Diversity (or lack of it) is still a major challenge for tech companies. Poised to revolutionize the world of work in general, some organizations are leveraging technology to root out bias, better identify and screen candidates and help close the diversity gap.That starts with understanding the nature of bias, and acknowledging that unconscious bias is a major problem, says Kevin Mulcahy, an analyst with Future Workplace and co-author of The Future Workplace Experience: 10 Rules for Managing Disruption in Recruiting and Engaging Employees. AI and machine learning can be an objective observer to screen for bias patterns, Mulcahy says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is keenly worried that President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will step up surveillance activities and pass laws to curtail electronic rights.As a result, the EFF is advising the tech sector to use end-to-end encryption for every transaction by default, and to scrub logs. "You cannot be made to surrender data you do not have," the EFF said.[To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page.]"We need to start securing our systems now," said Rainey Reitman, director of the EFF's activism team, in an interview. "If we wait until he [Trump] starts putting overbroad government demands on tech companies, they won't have the time to clean up their logs and encrypt data."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After years of teases, tantalizing promises, and Kickstarter campaigns, virtual reality finally became actual reality in 2016, with VR’s mere existence thrusting the entire PC industry into glorious, wonderful turmoil. Despite being around for just a handful of months, virtual reality has already inspired totally new genres of computers, wormed its way deep into Windows, and sent the price of graphics cards plummeting.Not too shabby for VR’s first real year on the streets, though the implementations could still use some fine-tuning. Let’s look back at how this wild new frontier blossomed in 2016.The birth of consumer virtual reality
From the very start of 2016 it was clear that the dawn of proper PC-powered VR had arrived. You could see evidence of this fact all over CES 2016 in January, where EVGA introduced a specialized graphics card designed to fit VR headset ergonomics; Nvidia rolled out a VR certification program; and seemingly every booth boasted some sort of virtual-reality hook, from VR treadmills to VR porn and VR Everest climbs (the latter two being mind-blowing in their own ways).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is now more than a year into reworking its Outlook clients and server software to truly support its mission to bring its Office communications tools everywhere: the Mail, Calendar, People (contacts), and Notes components in Outlook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
There are more free information security tools out there than you can highlight with a fist full of whiteboard pointers. While many are trial ware-based enticements designed to lure decision makers to purchase the pricey premium counterparts of these freebies, many are full-blown utilities. A few important categories include threat intelligence tools, tools to build security in during the development stage, penetration testers, and forensics tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Whether quantum computing is 10 years away -- or is already here -- it promises to make current encryption methods obsolete, so enterprises need to start laying the groundwork for new encryption methods.A quantum computer uses qubits instead of bits. A bit can be a zero or a one, but a qubit can be both simultaneously, which is weird and hard to program but once folks get it working, it has the potential to be significantly more powerful than any of today's computers.And it will make many of today's public key algorithms obsolete, said Kevin Curran, IEEE senior member and a professor at the University of Ulster, where he heads up the Ambient Intelligence Research Group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Virtual private networks (VPNs) encrypt internet connections between two points, to secure them from casual snoopers and hackers. These VPN services are particularly useful when accessing the internet from an untrusted location, such as a hotel, café or coworking space.A plethora of modern VPN services, with dedicated connectivity apps, have put an end to the maddening manual configuration VPNs once required. No two VPN offerings are alike, however, and it can be a challenge to find the right VPN. Here's a look at some of the top VPNs for privacy and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The financial services industry lives with a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it is at the heart of everything from economic health and growth to the daily reality of how consumers pay for housing, transportation or even a coffee on the go to start their day.Because our world is powered by transactions, both consumers and businesses alike look to the financial services industry to constantly innovate. That’s the good part of the mixed blessing: the opportunity to improve and reinvent. + Also on Network World: Financial services firm adopts agile for digital development +
On the other hand, there is a constant challenge around juggling changes. In an era when financial institutions are more highly regulated than ever before, risk and compliance mandates add an entirely new level of complexity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An international patent dispute has broken out between Apple and Nokia over the Finnish mobile network vendor's licensing terms for the widely used H.264 video codec and other technologies.Nokia on Wednesday filed lawsuits against Apple in Germany and in the U.S., alleging that the smartphone giant has infringed 32 of its patents.Nokia's five lawsuits follow an Apple lawsuit filed in California Tuesday. The U.S. company accused Nokia of working with patent assertion firms Acacia Research and Conversant Intellectual Property Management to "extract and extort exorbitant revenues unfairly and anticompetitively" from Apple and other smartphone makers. Nokia was not named as one of eight defendants in the Apple lawsuit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wondering what to have for Christmas dinner? AllRecipes.com will be a popular site to check this holiday season … and this year it’s using Microsoft Azure’s cloud.AllRecipes, founded in 1997 and owned by Meredith Corp., has undertaken a two-year migration to Azure, the IaaS public cloud. AllRecipes services 1.5 billion visitors each year who view an average of 95 recipes per second, 66% of which are done on mobile devices.The company’s load is cyclical: On a Sunday afternoon there is 60% more traffic on the website compared to a Monday morning. Just like a retailer, the holiday season is AllRecipe’s crunch time. Eight weeks in November and December including five days in particular – Christmas, Thanksgiving, the day before each and the Super Bowl – create the largest surge in traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“The Wi-Fi doesn’t work.” After speaking to hundreds of customers of all sizes, this is consistently one of the top help desk complaints that I hear. Not surprisingly, this creates a common perception about wireless that is unflattering to say the least.Some of the time, this is a fair complaint. Wireless is a pervasive technology, and it is difficult to deliver a consistent and reliable experience across the exploding stream of different devices and device types.+ Also on Network World: Wi-Fi troubleshooting remains a challenge for most organizations +
Other times, however, the Wi-Fi network is just getting a bad rap. It is guilty by association—i.e an easy target for people to blame when other issues might be at play. In fact, all of the following issues could impact network connectivity, casting a pall over the wireless experience:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has filed lawsuits against Apple in Germany in the U.S., alleging that the smartphone giant has infringed 32 of its patents, including the widely used H.264 video codec.The patent infringement lawsuits, filed with the Regional Courts in Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich in Germany and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, cover patents related to displays, user interfaces, software, antennas, chipsets, and video coding, Nokia said Wednesday. Nokia is planning to file more lawsuits in other jurisdictions, the company said in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Recent IT labor market analysis from CEB reveals that "IT project manager" is the most difficult-to-fill IT role globally. This comes as no surprise to IT and project management leaders who have consistently struggled to find the right talent to oversee their most critical projects and programs.
