The most important criteria for choosing a backup solution include short backup windows, ease-of-recovery and role-based access management, according to IT Central Station, a peer review site for IT users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft has launched the final push in its nine-and-a-half-month upgrade offensive against consumers and businesses running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.Last week, Microsoft switched the automatically-offered Windows 10 upgrade to a "Recommended" download that in turn scheduled the upgrade process unless the user interfered."As we shared in October, Windows 10 will be offered as a 'Recommended' update for Windows 7 and 8.1 customers whose Windows Update settings are configured to accept 'Recommended' updates," a Microsoft spokesman said Friday in an email reply to questions.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10
Those questions were spurred by reports from Computerworld readers, who said that they'd again been offered an upgrade after months of either ignoring the campaign or dodging the transmutation of their PCs from Windows 7 or 8.1 to 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For a conference that has been used to advance Android and Chrome, and introduce Google Glass with users parachuting from a plane, people are expecting to hear about virtual reality and artificial intelligence at this week's Google I/O conference."This year's focus will be virtual reality, no doubt," said Jeff Kagan, an independent industry analyst. "I believe Google wants to be a leader in virtual reality and, in this marketplace where there are no leaders yet, I think they will try and secure their place in the front of the line."Kagan said Google may even roll out its own early- generation virtual reality device at I/O, the company's annual developer conference, which generally draws more than 6,000 attendees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Connectivity and protocols are the largest technical challenges business people face as they attempt to adopt Internet of Things (IoT) projects, according to a new report.Those connectivity and protocol issue apparently come up in both planning and deployment, and then again in the analysis of IoT data, the study says.The industry survey was performed in Europe recently by U.S.-based PLAT.ONE, a software and industrial solutions firm specializing in IoT development. The survey asked executives what kinds of trouble they experienced with IoT projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT analytics company Nyansa today rolled out a public web portal, offering anonymized data pulled from instances of its flagship Voyance product in operation around the world.The idea behind Voyance Live, according to CEO Abe Ankumah, is to provide insight into common enterprise network problems and suggest possible solutions to IT departments.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Software audits: How high tech plays hardball + Washington nudges Verizon, striking unions back to bargaining tableTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Land O'Lakes picked Google to run the backend when it decided to launch a new application that connects a bunch of different cloud services to one another for the sake of improving farmers' decisions.It's something of a surprising choice for the decades-old company. Much of the company is built on Microsoft technology, said Teddy Bekele, the vice president of IT for Land O'Lakes's WinField division. While Microsoft's Azure cloud platform was in the running to host the new WinField Data Silo tool, Microsoft ended up losing out to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).It's a major win for Google, which has been trying to entice more large companies over to its cloud platform. And Land O'Lakes's decision is emblematic of the way that companies -- especially those with decades of technology history -- are approaching the public cloud. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Rumors are flying that Google will announce a virtual reality (VR) headset this week at the company’s annual software developer conference Google I/O. The rumors sound ridiculous to me. Here’s why.Today, the Verge and Android Police sparked more speculation based on a VR category showing up on the seller’s Google Play console and a year-old Wall Street Journal story that Google was working on a VR headset. Well, not exactly, but let’s take a minute, cut through the hype and think through this rationally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference that takes place May 18-20 in Mountain View, Calif., can be a tough ticket to get – there’s a lottery just to get the opportunity to buy one. Academic tickets are $300, and general admission is a weighty $900. So there are a lot of interested folks who might not have the time, money, or opportunity to get to Mountain View this year.Fortunately, Google’s got a number of ways to watch the events of I/O unfold, most notably live video streaming, which you ought to be able to stream it on their site here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Awhile ago I wrote a about Dome 9's security offering and was skeptical about its long-term opportunity. As I saw it, offering an add-on security product to a platform as voracious as Amazon Web Services (AWS) was a recipe for disruption. AWS has a history of intense innovation, and often ecosystem partners have been steamrolled by that process. As I saw it, Dome 9 filled a short-term opportunity that would soon be fulfilled by AWS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past two years, a group of cybercriminals has infected almost 1 million computers with malware that hijacks search results, even when they're served over encrypted HTTPS connections.The click-fraud botnet earns its creators money through Google's AdSense for Search program, according to researchers from security firm Bitdefender. The affiliate program, intended for website owners, allows them to place a Google-powered custom search engine on their websites to generate revenue when users click on ads displayed in the search results.Instead of doing that, this botnet's operators intercept Google, Bing, and Yahoo searches performed by users on their own computers and replace the legitimate results with those generated by their custom search engine. They do this using a malware program that Bitdefender products detect as Redirector.Paco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cyber insurance doesn’t come cheap and it doesn’t always pay out after a company is hacked. But today the Scottsdale-based company Trusona announced that it has become the world’s first insured authentication platform. Trusona, using its own cyber insurance, will insure the identity