Rick Perry, climate change skeptic, soon to oversee U.S. supercomputing

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, will also have charge of the nation’s largest supercomputers. These systems are used to investigate “national challenges,” which includes climate change. But Perry is a climate change skeptic, as is Trump, and believes the science is unsettled.Perry’s skepticism about the science of climate change may be a problem for the department he's been tapped to run; the Department of Energy (DOE) considers climate a major research focus.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers “DOE plays an important role in climate change research -- a very large role,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

List of remotely exploitable Netgear routers grows as beta firmware fix is released

Netgear stepped up by publishing a list of routers which are vulnerable to attack as well as releasing beta firmware to patch some of those models.The company confirmed the existence of the flaw which US-CERT believed was dangerous enough to advise users to stop using vulnerable routers. In addition to the originally announced vulnerable Netgear routers models R6400, R7000, R8000, Netgear warned that nine other router models are also vulnerable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

List of remotely exploitable Netgear routers grows as beta firmware fix is released

Netgear stepped up by publishing a list of routers which are vulnerable to attack as well as releasing beta firmware to patch some of those models.The company confirmed the existence of the flaw which US-CERT believed was dangerous enough to advise users to stop using vulnerable routers. In addition to the originally announced vulnerable Netgear routers models R6400, R7000, R8000, Netgear warned that nine other router models are also vulnerable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM goes to Trump Tower pledging 25,000 US hires

IBM will hire 25,000 workers in the U.S. over the next four years, the company's CEO said Tuesday on the eve of a meeting between technology industry leaders and President-Elect Donald Trump. The pledge comes just over a month after Trump criticized IBM for moving some jobs out of the country, an allegation IBM denied.Domestic job creation is likely to be a major topic at the meeting. Trump has called for U.S. corporations to keep jobs in the country and last month asked Apple CEO Tim Cook to build iPhones in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The top 2016 drones to zoom across our radar

What does it take to fly high in the world of drones? Is it convenience, safety, beauty, or adaptability? Our picks for the coolest drones of 2016 have it all.DHL's Parcelcopter and Rakuten's delivery drone will distribute goods to the most remote regions, while Altus Intelligence's drones will sail to safety on a parachute.And bumping into things? That's so last year thanks to obstacle avoidance systems developed by Intel and DJI. Intel's Shooting Star drones take the fire out of fireworks. Plus a drone that operates on land and water. What a year! To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft: We will democratize AI

Is artificial intelligence and conversational computing the next great frontier in IT? Microsoft believes so; the company is bullish on AI and is doubling down on opportunities it sees for the technology.At an event in San Francisco, Microsoft paraded a multitude of technologies focusing on bots, the Cortana personal digital assistant, and application development in these realms. "Our goal here is democratizing AI so that we make AI available for everyone," including developers, consumers, and businesses, said Harry Shum, executive vice president in Microsoft's AI and Research Group.[ The InfoWorld review: TensorFlow shines a light on deep learning. | Start here with TensorFlow. | Get a digest of the day's top tech stories in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ] The company officially introduced its Zo chatbot, an AI-driven, English-speaking conversation partner that is a follow-up to Tay, which had been contorted into misuse and abuse. More than 115,000 people have already been using Zo, according to Microsoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MXNet review: Amazon’s scalable deep learning

Deep learning, which is basically neural network machine learning with multiple hidden layers, is all the rage—both for problems that justify the complexity and high computational cost of deep learning, such as image recognition and natural language parsing, and for problems that might be better served by careful data preparation and simple algorithms, such as forecasting the next quarter’s sales. If you actually need deep learning, there are many packages that could serve your needs: Google TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Caffe, Theano, Torch, and MXNet, for starters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Tech Forecast 2017: 5 key technologies to double down on now

With digital transformation dominating the business agenda, IT pros are under pressure to create a modern-day tech foundation sturdy enough to drive that change as they head into 2017. What milestones are they aiming for in the year ahead? Where should they direct their limited resources?According to Computerworld's Forecast 2017 survey, IT professionals will prioritize security, analytics, XaaS or "as a service" technology, virtualization and mobile apps in the coming year. If you're thinking of adding those technologies to your own 2017 to-do list, read on for findings from our survey, along with real-world advice from other IT leaders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech Forecast 2017: 5 key technologies to double down on now

With digital transformation dominating the business agenda, IT pros are under pressure to create a modern-day tech foundation sturdy enough to drive that change as they head into 2017. What milestones are they aiming for in the year ahead? Where should they direct their limited resources?According to Computerworld's Forecast 2017 survey, IT professionals will prioritize security, analytics, XaaS or "as a service" technology, virtualization and mobile apps in the coming year. If you're thinking of adding those technologies to your own 2017 to-do list, read on for findings from our survey, along with real-world advice from other IT leaders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top 15 security predictions for 2017

