Worth Reading: SHA-1 collision found

Cryptographic hash functions like SHA-1 are a cryptographer’s swiss army knife. You’ll find that hashes play a role in browser security, managing code repositories, or even just detecting duplicate files in storage. Hash functions compress large amounts of data into a small message digest. As a cryptographic requirement for wide-spread use, finding two messages that lead to the same digest should be computationally infeasible. Over time however, this requirement can fail due to attacks on the mathematical underpinnings of hash functions or to increases in computational power. —Google Security Blog

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Porsche Design’s Book One looks to outrace Microsoft’s Surface Book

As with its cars, Porsche Design loved what it has created with its new Book One 2-in-1, made to challenge Microsoft's Surface Book.The 2-in-1 device is unique in that it is both a convertible and a detachable computer. The Book One can become a tablet by detaching the 13.3-inch screen or folding the screen 360 degrees onto the keyboard.The folding functionality exists because of the hinge, which has been borrowed from the Porsche cars' gearbox. The flexible folding and detaching mechanism gives the device a unique design that is hard to find in other 2-in-1s today. It's likely other PC makers will try to come up with copycat designs.Porsche Design has created a "new product category" with Book One, Roland Heiler, chief design officer for the Porsche Design Group, said at a press event at the fancy W Hotel in Barcelona. The press event was held on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress show going on this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Cisco wants to become the Switzerland of the cloud

After years of juggling with different strategies of how to pursue the cloud computing market, Cisco now has what it believes will be a winning one: Become a so-called Switzerland of the cloud.Cisco is not spending billions of dollars to build a public cloud to compete with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. “That ship has sailed,” says Fabio Gori, head of cloud marketing at Cisco.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cloud comparison Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Wi-Fi expanding to indoor location services

The purpose of indoor Wi-Fi is no longer simply about providing internet connectivity. Indoor positioning services that enable asset tracking and visitor navigation functions are adding to the traditional access point feature set of spotty internet access.GPS positioning doesn’t work as well indoors as out. And Wi-Fi equipment vendors are keen to point out that networks created with their equipment are better suited to indoor locationing—better than cellular, too, with its usually outdoor masts.This has led to the newest Wi-Fi system: meter-level positioning.9 tips for speeding up your business Wi-Fi The latest nod comes from the Wi-Fi Alliance, the certifier and association of Wi-Fi technology companies. It just launched a certified program for “meter-level accuracy for indoor device location data” using its technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Wi-Fi expanding to indoor location services

The purpose of indoor Wi-Fi is no longer simply about providing internet connectivity. Indoor positioning services that enable asset tracking and visitor navigation functions are adding to the traditional access point feature set of spotty internet access.GPS positioning doesn’t work as well indoors as out. And Wi-Fi equipment vendors are keen to point out that networks created with their equipment are better suited to indoor locationing—better than cellular, too, with its usually outdoor masts.This has led to the newest Wi-Fi system: meter-level positioning.9 tips for speeding up your business Wi-Fi The latest nod comes from the Wi-Fi Alliance, the certifier and association of Wi-Fi technology companies. It just launched a certified program for “meter-level accuracy for indoor device location data” using its technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blue Planet Lifecycle Service Orchestration – Moving From Promises to Production Q&A

Thanks to all who joined us for Blue Planet's LSO Report Webinar: Lifecycle Service Orchestration – Moving From Promises to Production. Read the full Q&A here.

Cisco Live 2017 – It’s Coming!

