Hacker hijacks thousands of publicly exposed printers to warn owners

Following recent research that showed many printer models are vulnerable to attacks, a hacker decided to prove the point and forced thousands of publicly exposed printers to spew out rogue messages. The messages included ASCII art depicting robots and warned that the printers had been compromised and they were part of a botnet. The hacker, who uses the online alias Stackoverflowin, later said that the botnet claim was not true and that his efforts served only to raise awareness about the risks of leaving printers exposed to the internet. Stackoverflowin claims to be a high-school student from the U.K. who is interested in security research. He said that for the most part he simply sent print jobs using the Line Printer Daemon (LPD), the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) and the RAW protocol on communications port 9100 to printers that didn't require authentication.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ZeroStack uses machine learning to create self-driving clouds

Cloud mania continues to grow as businesses move more and more workloads to platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). But while public cloud hype is stealing all the headlines, private data centers are quietly plodding along and growing, as well. There is so much data growth today that businesses have to invest in both public clouds and private data centers, hence the high adoption rate of “hybrid” environments. + Also on Network World: The cloud continues to rise—and fast + The landscape for public cloud services is set—Azure and Amazon have won that battle—but private data centers are in a state of change. The legacy model of buying best-of-breed components and cobbling the technology together to build a private cloud is a long, complex process that just can’t keep up with the needs of a digital organization. Turnkey private clouds are becoming increasingly popular because they give businesses an Amazon-like experience but in a private cloud model, so the data and infrastructure stays in the company data center. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hacking the 2016 election: A timeline

History has yet to judge the 2016 presidential election, but from where we sit in the early days of 2017, it’s hard to imagine that it will ever be relegated to a footnote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Hacking the 2016 election: A timeline

History has yet to judge the 2016 presidential election, but from where we sit in the early days of 2017, it’s hard to imagine that it will ever be relegated to a footnote. From how spectacularly polling failed to predict the election’s outcome to how the election was effectively decided by just “77,759 votes in three states,” not to mention that the loser walked away with 2.8 million more votes than the winner, the 2016 election season produced one big story after another. But what may prove to be the biggest story of the 2016 election is the series of hacks that undermined both the democratic process and the Democratic candidate — and the the role of the Russian government in those hacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Key tech companies oppose Trump immigration order in court

Google, Facebook, Intel, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple and Twitter are among a large group of companies that have filed a brief in opposition to an immigration order by U.S. President Donald Trump, citing the benefits to industry from liberal immigration rules and the disruption to business as a result of the regulation.A total of 97 companies from the technology and other sectors asked permission late Sunday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to file an amici curiae, also known as a friends-of-the-court brief, in favor of maintaining a restraining order from a lower court on Trump’s decision that restricts the entry of certain classes of visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What deep learning really means

Perhaps the most positive technical theme of 2016 was the long-delayed triumph of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and in particular deep learning. In this article we'll discuss what that means and how you might make use of deep learning yourself.Perhaps you noticed in the fall of 2016 that Google Translate suddenly went from producing, on the average, word salad with a vague connection to the original language to emitting polished, coherent sentences more often than not -- at least for supported language pairs, such as English-French, English-Chinese, and English-Japanese. That dramatic improvement was the result of a nine-month concerted effort by the Google Brain and Google Translate teams to revamp Translate from using its old phrase-based statistical machine translation algorithms to working with a neural network trained with deep learning and word embeddings employing Google's TensorFlow framework.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 ways to save money when you build a PC

For many enthusiasts, part of the fun of building a PC lies in not spending a penny more than necessary. Whether you’re building a basic everyday computer or trying to eke out a $500 gaming rig, shopping smart lets you do more with your money or, well, just plain save some cash on a purchase that’s already pricey enough.Good news: Costs savings abound, especially if you’re not in a rush. You just have to know where—and how—to look. These tips and tricks will help you save money on your next PC build. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Montreal sees its future in smart sensors, artificial intelligence (with video)

The Quebecois city of Montreal has long been known as a hotbed of creativity -- home of Cirque du Soleil and a hub for companies in the online gaming and special effects industries, not to mention its place as a financial and trade capital.Creativity played a key role when the city of 2 million (with 4 million regionally) competed against other municipalities globally to win the 2016 title of Intelligent Community of the Year.And now that commitment to creativity is spurring the city to explore a range of unique new smartphone apps and other startup-generated initiatives that leverage sensors, data collection and analysis, and machine learning to deal with snow removal, ever-increasing traffic and other municipal challenges.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Friends or enemies? Security vendors tiptoe towards collaboration

There are hundreds of security vendors across the security stack. You have providers for cloud, email, network and endpoint security, as well as threat, malware and DDoS protection, among phishing and whaling protection, insider threat detection and a whole lot more.The trouble is, a huge number of these solutions don’t ‘play’ well with one another, with this often making life difficult for security teams adopting these technologies. At the same time, these same teams are expected to keep up with an ever-changing landscape and criminals who innovate faster than most Fortune 500 companies.Magnum Consulting analyst Frank J. Ohlhorst captured this collaboration issue perfectly in an opinion piece last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Friends or enemies? Security vendors tiptoe towards collaboration

There are hundreds of security vendors across the security stack. You have providers for cloud, email, network and endpoint security, as well as threat, malware and DDoS protection, among phishing and whaling protection, insider threat detection and a whole lot more.The trouble is, a huge number of these solutions don’t ‘play’ well with one another, with this often making life difficult for security teams adopting these technologies. At the same time, these same teams are expected to keep up with an ever-changing landscape and criminals who innovate faster than most Fortune 500 companies.Magnum Consulting analyst Frank J. Ohlhorst captured this collaboration issue perfectly in an opinion piece last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What those IP ratings like IP68 or IP53 really mean

