A poverty-stricken school district in Southern California has come up with a novel way to alleviate the lack of internet access for kids in its catchment area. It’s repurposing school buses as internet hotspots.The school buses are parked overnight in impoverished areas where hard-wired broadband Internet access isn’t usually available and students aren’t able to access the internet. Most of the school district’s students reside in stone-broke rural areas and/or reservations.All of the children in the vast, 1,220-square-mile school district qualify for reduced-priced or free meals, says the Office of Educational Technology (OET). And almost half of the students are English-language learners.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bill Fathers, the former executive of Savvis who has been leading VMware’s hybrid cloud efforts for the past three years, is leaving the company. LinkedIn
VMware EVP and GM of Cloud Services Bill Fathers is leaving the company
VMware confirmed the news that was first reported by Fortune.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft, Google sweeten their cloud freebies | OpenStack then vs. now +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Supreme Court has adopted amendments to a rule to give judges the authority to issue warrants to remotely search computers whose locations are concealed using technology.The proposed move had been criticized by civil rights groups and companies like Google that said it threatened to undermine the privacy rights and computer security of Internet users.The top court has approved changes to the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure , including Rule 41, which with some exceptions prohibits a federal judge from issuing a search warrant outside of the judge’s district. The change in the rule was proposed by the Advisory Committee on the Rules of Criminal Procedure at the request of the Department of Justice .To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Take a peek inside Samsung’s vast developer conferenceImage by Stephen LawsonSamsung kicked off its massive developer conference in San Francisco this week, where it's trying to get developers excited about its latest software, services and hardwareTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon showed off its dominance in the public cloud market on Thursday as the capstone to a better than expected quarterly earnings report.Revenue from Amazon Web Services during the first quarter of 2016 was up 64 percent year-over-year, showing the big money that's still out there as companies invest more and more in the public cloud. Amazon's cloud platform generated revenue of $2.56 billion, putting it on pace to make $10 billion this year, in line with a letter from CEO Jeff Bezos sent to shareholders earlier this month. That's big money to go with Amazon's massive customer base, which includes names like Netflix, Time Inc., and Intuit. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thus far, in my journey to interview the leaders of every major Linux distribution, I’ve talked with the people behind Ubuntu, elementary, Fedora and openSUSE. This time around, I talk with Martin Wimpress—the man behind Ubuntu MATE.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle is spending $663 million to buy Textura, a company that offers cloud services for the engineering and construction industry.Textura's products will be combined with Oracle's existing Primavera project-management suite -- the result of a 2008 acquisition by the database giant -- in the Oracle Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit, Oracle announced on Thursday. The focus of that unit will be offering a comprehensive cloud-based project control and execution platform that manages all phases of engineering and construction projects."The increasingly global engineering and construction industry requires digital modernization in a way that automates manual processes and embraces the power of cloud computing to easily connect the construction job site, reduce cost overruns and improve productivity," said Mike Sicilia, a senior vice president at Oracle who will lead the newly expanded business unit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. and its allies should be concerned about cyberattacks from ISIS-affiliated groups, but the hackers are poorly organized and likely underfunded, at least in the short term, according to a new report.Several pro-ISIS hacking groups announced this month they are joining together to form the United Cyber Caliphate, but the groups seem to have limited abilities, according to a report from security intelligence research group Flashpoint. Still, with new coordination, "even limited success could inflate their notoriety and enable them to continue to grow their capabilities and attract talent," Flashpoint said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An Estonian man has been sentenced to seven years and three months in prison in the U.S. for his role in a cybercriminal operation that infected over 4 million computers with DNS hijacking malware.Vladimir Tsastsin, 35, from Tartu, Estonia, was one of the key players in a US$14 million click fraud scheme. He is the sixth individual to be sentenced in the case and has received the longest prison sentence. The sentence was handed down Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.According to the Department of Justice, between 2007 and 2011, Tsastsin and his co-conspirators set up companies that masqueraded as publisher networks and entered into agreements with advertising brokers to display ads on their properties.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every now and then I get a product demo that makes me grin. One where the value of the product is just so obvious that I can't argue. That was the case recently when I met with Teridion and heard about what they're up to.Technically speaking Teridion offers a cloud-optimized routing platform. That is an uber-technical description and doesn't really do the product justice. But how about a description that is easier to understand? Like Waze, but for the internet? Or how about some results—a 20 times internet performance improvement?Teridion offers the Global Cloud Network (GCN) a new approach to content delivery that is both non-caching and secure—and required no hardware or pre-provisioning of servers. GCN is a globally routed overlay network leveraging cloud-optimized routing. Teridion deploys a number of Cloud Virtual Routers across the global data centers of multiple cloud vendors. These routers automatically sense localized traffic issues and route traffic to the best path for optimum speed. The net result is blazing performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Six years ago in July 2010 OpenStack held its first ever Summit; a group of 75 people, many from Rackspace and NASA, gathered in Austin, Texas to help launch the open source project.This week 7,500 attendees descended on the 14th semi-annual OpenStack Summit, which returned to its hometown since that inaugural event. Things are very different now than they were then.