30% off Veepeak USB Rechargeable LED Motion Sensor Light for Closet with Magnetic Mounting – Deal Alert

The Veepeak Rechargeable Motion Sensor Light offers a simple solution to lighting any area inside your home. The portable and detachable design makes it versatile enough to be used as a night light in hallways and bedrooms or as a cabinet or closet light for dim areas. Installation is a breeze, the magnetic strip with 3M adhesive allows you to quickly mount wherever you need extra light.  This light is motion activated and will automatically turn on once it detects motion; when no movement is detected for about 20 seconds, the light will automatically turn off. This LED light is powered by built-in Lithium battery which can be charged with included USB cable by a phone charger or PC USB port. No electric wire, no need to replace batteries and one full charge provides up to 500 times of sensing at full brightness.  This light currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars (read reviews) and is discounted 30% down to just $13.99. For more information and buying options, see the discounted LED Motion light on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple is dedicated to the Mac desktop. And it’s not.

Several weeks ago, we ran a feature story by yours truly questioning Apple's dedication to its Mac hardware line. At the time, Mac desktops and MacBook notebooks were falling years out of date. Since then, Apple has introduced some new MacBooks, but desktops such as iMac, Mac Pro and Mac Mini remain woefully out of date. This led to more questions and doubt, and it forced the normally recalcitrant Tim Cook to post on an employee message board a letter assuring the staff that the company remains committed to the desktop line. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple gives iOS app developers more time to encrypt communications

Apple has backtracked on a plan to force iOS developers to encrypt their app communications by the end of the year.The company had previously announced at its Worldwide Developers’ Conference in June that all apps submitted to the App Store will need support the App Transport Security (ATS) feature starting January 1st, 2017. It has not yet set a new deadline.ATS is a feature first introduced in iOS 9 that forces apps to communicate with internet servers using encrypted HTTPS (HTTP over SSL/TLS) connections. It's an improvement over the third-party frameworks that developers previously used to implement HTTPS because it ensures that only industry-standard encryption protocols and ciphers are used.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple gives iOS app developers more time to encrypt communications

Apple has backtracked on a plan to force iOS developers to encrypt their app communications by the end of the year.The company had previously announced at its Worldwide Developers’ Conference in June that all apps submitted to the App Store will need support the App Transport Security (ATS) feature starting January 1st, 2017. It has not yet set a new deadline.ATS is a feature first introduced in iOS 9 that forces apps to communicate with internet servers using encrypted HTTPS (HTTP over SSL/TLS) connections. It's an improvement over the third-party frameworks that developers previously used to implement HTTPS because it ensures that only industry-standard encryption protocols and ciphers are used.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More 5G Trials and Friendly Users On the Horizon in 2017

Non-traditional players will test 5G too.

New accounting standards change the rules of IT leasing

The Financial Accounting Standards Board’s new lease accounting standards announced earlier this year will require public companies to recognize assets and liabilities from operating leases on their balance sheets for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2018.The changes — a response to a growing need to provide more transparency to off-balance sheet leasing obligations, estimated at some $1.2 trillion dollars — will impact not just accounting policies but lease vs. buy decisions within IT organizations whose companies will have to comply with the new standard.[ Back in 2002: Budget Strategies: A Lesson on Leasing ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AI tools came out of the lab in 2016

You shouldn't anthropomorphize computers: They don't like it. That joke is at least as old as Deep Blue's 1997 victory over then world chess champion Garry Kasparov, but even with the great strides made in the field of artificial intelligence over that time, we're still not much closer to having to worry about computers' feelings. Computers can analyze the sentiments we express in social media, and project expressions on the face of robots to make us believe they are happy or angry, but no one seriously believes, yet, that they "have" feelings, that they can experience them. Other areas of AI, on the other hand, have seen some impressive advances in both hardware and software in just the last 12 months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bridging California’s Rural Digital Divide

Push Configuration Snippet to a Bunch of Cisco IOS Devices

As I was trying to automate configuration deployment in a multi-router Cisco IOS lab, I got to a point where the only way of figuring out what was going on was to log commands on Cisco IOS devices. Not a big deal, but I hate logging into a dozen boxes and configuring the same few lines on all of them (or removing them afterwards).

Time for another playbook: this one can push one of many (configurable) configuration snippets to a group of Cisco IOS devices defined in an Ansible inventory file.

Interesting? Want to do something more complex? Join the Network Automation online course.

