One Redditor has made a mistake that you can be assured he will not make again: He deleted an entire zone of his company’s Domain Name System in the Microsoft Azure cloud.“I meant to delete a single record, but it’s the same button in the same place as deleting a zone. As soon as I hit the button I knew what I had done, then all our websites start failing,” the Redditor confesses.That’s an oops. He goes on to describe how his unidentified company’s VOIP phones went offline and the backup domain controller began having issues resolving DNS.Meanwhile, in the 'when it rains it pours' line of thinking, an unrelated error occurred AT THE SAME TIME on the company’s Hyper-V server network interface cards (NICs).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For the first Patch Tuesday of 2017, Microsoft is easing us into it by releasing only four security bulletins, half are of which are rated as critical for remote code execution flaws. In reality, only three of those are for Windows systems!This is the lightest load I can recall Microsoft handing us. It almost feels like this surely can’t be right, but hey – you didn’t want to work hard today anyhow, did you?CriticalMS17-002 resolves a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word 2016 32-bit and 64-bit editions and Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016 are listed as the only affected software versions. The RCE bug is a result of Office software failing to properly handle objects in memory. If an attacker successfully exploited the flaw, and the user had admin rights, the attacker could take control of the box.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Artificial intelligence technology is becoming an increasingly large part of our daily lives. While those developments have led to cool new features, they've also presented a host of potential problems, like automation displacing human jobs, and algorithms providing biased results.Now, a team of philanthropists and tech luminaries have put together a fund that's aimed at bringing more humanity into the AI development process. It's called the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, and it will focus on advancing AI in the public interest.A fund such as this one is important as issues arise during AI development. The IEEE highlighted a host of potential issues with artificial intelligence systems in a recent report, and the fund seems aimed at funding solutions to several of those problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chat is an old tool that’s newly popular. From Slack and HipChat to Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft’s new Teams tool (and a myriad of others), these collaboration tools supplement rather than replace enterprise social networks like Yammer or Jive. Microsoft’s Office division director Richard Ellis likens it to the difference between Facebook and WhatsApp: “The chat-based workspace fills a gap where people can talk rapidly, share content and work as a team.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
I’ve owned or driven five BMWs in my lifetime. The sixth one drove me.BMW kindly gave me the opportunity to pilot one of its prototype self-driving cars last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. And the experience wasn’t one of dawdling around a parking lot, cleverly avoiding a few traffic cones.Driving 60 mph, I commanded a powerful 5 Series, modified, but generally a production-level sedan. I allowed it to drive me for 11 miles along a congested, rush-hour interstate through the center of glittering sin city.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A cybersabotage program that wiped data from 30,000 computers at Saudi Arabia's national oil company in 2012 has returned and is able to target server-hosted virtual desktops.The malware, known as Shamoon or Disttrack, is part of a family of destructive programs known as disk wipers. Similar tools were used in 2014 against Sony Pictures Entertainment in the U.S. and in 2013 against several banks and broadcasting organizations in South Korea.Shamoon was first observed during the 2012 cyberattack against Saudi Aramco. It spreads to other computers on a local network by using stolen credentials and activates its disk-wiping functionality on a preconfigured date.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enough of the iPhone 10th anniversary celebrations (yes, I'm looking in the mirror here): It's time to channel our collective Apple watching energies into iPhone 8 (not to mention possible iPhone 7s and 7s Plus editions).
As Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the company's press release about the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone, "The best is yet to come."Heavy metal rumors
The hot rumor this week is that Apple will re-embrace stainless steel, harkening back to its pre-aluminum body iPhone 4 and 4S models. Speculation is that the iPhone 8 will have a bezel-free, 5.8-inch OLED display.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sure, you perform surgery on computer systems every day and are often on call to handle emergency password procedures, but salary-wise my IT professional friends, you are no doctor.LinkedIn Tuesday published its list of the top 20 highest paying jobs (median base salary as reported to LinkedIn Salary) in the United States, and the medical/healthcare field dominates. Tops is Cardiologist, with a median base salary of $356K, followed by Radiologist ($355K), Anesthesiologist ($350K), Surgeon ($338K) and Medical Director ($230K). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A couple of years ago I wrote about an innovative company called EdgeConneX that was focused on improving the internet experience by extending the internet’s edge into new markets.While there are many content delivery networks and internet optimization companies focused on this task, EdgeConneX’s approach has been to push the actual edge of the internet into new markets. All major U.S. cities, such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, are internet edge locations. EdgeConneX has expanded the edge to next tier cities such as Miami, Seattle and San Diego. Its customers are the content providers, media companies and fiber providers that deliver services to consumers and businesses. The vendors that leverage EdgeConneX are able to offer high-quality and faster services at a lower cost compared with backhauling traffic to the next closest point. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fortinet is adding Cisco, HPE and Nokia to its stable of partners whose security gear can share information with Fortinet products to improve overall security.The company is announcing at its Accelerate 2017 customer conference this week that equipment made by these new partners will integrate into the Fortinet Security Fabric via an API to tighten security in core networks, remote devices and the cloud.The amount of sharing that goes on depends on the individual third-parties’ APIs.Fortigate Security Fabric is woven from Fortinet products that can communicate among each other to find and analyze threats and let admins see their input in a single window. That’s an upgrade from the initial fabric in which IT teams had to switch among the dashboards for the Fortinet products involved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last year, I flew to Calgary, Canada, to host an executive roundtable on behalf of Intel and two partner organizations. I got off the plane, pulled out my phone and opened my Uber app.It has become my standard travel routine. Except this time, there were no Uber cars to be had—bylaw changes in 2015 forced the transportation company to cease operations. The fees imposed were too much, the company said.One of the sponsoring vendor executives opened the meeting by asking, “What’s up with Calgary? Do you guys want to stay stuck in the past?”+ Also on Network World: How to be a CTO in the age of digital disruption (and live to tell about it) +
