IDG Contributor Network: SpareFare helps travelers resell those pesky non-refundable tickets

Most of my travel is booked well in advance. I’m kind of obsessive about my calendar and with a busy life to manage, I like to know what I’m up to weeks in advance. I’m also very loyal to one particular airline (here’s looking at you Air New Zealand) and am happy to pay a little more for a ticket on a top-shelf carrier that has good terms an conditions.I realize, of course, not everyone is in the same position and there are lots of people who buy cheap flights or holiday packages and then come unstuck when plans change. This is where SpareFare comes in. The company created an online platform that aims to connect people who bought flights or holiday packages they can no longer use with people seeking urgent or discounted travel options.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Ransom by spreading the infection

Researchers say they have uncovered ransomware still under development that comes with a novel and nasty twist. Infected victims of the ransomware known as Popcorn Time, have the option to either pay up, or they can opt to infect two others using a referral link. If the two new ransomware targets pay the ransom, the original target receives a free key to unlock files on their PC. —threatpost

The post Worth Reading: Ransom by spreading the infection appeared first on 'net work.

BlackBerry counts on cars to reverse decline in revenue

BlackBerry reported another quarter of losses and declining revenue on Tuesday, but CEO John Chen forecast that the company will break even next quarter, its first since quitting the smartphone business.The company signaled its departure from the smartphone hardware business last week, licensing its brand to TCL, the Chinese manufacturer that built the last two BlackBerry handsets.Chen's break-even forecast had a caveat: It didn't include restructuring charges, stock compensation expenses, fair-value adjustments and a host of other things, so the company will still make a loss, but a smaller one.With smartphones out of its product mix, BlackBerry is looking to a different kind of mobility to drive its future growth: the automotive industry, the major source of revenue for its QNX embedded software platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BlackBerry counts on cars to reverse decline in revenue

BlackBerry reported another quarter of losses and declining revenue on Tuesday, but CEO John Chen forecast that the company will break even next quarter, its first since quitting the smartphone business.The company signaled its departure from the smartphone hardware business last week, licensing its brand to TCL, the Chinese manufacturer that built the last two BlackBerry handsets.Chen's break-even forecast had a caveat: It didn't include restructuring charges, stock compensation expenses, fair-value adjustments and a host of other things, so the company will still make a loss, but a smaller one.With smartphones out of its product mix, BlackBerry is looking to a different kind of mobility to drive its future growth: the automotive industry, the major source of revenue for its QNX embedded software platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This Intel board computer can be a powerful Ubuntu 16.04 Linux PC

If you want a PC with Ubuntu Linux, you can turn to Intel's Joule single-board computer instead of buying an expensive machine.Support for Ubuntu 16.04 desktop OS has been added to the Joule board, according to developer notes for Intel IoT Developer Kit 5.0 released late last week.Intel has two Joule boards: the 570x, which sells for $219 on Mouser, and the 550x, which is priced at $179 on the same retail site. The 550x, which started shipping recently, was priced at $349 until Monday, but was cut in half after a story by the IDG News Service pointed out the unusually high price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s Still Time! Go Here For Last Minute Deals That Will Ship Fast – Deal Alert

Procrastination has once again turned into desperation. "Maybe I could whittle a pan flute from those broken chair legs in the basement", you're thinking. Snap out of it! Stay calm and remind yourself that with just a few minutes on Amazon right now you can still snag great gifts for anyone left on your list, and have them at your doorstep with plenty of time to gift wrap. Amazon's "last minute deals" page right here features great deals in almost any department, guaranteed by Amazon to arrive by Christmas. You need Amazon Prime to take advantage of free 2-day shipping, so if you don't have a membership, take a minute to sign up for a free 30 day trial and feel the weight lift from your shoulders. But do it soon -- once the 2-day window closes, things will get ugly. Breathe deeply and go get the job done: See Amazon's Last Minute Deals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s Still Time! Go Here For Last Minute Deals That Will Ship Fast – Deal Alert