US collects social media handles from select visitors

Visitors to the U.S. under a visa waiver program are being asked by the Department of Homeland Security for information on their social media accounts, a plan that had drawn criticism from civil rights groups for its potential encroachment on privacy. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection unit of the DHS asked for written comments earlier this year on its proposal that would add to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) and to a form called I-94W the following entry: “Please enter information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier,” which visitors can fill optionally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US collects social media handles from select visitors

Visitors to the U.S. under a visa waiver program are being asked by the Department of Homeland Security for information on their social media accounts, a plan that had drawn criticism from civil rights groups for its potential encroachment on privacy. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection unit of the DHS asked for written comments earlier this year on its proposal that would add to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) and to a form called I-94W the following entry: “Please enter information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier,” which visitors can fill optionally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ClusterHQ, Stateful Container Startup, Is ‘Clusterf***ed’

Life was easier before stateful containers became a 'thing.'

DIY vs. fully integrated Hadoop – What’s best for your organization?

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.You don’t have to look far to see the amazing things that organizations are doing with big data technology: pulling information from past transactions, social media and other sources to develop 360-degree views of their customers. Analyzing thousands of processes to identify causes of breakdowns and inefficiencies. Bringing together disparate data sources to uncover connections that were never recognized before. All of these innovations, and many more, are possible when you can collect information from across your organization and apply data science to it. But if you’re ready to make the jump to big data, you face a stark choice: should you use a pre-integrated “out-of-the-box” platform? Or should you download open-source Hadoop software and build your own?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DIY vs. fully integrated Hadoop – What’s best for your organization?

Black market medical record prices drop to under $10, criminals switch to ransomware

The black market value of stolen medical records dropped dramatically this year, and criminals shifted their efforts from stealing data to spreading ransom ware, according to a report released this morning.Hackers are now offering stolen records at between $1.50 and $10 each, said Anthony James, CMO at San Mateo, Calif.-based security firm TrapX, the company that produced the report.That down a bit since this summer, when a hacker offered 10 million patient records for about $820,000 -- or about $12 per record -- and even a bigger drop from 2012, when the World Privacy Forum put the street value of medical records at around $50 each.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Black market medical record prices drop to under $10, criminals switch to ransomware

The black market value of stolen medical records dropped dramatically this year, and criminals shifted their efforts from stealing data to spreading ransom ware, according to a report released this morning.Hackers are now offering stolen records at between $1.50 and $10 each, said Anthony James, CMO at San Mateo, Calif.-based security firm TrapX, the company that produced the report.That down a bit since this summer, when a hacker offered 10 million patient records for about $820,000 -- or about $12 per record -- and even a bigger drop from 2012, when the World Privacy Forum put the street value of medical records at around $50 each.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The year of silicon photonics

Computing historians may look back on 2016 as the Year of Silicon Photonics. Not because the technology has become ubiquitous – that may yet be years away – but because the long-awaited silicon photonics offerings are now commercially available in networking hardware. While the advancements in networking provided by silicon photonics are indisputable, the real game changer is in the CPU. —The Next Platform

The post Worth Reading: The year of silicon photonics appeared first on 'net work.

Snapshot: NASA’s “Human Computers” and the Hidden Figures movie story

A math storyImage by NASAThe film Hidden Figures details an inspiring story about three particular African-American women mathematicians who were highly indispensable to the achievement of early spaceflight. The movie also involves some cool old mainframes and other high tech gear. Take a gander.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Announcing EVPN for scalable virtualized networks

This post was updated on 2/22/17 to reflect the official launch of EVPN. You can now access EVPN in general availability. Read the white paper to learn more about this exciting new feature.

When we set out to build new features for Cumulus Linux, we ask ourselves two questions: 1) How can we make network operators’ jobs easier? And 2) How can we help businesses use web-scale IT principles to build powerful, efficient and highly-scalable data centers? With EVPN, we believe we nailed both.

Why EVPN?

Many data centers today rely on layer 2 connectivity for specific applications and IP address mobility. However, an entire layer 2 data center can bring challenges such as large failure domains, spanning tree complexities, difficulty troubleshooting, and scale challenges as only 4094 VLANS are supported.

Therefore, modern data centers are moving to a layer 3 fabric, which means running a routing protocol, such as BGP or OSPF between the leaf and spine switches. In order to provide layer 2 connectivity, between hosts and VMs on different racks as well as maintain multi-tenant separation, layer 2 overlay solution is deployed such as VXLAN. However, VXLAN does not define a control plane to learn and exchange Continue reading

The group that hacked the DNC infiltrated Ukrainian artillery units

The cyberespionage group blamed for hacking into the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) earlier this year has also infiltrated the Ukrainian military through a trojanized Android application used by its artillery units.The group, which is known in the security industry under different names, including Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, and APT28, has been operating for almost a decade. It is believed to be the sole user and likely developer of a Trojan program called Sofacy or X-Agent that has variants for Windows, Android, and iOS.Fancy Bear has been responsible for many cyberespionage operations around the world over the years, and its selection of targets has frequently reflected Russia's geopolitical interests. Researchers from security firm CrowdStrike believe the group is likely tied to the Russian Military Intelligence Service (GRU).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here