Optical discs like Blu-ray are losing favor, but Sony and Panasonic don't seem to care. The companies have cranked up the storage capacity on optical media to a stunning 3.3TB.That's a big advance in Sony's optical storage, which is based on technology used in Blu-ray. The 3.3TB disc is targeted at studios, filmmakers, and broadcasters that store large volumes of video, and at large companies that store infrequently modified data.For example, video streaming companies could hold a large library of films in storage arrays with many optical drives. Instead of using PCs, servers in data centers could then pull out movies from the drives and serve them to users via the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Neither humans nor AI has proven overwhelmingly successful at maintaining cybersecurity on their own, so why not see what happens when you combine the two? That's exactly the premise of a new project from MIT, and it's achieved some pretty impressive results.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and machine-learning startup PatternEx have developed a new platform called AI2 that can detect 85 percent of attacks. It also reduces the number of "false positives" -- nonthreats mistakenly identified as threats -- by a factor of five, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Services that convert long, cumbersome URLs, such as those found in mapping directions, to short URLs are publicly exposing the original URL.Original addresses can be obtained through brute-force scanning, researchers say. And that vulnerability allows foes to track an individual’s possibly sensitive movements, as well as see perceived-of-as-private documents.Additionally, the brute force-exposed cloud documents could allow “adversaries” to “inject arbitrary malicious content into unlocked accounts, which is then automatically copied into all of the account owner’s devices,” say Vitaly Shmatikov, of Cornell Tech, and Martin Georgiev, an independent researcher, in their paper (PDF). They made the discovery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is nothing if not ambitious. It’s famed “moonshot” projects have taken on notoriously large projects, from extending human lifespans to drones that can stay aloft for years at a time. But this one takes the cake.According to the subscription tech news site The Information, Alphabet, Google’s holding company, is trying to get CEO Larry Page to sign off on “Project Sidewalk.” The Information describes the effort as an attempt “to create an area in the U.S. that serves as a test bed for new technologies from superfast internet to autonomous cars. … An area that could accommodate hundreds of thousands of people has been contemplated.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IT employees at EmblemHealth are organizing to stop the New York-based employer from outsourcing their jobs to offshore provider Cognizant.Employees say the insurer is on the verge of signing a contract with Cognizant, an IT services firm and one of the largest users of H-1B workers. They say the contract may be signed as early as this week.They fear what a contract with at IT services offshore firm may mean: Humiliation as part of the "knowledge transfer" process, loss of their jobs or a "rebadging" to Cognizant, which they see as little more than temporary employment. Many of the workers, about 200 they estimate, are older, with 15-plus-year tenures. This means a hard job search for them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Kirill Tatarinov took over as CEO of Citrix in January, a key piece of a company reorganization demanded by activist investor Elliott Management, which had acquired a 7.5% stake in Citrix. Tatarinov, a 13 year veteran of Microsoft, where he was most recently Executive Vice President of the Microsoft Business Solutions Division, is putting the finishing touches on the company’s new plan, which will be introduced at the company’s large user conference in May, but he shared a preliminary glimpse with Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.
Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Securing a business network has never been easy, but the task is becoming increasingly more difficult.Years ago, there was a single ingress/egress point to get into the network. The delineation between what was public and what was private was obvious.Today, that’s all changed. The rise of mobile devices, Wi-Fi access points, cloud applications and software-defined everything has increased the number of entry points into a company from one to tens, hundreds or even thousands for large organizations. For example, it’s common for a worker to connect to some kind of “free” Wi-Fi network when travelling without having any idea who might own that network, browse the web and infect their mobile device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The wave of rogue USB-C products that poses risks to PCs and mobile devices hasn't gone unnoticed, and the USB Implementers Forum has taken steps to eradicate the issue once and for all.A new specification announced by the USB 3.0 Promoters Group, which is part of USB-IF, aims to eliminate rogue cables, ports and chargers. The USB Type-C Authentication protocol will verify and ensure a USB-C connection won't fry a port or damage a device.A host device like a smartphone or PC will first verify the authenticity of the cable, charger or power source before any data is transferred. If everything checks out, a connection will be established.So if a smartphone or PC won't charge from a USB port in a public place, it's perhaps because there's a non-compliant component.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A software platform from startup Verodin launches simulated attacks against live networks as a way to check the effectiveness of their defenses and also train security operations personnel.Verodin’s gear includes software probes that are deployed in customer networks to act as both attackers and targets. Data about the effectiveness of the simulated attacks is fed to a Web-based management platform called a controller that shows how well the network defended itself.Verodin’s platform is similar to that from another startup called AttackIQ.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Startup Nyansa Inc. today launched a SaaS-based IT network analytics service that can inspect, analyze and correlate wireline and wireless data to help large campus IT shops speed network problem resolution and create performance baselines that can be used for network tuning, gauging the impact of network changes, and justifying new network investments.