Procrastination has once again turned into desperation. "Maybe I could whittle a pan flute from those broken chair legs in the basement", you're thinking. Snap out of it! Stay calm and remind yourself that with just a few minutes on Amazon right now you can still snag great gifts for anyone left on your list, and have them at your doorstep with plenty of time to gift wrap. Amazon's "last minute deals" page right here features great deals in almost any department, guaranteed by Amazon to arrive by Christmas. You need Amazon Prime to take advantage of free 2-day shipping, so if you don't have a membership, take a minute to sign up for a free 30 day trial and feel the weight lift from your shoulders. But do it soon -- once the 2-day window closes, things will get ugly. Breathe deeply and go get the job done: See Amazon's Last Minute Deals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenFlow Report Available from ONF: State of the OpenFlow Union

ONF and ON.Lab commissioned SDxCentral to research and author 2016 current state of OpenFlow report. Learn more and find out how to get your own copy.

IDG Contributor Network: Real edge computing will enable new business models

Edge computing today may be most simplistically defined as putting an extra layer of computing in the network between your smartphone and a centralized data center in the cloud for some optimizing purpose.From this original, slightly narrow vision, there is still some ways to go before realizing full stack relocations (e.g., relocation of an entire web server) that will allow true service enablement just one hop away from the end user device. Obvious benefits of realizing this vision include reduced latency and backhaul capacity reduction, but I believe there will be more profound benefits to operators and service providers in terms of new business model enablement, too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

No porn for you, South Carolina, if newly proposed bill becomes law

If two state representatives get their way and their newly proposed law moves forward, then people in South Carolina will be blocked from accessing online porn after purchasing a new device.There are many missing pieces to fully explain how porn blocking would work under the Human Trafficking Prevent Act, and reading the bill doesn’t make it any clearer. However, the bill sponsors—Reps. Bill Chumley (R-Spartanburg) and Mike Burns (R-Greenville)—wrote that porn is a “public health hazard” and viewing porn online has impacted the “demand for human trafficking and prostitution.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

No porn for you, South Carolina, if newly proposed bill becomes law

If two state representatives get their way and their newly proposed law moves forward, then people in South Carolina will be blocked from accessing online porn after purchasing a new device.There are many missing pieces to fully explain how porn blocking would work under the Human Trafficking Prevent Act, and reading the bill doesn’t make it any clearer. However, the bill sponsors—Reps. Bill Chumley (R-Spartanburg) and Mike Burns (R-Greenville)—wrote that porn is a “public health hazard” and viewing porn online has impacted the “demand for human trafficking and prostitution.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 technologies that will shake things up in 2017

If you thought 2016 was a fun time to be in IT, wait until 2017 hits. Network World presents an overview of five technologies and trends that will "shake things up" in the world of enterprise networking for the new year.

The year ransomware became one of the top threats to enterprises

On Feb. 5, employees at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, started having network access problems that prevented electronic communications. Over the next few days, they learned that the hospital was the victim of a ransomware attack that encrypted files on multiple computers.After several days during which staff had to resort to pen and paper for some record keeping, the hospital decided to pay the $17,000 ransom -- the equivalent of 40 bitcoins that the attackers had requested. It was deemed to be the fastest way to restore the affected files and systems.This was to be the first in a string of ransomware attacks that affected multiple healthcare organizations in the U.S. over the following months, including the Chino Valley Medical Center, the Desert Valley Hospital and Methodist Hospital in Henderson, Kentucky.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The year ransomware became one of the top threats to enterprises

On Feb. 5, employees at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, started having network access problems that prevented electronic communications. Over the next few days, they learned that the hospital was the victim of a ransomware attack that encrypted files on multiple computers.After several days during which staff had to resort to pen and paper for some record keeping, the hospital decided to pay the $17,000 ransom -- the equivalent of 40 bitcoins that the attackers had requested. It was deemed to be the fastest way to restore the affected files and systems.This was to be the first in a string of ransomware attacks that affected multiple healthcare organizations in the U.S. over the following months, including the Chino Valley Medical Center, the Desert Valley Hospital and Methodist Hospital in Henderson, Kentucky.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Web-scale networking with Cumulus Linux — announcing 3.2

We are pleased to announce that Cumulus Linux 3.2 is now available for installation. The priority of this release was our operators: how can we make web-scale networking with Cumulus Linux easier, faster and more efficient for operators coming from all types of engineering backgrounds.

