Planetary scientists push for unique asteroid deflection mission

Planetary scientists got together this week in Berlin express support for the future European/NASA asteroid redirect mission to develop technology that one day might prevent the Earth from being smacked by a destructive asteroid.+More on Network World: How to protect Earth from asteroid destruction+Proponents are trying to garner worldwide support for the mission pointing to the European Space Administration ministerial conference in Luzern next month where the decision will be made whether or not to fund the ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM). AIM is part of an over-arching collaborative effort with NASA known as theAsteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Planetary scientists push for unique asteroid deflection mission

Planetary scientists got together this week in Berlin express support for the future European/NASA asteroid redirect mission to develop technology that one day might prevent the Earth from being smacked by a destructive asteroid.+More on Network World: How to protect Earth from asteroid destruction+Proponents are trying to garner worldwide support for the mission pointing to the European Space Administration ministerial conference in Luzern next month where the decision will be made whether or not to fund the ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM). AIM is part of an over-arching collaborative effort with NASA known as theAsteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Indian Conglomerate Embarks on IoT Journey with Cisco Jasper

Reliance & Cisco launch Unlimit, targeting enterprise IoT.

47% off CyberPower CSP600WSU Surge Protector 6-AC Outlet Swivel with 2 USB (2.1A) Charging Ports – Deal Alert

The CyberPower Professional Series CSP600WSU Surge Protector is ideal for Home/ Office protection with 1200 joules, 6 swivel outlets, 2 USB charge ports (2.1 Amp shared), and a convenient wall tap design. The surge protector is ideal for protecting personal computers, phones/ fax/ modems, printers, stereos, and other electronics. Its two USB are perfect for keeping tablets, smart phones, and other rechargeable electronics ready to use.  With Amazon's current discount of 47% you can buy it now for $9.86 (See it on Amazon). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

23% off MagicFiber Microfiber Cleaning Cloths For Screens and Other Delicate Surfaces, 30 Pack – Deal Alert

This extremely soft, high-quality 6x7 microfiber cloth from MagicFiber absorbs and safely removes dust, oil smudges, fingerprints, and dirt from eyeglasses, camera lenses, computer screens, televisions, and other delicate surfaces without any harsh chemicals. It's machine or hand washable, and is built to last. The cloths are highly rated on Amazon, where it currently averages 4.8 out of 5 stars from over 8,300 people (90% rate 5 stars: read recent reviews). Its typical list price of $29.99 has been reduced 23% to $22.99 for a pack of 30 individually wrapped, so you may decide to toss one in everybody's stocking this holiday season. See the discounted 30-pack of microfiber cleaning cloths now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Siemplify Raises $10M for Its Security Platform

The company has raised $14M since its launch in February.

Reprisals against Apple in a U.S.-China trade war would be indirect

If the Chinese government retaliated against tariff increases by the United States, it would not take direct aim at Apple, an economist argued today."For China, the best target is Boeing," said Caroline Freund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.Freund was responding to questions after Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party-supported newspaper, warned of reprisals if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on a campaign pledge to dramatically increase tariffs on goods imported into the United States.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3D printer owners rate the best 14 machines

Online user community 3D Hubs has published its third annual 3D Printer Guide for 2017, based on reviews from 8,624 verified 3D printer owners of 513 different 3D printer models.Fourteen machines separated into five categories made it into the guide's top 3D printers list for 2017. The categories include Budget, Plug-N-Play, Prosumer, Workhorse and SLS or selective laser sintering machines, which is a new commercial-grade category.3D Hubs used a wide range of parameters to measure the user experience with 3D printers, which included print quality, build quality, reliability, ease of use, print failure rate, customer service, community, running cost, software, and value.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Can Technology be Morally Neutral?

“Technology is neutral. It’s only how it’s used that can be good or bad.” Back in the 1960s and even up to the 1970s, a statement along those lines was often the standard response you got from an engineer or scientist if you raised questions about the dangers or moral implications of a given invention. The neutrality argument was used to defend radio, television, computers, and even nuclear energy. But Sheila Jasanoff, for one, would disagree. —MercatorNet

The post Worth Reading: Can Technology be Morally Neutral? appeared first on 'net work.

Google levels up its cloud machine learning with new services

There's an arms race among public cloud providers to provide businesses with the best machine learning capabilities. Enterprises are increasingly interested in creating intelligent applications, and companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are rushing to help meet their needs.Google fired its latest salvo on Tuesday, announcing a set of enhancements to its existing suite of cloud machine-learning capabilities. The first was a new Jobs API aimed at helping match job applicants with the right openings. In addition, the company is slashing the prices on its Cloud Vision API and launching an enhanced version of its translation API.On top of that, Google is offering GPUs in its cloud both through the company's managed services and its infrastructure-as-a-service product. Companies that want to roll their own machine learning systems and algorithms can now take advantage of the new hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Smartphones cause insomnia, study finds

