The Best Songs of the Year lists are flooding the Internet these days, with music watchers from NME to Rolling Stone to Fuse sharing their picks. But what about the best technology-themed songs of 2016?I know a few possible candidates, including Tacocat's take on anonymous trolls in "The Internet" (see video below), but could use your help if you have candidates please email me here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this year Brocade announced its Workflow Composer (http://www.networkworld.com/article/3075335/network-management/brocade-workflow-composer-enables-it-to-move-with-digital-speed.html) platform, powered by StackStorm to automate data center processes and bring DevOps like automation and continuous innovation to the network. This week Brocade expanded its portfolio with a number of new automation suites for Workflow Composer and a line of new switches with increased flexibility and programmability capabilities. The combination of Workflow Composer and the new hardware enables Brocade customers to increase the level of network agility at a workflow level or down at the individual switch. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The days when hotel Wi-Fi just connected travelers to the Internet are going away. Now it can be part of a system that helps give guests more personalized service – if they don’t mind the hotel tracking their location on the property.The new MR30H access point from Cisco’s Meraki division will work with Bluetooth beacons - small wireless location devices that stores and other businesses are starting to use so they can tell where people are.The benefits, as long as guests are willing to opt in, could include things like having an attendant walk up and offer a drink or a towel as you go out to the pool, thanks to your frequent-guest status, said Pablo Estrada, Meraki’s director of marketing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
CloudVelox offers migration and disaster recovery (DR) tools for cloud computing environments. That’s a simple enough task, right? Well, kind of.The company's software automates the migration of applications to public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. But its aim to reduce the time, complexity, and hassle around this process is hampered somewhat by the fact that in the trio of functions that applications rely upon—storage, compute and networking—it is the last, networking, that dictates the availability or otherwise of an application. If the networks behind an application fail, the application essentially fails to exist.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google made a bunch of new hardware announcements earlier this year, which included new smartphones (the Pixel) and a virtual assistant (Google Home), but they also announced Google Wifi (love how they drop the hyphen and lowercase the F, causing whatever copy editors are left on the planet to wring their hands in anger), a wireless mesh platform to go up against the likes of other startups like eero, Almond, Luma, Amplifi, to name a few. Google Wifi is the update to its OnHub Wi-Fi platform - Google says that it's now on its third generation of products (the first one didn't make it to market, and the second one was OnHub). Google sent me a three-pack of the new system, which goes on sale to the general public today ($485 via Amazon, but also available from Best Buy, Walmart or directly from Google).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google Wifi jumps into the wireless mesh spaceImage by GoogleGoogle's new Google Wifi system combines wireless access nodes called "points" with a mobile app that lets you manage your mesh system. A mesh is created when you add two or more points to the existing system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lots of IT techs have access to network credentials to access company files and emails, but it wouldn’t cross the minds of most to abuse that knowledge for a “get-rich-scheme” in the flavor of insider trading. Yet that doesn’t apply to everyone, since a 28-year-old admitted to exploiting his position in order to gain insider knowledge and illegally trade and profit from those secrets.Jonathan Ly, a former IT tech for Expedia, pleaded guilty to securities fraud – something FBI Special Agent in Charge Jay S. Tabb, Jr. called, “Particularly egregious because Mr. Ly abused his special access privileges as an IT administrator. On top of violating the trust of the public and his company, he violated the privacy of fellow employees by surreptitiously accessing their files.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Watson has gone through school and ready for first internship. IBM today said its Watson cognitive computing system continues its path to become part of a full-fledged cybersecurity service by announcing 40 customers have begun beta testing the technology as an enterprise protection tool.+More on Network World: IBM Watson/ XPrize open $5 million AI competition for world-changing applications+Watson has recruited enterprises from auto, banking and insurance realms -- including Sun Life Financial, University of Rochester Medical Center, SCANA Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, California Polytechnic State University, University of New Brunswick, Avnet and Smarttech – to help research and develop new security applications that will use the systems natural language and machine learning techniques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Whether the disaster is a flood, a power outage or human error, IT departments have the critical role of getting business systems working again. And that requires reliable disaster-recovery software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
