Satya Nadella wasn't kidding when he said earlier this year that he believed in using chat as a platform for computing. Microsoft just bought Wand, a chat app for iOS, to further that vision. The Wand team will be joining Bing's engineering and platform group, Corporate Vice President David Ku wrote in a post announcing the deal Thursday. The company's team members will be working primarily on Microsoft's push to enable the creation of intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
China has set 2020 as the date for delivering an exascale system, the next major milestone in supercomputing performance. This is three years ahead of the U.S. roadmap.This claim is from China's National University of Defense Technology, as reported Thursday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.This system will be called Tianhe-3, following a naming convention that began in 2010 when China announced its first petaflop-scale system, Tianhe-1. The first petascale system was developed in the U.S. in 2008.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Improving every Apple platformImage by AppleIt was a jam-packed WWDC, and thankfully Apple gave us much-needed fixes to some of the most frustrating problems in all its major platforms.What were some of your personal headaches that Apple cured with the annnouncement of iOS 10, macOS, watchOS 3, and tvOS?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just half an hour of web browsing is enough time for machine learning mechanisms to uncover a person’s personality and produce identifying digital signatures, researchers say.Those traits can include conscientiousness and neuroticism, among other characteristics, the scientists from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia say in their media release published by AAAS, the science society.And it might identify the individual, too."Our research suggests a person's personality traits can be deduced by their general internet usage,” says Dr. Ikusan R. Adeyemi, a research scholar at the university.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. House of Representatives voted down an anti-surveillance amendment after some of its members expressed concern about its impact on the fight against terrorism, in the wake of Sunday’s massacre at a nightclub in Orlando.The measure was proposed by Congressman Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, and Congresswoman Zoe Lofrgren, a Democrat from California, as as an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act.It would prevent warrantless searches by law enforcement of information on Americans from a foreign intelligence communications database and prohibit with some exceptions the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency from using any funds appropriated under the Act to require that companies weaken the security of their products or services to enable surveillance of users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Help desk jobs have long been seen as a stepping stone to other roles, but that perception is out of date. Today’s help desk professionals are taking on more complex work and they’re in high demand.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft this week released the second upgrade for Office 365 commercial subscribers on the slow train, and warned those still running the original Office 2016 applications that they have four more months before they will be required to update.Alongside a large number of Windows security updates issued Tuesday, Microsoft also released build 1602 of the Office apps to corporate Office 365 subscribers who hew to the "Deferred Channel" track.Deferred Channel is the slower of the two main release tracks Microsoft established for Office 365. (Until February, it was called "Current Branch for Business" to match the name of a slow release track for Windows 10.) Unlike the faster "Current Channel" (CC), which boasts monthly updates to the Office 2016 applications -- Word, Outlook, Excel and the like -- Deferred Channel (DC) only provides updates every four months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Despite the hype of business chat messaging and a perception of smartphones introducing a connected work-everywhere lifestyle, a surprisingly large number of bosses are not at all happy with the proliferation of the devices.The honchos say mobile devices are killing productivity, according to employment firm CareerBuilder research. The problem appears to stem from the fact that employees are indeed using smartphones at work—just not for work.That the majority of workers with smartphones (65 percent) don’t have work email setup on the devices is one issue, the CareerBuilder study found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has made no secret of its AI ambitions, and on Thursday it announced the next step in its bold plans to realize them: a brand-new research group in Europe focused squarely on machine learning.Based in Google Research offices in Zurich, Switzerland, the new group will focus on three key areas of artificial intelligence: machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding, according to a blog post by Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research for Europe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Three models of Cisco wireless VPN firewalls and routers from the small business RV series contain a critical unpatched vulnerability that attackers can exploit remotely to take control of devices.
The vulnerability is located in the Web-based management interface of the Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall, RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router and RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router.