Put that smartphone away or limit your use of it if you want to get a decent night’s sleep and stay healthy.Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco say they have confirmed that sleep deprivation is magnified by exposure to a kind of blue light emitted by the devices. And missing sleep can instigate deadly diseases, such as obesity and depression.“Longer average screen-time was associated with shorter sleep duration and worse sleep-efficiency,” the journal PLOS ONE says of the research on its website.Sleep took longer to come on and quality was generally poor, according to the researchers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Troubleshooting High CPU Usage On Cisco Nexus 7000

Intel packs more horsepower in its monster 22-core processor

CPU performance increases were ignored for years, but AMD put them back on the map with its upcoming Zen chip. This has rubbed off on Intel in a good way.Intel's taken its fastest server chip, the top-line 22-core Xeon E5-2699 v4 chip, and made some tweaks to squeeze out more CPU performance. It has created a new chip called the 22-core Xeon E5-2699A v4, which is about 5 percent faster.While 5 percent may sound like a small number, it's big for those installing thousands of servers running on the chips. Four-socket servers can have up to 88 CPU cores and run up a 20 percent gain in performance improvements.The new chip could also be used in workstations with the latest GPUs to create VR content or run engineering applications like SolidWorks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s latest Xeon chips based on Skylake due next year

Intel has moved to a new architecture called Kaby Lake for its PC chips, but it isn't done with the previous generation Skylake yet. The company will release new Xeon server chips based on Skylake in mid-2017, and they will boast big performance increases, said Barry Davis, general manager for the accelerated workload group at Intel. The Skylake Xeon chips will go into mainstream servers and could spark a big round of hardware upgrades, Davis said. Xeon chips aren't as visible as Intel's PC chips but remain extremely popular. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon buy thousands of servers loaded with Xeon chips to power their search, social networking, and artificial intelligence tasks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhones in China are randomly shutting down, owners say

A consumer protection group in China is asking Apple to investigate problems with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s units automatically shutting off.Recently, iPhone customers in the country have been complaining about the problem to the China Consumers Association, the group said in a statement on Tuesday. The shutdowns occur when the phone’s battery charge drops to between 60 and 50 percent.The problem will persist despite upgrading to the latest version of iOS. It will also occur in both cold environments and at room temperature.  After the automatic shutdown, the phones will also fail to turn on without connecting to a power supply.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Super Mari-owned: Startling Nintendo-based vulnerability discovered in Ubuntu

A vulnerability in a multimedia framework present on Version 12.04.5 of Ubuntu can be exploited by sound files meant to be played on the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System, according to security researcher Chris Evans. The vulnerability is the result of a flaw in an audio decoder called libgstnsf.so, which allows gstreamer Version 0.10 to play the NSF files that the NES uses for music. NSF files, when played, use the host system’s hardware to create a virtualized version of the NES’ old 6502 processor and sound hardware in real time. +ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cool Yule Tools 2016: Digital disruption at Santa's Workshop + Android deems Instagram worthy of its presenceTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Super Mari-owned: Startling Nintendo-based vulnerability discovered in Ubuntu

A vulnerability in a multimedia framework present on Version 12.04.5 of Ubuntu can be exploited by sound files meant to be played on the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System, according to security researcher Chris Evans. The vulnerability is the result of a flaw in an audio decoder called libgstnsf.so, which allows gstreamer Version 0.10 to play the NSF files that the NES uses for music. NSF files, when played, use the host system’s hardware to create a virtualized version of the NES’ old 6502 processor and sound hardware in real time. +ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cool Yule Tools 2016: Digital disruption at Santa's Workshop + Android deems Instagram worthy of its presenceTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reactive Malicious Domain Detection (ENTRADA)

One interesting trend of the last year or two is the rising use of data analytics and ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) in solving network engineering problems. Several ideas (and/or solutions) were presented this year at the IETF meeting in Seoul; this post takes a look at one of these. To lay the groundwork, botnets are often controlled through a set of domain names registered just for this purpose. In the same way, domain names are often registered just to provide a base for sending bulk mail (SPAM), phishing attacks, etc. It might be nice for registrars to make some attempt to remove such domains abused for malicious activities, but it’s difficult to know what “normal” activity might look like, or for the registrar to even track the usage of a particular domain to detect malicious activity. One of the papers presented in the Software Defined Network Research Group (SDNRG) addresses this problem directly.

The first problem is actually collecting enough information to analyze in a useful way. DNS servers, even top level domain (TLD) servers collect a huge amount of data—much more than most engineers might suspect. In fact, the DNS system is one of those vast sources of information Continue reading

GE Digital Buys a Pair of AI Startups to Boost Predix

IoT keeps getting smarter.

GitLab ditches the public cloud

Popular developer platform GitLab has concluded that the public IaaS cloud is not an effective platform for hosting its open source file storage system with high input/output demands. So, GitLab is ditching the cloud.In a blog post explaining the decision, GitLab engineers say they’ll transition their CephFS storage tool to bare metal infrastructure that they will manage themselves. GitLab provides a platform to help teams of developers write, test and ship code. GitLab's storage issue is a prime example that not all workloads are ideally suited for the public cloud. GitLab is hardly the first company to pull an application from the public cloud; DropBox announced plans to build out its own cloud platform instead of using Amazon Web Service’s cloud earlier this year, for example. Still, many other enterprises are going all in on the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here