Microsoft buys former employee Charles Simonyi’s Intentional Software

Serial space tourist Charles Simonyi is going back again -- to his former employer, Microsoft.When Simonyi quit as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect in 2002, it was to create a start-up devoted to making programming simpler. Now Microsoft has agreed to acquire that company, Intentional Software.During his absence from Microsoft, Simonyi also found time to fly to the International Space Station -- twice. He made his first trip in 2007 and liked it so much that he went back again two years later.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Too Busy

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Drone software gives offline farmers real-time images

Cloud computing is all well and good for enterprises with big-data applications and consumers with virtual assistants, but it runs into some limits in an isolated cornfield.On farms and other places far from powerful computers and network connections, there's a trend away from centralized computing even while most of the IT world is embracing it. In remote places, the internet of things requires local processing as well as data-center analysis. So-called edge computing is coming to industries including manufacturing, utilities, shipping, and oil and gas. Agriculture is getting it, too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s cool quantum computing plan embraces cryogenic memory

Microsoft has crazy quantum computing plans. It is building hardware based on a particle that hasn't been discovered, and the company now wants to make super-cool memory for quantum computers.The company is working with Rambus to develop and build prototype computers with memory subsystems that can be cooled at cryogenic temperatures. Cryogenic temperatures typically are below minus 180 degrees Celsius or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit.Quantum computers could eventually replace today's PCs and servers and promise to be significantly faster. But the systems are notoriously unstable and need to be stored in refrigerators for faster and secure operation. As an example, D-Wave's 2000Q quantum computer needs to be kept significantly cooler than supercomputers so operations don't break down.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s cool quantum computing plan embraces cryogenic memory

Microsoft has crazy quantum computing plans. It is building hardware based on a particle that hasn't been discovered, and the company now wants to make super-cool memory for quantum computers.The company is working with Rambus to develop and build prototype computers with memory subsystems that can be cooled at cryogenic temperatures. Cryogenic temperatures typically are below minus 180 degrees Celsius or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit.Quantum computers could eventually replace today's PCs and servers and promise to be significantly faster. But the systems are notoriously unstable and need to be stored in refrigerators for faster and secure operation. As an example, D-Wave's 2000Q quantum computer needs to be kept significantly cooler than supercomputers so operations don't break down.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Underwriters Laboratories creates Living Lab for real-world IoT testing

What could go wrong with IoT devices? A lot when it comes to dozens of such devices working close to one another if not tested for interoperability first. Is the connected thermostat interfering with the smart TV? Or has the IoT-enabled door lock been hacked through the security camera?How do you to test if the smart appliances from different vendors work with your smart home ecosystem? Is one compromising the security of another? How do consumers really use their IoT devices?Underwriters Laboratories (UL) uses a real home fitted with IoT appliances and devices as a testing lab to find out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mobile, security tools among education tech favorites

In the school district of La Crosse, Vicki Lyons depends on mobile device management software from Jamf to manage the Wisconsin district’s fleet of iPads and MacBook Air devices. The Apple device management platform plays a key role in the district’s efforts to provide equitable access to technology to all of its students.“We use Jamf Pro as our device management solution for our 1:1 iPad program district-wide. As a result, we are driving student success with iPads and meeting their individual needs via personalized learning — something we weren’t able to previously do,” says Lyons, technology service director for the School District of La Crosse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mobile, security tools among education tech favorites

In the school district of La Crosse, Vicki Lyons depends on mobile device management software from Jamf to manage the Wisconsin district’s fleet of iPads and MacBook Air devices. The Apple device management platform plays a key role in the district’s efforts to provide equitable access to technology to all of its students.“We use Jamf Pro as our device management solution for our 1:1 iPad program district-wide. As a result, we are driving student success with iPads and meeting their individual needs via personalized learning — something we weren’t able to previously do,” says Lyons, technology service director for the School District of La Crosse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT execs tout benefits of SD-WAN

