Best Deals of the Week, September 19th - September 23rd - Deal AlertCheck out this roundup of the best deals on gadgets, gear and other cool stuff we have found this week, the week of September 19th. All items are highly rated, and dramatically discounted!1 Free Amazon Echo Dot When You Buy 5Echo Dot is a hands-free, voice-controlled device that uses Alexa to play & control music (either on its own, or through a connected speaker/receiver), control smart home devices, provide information, read the news, set alarms, and more. If you’re looking to buy them as gifts, or for different homes or rooms, Amazon will throw in a free one ($50 value) when you buy 5, or two free ones when you buy 10 (a $100 value). To take advantage of this limited time offer, select 6 or 12 in the quantity dropdown and add to your Shopping Cart. Enter promo code DOT6PACK or DOT12PACK at checkout where you will see the discount applied. The new Amazon Echo Dot comes in black, and now also white. See the new Amazon Echo Dot now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Eindhoven, Netherlands -- The 25th Global Forum, an annual policy and strategy conference sometimes called “the Davos of ICT,” was held this week in Eindhoven, a smart city and technology hub with a rich industrial past.Eindhoven was the original home and de facto company town of Philips Electronics, one of the world’s leading technology giants. Then, under pressure from Asian and global competitors, Philips began a long process of exiting its historic lines of business.Eindhoven suffered an economic and psychological blow when in 1997 the company moved its headquarters to Amsterdam.The resulting economic and social disruption challenged Eindhoven to reinvent itself. The community focused on research and innovation (R&I), and built upon its Philips legacy to become the industrial design center of its country and the European region.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.Enterprise chat applications have surged in popularity, driven in large part by Slack, which now claims to serve more than three million users daily. What’s more, the popularity of these apps has given rise to a new phenomenon known as ChatOps, which is what happens when these new messaging systems are used to automate operational tasks. The ChatOps term was coined by GitHub to describe a collaboration model that connects people, tools, processes and automation into a transparent workflow. According to Sean Regan, Atlassian’s Head of Product Marketing for HipChat, this flow connects the work needed, the work happening and the work done in a consistent location staffed by people, bots and related tools. Its transparent nature hastens the feedback loop, facilitates information sharing, and enhances team collaboration, but also ushers in a new set of challenges for securityand risk professionals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Roughly half of the audience informally polled at last month’s CIO 100 event said they had attended an IoT event in the last 12 months. "So what were the other half [of you] doing on the most hyped word on the internet today?" asked Vernon Turner, senior vice president of enterprise systems & fellow for the internet of things at IDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
If you asked a CIO to sketch the ideal modern IT architecture on a few cocktail napkins, it might resemble the system fashioned by of the Dollar Shave Club (DSC), the men's grooming ecommerce company that ascended from relative obscurity to prominence thanks to sound branding and this memorable YouTube clip.Running in a public cloud, the startup uses 22 custom applications to run sales and marketing campaigns and customer service, as well as a recommendation engine. The custom-cloud combination embodies the type of IT environment CIOs say they would build if they had a green field devoid of legacy architecture and technical debt.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. government's attempt to stop a lawsuit challenging the legality of the H-1B lottery was rejected Thursday by a federal court judge.The government tried to get this case dismissed on legal technicalities but failed. U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon, in Oregon, denied the government's dismissal motion in a 24-page ruling.This case may now be decided quickly. The plaintiffs are seeking a summary judgment with oral arguments schedule in December. If the summary judgment is granted, the lottery could end -- the plaintiffs hope -- as early as next year.The case was brought by Tenrec Inc., a web development firm, and Walker Macy LLC, a landscape architecture, urban design and planning firm. Both firms filed petitions to hire a person who needed an H-1B visa, but lost the lottery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Next week, New York State will begin a 45-day public comment period on its new financial industry cybersecurity regulation -- and, so far, security experts have a favorable view of the proposal.Under the new regulations, banks and insurance companies doing business in New York State will need to establish a cybersecurity program, appoint a Chief Information Security Officer and monitor the cybersecurity policies of their business partners.According to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, this is the first such regulation in the country. "This regulation helps guarantee the financial services industry upholds its obligation to protect consumers and ensure that its systems are sufficiently constructed to prevent cyber-attacks to the fullest extent possible," he said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Securing the internet of things should become a major priority now that an army of compromised devices – perhaps 1 million strong - has swamped one of the industry’s top distributed denial-of-service protection services.A giant botnet made up of hijacked internet-connected things like cameras, lightbulbs, and thermostats has launched the largest DDoS attack ever against a top security blogger, an attack so big Akamai had to cancel his account because defending it ate up too many resources.It wasn’t that Akamai couldn’t mitigate the attack – it did so for three days – but doing so became too costly, so the company made a business decision to cut the affected customer loose, says Andy Ellis the company’s chief security officer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yahoo's announcement that state-sponsored hackers have stolen the details of at least 500 million accounts shocks both through scale -- it's the largest data breach ever -- and the potential security implications for users.That's because Yahoo, unlike MySpace, LinkedIn and other online services that suffered large breaches in recent years, is an email provider; and email accounts are central to users' online lives. Not only are email addresses used for private communications, but they serve as recovery points and log-in credentials for accounts on many other websites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Anyone who has looked at automatically-generated subtitles on YouTube can tell you that asking a computer to describe what a human says can lead to hilarious results. Now, Apple has brought that issue to iOS 10 with support for transcribing voicemails.It's a cool feature that makes it easy to know what your Aunt Matilda said about the gastrointestinal problems her dog is having, without actually having to listen to a three-minute-long, blow-by-blow description. But be careful about trusting it -- or reading the transcriptions around sensitive eyes.I learned that the hard way Thursday when someone left me a message about a reorder special on a wine club shipment. Except my iPhone didn't hear it that way, proudly telling me about "wearing your c**k s**t."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has rolled out a Windows-based network management package that gathers Industrial Ethernet network events and alerts IT to the event for quick impact analysis and troubleshooting, the company said.