Fair Isaac Corp., the company that issues credit scores for individuals, was tired of other analytics companies developing security scoring tools for businesses and then proclaiming themselves “the FICO of security scores.”So in May, FICO upped its own scoring game. It acquired cybersecurity firm QuadMetrics to create its own brand of enterprise security scores for enterprises. The new scoring tool, available in August, uses predictive analytics and security risk assessment tools to issue scores and predict a company’s likelihood of a significant breach compared to other firms within the next 12 months.“Our own cyber breach insurance underwriters commented how great it would be if there was really a FICO score on this for the underwriting process,” says Doug Clare, vice president of cybersecurity solutions. The company had already invested in cybersecurity detection technology that assesses network traffic, and it saw the addition of QuadMetrics as “the right opportunity at the right time,” he adds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ARI Fleet Management manages 1.2 million things with wheels across North America and Europe, from telephone company trucks to corporate vehicles to railroad maintenance trucks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Facebook's Silicon Valley headquartersImage by Martyn WilliamsFacebook used to design its servers and other hardware at labs scattered across the company, but they've now been consolidated in a state of the art facility at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. The new lab is called Area 404, a play on the 404 error message seen on the web and, presumably, the U.S. military's Area 51 research base. It covers 22,000 square feet and has 50 workbenches where engineers design, build and test their protptype hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ten months after Dropbox first unveiled Paper, the collaborative writing tool entered open beta on Wednesday and is getting mobile versions for iOS and Android.Paper allows teams to work on documents together in the cloud. It makes it easy to add text, images, and embedded videos from YouTube, Google, or Dropbox itself. Users can also add programming code, which gets formatted automatically. And they can create to-do lists and assign tasks on those lists using the @ symbol.
Since its debut in private beta, Paper has been used to create more than a million documents for tasks like brainstorming ideas and capturing meeting notes, Dropbox said. Based on lessons learned along the way, Dropbox has improved the software with better tables and image galleries, more powerful search, and notifications via desktop and mobile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lazy people will love Windows 10 and its ability to automate home tasks, and the operating system's smart-home credentials are getting a serious boost with a recent internet of things pact.Microsoft wants to put Windows 10 at the center of smart homes. The company wants users to be able to tell the operating system's Cortana voice assistant to switch on a light, open a door, release food for a cat, and even check the contents of a refrigerator.For Windows 10 to be successful, the OS will have to work with a wide range of smart home and IoT devices, and that goal has taken a big step forward thanks to a recent agreement between standards bodies the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) and the Thread Group. The two organizations will work together on improving interoperability between smart home and IoT devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Firefox 48Image by PixabayFirefox, for years now, has been an also-ran in large chunks of the browser market – yet, in terms of its technology, has been catching up to the bigger players fast. Firefox 48 continues the process of making the browser more streamlined, robust and powerful. Take a look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Conventional thinking assumes that older workers have trouble adapting to new technologies.That notion is nothing more than a stereotype, but it’s a harmful one that could make life difficult for IT professionals over the age of 50 who are searching for new jobs. And now the results of a new survey suggest that the stereotype might not be accurate after all.Cloud storage provider Dropbox and Ipsos Mori, a London-based market research firm, surveyed more than 4,000 information workers in the U.S. and Europe about their use of technology in the workplace and found that people 55 and up use 4.9 forms of technology per week, on average — a smidge above the overall average of 4.7 per week. More importantly, the survey also revealed that older workers are less likely than their younger colleagues to find using technology in the workplace stressful. Just one-quarter of the respondents who are 55 or older said that they find tech in the workplace stressful. Meanwhile, 36 percent of the respondents who are 18 to 34 years old — the ones who supposedly grew up with technology — said they find tech in the workplace stressful.To read this Continue reading
In 2011, Hewlett-Packard ranked seventh in federal contracting. Barack Obama, a Democrat, was president. In 2012, HP CEO Meg Whitman publicly backed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for president, and even served as a California "statewide honorary chairman" for him.Did Whitman's backing of Romney help or hurt HP? Will her particularly brutal condemnation Tuesday of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hurt the firm, should he win the election?If Whitman's support for Romney caused any corporate damage it is not apparent in its federal contracting. In 2011, HP's total federal contracting was pegged at $3.83 billion by Washington Technology in its annual ranking of federal contractors, putting it in seventh place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Each of the nation's largest wireless carriers brag about having a great network, but comprehensive testing shows that network performance varies significantly from city to city.RootMetrics recently posted its latest rankings for the top 125 U.S. metro areas, which show that the two biggest U.S. cities rank pretty low. New York came in at 59th, while Los Angeles came it at 99th.The nation's third-largest city, Chicago, did well for a big city and was ranked fifth. Atlanta, the ninth-largest city, ranked third. No other top-10 city finished in the top 10 rankings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Donald Trump is a troll looking to say whatever will stir up the most people, according to security expert Dan Kaminsky who delivered the keynote at Black Hat today.“Don figures out what people don’t want to hear,” and then he says it, Kaminsky said in an interview after his speech.+More on Network World: Black Hat: Be wary of HTTP/2 on Web servers | Follow all the stories from Black Hat +“It’s not that Donald Trump is the worst troll ever, it’s just that the American public has never been trolled so effectively. The reaction is the point.