Hardware and AI lead the wayImage by Martyn WilliamsWith last year’s corporate restructuring out of the way, 2016 was a year of rebuilding for Google and its parent company Alphabet.This year, Google got much more serious about hardware, while placing big bets on artificial intelligence as the heart of its software. Products that fit this mission got revamped, while those that didn’t got axed or ignored. Read on for a review of what went right and wrong at Google in 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hortonworks has built its business on big data and Hadoop, but the Hortonworks Data Platform provides analytics and features support for a range of technologies beyond Hadoop, including MapReduce, Pig, Hive, and Spark. Hortonworks DataFlow, meanwhile, offers streaming analytics and uses technologies like Apache Nifi and Kafka.InfoWorld Executive Editor Doug Dineley and Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Hortonworks CTO Scott Gnau about how the company sees the data business shaking out, the Spark vs. Hadoop face-off, and Hortonworks' release strategy and efforts to build out the DataFlow platform for data in motion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on goods manufactured in Mexico and offshore may accelerate the movement to cloud computing, analysts said.IT managers may seek to protect their companies from higher hardware or capital expenditure costs by shifting more of their IT spending to services. This shift is well underway, and the new administration may push it along, even before Trump takes office next month.At this point, industry analysts are uncertain as to what Trump has planned. His statements regarding tariffs are short, vague and sometimes delivered by tweets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Working with cryptographic libraries is hard, and a single implementation mistake can result in serious security problems. To help developers check their code for implementation errors and find weaknesses in cryptographic software libraries, Google has released a test suite as part of Project Wycheproof."In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, and mistakes in open source cryptographic software libraries repeat too often and remain undiscovered for too long," Google security engineers Daniel Bleichenbacher and Thai Duong, wrote in a post announcing the project on the Google Security blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Infosec budgets. They are small, they largely come from IT, and CISOs/CSOs often complain they are not nearly big enough.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
No more than a week after the news that Microsoft had successfully gotten x86 Windows 10 to run on an ARM-based processor through emulation, a report out of Asia indicates OEMs are already interested in the offering and looking to make products. Microsoft made the announcement at the WinHEC show in China last week. It showed a native x86 version of Windows 10 running on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors with full x86 compatibility. The emulation was done on a new Snapdragon, the 835, that's not on the market and supports only 32-bit apps—but that's not a big deal, since most apps are 32-bit anyway. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A sorry, sorry lotMicrosoft couldn’t get out of its culturally-clueless way in 2016. Samsung apologized over and over for its flaming Note7 fiasco. HP, T-Mobile, Facebook and pretty much every other big name in tech was forced to issue a public apology or more during the year, as public relations pros earned their money (or not) to salvage their employer or client’s reputation – for the time being. You won’t be sorry for taking a spin through this collection of corporate apologies from the tech world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stream just about anything – blockbusters, broadcast TV, big entertainment brands, and niche channels. Movies, TV shows, live sports, news and music. Roku has the only streaming players that work with all these channels: Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, VUDU, Sling TV, and PBS KIDS. Easy access to 350,000+ movies and TV episodes across 3,500+ paid or free channels. Use your smartphone or tablet and the Roku mobile app to enjoy private listening anytime via your headphones. And use your mobile device as a fully functional remote control. The highly rated Streaming Stick from Roku is currently discounted 22% from its typical price of $49.99, so you can buy it now for just $39. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If the cloud is real, software important, and system reliability paramount, then non-stop computing, computing across time zones, and invisibly short repair times ought to be mandatory, wouldn’t you think? Of many requirements lain in litigation, regulatory compliance, and other “best practices,” there is one that doesn’t seem to make the checklists. Let me lay it out for you: Can you get support 24/7/365.25?You get bonus points for knowing leap seconds are coming. Why? Because among other things, Kerberos time synchronization mandates pretty accurate timing. We’re about to insert a leap second into your life on western New Year’s Day. You may have zones that celebrate other years, but to be in sync with the time standards in the United States, there will be an extra second. The earth is slowing down. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After the turmoil and chaos of the Ballmer years, the Nadella Era of Microsoft is almost boring. The company is executing well with a few misfires—nobody's perfect or flawless—controversy is minimal and employees seem content for the first time in ages. CEO Satya Nadella enjoys a 95 percent approval rating, according to Glassdoor. That doesn't mean 2016 was an uneventful year, just quieter than in the past with no major blowups. But let's look back at the year that was in Microsoft highs and lows. High: Microsoft introduced its real-time translation technology for Skype, creating the sort-of equivalent to the Star Trek universal translator where voice conversations would be translated in real time. We learned why the Skype translator came out. Nadella saw it still running as a lab project and lit a fire under the researchers to productize it. He wanted to see more of an effort to make commercial projects out of research experiments, and the translator was one of them. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
