Tighter security will soon be mandatory for IoT devices that use the popular Z-Wave wireless protocol.Starting next April, the Z-Wave Alliance will require all products to include its S2 (Security 2) framework before they can be certified as Z-Wave compliant. S2 is designed to prevent hackers from breaking into IoT devices that are on Z-Wave networks.Home IoT has recently proved to be a dangerous vector for internet-based attacks, such as the one that corralled thousands of IP cameras and other devices into the so-called Mirai botnet that disrupted internet service last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To sell its cloud services, ERP vendor SAP is crowdsourcing its sales team.SAP began offering its 15,000 software partners a share of revenue from cloud services they helped sell back in August, under a program called Cloud Choice Profit. It was a way to reward them for helping businesses migrate from traditional on-premise systems, where partners could capture a larger share of the revenue.At a sales conference in New York on Thursday, it extended the program to offer any businesses, partner or not, referral fees if leads they provide result in a sale of cloud services, an option SAP calls Cloud Choice Referral.The program covers sales of SAP's ERP Cloud and HCM Cloud, among other services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As we move into 2017, cybersecurity concerns continue to escalate. This past few months, we’ve seen some scary incidents, such as the Oct. 21 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the DNS services at Dyn that used IoT devices like home routers and cameras as a botnet. Oh, and the last few months of the U.S. presidential election featured data breaches of the DNC and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s email and the subsequent posting of this information on WikiLeaks.It's pretty alarming, and it doesn’t appear things will get better anytime soon. This begs the question: What type of cybersecurity response can we expect from President Donald Trump’s administration? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Third-quarter smartphone sales showed strength by Chinese vendors but declines of 6% for Apple iPhones and 14% for Samsung smartphones over last year.Samsung’s decline is unsurprising, given the furor over the overheated batteries in its Galaxy Note7s that surfaced in late August, leading to a global recall of millions of the devices.“The decision to withdraw the Galaxy Note7 was correct, but the damage to Samsung’s brand will make it harder for the company to increase smartphone sales in the short term,” said Anshul Gupta, research director for Gartner, which released the smartphone third-quarter sales numbers on Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A U.S. Federal Communications Commission plan to cap, and in some cases cut, prices charged for widely used business data lines is probably dead after Republicans in Congress pressured the agency to drop a scheduled vote.For more than a decade, some U.S. businesses and advocacy groups have been pushing the FCC to regulate prices for middle-mile business broadband connections largely owned by AT&T and Verizon. This so-called duopoly has forced customers to pay billions of dollars in inflated prices, critics say.Supporters of price caps were oh-so-close, with the FCC scheduled to vote on a plan from Chairman Tom Wheeler on Thursday, but the agency abruptly canceled the vote Wednesday afternoon after pressure from congressional Republicans. The proposal remains under consideration by the FCC but appears to be dead, observers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A group of laid-off IT workers at the University of California, San Francisco may resort to filing a lawsuit against the school, accusing it of discrimination by outsourcing their jobs to an all Indian staff.
It's a legal tactic that U.S. IT workers are increasingly considering to try and block employers from allegedly replacing their jobs with foreign workers.
In the case of UCSF, the school is dismissing 49 permanent employees from its IT department and contracting the work to outside firms. But in doing so, the school is also getting rid of a diverse staff comprised of Americans from various ethnicities, and replacing them with Indian workers from one of the contractors, the laid-off workers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Back for 11th helpings?Image by Mark Gibbs / psdblast.comWelcome, once again, to the Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards. It’s been a few years since our last effort to point the digit of disdain at those individuals, companies or entities that don't, won't or can't come to grips with reality, maturity, ethical behavior and/or social responsibility because of their blindness, self-imposed ignorance, thinly veiled political agenda, rapaciousness and greed, or their blatant desire to return us to the Dark Ages. Or all of those sins combined. But that lapse aside, with loins girded anew with cheap girders, we undertake again the traditional annual roasting of those who deserve a damn good basting. Without further ado, here in reverse order, are the top 10 Golden Turkeys for 2016 …To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Audrey Hatten-Milholin has worked at the University of California, San Francisco for 17 years. But come February, her job in the IT department as a system architect will be taken over by a worker from India.
Even worse, Hatten-Milholin has been asked to train her replacement.
“It’s horrible. Really horrible,” she said on Tuesday. “You want to treat people decently. But on the other hand, I’m pretty ticked off I have to do this.”
