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Creepy clowns cause sheriff to consult with FBI and Homeland Security

If you are going to be dressing up in a costume for Halloween, you might want to avoid dressing like a creepy clown, considering the sinister clown hysteria sweeping the nation. You don’t want to wear a clown costume in Kentucky where a sheriff contacted the FBI and Homeland Security over the “creepy clown” threat. In fact, in Gallatin County, Kentucky, the sheriff warned that people behind “clown threats” might face charges of “inducing panic and terroristic threatening.”Pennywise from Stephen King’s It really ruined clowns for a lot of people, changing their opinion of clowns from funny or cute to scary and creepy as can be. When the evil clown craze first started cranking up, some people suggested the clown sightings were pranks tied to some sort of promotion for the upcoming film It. Others suggested the clown sightings were inspired by Rob Zombie’s film 31, which includes kidnapped hostages trying to survive a violent game against a gang of sadistic clowns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BlackBerry stops making hardware, but BlackBerry phones live on

BlackBerry is getting out of the hardware business, but this isn’t the end of BlackBerry phones—or at least not yet.As part of its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday, the company announced that it would soon end all hardware development. Instead, BlackBerry phone production and design will be outsourced to third parties.“We are focusing on software development, including security and applications. The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a written statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How UPS delivers predictive analytics

UPS operates in more than 220 countries and territories with more than 1,800 facilities, with a delivery fleet of over 100,000 ground vehicles and over 500 aircraft (both owned and charter). So when the company’s vice president of IT Kim Felix talks about the challenge of building a business intelligence system to manage UPS’s transportation network, you can imagine the size and scale of data she’s dealing with — 8,700 events per second, every second of the day, Felix says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Customers have a love/hate relationship with IT outsourcing providers

HPE Outsourcing once again garnered the highest Net Promoter (NPS) score among IT service providers according to a 2016 analysis of NPS scores among corporate technology vendors recently published by the Temkin Group. However, its merger with CSC could shakes its customer experience standing.A company’s NPS is considered a measure of customer loyalty and has been proven by some to be a leading indicator of corporate growth. Customers are asked to rank the likelihood they would recommend a brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1-10. Those who answer 9 or 10 are considered promoters: loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others the company, thereby fueling growth. Respondents who answer 7 or 8 are considered passive customers: satisfied, but unenthusiastic and vulnerable to competitive offerings. Those who answer between 0 and 6 are detractors: unhappy customers who can damage a brand and impede growth with their negative word of mouth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Matching IT priorities with IT realities

Fall is back-to-school time, though for those of us who aren’t going back to school, it’s a really good time to reassess 2016 priorities and budgets to see what projects can get done by the end of the year. It’s good to take stock to see what’s been accomplished this year, and see what priorities should take precedence before the new year (and a new budget) approaches.At the beginning of 2016, some CIO priorities for the year included standardization, integration, faster service delivery, more innovation and better IT and business alignment. No problem, right? Right—unless you’re actually working, day to day, to keep networks and apps up and running for users. That makes it a lot harder to achieve those lofty goals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Matching IT priorities with IT realities

Fall is back-to-school time, though for those of us who aren’t going back to school, it’s a really good time to reassess 2016 priorities and budgets to see what projects can get done by the end of the year. It’s good to take stock to see what’s been accomplished this year, and see what priorities should take precedence before the new year (and a new budget) approaches.At the beginning of 2016, some CIO priorities for the year included standardization, integration, faster service delivery, more innovation and better IT and business alignment. No problem, right? Right—unless you’re actually working, day to day, to keep networks and apps up and running for users. That makes it a lot harder to achieve those lofty goals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Financial sector expands use of blockchain databases

Banks and financial markets are adopting blockchain distributed database software for their payments and lending services at a pace faster than once expected, according to a survey of 400 such businesses globally.Blockchain software is the basis of bitcoin, first developed in 2009, and acts as an automatic public ledger for transactions, primarily financial transactions.The survey, conducted by a research division of IBM, found that 15% of the banks and 14% of financial market institutions intend to implement full-scale, commercial blockchain-based services in 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 ways to get more out of meetings

The modern workforce is growing resentful of meetings. In fact, a recent survey from Atlassian found that, on average, employees attend 62 meetings per month and at least half of those meetings are considered "time wasted." Of the respondents, 91 percent admitted they daydreamed during meetings, 39 percent owned up to falling asleep during a meeting and 45 percent said they felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings they needed to attend.In fact, a whopping 96 percent said they often miss meetings all together, whether due to workload or overlapping meetings. And when employees do make it to meetings, 73 percent said they often did unrelated work during it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Elon Musk’s next great adventure: Colonizing Mars

