It's the catch-22 every new college graduate faces when looking for his or her first job: You need experience or a portfolio of completed work to prove your competency to a potential employer, but it's hard to get that tangible proof of your skills without having had a job first.That's one of the major benefits of the open source world, says Heidi Ellis, professor and chair of Computer Science and Information Technology at Western New England University in Springfield, Mass.Ten years ago, as a visiting professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., Ellis challenged her computer science students to use technology to solve some of the logistical and administrative problems than can hamper the effectiveness of humanitarian causes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Self-driving vehicles, traffic lights that adjust based on vehicle flow, bike sharing and smart pavement that provides public Wi-Fi access—those are just a few of the ideas for making cities smarter.
Not only have municipalities embraced the smart city concept—using technology to manage a city’s assets, improve the efficiency of services, reduce consumption of resources, reduce costs and improve the quality of life—but many are making it a reality.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has joined in to help cities implement smart city ideas, and it is offering a $40 million grant to the winner of its Smart Cities Challenge. The prize will go to the city that has the best plan for integrating innovative technologies such as self-driving cars, connected vehicles and smart sensors into their transportation network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Samsung Electronics is acquiring U.S. cloud services company Joyent as it builds its services business around mobile devices and the Internet of Things.The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Joyent will operate as a standalone subsidiary under the new dispensation and continue providing cloud infrastructure and software services to its customers.Samsung said Thursday the acquisition would give the smartphone maker access to its own cloud platform to support it in the areas of mobile, IoT and cloud-based software and services.The South Korean company said it had evaluated a number of providers of public and private cloud infrastructure but zeroed in on Joyent in San Francisco as it saw “an experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology validated by some of the largest Fortune 500 customers.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A hacker claiming responsibility for the recent data breach of the Democractic National Committee apparently has posted the stolen files online.The hacker, who goes by the name Guccifer 2.0, leaked the files on Wednesday following a breach of DNC computers that has been blamed on Russian hackers. The posted files include a 231-page dossier containing opposition research on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They also include documents concerning expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s election strategy, items on U.S. foreign policy, and donor lists.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Email scammers, often pretending to be CEOs, have duped businesses into giving away at least $3.1 billion, according to new data from the FBI.The email schemes, which trick companies into wiring funds to the hacker, continue to bedevil companies across the world, the FBI warned in a posting on Tuesday.The amount of money they've tried to steal has grown by 1,300 percent since January 2015, it said.In the U.S. alone, victims have lost $960 million to the schemes over approximately the past three years, FBI figures show. That figure reaches $3.1 billion when global data from international law enforcement and financial groups is included. The number of victims: 22,143.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Social dynamics and “culture fit” are a big reason that female engineers tend to stay in the profession at a lower rate than their male counterparts, according to a study released today by authors at MIT, University of California – Irvine, Michigan, and McGill.The research was conducted by having more than 40 undergraduate engineering students keep bi-monthly diaries, providing the study with more than 3,000 entries to analyze.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Chef’s open source tool lets applications automate infrastructure provisioning + This startup may have built the world's fastest networking switch chipTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Freeway speakerphone from Jabra is designed for the car, clipping neatly to your sun visor. It has 3 built-in speakers and virtual surround sound technology to deliver rich crisp sound while driving, and Blackout extreme noise reduction ensures your callers will hear clearly as well. You can use your voice to make and take calls, and the speaker can also be used to stream music or podcasts from your Bluetooth-enabled device. The Freeway even announces the name of the incoming caller. Battery life is 14 hours in-use and up to 40 days standby. It currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,600 customers (read reviews) and with the current 34% discount, its typical list price of $82.97 has been reduced to $54.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ever since its beta launch two years ago, x.ai's "Amy Ingram" virtual assistant has been scheduling meetings through Google Calendar. Now, the bot -- along with her gender opposite, Andrew Ingram -- can work with Office 365 and Outlook.com, bringing the promise of automated scheduling to a vastly broader audience.“We knew from the start that enabling Amy and Andrew to work across the Outlook.com and Office 365 calendars would be one of the first things we did once we had trained the machine to schedule meetings nearly autonomously,” said Dennis Mortensen, x.ai's founder and CEO.The wider reach means x.ai can now target its beta service at a potential 90 million U.S. knowledge workers, the company reckons, who schedule roughly 10 billion meetings a year. The technology is due out of beta this fall. