On April 14, MacKeeper security researcher Chris Vickery discovered another misconfigured MongoDB, but this time the database contained the full names, addresses, birth dates and voter registration numbers for every Mexican voter. The database containing personal information on 93.4 million Mexican voters was hosted on an Amazon cloud server with “no password or any authentication of any sort” to protect it. And it has been publicly accessible since September 2015, according to Salted Hash’s Steve Ragan; although it is unknown how many people besides Vickery accessed the records.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the peculiar things about computer security is how much the topic is written about and discussed (a huge amount) compared to how much is actually done (always less than you think). But what’s really peculiar is that enterprises, which you’d think would have better security than organizations in, say, the SMB space, often have serious security deficiencies. Case in point: The Bangladesh Central Bank.In February this year, hackers managed to get into the Bangladesh Central Bank’s network and acquired the bank’s SWIFT credentials, codes that authorize interbank transfers. The hackers then used the credentials four times to transfer some $81 million to various accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka via the New York Federal Reserve but on the fifth attempt, the hackers misspelled the receiving account’s name (they spelled “Shalika Foundation” as Shalika “Fandation”)(du’oh). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The HTC 10 announcement left the impression that HTC built another desirable unlocked phone like the HTC One A9 that Verizon Wireless customers were locked out of buying. But today, without a formal announcement the HTC 10 appeared on Verizon’s website. The Verizon version of the HTC 10 isn’t available on HTC’s website.Preorders begin on April 29 2016. There was no mention of price and availability. It should be priced at $699 unless HTC diverges from its usual policy of pricing the same models at the same prices; though promotions can be different between carriers for the same models. Looking at the hardware, the same model that supports AT&T and T-Mobile also has the frequency bands for Verizon, indicating that the early May availability could be the same for all three models.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The rivalry between AMD and Intel peaked during the first decade of the 2000s, when the companies consistently challenged each other with a stream of chip innovations.Since then, AMD lost its way, and today it barely registers as a threat to Intel. But the competitive landscape could start changing as early as next year.Intel's x86 chips are installed in most PCs and servers, and AMD has been losing market share for years. AMD's chip technology has fallen behind Intel's after some ill-advised architectural changes, acquisitions, and manufacturing problems.Intel's x86 processor market share was 87.7 percent the fourth quarter of 2015, growing from 86.3 percent a year earlier. AMD held just a 12.1 percent share, falling from 13.6 percent, according to Mercury Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.The adoption of software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies is driven by tremendous potential for dynamic scalability and business agility, but the transition is fraught with complexities that need to be considered.This ecosystem relies on the abstraction or pooling of physical resources (primarily compute, network and storage) by means of virtualization. With software orchestrating new or updated services, the promise is these resources can be provisioned in real-time, without human intervention. In essence, this is the technology response to the agility demands of the modern digital business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AI may have trounced humanity in the ancient game of Go, but it remains untested in countless other gaming arenas. Case in point: Doom, which, it turns out, will be the technology's next big challenge.Launched in 1993, Doom is widely considered a landmark title in the video-game industry for popularizing the first-person shooter genre. Now, artificial-intelligence researchers will have a chance to pit their creations against others in a contest based on the game at the IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games conference in September.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NASA this week said it was calling for public input on living quarters for astronauts to live in deep space as well as systems and technologies for a new Mars Orbiter.As far as the living spaces go, Congress earlier this year urged the space agency to move along its ideas for how humans would live on planets or other places far from Earth. With that pressure as a backdrop NASA said it wants US companies, universities, and non-profit organizations to offer up their best ideas for space living systems would include reliable life support systems, fire safety, atmosphere revitalization and monitoring, water processing, lighting, and fire detection and radiation protection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Obama administration is continuing its push to advance math and science education this week, turning attention to early learning with the announcement of a slew of initiatives aimed at promoting the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, mathematics and engineering.[ Related: STEM education gets boost from White House ]The White House and Department of Education are positioning early STEM education as a key to the administration's goal of elevating the nation's competitive position, both by measure of student achievement and, in the longer view, by the economic and social benefits that follow from a workforce with a solid foundation in the subjects that are increasingly critical to the 21st century economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Improving the delivery of services to citizens has been one of the driving goals of government IT reform, in particular as consumers seek out more services through agency websites or applications.At the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, CIO Mark Schwartz is helping lead an overhaul of the way the agency approaches software and application development[ Related: Government wants to increase IT spending 13% in proposed budget ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bitcasa is getting out of the consumer cloud storage business, the company announced Thursday.“We are discontinuing our Bitcasa Drive service in order to focus our full attention on our growing platform business,” the company said in a short blog post, as first reported by VentureBeat. “All account owners must take action to avoid losing their files.”Users who need assistance recovering and preserving their files should use Bitcasa’s Help Center, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A feature in the just-released 16.04 version of Ubuntu could pose a serious threat to the privacy of desktop Linux users, according to a well-known open-source software expert.Version 16.04, the latest long-term-support release of Ubuntu, features a new package format used for installing software on an Ubuntu system, called snap. Snaps are designed to be easier for developers to construct, simpler to deploy, and able to work comfortably alongside the existing deb package format.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows 10's upgrade model temporarily wipes $1.6B from Microsoft's books | One of GNU/Linux’s most important networking components just got an update To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Peter Waterhouse, Senior Strategist, CA TechnologiesAlthough vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.How many times have you witnessed a sub-optimal IT practice that everyone else thinks is ok, then over time accepted the behavior as being just fine and dandy?Regardless of whether you lead a startup or work in an established business, we all have a tendency to accept dodgy behaviors. Even if outsiders see them as wrong, our IT teams are so accustomed to using them (without any adverse consequences) that they’re quickly established as “normal” and accepted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google and Microsoft have agreed to end their long-running regulatory battles and stop complaining to government agencies about each other.Microsoft had been one of the leading companies calling for governments to investigate Google over potential antitrust violations in recent years. Earlier this year, though, Microsoft withdrew its support for FairSearch, a coalition of companies pushing the EU to file formal antitrust complaints against Google.The announcement of the new agreement between the two companies comes just two days after the European Commission filed new antitrust charges against Google related to packaging its apps on Android phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
The single location contact/call center of years past would have had little need for Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology. But today’s call/contact centers for customer service, technical support, outgoing call banks and other use cases are almost always multi-location and usually global, and the right SD-WAN solution can improve reliability and the customer experience while lowering costs.