5G and its multi-gigabit cellular speeds probably won’t hit the market until 2020, but one corporate customer of AT&T is about to taste what it may be like.AT&T is launching its first customer trial of 5G technologies – the first 5G trial for any business user in the U.S., the carrier believes. But this is no average customer that happened to draw a golden ticket. The trial will take place at an Intel facility in Austin, Texas. It will last about a month, use just one cell site, and cover an area with a radius of approximately 300 meters, AT&T said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Army ventured into unfamiliar territory last week, the first day of its “Hack the Army” bug bounty program that challenges dozens of invited hackers to infiltrate its computer networks and find vulnerabilities in select, public-facing Army websites."We're not agile enough to keep up with a number of things that are happening in the tech world and in other places outside the Department of Defense," explained Army Secretary Eric Fanning in announcing the plan in mid-November. "We're looking for new ways of doing business," which includes a break from the past when government avoided working with the hacker community.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Internet-connected toys subject children to hidden marketing messages and allow strangers to converse with them from a distance, consumer rights groups say.The groups highlighted breaches of security and basic consumer rights in two toys in particular, the i-Que robot and the My Friend Cayla doll.The toys connect via Bluetooth to smartphone apps that record children speaking and transmit the recordings to a voice recognition service provider in the U.S., Nuance Communications, allowing the toys to appear to converse with the children.But, the consumer groups say, there is no authentication or pairing of the Bluetooth connections, allowing strangers within radio range of the toys to detect them and connect with them to carry on a conversation with the children directly. Furthermore, they say, voice recordings that could contain personal information are transmitted to Nuance without explicit consent, and the toys inject messages into their conversations repeatedly endorsing Disney products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Working togetherImage by Rebecca SiegelCollaboration tools have become widely used across organizations today, as people come to rely on these handy tools to work more efficiently. They reduce reliance on email, increase conversation between teams and provide an easy way to share information with colleagues. However, with many workplace applications today, there are so many gaps where security settings can fail, and corporate IT is beginning to take notice. Mike McCamon, president at SpiderOak, recommends staying away from these common security and privacy mistakes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Now that Apple’s introduced the first major update to its MacBook Pro lineup in years, it’s time to square off the best of the best in Mac and PC laptops to see who currently prevails in this age-old rivalry.
It’s benchmarks at dawn between the new MacBooks, the new Surface Book i7, and a posse of other Windows laptops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When you warehouse and ship billions of pounds of food in the U.S.—food that is sold in Walmart, Costco and your local grocery store—food safety is a priority. Product must be protected and in the most energy-efficient way possible. That’s the challenge Lineage Logistics faces daily. A food processing, warehousing and distribution company, Lineage Logistics controls 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. third-party cold food chain, said Elliot Wolf, director of analytics at the San Francisco-based company. “We move an average of 20 billion to 30 billion pounds of food through our warehouses each year,” he said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Have you been thinking of re-assessing which word processor your business should standardize on? The obvious choices are the two best known: Microsoft Word and Google Docs. But which is better?Online photos and researchTracking changes in a documentTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The SD-WAN your company is building today will likely be the last you ever use. The race to move applications and services to the cloud, and the availability of high performance broadband is fueling the greatest networking revolution in a generation.Enterprises have long struggled with connecting users to applications, and until recently there were limited options to address these needs. Most businesses turned to carriers and purchased Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) private links for WAN connectivity. While MPLS has been a reliable means to connect, it suffers from high costs, slow speeds and an antiquated design not built for today’s traffic. In layman’s terms it’s rapidly becoming obsolete.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. consumers could one day see cybersecurity ratings on technology products, much like today's EnergyStar ratings, if the findings of a government-sponsored cybersecurity commission are heeded. Although like much in Washington right now, a lot depends on incoming U.S. President Donald Trump and his views on cybersecurity are far from clear.The report, published on Friday by the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, also suggests usernames and passwords are replaced with something more secure and wants 150,000 cybersecurity experts trained over the next four years to help the U.S. defend against hacking threats. The commission has the support of President Obama and began its work in February this year, with executives at Microsoft, IBM, Uber and former U.S. government officials. However, in releasing its findings, Obama acknowledged it’ll be up to the next president and U.S. Congress to more fully implement what the commission has recommended. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This lightweight and super portable keyboard from iClever features a compact design with full standard-size keys, but folds down into ⅓ of the size. This model has a convenient backlight feature with red, blue, or green selectable at two brightness levels, so you can type in every environment from a dimly-lit classroom to a dark airplane cabin. Its Broadcom Bluetooth module has a generous operating range of 30 feet, and connects quickly with your devices when you simply unfold the keyboard. The iClever backlit folding keyboard averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews) where its typical list price of $59.99 has been reduced 23% to $45.99. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today, on the opening day of the marquee AI conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona, Google announced in a blog post the release of its DeepMind Lab project available to the AI community under open source licensing terms.Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are the next two computing platforms. DeepMind Lab is a 3D AI platform for building virtual games that bring these two platforms together in multiple dimensions. DeepMind Lab uses a special kind of AI, called machine learning (ML). And within the field of ML, it uses an advanced form of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here