  It is hard to believe but in just a few months it will be time for the annual geek-camp (term credit goes to Fish) called Cisco Live!  Once again we are heading back to Las Vegas at the beautiful Mandalay Bay Convention Center.  While Vegas may not be my first choice of locations (I […]

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Hands on with the Moto G5 and G5 Plus: Almost like budget Nexus phones

Motorola's G series phones have been darlings of the Android community for their ability to deliver exceptional value. You can't expect the world from a $200 phone, but Moto G phones are usually "good enough" to make budget-conscious buyers balk at spending two or three times as much for a premium phone. The company is looking to continue that trend with the Moto G5 and G5 Plus. The G5 will cost only 199€ (it's not coming to the U.S.), while the G5 Plus will be only $229 when it ships here in March. For the price, they seem quite good. The bodies, now metal, aren't going to win any design awards, but they feel a bit more premium than the old plastic G series phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP’s Elite x3 Windows phone gets a job with Mobile Retail and Mobile Scanning Solutions

HP’s Elite x3 Windows phone is getting a job, with two similar scanning accessories designed to turn it into a workhorse for vertical industries—businesses such as retail and healthcare, which have specialized needs. Announced Sunday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, these accessories reinforce HP’s strategy since the Elite x3 launched a year ago: Put it into the hands of corporate employees, and the market share will follow.  One of the accessories, pictured above, is the Mobile Retail Solution, a barcode scanner that looks like a special cover for the phone. It’s designed to be used in retail storerooms, shipping warehouses and the like, where the barcode helps track products as they move from shelf to truck or display case. Before you blanch at the $999 price, note that it comes with an Elite x3 phone, which accounts for $699 of the cost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

LG launches G6 phone with 5.7-inch display in narrow body

BARCELONA -- LG on Sunday introduced the G6 smartphone with a 5.7-in. display in a new 18:9 aspect ratio that is designed to enhance videos and game play. The phone also comes with a bigger 3300 mAh battery -- 500 mAh more than the LG G5 -- that includes heat pipes to dissipate heat, similar to the way some laptops disperse heat. Battery heat is a current concern of smartphone makers, especially after Samsung Note7 Lithium Ion batteries overheated last year, prompting a worldwide recall of the devices. The G6 looks to solve the dilemma of smartphone users who want both a large screen and a small enough handset to be used with one hand, LG officials said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Alienware 13 Gaming Notebooks Discounted Up To $169 For a Limited Time – Deal Alert

Alienware’s first 13-inch VR gaming laptop features up to 7th Gen Intel Quad Core H- Class processors and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10-Series graphics. For a limited time various configurations have been discounted up to $169, with free shipping. See the various configurations and discounts now on Dell.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The latest ransomware threat: Doxware

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.As if ransomware wasn’t bad enough, there is a new twist called doxware.  The term "doxware" is a combination of doxing — posting hacked personal information online — and ransomware. Attackers notify victims that their sensitive, confidential or personal files will be released online. If contact lists are also stolen, the perpetrators may threaten to release information to the lists or send them links to the online content.Doxware and ransomware share some similarities. They both encrypt the victim's files, both include a demand for payment, and both attacks are highly automated. However, in a ransomware attack, files do not have to be removed from the target; encrypting the files is sufficient. A doxware attack is meaningless unless the files are uploaded to the attacker's system. Uploading all of the victim's files is unwieldy, so doxware attacks tend to be more focused, prioritizing files that include trigger words such as confidential, privileged communication, sensitive or private. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The latest ransomware threat: Doxware

The latest ransomware threat: Doxware

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.As if ransomware wasn’t bad enough, there is a new twist called doxware.  The term "doxware" is a combination of doxing — posting hacked personal information online — and ransomware. Attackers notify victims that their sensitive, confidential or personal files will be released online. If contact lists are also stolen, the perpetrators may threaten to release information to the lists or send them links to the online content.Doxware and ransomware share some similarities. They both encrypt the victim's files, both include a demand for payment, and both attacks are highly automated. However, in a ransomware attack, files do not have to be removed from the target; encrypting the files is sufficient. A doxware attack is meaningless unless the files are uploaded to the attacker's system. Uploading all of the victim's files is unwieldy, so doxware attacks tend to be more focused, prioritizing files that include trigger words such as confidential, privileged communication, sensitive or private. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Securing Electronic Healthcare Records: The New Frontier

We didn’t find any medical sutures or gauze at HIMSS last week, but there sure was a lot of talk about the future of healthcare IT security. The status of electronic health record (EHR) security as a hot topic is clear, too: patient information is increasingly being moved to electronic form in order for healthcare organizations to increase clinician efficiency and remain compliant, but as we’ve seen in other industries, electronic information is difficult to keep safe. EHR data contains our medical identities, complete with medical histories, address histories, extended family names and histories, and more, making it a prime target for bad actors attempting to steal personal information.

