7 hidden features in macOS Sierra you may have missed

There’s a lot going on in macOS SierraSiri, Universal Clipboard, Auto Unlock with Apple Watch—these are just three of the features that Apple showcases for macOS Sierra, the latest version of the company’s Macintosh operating system that made its debut last Tuesday. We go over the marquee features in our review, but there are a few features that go unheralded. We’ll shine a little bit of the spotlight on them in this slideshow. These are less glamourous, but they make your Mac a lot easier to use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The best online backup service for securely encrypting your data

Many people resist backing up their data to an online backup service like MozyHome, Carbonite, or Backblaze because they worry their data will be poked through by company employees, hijacked by criminals, or provided to law enforcement or government agents without due process. The sanctity of your data boils down to whether the encryption key used to scramble your data can be recovered by anyone other than yourself. Below I outline the various methods and levels of encryption that can be employed by these services, and then evaluate six of the best options for home users. Several give subscribers full control of their encryption. If you’re already using a service, it’s possible you can even upgrade to take advantage of greater ownership options.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hillary Clinton’s email has vanished but why can’t yours?

The warnings about the longevity of email are regular and ominous: Don’t be careless with it. Email is forever.Indeed, in some very high-profile cases it seems that way. Former CIA director and retired US Army General David Petraeus lost his job and his reputation, and "gained" a criminal record in 2012, when emails from an account he thought was private exposed his mishandling of classified information and an affair with his biographer.Much more recently – just in the past couple of weeks – a trove of embarrassing correspondence from the email account of former secretary of state Colin Powell was posted on the website DCLeaks.com. In the words of an anonymous television anchor, they upended the perception of Powell, also a retired four-star US Army general, as a stoic diplomat and revealed him to be, “just as gossipy as everyone else.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Real SDN

IDG Contributor Network: Gesture-controlled IoT extends freedom for the disabled

Christopher Reeve is famous as Superman in movies. As the man of steel with amazing superpowers, he was unbeatable.In real life, though, a bad fall from his horse left Reeve a quadriplegic. How suddenly life changes. One day you’re a hero with superpowers. The next day you’ve lost control of your body.The loss of control over their bodies is devastating for spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. An Israeli startup now offers the hope to regain some of the lost control with its app, Sesame Enable.Background The spinal cord is the main pathway for transmitting information between the brain and the nerves that lead to muscles, skin, internal organs and glands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 9.26.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Adaptiva OneSite 6.0Key features – OneSite 6.0 is the IT industry’s first serverless option for distributing software from the cloud at on-premise speeds, using Microsoft System Center Configuration (ConfigMgr). More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 9.26.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Adaptiva OneSite 6.0Key features – OneSite 6.0 is the IT industry’s first serverless option for distributing software from the cloud at on-premise speeds, using Microsoft System Center Configuration (ConfigMgr). More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix wins VDI shootout

Virtual Desktop Interface is becoming easier to do, with potentially killer graphics, reasonable port virtualization, fine-grained administrative control, and with potential hosts other than Windows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Citrix wins virtual desktop interface shootout

Virtual Desktop Interface is becoming easier to do, with potentially killer graphics, reasonable port virtualization, fine-grained administrative control, and with potential hosts other than Windows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Noction bets on BGP FlowSpec

The post Noction bets on BGP FlowSpec appeared first on Noction.

802.11ad is the fastest Wi-Fi that you might not ever use

Millimeter-wave Wi-Fi technology, better known as 802.11ad, is a powerful new wireless standard, for which products are just beginning to hit the market – a router from TP-Link and a laptop from Acer are the only ones so far. 802.11ad is based on very high-frequency radio waves – where today’s 802.11n and 802.11ac standards use 5GHz frequencies, ad uses 60GHz. That means that it’s both capable of handling a lot more data than earlier standards, and a lot more short-ranged, since higher frequency signals dissipate much faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Many vMotion Events Can You Expect in a Data Center?

One of my friends sent me this question:

How many VM moves do you see in a medium and how many in a large data center environment per second and per minute? What would be a reasonable maximum?

Obviously the answer to the first part is it depends (please share your experience in the comments), so we’ll focus on the second one. It’s time for another Fermi estimate.

