AI has already proved its prowess in chess, Jeopardy and the ancient game of Go, but it's now come out victorious in yet another arena: the classic game of Foosball.A group of computer engineering students at Brigham Young University have spent the past semester creating a robotic, computer-controlled Foosball table with the goal of beating human players. The table is constructed so that a camera mounted above can track the movement of the ball, while an algorithm controls the rods on which the plastic players are attached.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Through May 7th, in honor of Mother's Day, Amazon has discounted various models of Kindle and Fire Tablets, some up to 30% off their regular list price. Use the links below to learn more and explore buying options.
Save $30 on the Fire HD 6
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$20 Off Kindle Paperwhite -- Amazon's best-selling Kindle.
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To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell has made a tremendous amount of noise in the media over the past few months caused by the ripple effect of its acquisition of EMC. Whether one thinks the merger is a good idea or not, it’s a fact that the merger will have a significant impact on the storage and server industries.Today, Dell announced plans that will bolster its position in networking. The move to become a digital organization is a trend that’s now being felt across almost all companies in every vertical. The building blocks of digital are technologies such as cloud, mobile, big data and analytics. What do these have in common? They’re all network-centric, meaning the network plays a key role in the shift to a digital enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Our next installment of “Geek-themed Meme of the Week” comes courtesy of the Twitter account of INE, Inc., and will be familiar to all network professionals. INE via Twitter
How familiar? https://twitter.com/SDNgeek/status/723644359099322369
If you’d like to catch up on past “Geek-Themed Memes of the Week,” you can find the archive here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Traditionally the way an organization gives its remote employees access to corporate applications is via a Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPNs have never been a whole lot of fun to use, but as the world moves to ever higher numbers of discrete applications and a huge variety of access devices, the traditional VPN model is looking tired.Zscaler aims to change that with Zscaler Private Access, a new service that promises organizations to provide access to internal applications and services while ensuring the security of their networks.Zscaler is an internet security company. The company offers a secure web gateway, fully from the cloud. In doing so, Zscaler is helping to move security further out into the internet backbone. Indeed, Zscaler is operated from over 100 data centers globally. Zscaler covers a host of security needs, including internet security, next-generation firewall, web security, sandboxing/advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, data loss prevention, SSL inspection, traffic shaping, policy management and threat intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For decades, the U.S. took for granted the doubling of supercomputing power every 10 years, roughly in line with Moore's Law. But once a petascale system was reached in 2008, it gradually became clear that the next leap -- a system 1,000 times more powerful -- would be difficult.Initially, some believed such a system -- an exascale computer -- was possible in 10 years, or by 2018. But problems emerged. It took too much power, and it required new approaches to applications to utilize an almost unimaginable level of parallelism involving hundreds of millions of cores. Another problem to solve was the need for resilience, or an ability to continue to working around multiple ongoing hardware failures expected in a system of this size.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The aptly named advanced persistent threat (APT) is a type of network attack in which an attacker selects a specific target, uses social engineering and advanced technologies to break into a network and then focuses on that target for weeks, months or years until the attack has successfully played out (or been thwarted). Once inside a network, the attacker's goal is to remain undetected while using some type of malware to capture confidential information, which is ultimately sent to a different location for analysis and then sold on the black market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The ninth annual Verizon Data Breach Report came out this morning with bad news on multiple fronts, including click-through rates on phishing messages, how long it takes companies to detect breaches, and even whether companies spot the breaches at all.Phishing emails continued to be a primary starting point for attacks, said Bryan Sartin, executive director, global security services at Verizon.The number of phishing email messages that were opened hit 30 percent in this year's report, up from 23 percent last year.In addition, 12 percent of users don't just open the email but open the attachment as well, while 11 percent follow links in the email to online forms where they then input sensitive data such as login credentials.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nokia is paying 170 million euros (US$191 million) to acquire French fitness gadgets company Withings in a bid to get into the digital health market.For the Espoo, Finland company, which sold its handset business to Microsoft two years ago, and has been since mainly in the area of selling telecom equipment, the acquisition marks a strong push into connected healthcare and home products, ranging from activity trackers, weighing scales, thermometers, blood pressure monitors, and home and baby monitors.Nokia's brand, which is still well-regarded in many consumer markets, may aid the company as it enters new segments and starts what it describes as a "new chapter."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s one activity that dominates the athletic activities of pretty much everyone in IT and that activity is inactivity. Whether it’s in a car seat, a train, a bus, or in front of a computer, most of us are locked into a chair for 6 or more hours every day and what does this cost us? Along with all of the other health consequences (heart disease, muscle degeneration, strained necks, limp glutes (yewww), tight hips, … I could go on but it's pretty gruesome), sitting for long periods of time ruins our backs. We sit there every day squinting at our screens, slumped into postures that nature never intended us to hold for hours at a time then we wonder why we ache.