Waterproof phones are exciting. Instead of dropping your phone in a bowl of rice when you accidentally knock it off the counter and into the sink, you can just dry it off and keep on truckin’. And many of today’s waterproof phones are as waterproof as they can possibly get—they’ve got an IPX8 rating, where 8 is the highest (barring extreme products that aren’t made for consumers) “waterproofness” a consumer device can possibly qualify for.Right?Well…maybe not. The Samsung Galaxy S7 has an IP68 rating—the highest rating a consumer device can get on the IP scale—but that still doesn’t mean you should take it surfing or white-water rafting. Here’s what those IP ratings really mean.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The cloud continues to rise—and fast

Now that the big three cloud vendors—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—have released their financial results for the fourth quarter of 2016, it’s time once again to take stock of how fast the cloud is growing. The short answer remains: very, very fast. That conclusion comes in spite of some carping from analysts about the latest numbers from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but I don’t think those complaints add up to much when comes to the health of the cloud computing industry. But let’s take a closer look, and you can decide for yourself. AWS posted strong growth  AWS revenue grew 47 percent in the quarter to $3.5 billion. The business earned $926 million in the quarter, up from $540 million in Q4 2015. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft overhauls Azure Marketplace for easier app shopping

Microsoft´s Azure Marketplace is to Azure what the Windows Store is to the client operating system: an online software marketplace, only the Azure version is for buying and selling cloud apps and services from independent software vendors (ISVs) that have been certified by Microsoft to run on Azure. Over the years, the Marketplac has grown along with the popularity of Azure, and customers got frustrated with its interface due to an increasing number of categories, app types and providers. Finding the apps they wanted became a chore.So, Microsoft introduced a whole new Azure Marketplace interface designed to make things easier. For starters, the search form now provides search suggestions as you type, just like a search engine would. Results are sorted by relevance and popularity. You can do searches on basic terms and then narrow it down to more specific categories, applications and functions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stratoscale buys Tesora to bolster hybrid cloud database capability

Cloud service provider Stratoscale has snapped up database-as-a-service vendor Tesora to beef up its hybrid cloud offering.Stratoscale's key product, Symphony, is built on OpenStack and allows businesses to set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) "region" in their own data center, so they can easily move workloads between private and public cloud servers or scale up capacity without having to migrate to a different service.Tesora's database as a service, also built on OpenStack, runs in public, private or hybrid clouds. Stratoscale plans to use it to expand its existing managed database support, which includes AWS Relational Database Service and the AWS NoSQL database, DynamoDB. Tesora will bring Stratoscale self-service provisioning capabilities for Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgresSQL, Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis, DataStax Enterprise, Persona and DB2 Express databases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stratoscale buys Tesora to bolster hybrid cloud database capability

Cloud service provider Stratoscale has snapped up database-as-a-service vendor Tesora to beef up its hybrid cloud offering.Stratoscale's key product, Symphony, is built on OpenStack and allows businesses to set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) "region" in their own data center, so they can easily move workloads between private and public cloud servers or scale up capacity without having to migrate to a different service.Tesora's database as a service, also built on OpenStack, runs in public, private or hybrid clouds. Stratoscale plans to use it to expand its existing managed database support, which includes AWS Relational Database Service and the AWS NoSQL database, DynamoDB. Tesora will bring Stratoscale self-service provisioning capabilities for Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgresSQL, Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis, DataStax Enterprise, Persona and DB2 Express databases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fighting CLI cowboys with Napalm – An Introduction

A lot of people who aren’t familiar with Napalm tend to laugh nervously when you suggest they use it in their network. The name Napalm is partly based on getting that perfect acronym and partly a desire to incinerate the old way of doing things and move to network automation. This article is about explaining what Napalm is and what lies behind the acronym.
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BrandPost: To What Extent Can IT Future-Proof Storage?

Digital transformation is making a significant impact on the enterprise. Organizations in all industries are realizing the need to enhance the customer experience through IoT, social media, big data, and mobility. Not only are each of these opportunities transforming IT’s role within the enterprise, they are ultimately changing how organizations operate.To keep pace, numerous organizations are integrating flash storage into their infrastructure for many of their newest applications. But while flash is easy to deploy in satellite applications, integrating this valuable data back into the legacy storage infrastructure can be harder than expected. Aggressive deployment can be problematic, and enterprise networks often struggle to keep up with the higher performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

97 companies file brief against Trump’s immigration ban

Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, PayPal and the Wikimedia Foundation were among 97 companies which filed an amicus brief late Sunday opposing President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration on the grounds that it harms competitiveness and is discriminatory.The brief was filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals late last night, a bump up in the timetable as Bloomberg reported the companies had originally planned to file later this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

97 companies file brief against Trump’s immigration ban

Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, PayPal and the Wikimedia Foundation were among 97 companies that filed an amicus brief late Sunday opposing President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration on the grounds that it harms competitiveness and is discriminatory.The brief was filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals late last night, a bump up in the timetable, as Bloomberg reported the companies had originally planned to file later this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thought: Latest Apple Mac Customers Are Switching from Windows

Tim Cook in the latest earnings calls.

The Mac not only returned to growth but generated its highest quarterly revenue ever. Our latest data shows that most Mac customers are buying their first Mac, with the vast majority of them coming from a Windows PC.

(My emphasis).

Thinking

1. The latest Mac is a technical lemon – CPU is old, memory capacity is limited, touch bar not relevant to prosumers
2. Normal people are still switching away from Windows. And who could blame them ?
3. Mac OS X is the platform for choice for those wanting an alternative to Microsoft Windows.

I forget these things.

Link: Apple (AAPL) Q1 2017 Results – Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha – http://seekingalpha.com/article/4041266-apple-aapl-q1-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

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