computing analyst at IDC. "The Chinese are putting a stake in the ground and saying we're going to have a prototype computer soon, maybe a year or so sooner than people expected," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Microsoft launched its Cache note-taking experiment last year, we hoped it could become Microsoft’s version of Google Keep, if Microsoft devoted enough resources to it. Sadly, that’s not the case.In a note to users, Microsoft said Thursday that it would shut down Cache at the end of February, and would no longer market it as a standalone service.“Over the course of this year, we learned that there was an appetite for a service like Cache, but more importantly, your feedback taught us a lot about the extent of the challenges people have with managing and organizing their work,” Microsoft said in an email from the Cache team.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you've got an Amazon Echo, Dot, or other Alexa-enabled device, you've probably discovered Flash Briefings. (For those not yet talking to Amazon devices, a Flash Briefing is a customized audio news report.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
U.S. iPhone buyers significantly shifted purchase preference to the larger 7 Plus in 2016, boosting the 5.5-in. smartphone's share of all Apple handsets, a research analyst said Thursday."The U.S. market finally likes these bigger phones," said Mike Levin, of Chicago-based Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP).Levin cited CIRP's latest survey, which polled 500 U.S. consumers who had purchased between October and December, to prove his point. Of those who bought a new iPhone in the fourth quarter, 32% selected the iPhone 7 Plus, one of two models introduced in September. Another 40% chose the smaller, less expensive iPhone 7.The iPhone 7 Plus share of the total approached double that of the then-new iPhone 6S Plus the year before: Just 19% of all fourth-quarter iPhones in 2015 were the bigger-screen model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The IoT security market will reach a valuation of $36.95 billion by 2021, says data from a Marketsandmarkets.com analyst report. Where the cyber security mayhem grows, so flows the security market money.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
FortifiedImage by CrisCan you even tell if a breach has occurred? Have you inventoried its vulnerabilities - and taken steps to prevent, for example, a $22 million per minute loss due to a SAP breach as experienced by one Fortune 100 company? Or have you concluded that the scale of SAP ERP implementations makes it just too big to manage? Ask yourself these 10 questions - compiled by David Binny, vice president of product management at Panaya, and gleaned from its analysis of thousands of SAP landscapes - to find out if your SAP is safe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Verizon has doused a public-relations flare-up with the volunteer fire department that serves a small Virginia island community, meaning that:
The Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company will pay far less than $73,000 to have telecommunications equipment moved off land that will accommodate its new headquarters.
This financial relief will forestall the heftier bill possibly having had to come out of the hides of the Chincoteague Ponies, a herd of 150 wild horses that are shepherded by the firefighters and helpful to have when publicly battling a major corporation.
And, finally, that T-Mobile CEO John Legere can keep his checkbook in his pocket.
First the cease-fire. From the fire company’s Facebook page:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft’s lawsuit objecting to the indiscriminate use by U.S. law enforcement of orders that demand user data without the opportunity to inform the customer may run into questions about the software giant's standing to raise the issue on behalf of its customers.A government motion to dismiss Microsoft’s complaint comes up for oral arguments Monday and significantly the judge said on Thursday that the issue of whether Fourth Amendment rights are personal or can be “vicariously” asserted by third-parties on behalf of their customers would have to be addressed by both sides. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizure of property.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the last several years we’ve seen a major shift in the data center where organizations are moving to cloud, whether private or public. More and more, customers are leveraging software as a service (SaaS) applications and cloud services from providers such as AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure and others. This, has shifted enterprise data traffic patterns as fewer and fewer apps reside within the walls of corporate data centers.
This major shift in the app consumption model is having a huge impact on organizations and infrastructure. In this recent article “How Amazon Web Services is luring banks to the cloud”, we see that some companies already have completely moved to public cloud. An interesting fact is that while many organizations have stringent regulatory compliance requirements, they still have made the move to cloud. This tells us two things – the maturity of using public cloud services and the trust these organizations have in using public cloud is high. Again, it is all about speed and agility – without compromising performance, security and reliability.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday updated rules relating to the collection, retention and dissemination of information of U.S. persons, including putting a limit of five years on holding certain sensitive data and introducing restrictions for querying the data.The announcement by the spy agency comes a couple of days before a new administration under President-elect Donald Trump takes charge, and could address to an extent concerns expressed by civil rights groups about the collection and handling of information of U.S. persons in the course of overseas surveillance. Such information is collected by the CIA under Executive Order 12333.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Mac malware that’s been spying on biomedical research centers may have been circulating undetected for years, according to new research.Antivirus vendor Malwarebytes uncovered the malicious code, after an IT administrator spotted unusual network traffic coming from an infected Mac.The malware, which Apple calls Fruitfly, is designed to take screen captures, access the Mac’s webcam, and simulate mouse clicks and key presses, allowing for remote control by a hacker, Malwarebytes said in a blog post on Wednesday.The security firm said that neither it nor Apple have identified how the malware has been spreading. But whoever designed it relied on “ancient” coding functions, dating back before the Mac OS X operating system launch in 2001, said Malwarebytes researcher Thomas Reed in the blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hot topics at this year's RSA Conference in February will include cloud security, Internet of Things security and encryption -- and all of those issues unsurprisingly are represented among the 10 finalists announced for the event's annual Innovation Sandbox Contest for startups.I ran the company descriptions provided in the RSA Conference press release about the contest through a Wordcloud generator and produced the spectacular graphic above that put "data" protection at the heart of what these newcomers are addressing. The biggest shock for me was that machine learning didn't get mentioned in each description...but it did make the cut in three of the 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There have been several efforts on the part of handset makers to create a folding device, so the large chocolate bar design of the phone will fit more easily in the pocket. Well, Microsoft has one-upped them with a patent for a mobile device that can be unfolded not once, but twice—turning it into a tablet-style device.The company initially filed the patent application Oct. 16, 2014, and was awarded the patent (US 9,541,962 B2) by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on Jan. 10, 2017. The news was first spotted by MSPoweruser. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s good news for security pros worried that their organizations may be liable if their employees’ personal information gets hacked: a panel of judges in Pennsylvania says workers can’t collect damages from their employer if things like Social Security numbers, bank account information, birth dates, addresses and salaries are compromised in a data breach.Even though the stolen data was used to file phony tax returns in order to get the refunds, the workers at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) had no reasonable expectation that the data would be safe, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania ruled recently.The case, known as in Dittman v. UPMC, pertains solely to employee records, not customer records, and not patient records, which are protected by HIPAA.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s nearly that time again when SplashData will release its annual list of worst passwords, but this list of passwords comes from Keeper Security. The company analyzed over 10 million passwords available on the public web before publishing a list of 25 most common passwords of 2016.Keeper pointed a finger of blame at websites for not enforcing password best practices. Even if a site won’t help you determine if a password is decent, then people could use common sense. It’s disheartening to know that 17% of people are still trying to safeguard their accounts with “123456.” And “password” is of course still on the list as well as keyboard patterns such as “qwerty” and “123456789”.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding the bad guys right awayImage by ThinkstockWhile organizations always want to find threats as quickly as possible, that ideal is far from being met. On average, dwell times last months and give cyber criminals all the time they need to peruse a network and extract valuable information that can impact a company, its customers and its employees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here