Viber, a popular instant messaging and Voice-over-IP service provider with more than 700 million users, has implemented end-to-end encryption to protect its customers' communications against snooping.The move comes after Facebook-owned WhatsApp turned on full end-to-end encryption earlier this month, bringing secure and private instant messaging into the mainstream.The majority of IM apps have long encrypted the communications between users' devices and their own servers. However, in such a configuration, the service providers themselves can still read communications as they pass through their servers to get routed to the intended recipients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sennheiser, one of the world's leading manufacturers of headphones, microphones and wireless transmission systems, is currently offering their RS120 Wireless Heaphones at a 39% discount. With a regular price of $129, this unit can be purchased on Amazon now for just $78. The RS120 receives an average of 4 out of 5 stars from nearly 10,500 reviewers (read reviews).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After Siri provided a sneak peek at the dates for Apple’s 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference, the Cupertino-based company confirmed the event by launching its WWDC 2016 website.
WWDC starts on Monday, June 13, and runs throughout the week until Friday, June 17. WWDC actually takes place at two venues. Monday, the day of the keynote, will be at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. The rest of the week will be at Moscone West, where WWDCs in recent past have been held.
MORE: Siri says Apple WWDC is June 13-17To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today's workplace landscape is in a state of flux. Workers are still adjusting to a new normal in which job tenure is shorter and the hunt for a new position never stops. The annual Job Seeker Nation study from recruiting and hiring services company Jobvite shows that while 74 percent of the survey respondents say they're satisfied with their current job, that same percentage say they're also open to new opportunities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When it comes to performing ongoing maintenance, stomping out crises, or scoping new projects, most administrators either execute tasks manually or write a script to automate the process. But the really smart ones look for a capable tool to do the job.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
In a story I wrote for Computerworld in January, which was a review of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4, I mentioned Windows Server's new support for Hyper-V containers that had been added to its support for Docker-style containers (present within the beta product since the previous beta milestone release).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Google won approval last week to begin testing innovative 3.5 GHz wireless capabilities by using antennas on light poles and other structures in eight areas of Kansas City, Mo.It will be the first large-scale test of its kind in the nation, following a framework created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a year ago for the new Citizens Broadband Radio Service, which uses 3.5GHz spectrum and allows for dynamic spectrum sharing.+ ALSO: Kansas City presses on with emerging 'smart city' corridor (with video) +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies are feeling more comfortable with the cloud, virtualization and even software defined data centers than ever before, despite their fears about security breaches, according to a study due out this month by technology companies HyTrust and Intel. While no one thinks security problems will go away, companies are willing to tolerate the risk in the name of agility, flexibility and lower costs.Some 62 percent of executives, network administrators and engineers surveyed expect more adoption of SDDC in 2016, which can quantifiably drive up virtualization and server optimization, while 65 percent predict that these implementations will be faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every couple of weeks or so, Tom Kemp's company gets hit by ever-more-sophisticated attempts to trick them out of large sums of money.It started two years ago, before business email compromise -- also known as CEO fraud -- became as widely-known as it is today.The email came in addressed directly to the company's controller, asking for a wire transfer of more than $350,000. The email seemed to come from the CFO and was part of a longer chain of emails between the CFO and the CEO discussing the transfer."If you looked at the email thread, it looked legitimate," said Kemp, CEO at security firm Centrify. "And there was a real bank account and a real company name associated with it."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You may have seen Skype used for interviews on cable or local news channels. I see it used regularly on the small One America News Network (OANN) for live interviews, with the "SKYPE" logo plastered large on the screen.While the interview subject may be using the version you have installed on your PC, OANN and other cable news outlets use something very different, something called Skype TX. Skype TX is a "studio-grade" version of the software made for broadcasters to host guests and is integrated with their cable television infrastructure.Microsoft launched Skype TX two years ago and is now up to version 4. Microsoft said it got feedback from broadcasters in nearly 100 markets around the world, and it based the new version on their feedback. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We’ve all heard the expression, “Everyone else was playing checkers, but that guy was playing chess.” And “that guy” is usually the person who came out ahead because he (or she) was able to see past the immediate short-term problems and make plans that would win in the long run.In many ways, this is a microcosm of the battle over what hardware computing platform to use. And while everyone scurried around to figure out what platform won, a clear victor emerged: data.That’s right: data is the big winner.Of course, you are probably wondering why I think the so-called “platform wars” are over. My answer is simple: they’re not over, but they’re not as important as they once were. That's because while the rest of us were busy debating the merits of mainframes, IBM i, UNIX and Windows, data managed to work its way free of any one platform. In fact, any piece of data created on any system can be accessed and used by just about any machine in the world. It’s sort of like driving. Anyone can pull into any service station and fill up their tank regardless of whether they’re driving a Porsche, Chevy Continue reading