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The new Apple Photos now labels photos based on facial recognition and content such as landscapes and objects so that users can search and sort photos. Apple copied what Google announced last year. This is good news for Apple users. No one wants to deny iPhone users a better experience organizing their photos. But any of them with a lick of sense about scientific research should also be offended.Apple stood on the shoulders of giants to produce Photos. Photo labeling isn’t new. It was one of the first areas of machine learning research to be tackled by machine learning researchers after character recognition. Almost all the software or concepts used to do this could be open source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An IT worker at Mossak Fonseca, the company at the heart of the "Panama Papers" leak, was arrested Wednesday in Geneva.The arrest was made as part of the investigation into the leak, which saw 11.5 million documents from the law firm leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.The documents detailed thousands of offshore companies set up by Mossak Fonseca on behalf of rich clients, sometimes for the purpose of tax avoidance.The identity of the worker has not been released, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter who led a year-long investigation into the documents said he did not believe the arrested worker was his source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two years in the making, Cisco today rolled out a turnkey, full-rack appliance that promises to do just about everything it takes to control a data center -- from easing IT operations and controlling security to application monitoring.The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring, said Yogesh Kaushik, Cisco senior director of product management, Tetration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovation Everywhere ChallengeImage by CiscoNearly half of Cisco’s 74,000-member workforce got involved in the company’s recently Innovation Everywhere Challenge, designed to spark startup-like activity among its ranks. More than 1,100 ideas were submitted and 3 winners were selected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovate Everywhere ChallengeImage by CiscoNearly half of Cisco’s 74,000-member workforce got involved in the company’s recently completed Innovate Everywhere Challenge, designed to spark startup-like activity among its ranks. More than 1,100 ideas were submitted and 3 winners were selected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Distributed denial-of-service attacks have been getting bigger and lasting longer, and for the past few years defenses haven’t kept pace, but that seems to be changing, Gartner analysts explained at the firm’s Security and Risk Management Summit.Gartner tracks the progress of new technologies as they pass through five stages from the trigger that gets them started to the final stage where they mature and are productive. The continuum is known as the Hype Cycle. Gartner
Gartner analyst Lawrence OransTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Algolia offers a hosted search platform. That means if you're a developer wanting to offer search within your applications and websites, you just integrate Algolia's search engine and it does it all for you—allowing you to focus on what is important: your app. Since its inception in 2012, Algolia has gained over 1,500 customers.Algolia API returns search results quickly and offers a search-as-you-type experience for end users. A perfect example of farming out parts of an application to third parties, Algolia follows in the footsteps of communication platforms such as Twilio and email platforms such as Sendgrid. To deliver both economics and speed, Algolia built itself a distributed, cloud-based, search network. It leverages 12 individual data centers globally to deliver a claimed 50ms response time for search within the top markets globally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has fixed more than 40 vulnerabilities in its products Tuesday, including critical ones in Windows, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Office.The vulnerabilities are covered in 16 security bulletins, six of which are marked as critical and the rest as important. This puts the total number of Microsoft security bulletins for the past six months to more than 160, a six-month record during the past decade.Companies running Windows servers should prioritize a patch for a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the Microsoft DNS Server component, covered in the MS16-071 bulletin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Large cities could crash to a halt “with the click of a button,” the Telegraph newspaper has reported. The head of spying for the United Kingdom has apparently warned that Internet of Things (IoT) adoptation increases the risk of hackers bringing “major cities to a standstill.”Robert Hannighan, the director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, made the warning at a science festival in the U.K. recently, the Telegraph writes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Self-styled spam king Sanford Wallace was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison on Tuesday for a phishing scam that resulted in the sending of over 27 million messages to Facebook users.Last August, Wallace admitted to compromising around 500,000 Facebook accounts, using them to send over 27 million spam messages through Facebook's servers, between November 2008 and March 2009.Sentencing had been scheduled for last December, but it has taken the court almost a year to reach a sentencing decision.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's a rare consumer today who doesn't use a mobile video and messaging app like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Vine, but such capabilities are still few and far between on the enterprise side.So argues Samba Tech, a Brazilian company that on Wednesday set out to fill that gap with a free mobile video app called Kast.Samba Tech is an independent distributor of online videos in Latin America, and it's gathered US $3 million in funding to support Kast's U.S. launch. It's also partnered with Microsoft and built Kast on top of Azure.Essentially, the company hopes to outdo Slack as the enterprise messaging platform of choice, becoming the corporate world's equivalent of Snapchat. Kast aims to go beyond tools like email, text, and chat and allow users to bring audio and video posts directly to select teams and channels, both at the office and on the go.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here