Trump hotel chain fined over data breaches

Trump Hotel Collection has arrived at a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman over hacks that are said to have led to the exposure of over 70,000 credit card numbers and other personal data.The hotel chain, one of the businesses of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, has agreed to pay US$50,000 in penalties and promised to take measures to beef up its data security practices, according to the attorney general’s office.The chain is one of many hotels and retailers that have been hit recently by malware that skimmed payment card information.The key charges apparently against Trump Hotel Collection (THC) are that it didn’t have adequate protection and even after the attacks became known, did not quickly inform the people affected, in breach of New York law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump hotel chain fined over data breaches

Trump Hotel Collection has arrived at a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman over hacks that are said to have led to the exposure of over 70,000 credit card numbers and other personal data.The hotel chain, one of the businesses of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, has agreed to pay US$50,000 in penalties and promised to take measures to beef up its data security practices, according to the attorney general’s office.The chain is one of many hotels and retailers that have been hit recently by malware that skimmed payment card information.The key charges apparently against Trump Hotel Collection (THC) are that it didn’t have adequate protection and even after the attacks became known, did not quickly inform the people affected, in breach of New York law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to keep terrifying medical device hacks from becoming reality

While some of the scariest IoT hacks envisioned – those involving hijacked medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps – have yet to surface in the real world, those in the medical and IT security fields are not letting down their guard. They’ve seen enough ransomware and other attacks on healthcare outfits of late to know they are major cyberattack targets.The reality is that more medical devices are becoming connected ones, and that’s increasing the security threat surface, said panelists this past week at the Security of Things Forum in Cambridge, Mass.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to keep terrifying medical device hacks from becoming reality

While some of the scariest IoT hacks envisioned – those involving hijacked medical devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps – have yet to surface in the real world, those in the medical and IT security fields are not letting down their guard. They’ve seen enough ransomware and other attacks on healthcare outfits of late to know they are major cyberattack targets.The reality is that more medical devices are becoming connected ones, and that’s increasing the security threat surface, said panelists this past week at the Security of Things Forum in Cambridge, Mass.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Podium Data wants to offer a complete data wrangling platform

News today from quiet 2-year-old startup Podium Data, which has raised $9.5 million by way of a series A funding round. The round comes from a syndicate of investors led by Malibu Ventures. The company was founded back in 2014, and since then it has quietly been going about building its offering.The founding team has broad experience within the big data industry, having wrangled data warehousing, advanced high-performance computing, systems integrations, business intelligence and database systems within Fortune 100 companies.+ Also on Network World: Data lakes: A better way to analyze customer data +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Podium Data wants to offer a complete data wrangling platform

News today from quiet 2-year-old startup Podium Data, which has raised $9.5 million by way of a series A funding round. The round comes from a syndicate of investors led by Malibu Ventures. The company was founded back in 2014, and since then it has quietly been going about building its offering.The founding team has broad experience within the big data industry, having wrangled data warehousing, advanced high-performance computing, systems integrations, business intelligence and database systems within Fortune 100 companies.+ Also on Network World: Data lakes: A better way to analyze customer data +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When the IPv6 Data Changes, so Should Your Opinion

Sky UK recently completed their rollout of IPv6. The uptake statistics are quite remarkable. If you think that people don’t have IPv6-capable devices, or that their home routers can’t handle IPv6…you really need to look at the data, and re-think your opinion.

APNIC has a long-running program collecting data on IPv6 client capability/preference by country and ASN. This graph shows the data for Great Britain:

So a year ago we had ~5% takeup, and now it’s 20-25%. And here’s the reason for that big jump from April this year – this graph shows the data for AS5607, BSkyB:

So > 80% of clients on the BSkyB network are IPv6-capable.

If someone tells you that people don’t have IPv6-capable devices, or routers: the data does not back that up. A few years ago that may have been true, but people don’t access the Internet using Windows XP desktops anymore: They use iOS and Android mobile devices. These have short replacement lifecycles, so people tend to be running newer versions. These are capable of using IPv6, and will prefer it if it is available.

The other related trend is that people have more wireless devices at home, and they have Continue reading

When the IPv6 Data Changes, so Should Your Opinion

Sky UK recently completed their rollout of IPv6. The uptake statistics are quite remarkable. If you think that people don’t have IPv6-capable devices, or that their home routers can’t handle IPv6…you really need to look at the data, and re-think your opinion.

APNIC has a long-running program collecting data on IPv6 client capability/preference by country and ASN. This graph shows the data for Great Britain:

So a year ago we had ~5% takeup, and now it’s 20-25%. And here’s the reason for that big jump from April this year - this graph shows the data for AS5607, BSkyB:

So > 80% of clients on the BSkyB network are IPv6-capable.

If someone tells you that people don’t have IPv6-capable devices, or routers: the data does not back that up. A few years ago that may have been true, but people don’t access the Internet using Windows XP desktops anymore: They use iOS and Android mobile devices. These have short replacement lifecycles, so people tend to be running newer versions. These are capable of using IPv6, and will prefer it if it is available.

The other related trend is that people have more wireless devices at home, and they have Continue reading