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Category Archives for "Networking"

Microsoft’s enterprise phone strategy flops as revenue evaporates

Microsoft last week quietly acknowledged that a year-old plan to focus phone sales on the enterprise market is dead."We had no material Phone revenue this quarter," said Amy Hood, the company's CFO, during an earnings call with Wall Street on Thursday.In fact, phone revenue amounted to just $5 million for the three-month stretch, representing a massive decline of 99% from the same period of the prior year. Assuming each Windows smartphone brought $500 to Microsoft, that was a sluggish pace of just five phones sold per hour. Worldwide.It's not as if the demise of Microsoft's phone business was a surprise. The division, which was based on the 2014 acquisition of Nokia, has been in trouble with a capital "T" since 2015, when Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion, nearly the full price it paid for the Finnish company's mobile phone assets and a collection of associated patents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Data breaches: It’s still personal

In a blog post last September, I highlighted how data breaches for the first half of 2016 shifted from stolen credit card data and financial information to the theft of something much more personal—identities. Unsurprisingly, this trend continued throughout the remainder of the year.According to the recently released Breach Level Index, 1,792 data breaches led to almost 1.4 million data records being compromised worldwide, an increase of 86 percent compared to 2015. Once again, identity theft was the leading type of data breach last year, accounting for 59 percent of all data breaches. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Data breaches: It’s still personal

In a blog post last September, I highlighted how data breaches for the first half of 2016 shifted from stolen credit card data and financial information to the theft of something much more personal—identities. Unsurprisingly, this trend continued throughout the remainder of the year.According to the recently released Breach Level Index, 1,792 data breaches led to almost 1.4 million data records being compromised worldwide, an increase of 86 percent compared to 2015. Once again, identity theft was the leading type of data breach last year, accounting for 59 percent of all data breaches. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Summoning All Youth! Let the World Know What You Think About the Internet!

I'm Bruna Santos, a Brazillian tech policy nerd!

For the past three years I have worked as a legal advisor at the Presidency of Brazil, covering Human Rights and Internet Governance issues and taking part in interesting discussions on the Internet in Brazil in past years like the Marco Civil da Internet (Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet) and Data Protection bill draft. I am also an alumna of the Brazilian School of Internet Governance, a CGI.br fellow at the 9th Latin America and Caribbean Regional Preparatory Meeting for the Internet Governance Forum, an ICANN Fellow during ICANN58, and a very proud member of the Internet Society Special Interest Group Youth Observatory.  

Bruna Santos

Microsoft to host Windows as a Service AMA chat

News aggregator and fan community Reddit frequently hosts an “Ask me Anything” (AMA) live discussion where people can ask questions of celebrities, technologists, politicians, and whatnot and get answers almost in real time. They can be informative and entertaining, or they can turn into unmitigated disasters.Microsoft is no doubt hoping for the former as it hosts its own AMA event to give its customers the chance to ask about the company’s plans for Windows as a Service (WaaS), its efforts to move Windows to a internet-dependent state of continuous development rather than going the old route of just providing fixes and an occasional service pack before the next major OS release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: From Self-Driving Cars to Self-Driving WANs

I realize that the idea of a ‘Self-driving’ WAN could seem like science fiction. But if you think of the visions propelling companies like Google, Tesla and Amazon, you can begin to realize how big an impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have in the next few years, both on our personal lives—and the way IT runs enterprises.MOVING FROM AUTOMATED TO AUTONOMOUSEnterprises are already turning to Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions to connect employees consistently and securely to applications—whether the applications are in the data center or the cloud.Automation plays a key role in these current SD-WAN offerings, eliminating many of the repetitive and mundane manual steps required to configure and connect remote offices and branch locations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MIT’s WiGait uses wireless signals to step up detection of health issues

Professor Dina Katabi's endlessly inventive team at MIT's CSAIL outfit has now come up with what it says is an unobtrusive way to wirelessly detect possible health issues via changes in walking speed.The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) claims its WiGait system is more accurate than wearables like FitBits and smartphone-based step trackers, and they outline the technology in a new paper titled "Extracting Gait Velocity and Stride Length from Surrounding Radio Signals" to be presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The researchers claim WiGait, a wall-mounted device described as being the size of a small painting, is 95% to 99% accurate at measuring walking speeds of multiple people and requires no wearable gear on its targets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Star Wars Holochess can become a reality thanks to Vuforia and Tango