Hatten-Milholin was among about 80 laid-off IT workers who held a rally on Tuesday, calling for an end to the university's outsourcing program. The IT department workers, including permanent staff and contract employees, will be replaced by workers from an India-based IT services firm called HCL.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many enterprises rely on multi-protocol label switching VPNs for high-performance, critical communications. Now those services can be enhanced with new virtualized, cloud services for on demand access.Because it is by definition multiprotocol, MPLS can handle multiple types of data streams, including IP, ATM and frame relay, making it the predominant option for large enterprises.MPLS utilizes a communication service provider’s (CSP) infrastructure to deliver a segregated wide area network (WAN), avoiding the cost and complexity of an enterprise having to maintain private lines for its WAN. As it is under the control of a single operator and supports traffic policy enforcement, MPLS offers greater reliability and performance for enterprise WANs and VPNs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The CyberPower Professional Series CSP600WSU Surge Protector is ideal for Home/ Office protection with 1200 joules, 6 swivel outlets, 2 USB charge ports (2.1 Amp shared), and a convenient wall tap design. The surge protector is ideal for protecting personal computers, phones/ fax/ modems, printers, stereos, and other electronics. Its two USB are perfect for keeping tablets, smart phones, and other rechargeable electronics ready to use. With Amazon's current discount of 47% you can buy it now for $9.86 (See it on Amazon). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If the Chinese government retaliated against tariff increases by the United States, it would not take direct aim at Apple, an economist argued today."For China, the best target is Boeing," said Caroline Freund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.Freund was responding to questions after Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party-supported newspaper, warned of reprisals if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on a campaign pledge to dramatically increase tariffs on goods imported into the United States.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Online user community 3D Hubs has published its third annual 3D Printer Guide for 2017, based on reviews from 8,624 verified 3D printer owners of 513 different 3D printer models.Fourteen machines separated into five categories made it into the guide's top 3D printers list for 2017. The categories include Budget, Plug-N-Play, Prosumer, Workhorse and SLS or selective laser sintering machines, which is a new commercial-grade category.3D Hubs used a wide range of parameters to measure the user experience with 3D printers, which included print quality, build quality, reliability, ease of use, print failure rate, customer service, community, running cost, software, and value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's an arms race among public cloud providers to provide businesses with the best machine learning capabilities. Enterprises are increasingly interested in creating intelligent applications, and companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are rushing to help meet their needs.Google fired its latest salvo on Tuesday, announcing a set of enhancements to its existing suite of cloud machine-learning capabilities. The first was a new Jobs API aimed at helping match job applicants with the right openings. In addition, the company is slashing the prices on its Cloud Vision API and launching an enhanced version of its translation API.On top of that, Google is offering GPUs in its cloud both through the company's managed services and its infrastructure-as-a-service product. Companies that want to roll their own machine learning systems and algorithms can now take advantage of the new hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Put that smartphone away or limit your use of it if you want to get a decent night’s sleep and stay healthy.Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco say they have confirmed that sleep deprivation is magnified by exposure to a kind of blue light emitted by the devices. And missing sleep can instigate deadly diseases, such as obesity and depression.“Longer average screen-time was associated with shorter sleep duration and worse sleep-efficiency,” the journal PLOS ONE says of the research on its website.Sleep took longer to come on and quality was generally poor, according to the researchers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
CPU performance increases were ignored for years, but AMD put them back on the map with its upcoming Zen chip. This has rubbed off on Intel in a good way.Intel's taken its fastest server chip, the top-line 22-core Xeon E5-2699 v4 chip, and made some tweaks to squeeze out more CPU performance. It has created a new chip called the 22-core Xeon E5-2699A v4, which is about 5 percent faster.While 5 percent may sound like a small number, it's big for those installing thousands of servers running on the chips. Four-socket servers can have up to 88 CPU cores and run up a 20 percent gain in performance improvements.The new chip could also be used in workstations with the latest GPUs to create VR content or run engineering applications like SolidWorks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel has moved to a new architecture called Kaby Lake for its PC chips, but it isn't done with the previous generation Skylake yet.
The company will release new Xeon server chips based on Skylake in mid-2017, and they will boast big performance increases, said Barry Davis, general manager for the accelerated workload group at Intel.
The Skylake Xeon chips will go into mainstream servers and could spark a big round of hardware upgrades, Davis said.
Xeon chips aren't as visible as Intel's PC chips but remain extremely popular. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon buy thousands of servers loaded with Xeon chips to power their search, social networking, and artificial intelligence tasks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A consumer protection group in China is asking Apple to investigate problems with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s units automatically shutting off.Recently, iPhone customers in the country have been complaining about the problem to the China Consumers Association, the group said in a statement on Tuesday. The shutdowns occur when the phone’s battery charge drops to between 60 and 50 percent.The problem will persist despite upgrading to the latest version of iOS. It will also occur in both cold environments and at room temperature. After the automatic shutdown, the phones will also fail to turn on without connecting to a power supply.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A vulnerability in a multimedia framework present on Version 12.04.5 of Ubuntu can be exploited by sound files meant to be played on the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System, according to security researcher Chris Evans.
The vulnerability is the result of a flaw in an audio decoder called libgstnsf.so, which allows gstreamer Version 0.10 to play the NSF files that the NES uses for music. NSF files, when played, use the host system’s hardware to create a virtualized version of the NES’ old 6502 processor and sound hardware in real time.
+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cool Yule Tools 2016: Digital disruption at Santa's Workshop + Android deems Instagram worthy of its presenceTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Popular developer platform GitLab has concluded that the public IaaS cloud is not an effective platform for hosting its open source file storage system with high input/output demands. So, GitLab is ditching the cloud.In a blog post explaining the decision, GitLab engineers say they’ll transition their CephFS storage tool to bare metal infrastructure that they will manage themselves. GitLab provides a platform to help teams of developers write, test and ship code. GitLab's storage issue is a prime example that not all workloads are ideally suited for the public cloud. GitLab is hardly the first company to pull an application from the public cloud; DropBox announced plans to build out its own cloud platform instead of using Amazon Web Service’s cloud earlier this year, for example. Still, many other enterprises are going all in on the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the world of networked cameras used for security situations (in home and at work), most (if not all) of the devices required an external power source as well as access to a Wi-Fi network. Netgear, through its Arlo division/brand, wants to change that with its new line of cameras that run without external power as well as LTE network support.
The Arlo Go Mobile HD Security Camera (model LTE-VML4030) uses 3G and 4G LTE (via the AT&T network) for its connectivity, letting users place the cameras in areas where Wi-Fi doesn’t exist (think rural, vacation cabins, marinas, farms, etc.). The camera features quick-charge rechargeable batteries, meaning you don’t have to put them near a power outlet (although you can keep it charged via power cord if you like). For local storage of video footage, a built-in microSD card slot is available (in case Internet access is disrupted). The camera also supports two-way audio (with its built-in microphone and speaker), motion and audio detection, night vision, live viewing and weatherproofing for outdoor placement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here