Cloud computing startup Mesosphere has decided to open source its platform for managing data center resources, with the backing of over 60 tech companies, including Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems.Derived from its Datacenter Operating System, a service that Mesosphere set out to build as an operating system for all servers in a data center as if they were a single pool of resources, the open source DC/OS offers capabilities for container operations at scale and single-click, app-store-like installation of over 20 complex distributed systems, including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka and Apache Cassandra, the company said in a statement Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Palo Alto Networks is on board with industry-wide efforts to share threat intelligence and disseminate it so the collective knowledge businesses gather about threats can be quickly turned into defenses against new types of attacks.Its efforts include support for the new federal Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that lifts some of the liability businesses are exposed to if they share data about security incidents. If the data inadvertently reveals personal information but was submitted in accordance with the law, the contributor would not be legally liable.The company is also hammering out the details of the Cyber Threat Alliance it formed last year to gather threat information from security vendors and researchers that can rapidly and thoroughly unmask current threats. The goal is to shorten the useful lives of attacks and put a heavier burden on attackers who want to stay in business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has cited new European data protection rules in support of its claim that the U.S. government should use inter-governmental agreements rather than a warrant to force the technology company to provide emails stored in Ireland that are required for an investigation.The General Data Protection Regulation was adopted last week by the European Parliament with an aim to provide an unified data protection regime across member states. It was earlier adopted by the Council of the EU, and is to come into effect in a little over two years after its publication in the EU Official Journal. The legislation will replace the EU Data Protection Directive, which dates back to 1995.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When you want to get an answer from Apple, your best bet is to go directly to Siri and cut out the middleman. Siri says Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference will be held June 13 through 17 in San Francisco.
And Siri can't wait for it: "I'm so excited."
Maybe that's because Apple is expected to reveal iOS and OS X updates in which Siri might even get a new feature or two. A thinner version of Apple Watch, plus upgrades to the Mac line, are also expected.
The 9to5Mac blog first picked up on the Siri leak about WWDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While Apple's annual iPhone unveiling is undoubtedly the company's biggest event each and every year, WWDC is clearly a close second. As the event where Apple showcases its latest advancements in user design and iOS and OS X technologies, Apple's annual worldwide developers conference typically provides us with a fascinating sneak peak at the future of mobile and desktop computing.This year, WWDC is slated to take place from June 13 and June 17 in San Francisco at the Moscone West convention center. Interestingly enough, word of Apple's WWDC schedule this year was initially leaked by Siri. Earlier today, a number of sites noted that when you ask Siri when WWDC is, Apple's intelligent personal assistant responds with the following:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While many of the usual suspects are still the top space junk producers, much more debris is now floating around Earth’s atmosphere since the six years NASA last looked a the top 10 space junk missions.
NASA' s Orbital Debris Program Office said that by far the source of the greatest amount of orbital debris remains the Fengyun-1C spacecraft, which was the target of a People’s Republic of China anti-satellite test in January 2007.
+More on Network World: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you think that making up a bogus name or using a fake age on a profile actually makes you harder to link to your profiles on other sites, then think again as researchers have determined how to use location data to link users across domains. You also should not be comforted when you learn that big data has been stripped of names and personal details; researchers say it is “no guarantee of privacy.”Columbia University computer science researchers Chris Riederer, Yunsung Kim, and Augustin Chaintreau, along with Google researchers Nitish Korula and Silvio Lattanzi, combined their considerable brain power to come up with an algorithm that only needs location data from two apps to identify someone. The researchers recently presented their paper, “Linking Users Across Domains with Location Data: Theory and Validation” (pdf), at the 25th International World Wide Web Conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Wellesley College may be known as a liberal arts college for women, but you can see that STEM is in full bloom at the school too by the nature of some of the signs students waved to runners along the Scream Tunnel at this year's Boston Marathon.MORE: 2012's Geekiest Boston Marathon Scream Tunnel signs
Bob Brown/NetworkWorld Kiss Me I Can Laser CutTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here