The Calgary city council has since approved new bylaws that "make the city's licensing fee structure more favourable for the company," CBC News reported. And Uber is operating again in the city.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Once you’ve realized how important it is to invest in a digital workplace and have secured the budget you need to move forward with your plan, it’s time to begin looking for a collaboration solution to support this new way of work.Ultimately, the goal is to bring your people, content and technology together in a single, unified content-experience platform that promotes effective team collaboration. To get there, you’ll need to move beyond conventional collaboration applications, which typically include only file sharing or chat, to a more comprehensive solution that includes visual collaboration. But with so many new visual collaboration platforms emerging, how can you decide which one best suits your needs?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Top Android phones from 2016Image by Google, HTC, MotorolaToday, it is nearly impossible for smartphone manufacturers to build a bad phone. Component makers and the supply chain that serve the manufacturers have amazing momentum. It is the same momentum that drove PCs to market share leadership in the 1990s. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A bill has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require that law enforcement agencies get a warrant before they poke around users’ emails and other communications in the cloud that are older than 180 days.The Email Privacy Act, reintroduced on Monday, aims to fix a loophole in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allowed the government to search without warrant email and other electronic communications older than 180 days, stored on servers of third-party service providers such as Google and Yahoo.“Thanks to the wording in a more than 30-year-old law, the papers in your desk are better protected than the emails in your inbox,” digital rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
10 years ago today, Steve Jobs delivered one of the most masterful product introductions in history when he unveiled the iPhone. Though the idea that Apple was working on a phone had been making its way through the rumor mill over the preceding few months, what the iPhone actually delivered to the table surpassed even the most optimistic of expectations.With a multitouch display and intuitive access to the entire web via mobile Safari, the iPhone instantly changed the way people used their smartphones. And that's not to say nothing of the App Store which went live in July of 2008 and quickly turned the smartphone industry on its head.Apple earlier today, naturally, celebrated 10 years of the iPhone with a special splash page on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Windows 10 beta testers who are used to the warm, familiar glow of Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death will start learning it’s not easy being green.Microsoft is tweaking its venerable error message that lets people know that something went wrong, and their computers need to be restarted. While everyday consumers will still see the same old BSOD that we love to hate, people who are using beta builds released as part of the Windows 10 Insider Program will now see a Green Screen of Death.The change is designed to help distinguish between crashes in the generally available branch of Windows 10 and the beta branch. Microsoft lets people know that they use Insider builds at their own risk, and the betas can contain bugs that crash programs or entire devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Back in 2014, Intel declared it wanted laptops to be free of wires, and a centerpiece of that plan was wireless charging. But the technology has been slow to mature, and it may be years before it takes off.At CES last week, Dell showed a wireless charging PC called the Latitude 7285, a 2-in-1 with a detachable screen attached to a keyboard base. It's the first wireless charging laptop based on the AirFuel Alliance's emerging wireless PC charging standard.But Dell doesn't have widespread plans to put wireless charging in a host of new devices. That's partly because the technology, with slow charging speeds, is limited to low-power devices and isn't mature enough to replace wired charging. The wireless charging Latitude 7285 has a low-power Intel Kaby Lake chip that draws just 4.5 watts of power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The billionaire head of China's biggest e-commerce retailer met with President-elect Donald Trump on Monday to promote his site by dangling the possibility of a million new U.S. jobs.Jack Ma met Trump in New York and the two talked U.S.-China trade and specifically small business. Ma promoted Alibaba as a platform through which U.S. small businesses could sell products to consumers in China and Southeast Asia.By doing that, up to a million new jobs could be created at a million small businesses, Alibaba said. Alibaba didn't commit to hiring new staff in the U.S. itself."We mainly talked about small business, and young people and selling American agricultural products to China," said Ma.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is giving users some more control over Windows 10 updates, with a new beta build of its operating system released Monday.The build allows folks with the Windows 10 Professional, Education, and Enterprise versions to defer new updates for up to 35 days. In addition, the company will allow those users to decide whether or not they want to include driver updates when they want to update Windows.It’s a move that helps respond to one of the key criticisms of Windows 10: that Microsoft’s regime of forced, cumulative updates has caused problems for users with some configurations. This way, users can steer clear of updates they don’t want to install yet and dodge problematic driver updates.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Citrix and Microsoft are strengthening a long-standing partnership by making it easier for customers to use Citrix’s application and desktop virtualization products, as well as control a fleet of mobile devices, in the Microsoft Azure cloud.Citrix has kicked off its annual partner Summit in Anaheim this week with news of the expanded pact with Microsoft. The moves build on years worth of integration between the two companies, but analysts say there’s a new-found heft behind the partnership since Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov took over the company last year after having previously served as a Microsoft executive.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Citrix is building your workspace of the future | Introducing the New Citrix +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here