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many enterprises are looking to the Internet of Things to monitor and control assets they can't physically reach. Building networks that can cover all those assets is one of the big challenges of industrial IoT.Cellular networks cover people well, at least in developed countries, but total land area not as well. LPWANs (low-power wide-area networks) are emerging as an alternative for reaching endpoints over longer distances, thanks to their lower speed and power levels and designs optimized for IoT. But for truly global connectivity, satellite is really the only game in town. (And, more importantly, far out of town.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AUSTIN, Texas – Today, 114 petabytes of data traverse AT&T's network daily, and the carrier predicts a 10x increase in traffic by 2020. To help manage this, AT&T is transitioning from purpose-built appliances to white boxes running open source software. And according to AT&T Senior Vice President of Software Development and Engineering Sarabh Saxena, OpenStack has been a key part of this shift.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: OpenStack Director: Why open source should be the core of your cloud | Cool products from OpenStack Summit +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This security camera from Wansview currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from 180 reviewers on Amazon (read reviews). It lists for $199.99, but with the current 55% discount you save $110 and can buy it for just $89.99.The unit has clarity up to 1920x1080, and and SD card slot (max 64GB supported) for video recording and playback. Horizontal 340 degree and vertical 90degree pan & tilt capability. 4x digital zoom, and IR LED night vision up to 26 feet. It also features a built-in mic and speaker for 2-way audio communication and connects easily to your smartphone for remote viewing. If enabled, it can send pictures or video when motion is detected. See this feature-packed IP camera on Amazon and review buying options.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In February, attackers tried to steal $951 million using the SWIFT bank transfer system by submitting transfer requests from the Central Bank of Bangladesh to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Before the cyber heist was detected, attackers got away with $81 million by routing and laundering the funds through a bank account in the Philippines. Most of the transfers were thwarted for an unexplained reason.Reuters reported the details of the cyber heist based on an interview with defense contractor and security researcher BAE Systems. It wasn’t clear if BAE Systems worked independently, for SWIFT or for the Bangladesh Bank. The report exposes that the SWIFT software has the same design flaws as the Target point-of-sale (POS) system. Both imprudently relied on the assumption of an impenetrable perimeter for security. The fault appears to be SWIFT’s—if BAE is correct in its report that “the malware registers itself as a service and operates within an environment running SWIFT’s Alliance software suite, powered by an Oracle Database.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It might have been a pretty nice life for Thomas Hauk -- for a while anyway -- but frauds usually explode and this one was nothing different.The US Marshals this week announced the auction of the Hauk’s spoils -- 25 vehicles, including Ferrari, Mclaren, BW and Porche cars worth more than $1.5 million.+More on Network World: 26 of the craziest and scariest things the TSA has found on travelers+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An international group of investors announced today that Sirin Labs, a startup with $72 million in venture funding, is planning to create a smartphone that combines premium performance and functionality with strong privacy protection.Sirin’s announcement gave few details about the device, internally dubbed the SP1, but the company says that interested parties won’t have long to wait for additional information, as it should go on sale within the next two months. The SP1’s design, according to Sirin, will attempt to graft high-end flagship features onto a far greater emphasis on security than most modern smartphones.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Top U.S. universities failing at cybersecurity education + Malvertising attack silently infects old Android devices with ransomwareTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While always an integral part of a company’s security procedures, firewalls are becoming even more important as more companies move to the cloud and software defined networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Brocade announced today the availability of its virtual network function (VNF) Manager. The product is a commercial version of OpenStack Tacker, an OpenStack lead project designed to make it easier to deploy and operate virtual network services. The initiative is compatible with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Framework.For those not familiar with NFV, the technology allows organizations to run network services as virtual functions instead of requiring a single appliance per function. NFV has many cost benefits, as it reduces the overall hardware that needs to be purchased and managed. More important, it gives network services the same level of agility as virtual servers and storage. Infrastructure agility is a core requirement of becoming a digital company, and NFV enables that at the network level. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Data science may have dominated recent discussions about IT skills in chronically short supply, but it's not the only area facing a shortage. Cloud computing is another big one, and on Monday the OpenStack Foundation launched a new program it hopes will help.The group's new Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam is designed to give cloud professionals a way to prove their worth while also helping employers identify qualified candidates. Originally announced in October at OpenStack Summit Tokyo, the performance-based exam can now be delivered virtually anywhere in the world through the OpenStack Foundation's training marketplace. It is the foundation's first professional certification offering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
High-profile data breaches have become all too common in recent years with companies such as Target Home Depot and Anthem forced to own up to and handle PR nightmares following large-scale hacks. As a result, security has become a major priority for businesses both big and small -- but hackers always seem to be one step ahead. Experts agree that there is a growing need for cybersecurity professionals and universities across the country haven't caught up to the needs of the corporations. In fact, a recent study by CloudPassage found that most schools earn an "F" grade when it comes to teaching the next generation of cybersecurity pros.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here