Dash is a real robot that makes learning to code fun for kids. Responding to voice, navigating objects, dancing, and singing, Dash is the robot you always dreamed of having. Use the free iOS, Android and Kindle Fire apps to create new behaviors for Dash – doing more with robotics than ever possible. Dash presents your kids with hundreds of projects, challenges, and puzzles as well as endless possibilities for freeform play. Dash Robot averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 150 customers on Amazon (read reviews), where its typical list price of $150 has been reduced 17% to $125. See it on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Members of congress are demanding answers over claims that Russia attempted to influence the U.S. presidential election with several high-profile hacks. U.S. intelligence agencies are confident that the Kremlin was involved, but incoming president Donald Trump remains skeptical. As they prepare to investigate, here’s some questions lawmakers should be asking to help them understand and respond to these hacks. What evidence do we have proving Russia’s involvement?
Attribution in any hack can be incredibly difficult, as Trump noted in a tweet, but cybersecurity experts say they have technical evidence showing that Democratic groups and figures were at the very least hacked with spear phishing emails and hard-to-detect malware from two suspected Russian hacking teams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In what is likely the largest data breach ever, Yahoo is reporting that data associated with more than 1 billion user accounts was stolen in August 2013.The incident is separate from a breach Yahoo reported in September involving at least 500 million users that originally occurred in late 2014 and shook public trust in the company.Stolen user data from this new breach involves names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and hashed passwords using an aging algorithm known as MD5 that can be cracked.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President-elect Donald Trump kicked off a meeting with U.S. tech leaders on Wednesday by promising his administration was there to help them do business and make money."We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation," Trump said. "There’s nobody like you in the world, in the world, there’s nobody like anyone in this room. And anything we can do to help this go along, and we’re going to be there for you."Among the issues the tech CEOs might discuss with Trump is his proposed curbs to immigration. Silicon Valley relies on bringing in large numbers of immigrants every year or keeping them in the U.S. after college. Making immigration more difficult or restricting the number of H-1B high-skill visas available could cause tech companies problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This USB-C cable connects your iPhone, iPad, or iPod with Lightning connector to your computer's USB-C port for syncing and charging.(amazon.com)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's sending a strong message: You don't need high-end hardware to plug most VR headsets into PCs.The company has established an amazingly modest set of minimum hardware requirements for upcoming VR headsets to be used with PCs. Microsoft believes mixed reality is the future of computing and wants to bring VR as many PCs as possible.The requirements for Windows 10 PCs for tethered VR headsets do not apply to fully integrated headset computers like Microsoft's HoloLens. Companies like Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, and Lenovo plan to come out with headset accessories for PCs, and Microsoft has said prices for those VR headsets would start at US$299.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Evernote is changing its privacy policy to let employees read its customers' notes, and they can't opt out. Users have until Jan. 23 to move their notes out of the company's system and delete their accounts if they want to avoid the sanctioned snooping. Companies using Evernote Business can have their administrators opt out, but users won't have individual control over it.The change a push by the company to enhance its machine learning capabilities by letting a select number of employees view the private information of its users to help with the training of algorithms."While our computer systems do a pretty good job, sometimes a limited amount of human review is simply unavoidable in order to make sure everything is working exactly as it should," the company said in a support bulletin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In his 2011 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen examined why large organizations often fail to innovate and leave themselves open to disruption from faster, more nimble competitors. And this was before the current generation of technology companies unleashed their onslaught of disruptive technologies.It’s fair to say that in the six years since the book’s release, the stakes have grown exponentially greater. Yet for many enterprise organizations, the struggle to create a truly innovative culture continues. The vast majority of corporate executives fully expect new tech startups to disrupt their organizations, yet still have trouble overcoming the ‘innovator’s dilemma.’To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As 2016 draws to a close, we can reflect on a year where cybersecurity has played a major role. Even presidential campaigns haven’t been free from hacking scandals and data leaks. The average cost of a data breach for companies grew from $3.8 million last year to $4 million in 2016, according to the Ponemon Institute.Companies of all sizes have embraced the cloud and open source has become the standard for infrastructure software. Both pose their own blend of benefit and risk. A major datacenter attack or failure could be problematic for many companies, and we can certainly expect an increase in the number of cyber-attacks based on open source vulnerabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Game changers?Image by ThinkstockIn the networking industry, it seems that every year there’s a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. Turns out that 2016 was no different. Here are 10 that have the most game changing potential, since they have the potential to move the acquiring company into an entirely new market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While the Internet of Things has started to become useful, many are still freaked out about devices not working well together and becoming security liabilities. The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) will attempt to address both of those concerns via its new IoT Testing Services.
Test services will apply to devices for homes, industrial networks, smart cities and connected cars, according to UNH-IOL. What's more, testing will be offered for the IPv6 Forum's IPv6 Ready IoT Logo in the spring.