It can be easily exploited if the affected devices are configured for remote management since attackers only need to send an unauthenticated HTTP request with custom user data. This will result in remote code execution as root, the highest privileged account on the system, and can lead to a complete compromise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At $249.99, Asus' new Android-based ZenPad Z8 tablet could make you ponder why you should buy Apple's iPad Mini 4, which starts at $399.The Asus tablet will be available exclusively through Verizon Wireless, and will ship starting on June 23. It is ready for Verizon's LTE network in the U.S, and can be ordered online.The cellular-ready ZenPad Z8 will come with the latest Android version, Android M OS. A cellular-ready version of the iPad Mini 4 starts at $529.From a pure hardware standpoint, the Android tablet is comparable, and in some respects, offers more than than the iPad Mini 4. It ultimately comes down to whether you want Android or iOS on this sort of device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Way back in February, I wrote a blog about President Obama’s proposed Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP). As part of this plan, the President called for $19 billion for cybersecurity as part of the 2017 fiscal year federal budget, a 35% increase over 2016 spending. While CNAP has a lot of thoughtful and positive proposals, I’m troubled by the fact that federal cybersecurity programs seem to have a life of their own with little oversight or ROI benefits. I often cite DHS’s Einstein project as an example of this type of government cybersecurity waste. In my humble opinion, the feds are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on custom research and development for Einstein when commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) network security products could do the same job at a fraction of the cost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For years those who track the cloud computing market have predicted consolidation. The market is young enough, promising enough, and the barriers to entry for companies that want a slice of this market are high enough that mergers and acquisitions are to be expected. Stephen Lawson
At its 2016 developer conference in San Francisco this week, the company worked to get developers excited about its software and services as well as its hardware platforms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tim Greene
Jie Zhang
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- Jie Zhang says that as a child in China she played a game picking up marbles with chopsticks and performing the delicate task of carrying them to another room without dropping them. That’s what doing business in China is like for Westerners, she told a breakfast gathering today at Gartner’s Security and Risk Management Summit.They have to get used to long-standing customs and practices that violate some basic business principles respected outside of China and some new ones that deal specifically with technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has always been a master at picking the right adjacent markets to move into at the right time, and it often becomes one of the leaders in that space. Think of the impact the company has had in telephony, blade servers and security—to name just a few.This week at an event with a lot of pomp and circumstance that included CEO Chuck Robbins, Cisco announced it is moving into the analytics market. At first glance, one might ask what the heck Cisco is doing in analytics.The timing for Cisco is right, though. Many of the building blocks of the digital enterprise—technologies such as Internet of Things, cloud computing, mobility and security are network centric today. By harnessing network data, Cisco can provide data and insights that another vendor could not. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Remember when you got your driver’s license? That was a pretty big day. Now imagine that as the person at the DMV handed you your card, he or she also slipped you permits to operate a boat, drive a motorcycle and fly the Space Shuttle. Sounds crazy, right? Yet it’s happening in the world of mainframes every day thanks to new tools that make it possible to program and manage big iron in just about any language and on any platform.
Even five years ago it would have been inconceivable for this to happen. If you wanted to use a mainframe, you had to know COBOL. That’s all fine and good—if you graduated from college in 1978. But what about the next generation of mainframers? How were they supposed to use computers that required users to know a language that wasn’t even taught in most computer science programs anymore?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's the issue that won't die: A Senate committee has voted to weaken the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules.The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee voted Wednesday to approve a bill that would exempt small broadband providers from rules requiring them to provide their customers with information about network performance, network management practices, and other issues.The rules are intended to give broadband customers data about actual speeds, compared to advertised speeds, and potentially controversial congestion management practices.The Senate bill, the Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, would still ensure "meaningful transparency for consumers" because older FCC rules requiring some disclosure of network management practices remain in place, said Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican and committee chairman.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The use of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube by terrorist groups for propaganda, recruitment, fundraising and other activities has come into sharp focus recently.
It seemed inevitable that these companies would at some point be blamed for the misuse of these forums and become targets of lawsuits from families of victims.
A lawsuit filed in a federal court in California by the father of Nohemi Gonzalez, a victim of the Paris terror attack in November, charges that Twitter, Facebook and Google “have knowingly permitted the terrorist group ISIS [Islamic State group] to use their social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a sea of vulnerabilities clamoring for attention, it’s almost impossible to know which IT security issues to address first. Vendor advisories provide a tried-and-true means for keeping on top of known attack vectors. But there’s a more expedient option: Eavesdrop on attackers themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
I’ll take thisImage by ThinkstockIt may come as a surprise, but more likely than not, when employees leave a company they’re taking company data with them. While it’s not always out of malicious intent, the amount of unprotected company information that walks out the door can result in bigger losses in the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here