Enterprises are adopting software-defined WAN to simplify branch office connectivity, improve application performance, and better manage WAN expenses, according to Gartner, which predicts that spending on SD-WAN products will rise from $129 million in 2016 to $1.24 billion in 2020.“While WAN architectures and technologies tend to evolve at a very slow pace — perhaps a new generation every 10 to 15 years — the disruptions caused by the transformation to digital business models are driving adoption of SD-WAN at a pace that is unheard of in wide-area networking,” Gartner writes.Two early adopters of SD-WAN shared some of the gains they’re realizing from the technology. The Bay Club Company and Autodesk are deploying SD-WAN technology from VeloCloud and CloudGenix, respectively, to transform the way they provision and support remote sites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT execs tout benefits of SD-WAN

Enterprises are adopting software-defined WAN to simplify branch office connectivity, improve application performance, and better manage WAN expenses, according to Gartner, which predicts that spending on SD-WAN products will rise from $129 million in 2016 to $1.24 billion in 2020.“While WAN architectures and technologies tend to evolve at a very slow pace — perhaps a new generation every 10 to 15 years — the disruptions caused by the transformation to digital business models are driving adoption of SD-WAN at a pace that is unheard of in wide-area networking,” Gartner writes.Two early adopters of SD-WAN shared some of the gains they’re realizing from the technology. The Bay Club Company and Autodesk are deploying SD-WAN technology from VeloCloud and CloudGenix, respectively, to transform the way they provision and support remote sites.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s behind VMware’s Wavefront acquisition?

VMware’s acquisition of monitoring software maker Wavefront for an undisclosed sum is a move core to VMware's strategy to round out its portfolio for facilitating and managing hybrid cloud environments. It highlights in the need to ensure that applications running between private and public clouds perform up to par.[ 30 CIOs share their strategic focus ] Companies undertaking digital transformations are leaning heavily on hybrid clouds to deploy software, a scenario playing out across nearly every industry. To enable this at a high velocity, companies are instituting DevOps, in which code is constantly written, shipped, run and regularly refined. In DevOps environments, corporate developers code application functionality, called microservices, which they ship via virtual containers to run between private cloud environments and public cloud systems such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Samsung Dex nearly nails smartphone-as-desktop

We all love our smartphones and tablets, but boy do we miss our big screens, mice, and keyboards when doing complex work on those mobile devices. That’s why the notion of a smartphone that acts like a PC when connected to those peripherals has kept recurring ever since the iPhone redefined mobility for the modern era.But so far, reality has not delivered on that promise of the mobile-on-desktop notion. Now, Samsung is trying its hand at this puzzle, with the Dex dock available for its new Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones.[ Review: Samsung’s Galaxy S8 is an unpleasant smartphone. | iPad Pro vs. Surface Pro vs. Pixel C vs. Galaxy TabPro S: The “tabtop” tablet/laptop hybrids compared. ] The journey from the Lapdock to the Dex Station The Motorola Lapdock back in 2011 was the first dock to put smartphone screens on a computer monitor, as well as provide a full-screen browser and connections for physical keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals. But the constrained smartphone apps weren’t much easier to use as big-screen windows, and the Linux-based browser was too limited.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Galaxy S8+ review: The future of Android is now

Samsung has finally beat Apple at its own game.While the Galaxy S has been regarded for years as the best Android phone money can buy (at least until the Pixel came around), it’s always existed in the iPhone’s lengthy shadow. Even with a higher market share, a dominant OS, and a years-long lead on features like screen size and water resistance, the Galaxy S has stayed just out of reach of the iPhone zeitgeist. No matter how much it tried to create its own end-to-end experience, Apple fans saw it as a copycat and Android enthusiasts lamented its aggressive TouchWiz interface overhaul.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity remains an elusive business priority

I’ve been remiss by not blogging earlier this year about ESG’s annual IT spending intentions research. The year 2017 continues to follow a pattern: Cybersecurity is a high business and IT priority for most organizations. Based upon a global survey of 641 IT and cybersecurity professionals, the ESG research reveals: While just over half (53%) of organizations plan on increasing IT spending overall this year, 69% said they are increasing spending on cybersecurity. As far as cybersecurity spending goes, 48% will make their most significant cybersecurity technology investments in cloud security, 39% will in network security, 30% in endpoint security, and 29% in security analytics.    Respondents were asked which business outcomes were their highest priorities for this year. The top three results were as follows: 43% said “reducing costs,” 40% said “increasing productivity," and 39% said “improving information security.”  When asked which business initiatives will drive the most IT spending, 39% said “increasing cybersecurity,” the top selection of all. When asked to identify the most important IT initiatives for this year, the number one answer was “strengthening cybersecurity controls and processes.”  For the sixth year in a row, survey respondents said cybersecurity is the area where Continue reading