Call centers were among the first adopters of VoIP, at least within the call center network, and they have historically used MPLS in the WAN, very often dual MPLS networks. While the latter is expensive, the approach has been needed to maintain reliability and call quality.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Orange Tsai set out to participate in Facebook's bug bounty program in February, he successfully managed to gain access to one of Facebook's corporate servers. But once in, he realized that malicious hackers had beaten him to it.Tsai, a consultant with Taiwanese penetration testing outfit Devcore, had started by mapping Facebook's online properties, which extend beyond user-facing services like facebook.com or instagram.com.One server that caught his attention was files.fb.com, which hosted a secure file transfer application made by enterprise software vendor Accellion and was presumably used by Facebook employees for file sharing and collaboration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yesterday, the European Union launched an inquiry into Android’s dominant 80% share of the smartphone market. The Antitrust Commission announced it will investigate the connection between Google Play services and Google apps.Any smartphone supplier can run the Android Open Source Project (OASP,) a free and available as an open source project. China’s Xiaomi, for instance, takes the Android OASP and repackages it with a UI that looks like iPhone’s UI. Xaomi doesn’t opt in to the Play Store for its apps, but relies on its own app store. Most hardware OEMs opt in to Google Play services because they want access to the million plus apps on the Play Store and Android’s security services. Security is a more subtle point but an important part of the Android operating systems architecture that is built on Play Services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tech companies dominate Glassdoor’s ranking of the highest paying companies in the U.S., snagging 20 of the top 25 spots. But no tech company ranks higher than Juniper Networks, which pays its workers a median total compensation of $157,000.The next-highest ranking tech company is Google, which landed at No. 5 on Glassdoor's list with a median total compensation of $153,750.While tech companies earned the most spots on the list, consulting firms set the high bar for compensation in Glassdoor’s report, “25 Highest Paying Companies in America for 2016." No. 1 on the list is A.T. Kearney, which pays a median total compensation of $167,534. Strategy&, at No. 2 on the list, pays a median total compensation of $160,000.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has released patches to fix serious denial-of-service flaws in its Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) software, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software and the Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP) library that's used in many products.The Cisco WLC software contains two denial-of-service vulnerabilities, one of which is rated critical and could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker through specially crafted HTTP requests sent to the device. This can cause a buffer overflow condition that, in addition to a device reload, might also allow for execution of arbitrary code on the device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One wouldn't typically imagine liquid cooling in a tablet, but Acer has pulled it off with its latest Switch Alpha 12.The liquid-cooling feature is especially noteworthy, considering fans are disappearing from tablets and hybrids. But tablet has Intel's Skylake-based Core I processors, and it needed a cooling mechanism, and Acer didn't want fans in it.While announcing the tablet Thursday, Acer said it is the first fanless tablet with a Skylake Core I processor. The device doesn't use Intel's power-efficient Core M processors, which is offered in many Windows thin-and-lights and the new MacBook.The Acer device has a "closed-loop liquid system," which dissipates the heat as liquid floats through the system. The liquid cooling system takes up little space.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Jason Koebler at Motherboard has done the worlds of reading, writing and recycling a massive favor by clarifying – debunking, in many cases – a run-amok story from earlier this week that created the erroneous impression that Apple was profiting handsomely from the mining of millions of dollars worth of gold from old iGadgets. Koebler’s piece begins:
You may have seen a viral headline floating around over the last few days: Apple recycled $40 million worth of gold last year, which was extracted from iPhones. Almost none of what was reported is true.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here