+More on Network World: Ethernet: Are there worlds left to conquer?+The product, Industrial Network Director, builds an integrated topology of all network automation and assets and lets operators zoom in on specific devices for real-time monitoring of device status and traffic statistics, Cisco said. The system can integrate into other existing industrial asset management systems which lets customers and system integrators build dashboards customized to meet specific monitoring and accounting requirements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission should stop mobile messaging service WhatsApp from sharing user data with parent company Facebook in violation of earlier privacy promises, several privacy groups said.The FTC should step in to stop WhatsApp from violating "commitments the company previously made to subscribers," the 17 groups said in a letter sent to the agency Thursday. WhatsApp has long billed itself as a secure and private messaging service. WhatsApp's recently released plan to share user data with Facebook as a way to target advertising could amount to an "unfair and deceptive" trade practice, said the groups, including the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Consumer Watchdog, and Demand Progress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This gadget from Inateck will duplicate any 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch SATA HDD/SSD drive quickly and automatically without the need for a computer, by just pushing a button. Once cloning has started, an LED indicator shows you 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% completion status. Or don't kick off the cloning process, and the unit allows you to move files freely between drives as you would an external HDD/SSD. Built-in safeguards protect against overheating, overvoltage, current leaks, short circuits, peak voltage, and other disturbances to ensure safe data access and transfers. The unit currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 530 customers (read reviews). With a typical list price of $69.99, this 50% off deal puts it at just $34.99. See the discounted Inateck HDD/SSD cloning station now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For more than 50 years mainframes have powered thousands of organizations around the world, from banks to militaries to government agencies. Looking looking back at all that history makes me think about the critical role that big iron has played in the world, but it also gets me thinking about the future and what the next 10 years holds for the mainframe industry.+ Also on Network World: The future of virtualization: Don’t forget the so-called 'old' +What makes me so confident that mainframing even has a 2026 worth looking forward to? After all, hasn’t the cloud revolutionized data storage and processing and ushered in the end of mainframes? The truth is that not every disruptive development replaces what it disrupted—sometimes not immediately and sometimes not at all. Globalization did not kill American IT jobs, Metallica didn’t negate Van Halen, and the cloud won’t kill mainframes because mainframes have something that the cloud will need over the next decade: power.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's decision to force Windows 10's patch and maintenance model on customers running the older-but-more-popular Windows 7 has patch experts nervous."Bottom line, everyone is holding their breath, hoping for the best, expecting the worst," said Susan Bradley in an email. Bradley is well known in Windows circles for her expertise on Microsoft's patching processes: She writes on the topic for the Windows Secrets newsletter and moderates the PatchMangement.org mailing list, where business IT administrators discuss update tradecraft.Bradley's anxiety stems from Microsoft's announcement last month that beginning in October it will offer only cumulative security updates for Windows 7 and 8.1, ending the decades-old practice of letting customers choose which patches they apply.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In Lew Cirne's view, all companies are now software companies and understanding how your software is treating your customers is key to business success. Cirne is the founder and CEO of New Relic, a cloud-based provider of application management tools. In this CEO Interview Series conversation with IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant, Cirne explained how New Relic gets IT and business execs on the same page in improving operations and customer experience, and he described the company's new tools for keeping highly virtualized private and public infrastructure in synch. He also talked about a 'unique' pricing scheme that recognizes the dynamic nature of computing today, and outlined why existing management tool vendors have a long way to go to catch up with New Relic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Third-party accessImage by Harris & Ewing Collection (Library of Congress)Earlier this year, the Soha Third-Party Advisory Group conducted a study that surveyed more than 200 enterprise IT and security C-Level executives, directors and managers about the daily challenges they face providing fast and secure third-party application access to their contractors and suppliers. The survey revealed that 98 percent of respondents do not consider third-party access a top priority in terms of IT initiatives and budget allocation. This is a huge concern, considering that third parties cause or are implicated in 63 percent of all data breaches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Technology has considerable potential to make the world better, but those benefits are far from guaranteed. Plenty of downsides can pop up along the way, and some of them have Turing Award winners especially worried.1. The internet echo chamber "Technology by itself is not evil, but people can use it for bad things," Barbara Liskov, an Institute Professor at MIT, told an audience of journalists Thursday at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany. "I do worry a lot about what's going on."The ability to selectively filter out news and opinions that don't agree with one's own viewpoint is one of Liskov's top concerns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Developing a computer that can be as decisive and intelligent as humans is on IBM's mind, and it's making progress toward achieving that goal.IBM's computer chip called TrueNorth is designed to emulate the functions of a human brain. The company is now running tests and benchmarking TrueNorth to demonstrate how fast and power efficient the chips can be compared to today's computers.The results of the head-to-head contest are impressive. IBM says TrueNorth can engage in deep learning and make decisions based on associations and probabilities, much like human brains. It can do so while consuming a fraction of the power used by chips in other computers for the same purpose.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Yahoo said on Thursday that data from at least 500 million user accounts had been hacked, it wasn't just admitting to a huge failing in data security -- it was admitting to the biggest hack the world has ever seen.Until Thursday, the previous largest known hack was the 2008 breach that hit almost 360 million MySpace accounts, according to a ranking by the "Have I been pwned" website. Like the Yahoo breach, the hack was only publicly disclosed this year after data was offered on a hacker forum.And only three breaches had ranked above the 100 million level:LinkedIn reported a loss of 167 million email addresses and passwords. They were originally stolen in 2012 but not publicly disclosed until 2016, again after the data was offered on an underground "dark market" site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here