As more and more organizations are adopting a cloud environment for various uses, web-scale IT principles become an increasingly relevant tool for building efficient, automatable and scalable data centers. This release offers our customers a path to web-scale networking that is simple and user friendly.

Over the next several days, we’ll be posting several blog posts that go into detail about some of our 3.2 features. In the meantime, here is the overview.

Cumulus Linux 3.2 includes:

• NCLU: Network Command Line Utility (NCLU) provides users one central point where they can manually drive the system. This new feature both enables network engineers from all backgrounds and retains all the benefits of standardizing on Linux to achieve significant operational efficiency. Learn more about NCLU.
• PIM: Protocol-Independent Multicast enables efficient data distribution over Internet Protocol (IP). With the availability of PIM, you can now build networks utilizing web-scale networking ethos.
• System Snapshots Continue reading

Fraud detection firm outs $1b Russian ad-fraud gang and its robo-browsing Methbot

A $1 billion Russia-based criminal gang has been bilking online advertisers by impersonating high-profile Web sites like ESPN, Vogue, CBS Sports, Fox News and the Huffington Post and selling phony ad slots, but that’s about to end.Online fraud-prevention firm White Ops is releasing data today that will enable online advertisers and ad marketplaces to block the efforts of the group, which is cashing in on its intimate knowledge of the automated infrastructure that controls the buying and selling of video ads.The group has been ramping up its activities since October so that it now reaps roughly $3 million to $5 million per day from unsuspecting advertisers and gives them nothing in return, says White Ops, which discovered the first hints of the scam in September.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s biggest hits, misses, and WTF moments of 2016

Hardware and AI lead the wayImage by Martyn WilliamsWith last year’s corporate restructuring out of the way, 2016 was a year of rebuilding for Google and its parent company Alphabet.This year, Google got much more serious about hardware, while placing big bets on artificial intelligence as the heart of its software. Products that fit this mission got revamped, while those that didn’t got axed or ignored. Read on for a review of what went right and wrong at Google in 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A: Hortonworks CTO unfolds the big data road map

Hortonworks has built its business on big data and Hadoop, but the Hortonworks Data Platform provides analytics and features support for a range of technologies beyond Hadoop, including MapReduce, Pig, Hive, and Spark. Hortonworks DataFlow, meanwhile, offers streaming analytics and uses technologies like Apache Nifi and Kafka.InfoWorld Executive Editor Doug Dineley and Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Hortonworks CTO Scott Gnau about how the company sees the data business shaking out, the Spark vs. Hadoop face-off, and Hortonworks' release strategy and efforts to build out the DataFlow platform for data in motion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s tariff threat may speed cloud adoption

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on goods manufactured in Mexico and offshore may accelerate the movement to cloud computing, analysts said.IT managers may seek to protect their companies from higher hardware or capital expenditure costs by shifting more of their IT spending to services. This shift is well underway, and the new administration may push it along, even before Trump takes office next month.At this point, industry analysts are uncertain as to what Trump has planned. His statements regarding tariffs are short, vague and sometimes delivered by tweets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google open-sources test suite to find crypto bugs

Working with cryptographic libraries is hard, and a single implementation mistake can result in serious security problems. To help developers check their code for implementation errors and find weaknesses in cryptographic software libraries, Google has released a test suite as part of Project Wycheproof."In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, and mistakes in open source cryptographic software libraries repeat too often and remain undiscovered for too long," Google security engineers Daniel Bleichenbacher and Thai Duong, wrote in a post announcing the project on the Google Security blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here