Looking into the crystal ballImage by ThinkstockIt is once again, as the song doesn’t quite say, “the most predictive time of the year.” Not that anybody knows for sure what will be happening even a month from now, never mind six months to a year.But that does not, and should not, stop organizations from trying. The way to get ahead and stay ahead, especially in online security, is to look ahead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top 15 security predictions for 2017

Looking into the crystal ballImage by ThinkstockIt is once again, as the song doesn’t quite say, “the most predictive time of the year.” Not that anybody knows for sure what will be happening even a month from now, never mind six months to a year.But that does not, and should not, stop organizations from trying. The way to get ahead and stay ahead, especially in online security, is to look ahead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Businesses looking to hire candidates willing to collaborate

For most businesses, IT has traditionally operated separately from the rest of the business -- employees knew to submit a ticket when something wasn't working, but for the most part, IT worked behind the scenes.Now, technology is in the hands of every employee, which means IT can no longer control all the hardware, software and apps coming through the door. With more departments relying on technology, it will require more collaboration with IT to help find the best products and to educate workers on security risks.But this demand for collaboration has also caused a shift in the skills employers value in IT workers. Businesses are looking to hire candidates with soft skills, who are "versatile and willing to collaborate with each other to solve problems as a team, rather than as individual experts," says Patric Palm, CEO and co-founder of Favro, a company that offers project management and collaboration tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s collaboration strategy seems messy

The enterprise collaboration market is increasingly crowded with apps and services that target distinct needs for messaging and communication. With its growing suite of apps that target the market from many different angles, Microsoft represents the challenge of modern collaboration.Collaborative work-related activities increased significantly during the last five years, and apps such as Microsoft's Yammer, Skype for Business and the recently launched Teams are quickly becoming a bigger part of the way people work, according to Bryan Goode, Microsoft's general manager of Office 365. As the average age of today's worker trends younger and more employees work remotely, businesses flock to cloud-based collaboration tools, Goode says. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to tweak your benefits package to find and retain talent

In today's competitive war for talent, employers are using substantial benefits packages to give them an edge when recruiting and retaining talent, according a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey report.The report, which surveyed 738 randomly selected HR professionals, showed that 95 percent rated healthcare as one of the three most important benefits to employees; 71 percent say retirement savings and planning are top-rated employee benefits and 50 percent say leave is an important benefit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Postman Releases Postman Pro to Provide API Monitoring

Postman Cloud users will automatically be upgraded to Postman Pro.

A WLAN Pro’s Wish List For 2017

IDG Contributor Network: CrateDB: The IoT and machine data-focused database

There’s been a whole bunch of conversation in the database world in recent years around what the best type of database is for modern applications. Over the past couple of years this has mainly centered around the SQL verses NoSQL wars.On the one hand are the traditional SQL-based databases, which all follow a traditional row and column format. These are the databases that have existed since pretty much year dot and have proved themselves to be good all-around tools.+ Also on Network World: IT wants (but struggles) to operationalize big data + With the advent of social media and the need for database approaches that worked well within the unstructured data landscape that these properties work within has led to the rise of the NoSQL databases. These databases don’t follow, or at least don’t only follow, the standard tabular approach towards data. Hence storage and retrieval of data doesn’t follow the rigid row and column, tabular approach.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How Swift drives innovation on the cloud

One year ago, Swift became available as open source, and the community immediately set out to make the language usable for everything from systems programming to mobile apps to cloud services.Building on that momentum and creativity, the enterprise is now poised to deploy Swift for front-end and back-end development.The cloud is rapidly becoming the platform for innovation, with enterprises building applications that leverage cognitive, the Internet of Things (IoT) and other emerging technologies. But enterprises need a simpler way to develop apps and innovate quickly on the cloud. When we saw the speed, performance and creativity our development team experienced using Swift to build more than 100 MobileFirst for iOS apps, we focused our efforts on fully enabling Swift for server development so enterprises could also take advantage of these benefits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP Security: Preventing Bad Route Propagation

Microsoft adds Skype translation to landline calls

One would think the addition of a feature like this would have Microsoft screaming from the rooftops, but very quietly Microsoft added a new feature to Skype that supports its real-time translation technology in calls to landlines and mobile phones. The new feature was added to its preview build of the Skype Windows Store app late last week. The new version of Skype Preview can now perform real-time spoken-word translations via Skype Translator when calling landlines and mobile phones, and the person on the other end does not need Skype on their phone to receive translations or be translated.Of course, it's not for everyone. To use this new version of Skype Preview, you need to be run the latest build of Windows 10 Insider preview from the fast ring. That tends to be reserved for dedicated testers and developers, since fast ring releases aren't as stable as normal builds and are geared for debugging. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here