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's quite a day for Microsoft Edge and the few people who use it. Thanks to the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Edge will finally gain support for extensions. And by supporting extensions, one of the first out of the gate is Adblock Plus, that bane of advertisers everywhere.Edge can now use extensions for both Chrome and Firefox. To get extensions, open Edge and click on the menu icon, the three horizontal dots in the upper-right corner. Next, select Extensions from the drop-down menu. It's near the bottom. This will open a new window with extensions you already have installed and a link labeled "Get Extensions from the Store."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies face demographic change as Baby Boomers continue their steady departure from the workplace. At the same time, recruiting and retaining employees to work in large companies is becoming more difficult as freelance and entrepreneurial ventures become more popular, especially among Millennials. These challenges make attracting and developing talent critical for organizations that seek to keep pace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Tech industry CEOs are extremely concerned about their products’ relevancies in the next few years, so they are concentrating on innovation as a strategy, according to a new survey.The way they intend to move forward is by developing a combined human and digital labor force, says accountancy and advisor KPMG, which conducted the survey.By that, it means deploying automation and cognitive machine learning digitization, but also building a human workforce geared towards constant innovation.+ Also on Network World: Turns out machine learning is a champ at fixing buggy code +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past few years, I've tried out a several solar-powered recharging devices, usually in conjunction with summer gift guides or other outdoor gadget projects. For the most part, the solar chargers were big, bulky things that required a lot of heavy lifting in order to recharge your much smaller smartphone, and didn’t seem worth the extra effort in lugging it around on your travels. One exception - the very cool solar-powered flashlights and other devices that incorporate the hand-crank generator. GoalZero, one of the leaders in the solar power market, has upped its game a bit. This week at the Outdoor Retailer Expo in Salt Lake City, the company showed off some new devices aimed at shrinking the size and bulkiness of those solar panels.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Windows 10 was expected to save the slumping PC market, but it hasn't. PC shipments are still declining, and people haven't bought new hardware just to get Windows 10.But the Windows 10 Anniversary Update has features that will make new hardware desirable. Moreover, the period to upgrade for free to Windows 10 from older versions has ended, and analysts believe people will buy a new PC instead of shelling out $119.99 to $199.99 for a Windows 10 license.PC makers hope for nothing more than the death of Windows 7, which some users -- especially businesses -- have been hanging on to. Companies like Lenovo and HP are slowly getting rid of lingering Windows 7 Professional PC models, which will ultimately force holdover users to Windows 10. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Turn your iPad Air into a laptop with the Belkin QODE Ultimate Keyboard Case. The well-spaced keys offer the movement and response of a laptop keyboard, making emails and word processing far easier and more comfortable than typing on a tablet's touchscreen. Smart sensing technology automatically turns the keyboard on when you need to use it, and off when you don't. The case supports multiple viewing angles to help you find the most comfortable position for watching videos or reading blogs. Made of aircraft grade aluminum, the lightweight keyboard acts as a cover offering exceptional protection for your iPad Air while the case prevents it from being scratched. Averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 750 people (read reviews). It's list price of $130 has been reduced significantly to just over $94. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many of the large payment card breaches that hit retail and hospitality businesses in recent years were the result of attackers infecting point-of-sale systems with memory-scraping malware. But there are easier ways to steal this sort of data, due to a lack of authentication and encryption between card readers and the POS payment applications.POS systems are specialized computers. They typically run Windows and have peripherals like keyboards, touch screens, barcode scanners and card readers with PIN pads. They also have specialized payment applications installed to handle transactions.One of the common methods used by attackers to steal payment card data from PoS systems is to infect them with malware, via stolen remote support credentials or other techniques. These malware programs are known as memory or RAM scrapers because they scan the system's memory for credit card data when it's processed by the payment application on the POS system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From Aug. 5 to Aug. 21 the world will be watching Brazil as it hosts the Games of the XXXI Olympiad; and some of the biggest names in technology are helping put on the show.More than 10,500 athletes from 206 countries (including 555 U.S. Olympians) are expected to compete in 28 sports and 306 events at 37 venues over the course of the 16-day event.Technology companies aren’t just supplying technology; they’re also helping to sponsor the games. Atos, a European IT services company is a Worldwide Olympic Partner; Cisco is an official Olympics supporter and Microsoft and Symantec are official Olympic suppliers.+ MORE OLYMPICS: Rio Olympics pose security risks to travelers +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers at Black Hat describe finding four flaws – now fixed - in the way the major server vendors implemented HTTP/2, but warn that the year-old Web protocol remains fertile ground for hackers seeking weaknesses in the way it’s rolled out.+More on Network World: IRS warns on super summer scam scourge | Follow all the coverage from Black Hat +A team at security vendor Imperva says they found nothing vulnerable about the protocol itself, but that they created distributed denial-of-service attacks that took advantage of openings left by how servers support the protocol.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Federal Aviation Administration this week granted permission to a privately-held space firm to launch a robotic spacecraft to the moon.
Moon Express expects to launch its MX-1 spacecraft on a two-week mission to the lunar surface in 2017. The MX-1, which is about as large as a suitcase will include instruments and a camera to explore the moon’s surface.
+More on Network World: NASA: Top 10 space junk missions+
“The MX-1E is a spacecraft/lander capable of transfer from Earth orbit to the Moon, making a soft landing on the lunar surface, and performing post-landing relocations through propulsive ‘hops,’” the FAA stated. The FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation holds controlling powers over space launches and their payloads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here