Cybersecurity Remains an Elusive Business Priority

I’ve been remiss by not blogging earlier this year about ESG’s annual IT spending intentions research (note: I am an ESG employee).  The year 2017 continues to follow a pattern – cybersecurity is a high business and IT priority for most organizations. Based upon a global survey of 641 IT and cybersecurity professionals, the ESG research reveals: While just over half (53%) of organizations plan on increasing IT spending overall this year, 69% say they are increasing spending on cybersecurity.  As far as cybersecurity spending goes, 48% will make their most significant cybersecurity technology investments in cloud security 39% will in network security, 30% in endpoint security, and 29% in security analytics.    Respondents were asked which business outcomes were their highest priorities for this year.  The top three results were as follows: 43% said “reducing costs,” 40% said “increasing productivity, and 39% “improving information security.”  When asked which business initiatives will drive the most IT spending, 39% said, “increasing cybersecurity,” the top selection of all. When asked to identify the most important IT initiatives for this year, the number one answer was, “strengthening cybersecurity controls and processes.”  For the 6th year Continue reading

Cybersecurity remains an elusive business priority

I’ve been remiss by not blogging earlier this year about ESG’s annual IT spending intentions research. The year 2017 continues to follow a pattern: Cybersecurity is a high business and IT priority for most organizations. Based upon a global survey of 641 IT and cybersecurity professionals, the ESG research reveals: While just over half (53%) of organizations plan on increasing IT spending overall this year, 69% said they are increasing spending on cybersecurity. As far as cybersecurity spending goes, 48% will make their most significant cybersecurity technology investments in cloud security, 39% will in network security, 30% in endpoint security, and 29% in security analytics.    Respondents were asked which business outcomes were their highest priorities for this year. The top three results were as follows: 43% said “reducing costs,” 40% said “increasing productivity," and 39% said “improving information security.”  When asked which business initiatives will drive the most IT spending, 39% said “increasing cybersecurity,” the top selection of all. When asked to identify the most important IT initiatives for this year, the number one answer was “strengthening cybersecurity controls and processes.”  For the sixth year in a row, survey respondents said cybersecurity is the area where Continue reading

Worth Reading: IPv6 data exfiltration

The transition to internet protocol version 6 has opened up a whole new range of threat vectors that allow attackers to set up undetectable communications channels across networks, researchers have found. A paper has been published by researchers at the NATO defence alliance’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology. It outlines how attackers can create covert data exfiltration channels and system remote control, using IPv6 transition mechanisms. IPv6 aims to remove the technical drawbacks of the older IPv4 addressing scheme but brings its own fresh set of dangers, the researchers warned. Since IPv6 implementations and security solutions are relatively new and untested, and systems engineers aren’t fully aware of them, the new protocol can become a network backdoor attackers can exploit undetected. —itnews

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Meanwhile in China: Surveillance required on public Wi-Fi

Every once in a while, something in China that sounds like it came out of a dystopian movie catches my attention.China’s great surveillance machine seems to know no bounds. China has already cracked down on unauthorized VPN use. Last month, we learned that if you want toilet paper at one UNESCO World Heritage Site in China, then you must submit to facial recognition in order to be issued a strip of toilet paper. This time, we are looking at China requiring surveillance technology on public Wi-Fi and Chinese loan startups determining credit-worthiness by the model of smartphones used and if the battery runs low.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meanwhile in China: Surveillance required on public Wi-Fi

Every once in a while, something in China that sounds like it came out of a dystopian movie catches my attention.China’s great surveillance machine seems to know no bounds. China has already cracked down on unauthorized VPN use. Last month, we learned that if you want toilet paper at one UNESCO World Heritage Site in China, then you must submit to facial recognition in order to be issued a strip of toilet paper. This time, we are looking at China requiring surveillance technology on public Wi-Fi and Chinese loan startups determining credit-worthiness by the model of smartphones used and if the battery runs low.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can Container Security Surpass That of Virtual Machines?

Containers certainly face security threats that virtual machines do not.