As organizations strive to digitize, the challenge of finding skilled IT project managers will only increase. The type of work that supports the typical organization’s digitization ambitions—rapid, often iterative, and typically involving new technologies or processes—is the type of work that the average, process-focused project manager isn’t well equipped to handle.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This cordless electric wine opener from Oster removes the cork in seconds with one-button operation, and opens up to 30 bottles before needing to be recharged. It features a foil cutter for easily removing seals and a comfortable soft-grip handle. Currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 4,300 people (read reviews). It's discounted 10% on Amazon, so you can get it right now for just $17.99. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s no doubting Facebook’s commitment to open-source projects. The company has a portfolio of over 400 open-source projects with over a half million followers. A look at the top five projects gives a bird’s eye view of Facebook’s obsession with unifying and improving the effectiveness of its large internal developer community, automating the process of building software by continually deploying it, and operating at a scale matched by just a few other companies, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.The commit statistics below are a measure of the development activity of Facebook’s top five open-source projects that impact different parts of software development and execution. A commit is a revision or additional file usually containing software code that is saved to a GitHub repository. The commit is saved with a unique generated ID or hash and is time-stamped so that code contributions can be managed from creation through final release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Social media had a big 2016. The medium and all of the leading social companies reached new heights of influence … but not without consequence. These are the stories that shaped the conversations and intrigue around social media during the past year.Social media and the 2016 presidential election
The American public is still grappling with all the ways social media shaped the 2016 presidential campaign. However, CIO.com uncovered how social media brings out the darker side of digital introverts and often amplifies slanted views or political biases. During the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election it became quite clear that social could not be more powerful or dangerous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adversity makes strange bedfellows, and in the case of VMware — a company that has made its fortune selling server virtualization software — that bedfellow is Amazon Web Services (AWS), the public cloud leviathan.Let's rewind to the middle of October, when Mark Lohmeyer, a VMware cloud business unit vice president, announced that the company was forming a strategic partnership with AWS so that VMware's server virtualization and other software could be run in the AWS public cloud. The idea is that VMware customers using the company's software to run a private cloud in their own data centers will be able to expand into a similar VMware infrastructure run in AWS's public cloud, thereby forming a VMware-based hybrid cloud. The VMware software (called vCenter) used by company administrators to manage the private cloud will reach into the AWS cloud to manage the VMware software running there as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Nmap Project just released the Holiday Edition of its open source cross-platform security scanner and network mapper, with several important improvements and bug fixes.New features in Nmap 7.40 include Npcap 0.78r5, for adding driver signing updates to work with Windows 10 Anniversary Update; faster brute-force authentication cracking; and new scripts for Nmap Script Engine, the project’s maintainer Fyodor wrote on the Nmap mailing list.[ Give yourself a technology career advantage with InfoWorld's Deep Dive technology reports and Computerworld's career trends reports. GET A 15% DISCOUNT through Jan.15, 2017: Use code 8TIISZ4Z. ]
The de facto standard network mapping and port scanning tool, Nmap (Network Mapper) Security Scanner is widely used by IT and security administrators for network mapping, port-scanning, and network vulnerability testing. Administrators can run Nmap against the network to find open ports, determine what hosts are available on the network, identify what services those hosts are offering, and detect any network information leaked, such as the type of packet filters and firewalls in use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Anyone who has ever done any news video knows that much of what originally gets recorded winds up on the cutting room floor, or these days, in the digital dustbin. That's usually for the best and that was the case recently when myself and other IDG editors were asked to share our 2017 tech predictions, as seen in the embedded video here.
But since I went to the effort of coming up with another prediction, beyond expecting 5G hype to crank up in 2017, and looked back to see how my 2016 predictions fared, I figured I'd lay that all out here.
My other prediction, which was essentially thrust upon me every time I attended a conference in the second half of 2016, or more recently, peered into my email inbox, is that enterprise IT staffs are going to be inundated with requests by higher ups and end users to support conversational interfaces and chatbots.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here