MORE: Beware the ticking Internet of Things security time bombTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hefty judgement against Ashley Madison, the dating site for adulterers, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to penalties the company must pay as a result of the theft and public posting of its customers' data when the company was hacked last year.Ruby Corp., the parent company of Ashley Madison agreed to pay $8.75 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission and another $8.75 million to 13 states that also filed complaints. It will wind up paying just $1.6 million because it is strapped for assets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM today made its serverless computing platform named OpenWhisk – which is also an open source project – generally available in the company’s BlueMix cloud.Serverless computing is one of the most discussed emerging technologies in the IaaS public cloud market, so IBM making its flagship serverless product generally available marks a milestone for the technology.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Serverless use case: How this company runs its app without provisioning any servers or virtual machines +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nearly everyone thinks his or her performance is above average. You don’t have to be a statistician to know that nearly half of them must be wrong.Managers are no different when it comes to this distorted self-perception. The problem is that managers’ misconceptions prevent them from learning and becoming better at their jobs. Worse than that, their deficiencies impose burdens on so many others: subordinates, peers, supervisors and outside stakeholders. If you’re a manager, it’s worth investing some energy to make sure that you have an accurate picture of your strengths and weaknesses.Don’t worry about the psychological processes that can lead to such misperceptions. Although the debates about that are interesting, what is important is to know that it is overwhelmingly likely that you have unreliable beliefs about the quality of your management. I’m not saying that you are a terrible manager and don’t know it. In fact, you might be better than you perceive yourself to be. Either way, having an unrealistic self-assessment is not a weakness; it’s just part of being human.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An odd thing happened this morning. My Windows 10 PC notified me I had another system update ready and waiting for a reboot—the second update in less than a week! Turns out, this latest update fixes a big mistake that may (or may not) have rolled out earlier this month.Several Windows 10 users recently reported difficulty connecting to the Internet, with the presumed culprit being the December 9 update KB3201845.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10
That may not be the case, however. Woody Leonhard, our colleague over at InfoWorld, says the connection issue pre-dates KB32018045 by several days. Microsoft has posted a banner warning across its entire support site that Windows 10 users with connection issues should first try and restart their PCs—a shut down and later cold boot won’t do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Docker is releasing Containerd (pronounced container-dee), a set of basic components designed to run containers, as part of an open source project.Containerd includes supervisor and executor components that work together to function as the core container runtime that underpins the company's Docker Engine software. It's designed to allow companies to build their own software for managing containers while using a consistent foundation.As the name implies, containers provide applications with a lightweight, constrained environment that makes them easy to migrate, scale up and scale down across different hardware. They've had increasing use over the past year, in part because they make it easier for developers to have a consistent environment for their software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
How AWS has disrupted companies and sectorsImage by ThinkstockWhen Amazon.com launched Amazon Web Services a decade ago no one could have imagined that the business, viewed largely as a sideshow geared to serve the ecommerce company’s e-tailing interests, would become a significant player in corporate computing. But as CIO.com noted last week, AWS’ public cloud software, now a $13 billion business, has become a serious contender in the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The company behind Ashley Madison, the adultery enabling website, has agreed to pay a US$1.6 million settlement related to a major data breach last year that exposed account details of 36 million users.Ashley Madison's operator, Toronto-based Ruby, is making the settlement for failing to protect the account information and for creating fake user profiles to lure in prospective customers, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Wednesday.In July 2015, a hacking group called Impact Team managed to steal the account details and then post them online a month later -- potentially damaging the reputation of the customers using the adultery website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Picture this: Your company's network is facing a DDoS attack, but you have no idea who is responsible or what their motivation might be. Without this knowledge, you can't tell if they want money in exchange for stopping the attack or if the attack is a diversion to occupy your security team while your network is being penetrated and commercial secrets are stolen.In the aftermath of a network breach it can also be incredibly useful to know some information about the likely attackers. That's because knowing who they were — or just where they were from — can help you carry out a more accurate damage assessment exercise. This knowledge can guide you where to look for signs of data compromise, and what other specifics (such as exploit kits or Trojans that may have been left behind) to search for.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my previous post, I previewed what we should expect to see from Cisco in 2017. While I think Cisco is in a strong position next year, I don’t expect Cisco’s competitors to sit around and let it take share. Below are the market segments where I think we’ll see the most activity and which vendors are likely to be the most disruptive.Collaboration
Hard-charging Microsoft has turned its unified communications (UC) focus to the cloud with its Skype For Business Voice available as part of the Office 365 suite. One can argue who has better voice or video, but Microsoft’s real strength is in how easy it is to purchase and start using voice, including PSTN calling. Microsoft also announced its Team product, which directly competes with Cisco’s Spark product, so the collaboration battle will be drawn on many fronts. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here