Over 25 percent of the 500 companies surveyed by IDC are testing augmented reality (AR) prototypes. Much of this interest, however, is stuck in the prototype stage because most hardware platforms are prototypes and many of the tools needed to build the killer app to move into production are still under development.Vuforia adds an important piece to the AR toolchain puzzle, though, with its announcement today of Smart Terrain for Google’s Tango tablet.Smart Terrain, announced in conjunction with Google and Unity3D during the opening keynote at the Vision VR/ AR Summit, builds on two mature components of AR: Vuforia’s early experience solving a very specific AR development problem and Google Tango, which looks like the first AR platform ready to emerge from prototype status and become a mainstream platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon bestows free Prime memberships on townspeople who need them not at all

Free is free and it’s probable that even the well-to-do of Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., would rather have a free year’s worth of Amazon Prime – retail: $99 per year – than not have a free year’s worth of Amazon Prime.But it would be difficult to find a less needy population for such a gift.Nevertheless, Amazon announced today that it is bestowing the free year – plus some free popcorn – upon the town to mark the streaming release on Prime of the Oscar-winning movie, yes, you guessed it, “Manchester-by-the-Sea.”From a press release:“Oscar winning ‘Manchester by the Sea’ is coming to Prime Video on May 5, and we wanted customers in the town to enjoy popcorn and a movie on us,” said Greg Hart, Vice President of Amazon Video, worldwide. “Manchester by the Sea is a masterpiece representing the best of cinematic storytelling. In other words, it is wicked awesome.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump seeks to upgrade US government IT services

President Donald Trump is launching a special council to upgrade the U.S. government’s IT services at a time when some systems more than 50 years old. Americans deserve better digital services from their government,” the"Americans deserve better digital services from their government," said an executive order from Trump, released on Monday.The order seeks to "promote the secure, efficient and economical use" of IT. As part of that goal, Trump is establishing the American Technology Council, which he will chair.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump seeks to upgrade US government IT services

President Donald Trump is launching a special council to upgrade the U.S. government’s IT services at a time when some systems more than 50 years old. Americans deserve better digital services from their government,” the"Americans deserve better digital services from their government," said an executive order from Trump, released on Monday.The order seeks to "promote the secure, efficient and economical use" of IT. As part of that goal, Trump is establishing the American Technology Council, which he will chair.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Class of 2017 may be in for a rude awakening

The Class of 2017 graduates in just a few weeks and will enter the IT job market, but they may be in for a rude awakening, as new iCIMS research reports that their skills and education aren't aligning with what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for in entry-level talent.The research, the Class of 2017 Job Outlook Report, which polled 401 U.S. college seniors and 401 recruiting professionals between March 6 and 17, 2017, reveals that while 91 percent of college seniors polled think they have the skills necessary to land the job they want, a whopping 98 percent of recruiters receive resumes from unqualified applicants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Report: Bad policies and practices put data at risk [Infographic]

Almost every company has data stored in its systems that is overexposed and at risk. That’s the finding of the recently released 2017 Varonis Data Risk Report. The report is based on assessments that Varonis conducts for its customers and prospects to determine which data is at risk. The report data is aggregated and anonymized.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Report: Bad policies and practices put data at risk [Infographic]

Almost every company has data stored in its systems that is overexposed and at risk. That’s the finding of the recently released 2017 Varonis Data Risk Report. The report is based on assessments that Varonis conducts for its customers and prospects to determine which data is at risk. The report data is aggregated and anonymized. download 2017 Varonis Data Risk Report Highlights Varonis What this year’s report revealed is that much of the risk is due to bad policy or failure to follow an established policy. For example, files were accessible to people who should not have access, complex permissions rules negatively impacted enforceability, and some companies fail to properly audit data for risk. The report also found that these risks were consistent across geographies and industries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)