WUMT is short for Windows Update MiniTool, a free software tool that handles Windows updates without requiring use of the built-in Update & Security facility in Windows 10. WUMT, which originally appeared on the Wilders Security Forums in October 2015, comes from an anonymous Russian translator who goes by "Mr. X." He maintains the tool on a Spanish language page on blogspot, where he regularly updates the program, currently numbered 30.09.2016 (which corresponds to its release date at the end of September 2016). You can also download the tool from MajorGeeks.com.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
As Samsung looks to publicly move past the Note7 debacle with a series of upcoming carrier updates designed to brick any remaining devices, the company is also moving forward with its internal investigation of the issue. According to a report from South Korea-based The Investor, Samsung has wrapped up its probe of the phablet’s exploding batteries.Very few details are offered in the report, but the publication says Samsung’s findings have been sent to the appropriate agencies, Korea Testing Laboratory and U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration-approved UL. Thus far, Samsung has been mostly mum on the cause of Note7 fires around the world, but independent third-party investigations have pointed to the devices’ extreme thinness as a likely culprit. A representative for Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
How valuable is personal healthcare data?Apparently it depends. Based on at least some price comparisons on the Dark Web – the underground online marketplace for cyber criminals – electronic health records (EHR) are not even close to premium goods.McAfee, now a division of Intel Security, reported recently that the price for an individual medical record ranges from a fraction of a cent to $2.50, while a so-called “fullz” record – name, Social Security number plus financial account information from a credit or debit card can fetch $14 to $25.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cybercriminals are adding file-encrypting features to traditional mobile banking trojans, creating hybrid threats that can steal sensitive information and lock user files at the same time.One such trojan is called Faketoken and its primary functionality is to generate fake login screens for more than 2,000 financial applications in order to steal login credentials. The malicious app also displays phishing pages to steal credit card information, and it can read and send text messages.Faketoken's creators have added the ability to encrypt user files stored on the phone's SD card sometime in July and have since released thousands of builds with this functionality, according to researchers from Kaspersky Lab.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cameras used to be more about the lenses and the aperture, but today’s security and sportscams are building in technology to make them “conscious,” using edge computing and on-chip processing to get past challenges around massive data generation and poor image quality and bringing exciting new capabilities, such as facial and object recognition, in the camera itself.Take the example of Silk Labs, a company using intelligent real-time video to alert people when a package has been delivered at the home door or alert them about a stranger at the door. Or consider Knit, a camera that can see how well your baby is sleeping, inform parents about her sleep trends and monitor breathing for peace of mind during the night—all without any devices attached to the child. And more will come. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel is now shipping a new single-board computer, the Joule 550x, that will challenge the dominance of Raspberry Pi.The board was announced in August but didn't ship right away. The Joule 550x is a full-fledged computer on a small circuit board, and it packs more horsepower and graphics capabilities than the Raspberry Pi 3.But at prices of up to US$349, the Joule 550x costs about 10 times more than Raspberry Pi 3. The board is now available from online retailer Mouser. It is available for $291 on Newegg.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Average internet users are starting to realize they should be protecting their personal information better. But do they understand why?Protecting private data is more important than many people realize, and also quite simple. I’d like to unpack the top five most common misconceptions of cybersecurity to demonstrate why you should learn how to protect yourself and your data. 1. I have nothing to hide. Why do I need my data to be encrypted?No skeletons in your closet? No searches you’d prefer didn’t surface? That’s fine, but what about your credit card information, passwords and Social Security number? Just because you don’t have dirty laundry to air doesn’t mean your personal data isn’t worth protecting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The election is well over, but the storm is still brewing with no end in sight when it comes to trying to figure out what to do about Russian hacks aimed at influencing the election.On Sunday Dec. 11, US Senators John McCain, Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham and Jack Reed urged Majority Leader Mitch McConnell not to allow an investigation into Russian interference of the election to become a partisan issue. It’s an issue which “should alarm every American.”That same day, President-elect Donald Trump blew off the idea that the intelligence community had a clue as to whom was behind the hacks. His transition team later added, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Computers fully comprehending things they see in front of them will be the technical advance that takes us to the next level in our digitized world, experts say.“The next leap in computing will be in how we interpret images,” said Jem Davies, an ARM executive at an embedded technology conference recently. “That will be revolutionary,” he said, according to IEEE Spectrum, writing about the processor executive’s talk in the article “Bringing Eyes to the Internet of Things.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here