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: OpenStack users share challenges, benefits of open source cloud computing | Cool products from OpenStack Austin Summit +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mark Zuckerberg expects artificial intelligence will progress to make computers better than humans at basic sensory perception within the next 10 years, and that Facebook will end up knowing a lot more about you than it does now.The prediction is the latest from a top tech CEO to indicate the fast improvement being made in machine learning systems that just a few years ago would have struggled to recognize a dog from a cat.The Facebook CEO was speaking about core things that humans do, such as seeing, hearing and understanding language and was careful to clarify that computers will still have limited abilities elsewhere."That doesn't mean that the computers will be thinking or be generally better, but that is useful for a number of things," he told financial analysts on a conference call on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has partnered with a San Francisco-based company to encode information on synthetic DNA to test its potential as a new medium for data storage. Twist Bioscience will provide Microsoft with 10 million DNA strands for the purpose of encoding digital data. In other words, Microsoft is trying to figure out how the same molecules that make up humans' genetic code can be used to encode digital information. While a commercial product is still years away, initial tests have shown that it's possible to encode and recover 100 percent of digital data from synthetic DNA, said Doug Carmean, a Microsoft partner architect, in a statement.Using DNA could allow massive amounts of data to be stored in a tiny physical footprint. Twist claims a gram of DNA could store almost a trillion gigabytes of data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
USB Type C is the intriguing new port that began appearing in laptops, tablets, phones, and other devices well over a year ago, but we had no real way test its throughput performance until now. Thanks to Sandisk’s Extreme 900, we’re finally able to push that tiny reversible port to its limits. To do that I gathered up no fewer than eight laptops equipped with USB Type C ports, and threw in a desktop PCIe card for good measure too.What your USB-C port isn't telling you
USB Type C is supposed to be a universal standard, but it’s just universally confusing. A USB Type C port can run at either 5Gbps or 10Gbps and still be labeled USB 3.1 by the laptop maker. USB Type C even technically supports USB 2.0 speeds at a pathetic 480Mbps. So when you see a USB Type C port, the only assumption you can make is that its transfer speeds can vary from as low as 480Mbps to as high as 10Gbps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Android apps for app buildersWhen it comes to tablet apps, iPad vs. Android comparisons spark spirited debate. In the area of apps for developers, the Android tablet apps are more often free and less polished. On the other hand, there are plenty of Android tablet apps that will help developers in one way or another. While Android takes a lot of flack for “fragmentation,” in many ways it is now less fragmented than iOS from the viewpoint of a developer. It’s straightforward to create a single Android app that will work properly on a large range of devices, measured in operating system level, CPU power, available memory, and device size. On iOS, developers often find themselves writing separate iPhone and iPad apps in order to optimize both.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Identity protectionImage by ThinkstockThe IoT security battle is lost if you’re uncertain that the person or thing on the other end of an online transaction is actually who or what it claims to be. Most IoT attacks occur when malicious actors are able to replace an authentic sensor with a compromised device, or when unauthorized remote access is gained and transmits a false signal to a device. To prevent these kinds of attacks, digital identity must establish effective online trust for all connected devices and people in an IoT interconnected ecosystem. This kind of online trust is achieved by implementing a comprehensive approach to digital identity and access management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP's new Chromebook 13 offers some of the latest technologies that the company is also putting in its top-line Windows PCs.The new laptop is just 12.9-millimeters thick and has a 13.3-inch display that shows images at a 3200 x 1800 pixel resolution. That is the highest-resolution screen ever in Chromebooks, an improvement from the 2560 x 1700 pixel display on Google's Chromebook Pixel.The Chromebook 13 weighs 2.86 kilograms, and is the first with Intel's Skylake-based Core M processor, which focuses more on battery life than performance. HP claims the Chromebook 13 delivers 11.5 hours of battery life.It has a metallic finish, giving it a premium look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ransomware has become a major threat to the U.S. healthcare industry this year. The high-profile attacks that involved Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles, MedStar Health in Washington, D.C., and other healthcare systems are just the tip of the iceberg. Over half of hospitals surveyed recently by HIMSS Analytics and Healthcare IT News said they had been hit by ransomware attacks in the past year. Another 25 percent were unsure whether such attacks had occurred. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“Government, we have a problem”—to paraphrase the crew of the 1970 moon flight reporting back on Apollo 13’s technical fault. But it sounds about right to describe, in one line, the somewhat frightening state of U.S. government infrastructure—including that of NASA, which is the worst of the federal agencies—exposed recently in a report.Network infrastructure weaknesses and vulnerabilities abound, according to SecurityScorecard.The tip of the iceberg appears to be the now-famous 2015 Office of Personnel Management loss of 21 million people’s Social Security numbers and other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today I’m confronted with the possibility that Comcast may buy DreamWorks. This should be banned.
Why?
Last Thursday, I called Comcast to move my service. No matter that I’ve had Comcast on and off (no pun intended) since 1998. Disregard the numerous complaints to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission regarding the company’s service, billing, infrastructure problems and varying forms of incompetence.
During call #1, the over-eager customer service agent (CSA) disconnected my service then and there, and thus also terminated my call, as it was over Skype.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here