The CEO and co-founder of the company, which has raised $12 million in venture backing, is Abe Ankumah, onetime Senior Director of Products and Business Operations at Aruba Networks, who went on to become Director of Client Products and Alliances at Meraki. When Meraki was acquired by Cisco in 2012 Ankumah became Director of Cisco’s Cloud Networking Group, but left in late 2013 to cofound Nyansa with CTO Anand Srinivas and VP of Engineering Daniel Kan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my last post I posed the question of whether it’s time to look for alternatives to the leading publishing platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc., but, truth be told, finding an alternative that can do everything these products do is practically impossible … that is, unless you’re willing to spend money building a customized solution.And that may be the reality of the future; if you don’t build your own solution paying upfront at perhaps 100x the cost (thanks, Keith) of, say, a simple WordPress installation, you’ll windup paying far more than that when you get hacked. According to IBM’s tenth annual Cost of Data Breach Study:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The hacker responsible for bringing pwnage pain to the Hacking Team last July has published an in-depth “DIY guide” for how he pulled it off. It’s a detailed, really great read.The hacker is none other than Phineas Fisher; he runs the @GammaGroupPR Twitter account, now referred to as “Hack Back,” and previously leaked FinFisher spyware documents, including details like which antivirus solutions could detect Gamma International’s surveillance malware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe.
Last year the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) issued a statement to notify financial institutions about the growing trend of cyber attacks designed to steal online credentials. While this is certainly a big issue for banks and credit unions, concern about stolen credentials extends far beyond the financial services industry. Basically any organization with valuable data is at risk of an attack initiated with seemingly legitimate credentials.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding bugs in Web applications is an ongoing challenge, but a new tool from MIT exploits some of the idiosyncrasies in the Ruby on Rails programming framework to quickly uncover new ones.In tests on 50 popular Web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed security flaws, and it took no more than 64 seconds to analyze any given program.Ruby on Rails is distinguished from other frameworks because it defines even its most basic operations in libraries. MIT's researchers took advantage of that fact by rewriting those libraries so that the operations defined in them describe their own behavior in a logical language.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After months of speculation, Mitel finally pulled the trigger on acquiring Polycom for $1.96 billion.Competing in the unified communications (UC) market means having to butt heads with not just one, but two 800-pound gorillas named Cisco and Microsoft. The combined “MiPolycom” will be a much bigger, stronger, $2.5 billion revenue company—much more capable of competing with the big boys.Mitel’s acquisition of Polycom is a bit of an unusual situation. Polycom is bigger than Mitel in both revenue and market cap, but Mitel was able to secure a $1.05 billion loan from Bank of America and Merrill Lynch to complete the deal. Under the terms of the agreement, Polycom will continue to run as a separate business unit under Mitel and will retain its brand. Rich McBee, Mitel’s CEO, will be the CEO of the combined organization, which will be headquartered in Ottawa, Canada.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It was no surprise when Samsung unveiled its first tablet hybrid, the Galaxy TabPro S. However, the surprise came when Samsung announced it opted to equip the device with Windows 10 instead of Android. It was a smart move by Samsung, firmly placing the Galaxy TabPro S alongside the Microsoft Surface Pro 4. The Surface 4 is the most popular Windows 10 hybrid today, but that could change with Samsung's latest flagship device. But which device is the better enterprise option when you pit them head-to-head? Microsoft
Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 is the kind of device leading the trend toward detachable tablets, also called 2-in-1s. Many Windows 10 detachables are expected to be launched in 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a bill that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from regulating broadband pricing under its net neutrality rules.The No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act would limit the FCC's authority over prices after the agency reclassified broadband as a regulated telecom service when it passed net neutrality rules in February 2015. The bill passed 241-173 Friday, with only five Democrats voting for it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Colfax's new Ninja desktops are anything but invisible; these workstations can roar with the unprecedented computing power of Intel's latest 72-core supercomputing chips.The workstations have the upcoming Xeon Phi chip code-named Knights Landing, which Intel has claimed is its most powerful chip to date. Intel last year said a limited number of workstations with the chip would become available in 2016. Knights Landing wasn't designed with desktops in mind, but for some of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The 72-core chip can be used as a primary CPU, or as a coprocessor to rev up intense computing tasks, much like GPUs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The cloud is exploding globally, with most of IT spending soon to be allocated to cloud, according to a new Intel report.The technology company predicts that virtually all IT spending (80 percent) will be on cloud in the next 16 months. One reason is that ever-increasing digital activities “are leveraging cloud computing in some way,” the company said in its press release.And it’s happening quickly, according to the survey of 1,200 IT executives in eight countries, which was conducted by market research provider Vanson Bourne on behalf of Intel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
That didn’t take long.In an interview published only two days ago by Variety, the head of AMC Entertainment, Adam Aron, suggested that making his company’s theaters more “texting friendly” would be just the ticket to attract more moviegoers, particularly younger ones.As anyone other than Aron should have expected, reaction to the idea was almost universally negative.And so this morning, while many media outlets were just getting around to reporting on Aron’s texting trial balloon, AMC stuck a pin in it via Twitter: “NO TEXTING AT AMC. Won't happen. You spoke. We listened. Quickly, that idea has been sent to the cutting room floor.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here