and thereby the transactions of Trutoken users up to $1 million.Tim Greene previously wrote about Trusona’s “100% accurate authentication scheme” which uses the company’s Trutoken dongle. The product is primarily aimed at users such as bank customers moving thousands of dollars or corporate executives with access to critical data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enabling e-commerce capabilities isn't a trivial matter for companies small or large, but SAP has a new cloud tool it thinks will help SMBs in particular. Called SAP Anywhere, it's designed specifically for companies with 10 to 200 employees.SAP Anywhere aims to help small and midsize businesses build a website or online store, create marketing campaigns, sell products and take payments, manage inventory, and analyze business performance, all from a mobile phone or tablet."More than 28 million small firms in the United States need to market goods online and satisfy customers' desire for a digital buying experience," said EJ Jackson, senior vice president and general manager for SAP Anywhere. "At the end of the day, company size is irrelevant to the consumer."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At the end of July 2016, the free upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10 will come to an end. In the meantime, lots of users and admins may find themselves electing to exercise their upgrade options, rather than let them go unused.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Google could face a record fine of up to €3 billion (US $3.4 billion) as soon as early next month as part of a six-year European Commission antitrust investigation into the company's search engine dominance, according to a news report.A fine in the European Commission's long-running investigation, launched in November 2010, is expected by summer, according to a report in The Telegraph, which cited anonymous sources. The $3.4 billion fine cited in the report would be less than the maximum allowed, which is 10 percent of Google's worldwide revenue, or about $7.5 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I'm a massive fan of HelloSign. I seem to have an ever-increasing number of documents to sign and forms to fill out. This, coupled with the fact that I don't work from one fixed location, means that I always had lots of frustration when it came to form filling. Having to find a printer to print a form out, a pen to fill it in and then some way of digitizing the form to send it back was a real pain.I haven't had to do any of that for a year or two now—I simply use HelloSign (and its super-handy Gmail integration) to fill in, sign and send forms in a flash. So, now that my business form signing problems are solved, what other areas can HelloSign help with?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Recently released reports from two investment research firms call into question just exactly where IBM fits in the cloud computing market.Deutsche Bank’s Markets Research team issued a note titled “Why IBM Won’t Catch AWS,” which argues that IBM’s focus on hybrid cloud computing puts the company in a different, and smaller, market than Amazon Web Services.Another report from UBS Global Research focused more broadly on the cloud computing market and said IBM should be considered among the “Big 4” providers in cloud: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.The conflicting reports show IBM is sitting on the fringe of the cloud market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The scam business of tricking employees into opening company coffers by spoof e-mails apparently from their CEO is on the rise.
The FBI says that the so-called business e-mail compromise scam has caused $2.3 billion in losses to 17,642 business and non-profit organizations in the U.S. and other countries since October 2013, with the number of victims nearly tripling since January 2015.
+More on network World: IRS: Top 10 2015 identity theft busts+
This week the Federal Trade Commission blog wrote that the CEO schemers first study their intended victims closely.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon's Fire tablet comes in a well thought out kid's edition. If you're in the market for a kid-proof tablet that won't break the bank, this is one to consider at its currently discounted price of $99.99. That's a $50 savings on its regular list price of $149.99.
The Fire Kids Edition sports a 7" 1024 x 600 IPS display (wider viewing angle and higher quality colors). There is a 2MP rear-facing HD camera as well as a VGA front-facing camera for things like Skype. 8GB internal storage is expandable to 128GB via a microSD slot, and Amazon gives you free unlimited cloud storage for Amazon content and photos/videos taken from the device. There's an accelerometer and gyroscopic sensor onboard, and Bluetooth for wireless headphones or microphone connections. Battery life is roughly 7 hours, and it recharges to 100% in about 6.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What the – ! Well the FBI is back to the same old shady surveillance tricks, shady if you believe the Fourth Amendment still means something. The next time you are near a courthouse, heck even out on a sidewalk or waiting at a bus stop, you might want to pay a little more attention to any trees or rocks that are nearby. Look closely; see any microphones or cameras? Why stop there? The FBI certainly didn’t when it secretly planted microphones in public near courthouses to record conversations and cameras to conduct clandestine video surveillance. And apparently the FBI decided it didn’t need no stickin’ warrant.But hey, the FBI didn’t just bug bus stops, light boxes, hedges, backpacks and vehicles near Alameda County’s Rene C. Davidson Courthouse for 10 months between March 2010 and January 2011. According to Jeff Harp, a former FBI special agent and a security analyst for KPIX 5, a CBS affiliate for the San Francisco Bay Area:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Back in 2013 I read a paper titled Life-Cycle Economic Analysis of Distributed Manufacturing with Open-Source 3-D Printers. The study, which focused on the legendary RepRap 3D printer, was conducted by Joshua Pearce at Michigan Technological University and concluded:
The results show that even making the extremely conservative assumption that [a] household would only use the printer to make the selected twenty products a year the avoided purchase cost savings would range from about $300 to $2000/year. Assuming the 25 hours of necessary printing for the selected products is evenly distributed throughout the year these savings provide a simple payback time for the RepRap in 4 months to 2 years and provide an ROI between>200% and >40%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here