What is the current threat landscape for this EHR data? A recent Accenture survey found approximately 26 percent of Americans have been impacted by a healthcare data breach. To combat the rise in healthcare cyber attacks, health providers are looking to IT for infrastructure and application support that prioritizes data security while continuing to maximize clinician workflow efficiency and drive better patient outcomes.

That’s where VMware NSX comes in. NSX empowers healthcare organizations to secure the infrastructure that EHR systems and other critical care applications live on. This ensures the healthcare Continue reading

SHA-1 collision can break SVN code repositories

A recently announced SHA-1 collision attack has the potential to break code repositories that use the Subversion (SVN) revision control system. The first victim was the repository for the WebKit browser engine that was corrupted after someone committed two different PDF files with the same SHA-1 hash to it.The incident happened hours after researchers from Google and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands announced the first practical collision attack against the SHA-1 hash function on Thursday. Their demonstration consisted of creating two PDF files with different contents that had the same SHA-1 digest.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SHA-1 collision can break SVN code repositories

A recently announced SHA-1 collision attack has the potential to break code repositories that use the Subversion (SVN) revision control system. The first victim was the repository for the WebKit browser engine that was corrupted after someone committed two different PDF files with the same SHA-1 hash to it.The incident happened hours after researchers from Google and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands announced the first practical collision attack against the SHA-1 hash function on Thursday. Their demonstration consisted of creating two PDF files with different contents that had the same SHA-1 digest.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Perfect and the Good

Perfect and good: one is just an extension of the other, right?

When I was 16 (a long, long, long time ago), I was destined to be a great graphis—a designer and/or illustrator of some note. Things didn’t turn out that way, of course, but the why is a tale for another day. At any rate, in art class that year, I took an old four foot spool end, stretched canvas across it, and painted a piece in acrylic. The painting was a beach sunset, the sun’s oblong shape offsetting the round of the overall painting, with deep reds and yellows in streaks above the beach, which was dark. I painted the image as if the viewer were standing just on the break at the top of the beach, so there was a bit of sea grass scattered around to offset the darkness of the beach.

And, along one side, a rose.

I really don’t know why I included the rose; I think I just wanted to paint one for some reason, and it seemed like a good idea to combine the ideas (the sunset on the beach and the rose). I entered this large painting in a local Continue reading

SK Telecom pushes for interoperable quantum crypto systems

SK Telecom and Nokia have developed a prototype quantum cryptography system that combines the South Korean company's quantum key server with an encryption device from Nokia.The system, shown Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, was put together to demonstrate interoperability between the two vendors and comes as SK Telecom kicks off a push to get telecom carriers and equipment vendors working together on next-generation quantum-secured networks.Quantum cryptography involves the transmission of encryption keys across fiber optic networks. It relies on the principles of quantum mechanics to detect if an eavesdropper has viewed a key en route.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SK Telecom pushes for interoperable quantum crypto systems

SK Telecom and Nokia have developed a prototype quantum cryptography system that combines the South Korean company's quantum key server with an encryption device from Nokia.The system, shown Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, was put together to demonstrate interoperability between the two vendors and comes as SK Telecom kicks off a push to get telecom carriers and equipment vendors working together on next-generation quantum-secured networks.Quantum cryptography involves the transmission of encryption keys across fiber optic networks. It relies on the principles of quantum mechanics to detect if an eavesdropper has viewed a key en route.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here