You cannot say that Elon Musk doesn’t dream big. Today he outlined what would be his biggest aspiration ever – colonizing Mars.If you watched Musk, who is SpaceX Founder, CEO, and Lead Designer deliver the details today on his Mars colonizing mission to the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico you may have been struck by the matter-of-fact way he delivered the details of what even he calls a very complex and dangerous mission.“I think the first trips to Mars are going to be really, very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high. There is just no way around it," he said. "It would basically be, 'Are you prepared to die?' Then if that's ok, then you are a candidate for going."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Elon Musk’s next great adventure: Colonizing Mars

You cannot say that Elon Musk doesn’t dream big. Today he outlined what would be his biggest aspiration ever – colonizing Mars.If you watched Musk, who is SpaceX Founder, CEO, and Lead Designer deliver the details today on his Mars colonizing mission to the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico you may have been struck by the matter-of-fact way he delivered the details of what even he calls a very complex and dangerous mission.“I think the first trips to Mars are going to be really, very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high. There is just no way around it," he said. "It would basically be, 'Are you prepared to die?' Then if that's ok, then you are a candidate for going."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The power of lazy programming

Whoever said working hard is a virtue never met a programmer. Yes, ditch diggers who work hard generate longer ditches than those who daydream, and farmers who lean into the plough plant more food than those who stare off into the sky. But programming isn’t the same. There is no linear relationship between sweat on the brow and satisfied users.Sometimes it helps if programmers pull all-nighters, but more often than not it’s better for programmers to be smart -- and lazy. Coders who ignore those “work hard, stay humble” inspirational wall signs often produce remarkable results, all because they are trying to avoid having to work too hard. The true geniuses find ways to do the absolute minimum by offloading their chores to the computer. After all, getting the computer to do the work is the real job of computer programmers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HackerOne CEO: ‘We’re building the world’s biggest security talent agency’

Marten Mickos, a veteran executive with companies from MySQL to Sun, Nokia and HP, was not particularly excited about his meeting to explore a leadership role with HackerOne, a fledgling security company. Security is hard, it’s unpleasant, it doesn’t work very well. But he perked up fast after learning about HackerOne’s crowdsourced model of finding and fixing security flaws – a model in which HackerOne plays a key matchmaking role between companies and ethical hackers in a rapidly growing marketplace of skills and needs. Those are still conducted through your platform, those private bounty programs?With increasing urbanization in the world, increasing internet access, good STEM education in many countries in the world, there is no practical limit to how many hackers we can find. We get them from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, all the Russian-speaking countries, Western Europe, the U.S.A., Chile, Argentina. It’s fantastic to see them because you suddenly realize that there are all these mostly young people who have a burning desire to make the world safer and, of course, make some money at the same time. They have such great intent and instincts about this. I don’t think we’ll run out of hackers Continue reading

HackerOne CEO: ‘We’re building the world’s biggest security talent agency’

Marten Mickos, a veteran executive with companies from MySQL to Sun, Nokia and HP, was not particularly excited about his meeting to explore a leadership role with HackerOne, a fledgling security company. Security is hard, it’s unpleasant, it doesn’t work very well. But he perked up fast after learning about HackerOne’s crowdsourced model of finding and fixing security flaws – a model in which HackerOne plays a key matchmaking role between companies and ethical hackers in a rapidly growing marketplace of skills and needs. After all, Mickos – who joined as CEO in November, 2015 – knows well the power of crowdsourcing, having served as chief executive of open source companies Eucalyptus and MySQL. In this conversation with IDG Chief Content Officer John Gallant, Mickos explains how the HackerOne system works and how companies get started. He talks about the company’s bug bounty platform for private and public-facing projects, and discusses how it can be expanded to tackle other big security problems in the future. Mickos also explores what attitude adjustments are required from mainstream companies in order to embrace crowdsourced security. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Plat.One acquisition marks start of $2B IoT investment plan for SAP

SAP has bought IoT software developer Plat.One, marking the start of a plan to invest US$2 billion in the internet of things over the next five years.Some of those billions will be spent on the creation of IoT development labs around the world, SAP said Wednesday. It already has plans for such labs in Berlin, Johannesburg, Munich, Palo Alto, Shanghai and São Leopoldo in Brazil. The company is also rolling out a series of "jump-start" and "accelerator" IoT software packages for particular industries, to help them monitor and control equipment.Another compoent of SAP's IoT plan is to acquire new businesses, the latest of which is Plat.One. This company makes a platform that helps smart devices talk to one another and with a central database, translating between the different protocols they use to communicate. Plat.One says it manages 200,000 devices for 25 enterprise customers, including three telecommunications companies: BT, T-Systems and Telecom Italia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 tips for a successful cloud plan

How do you get started using the cloud?For some organizations, cloud usage has already begun by someone in the company - whether they know it or not. But to have a successful cloud deployment, it’s helpful to have a plan.Consultancy Cloud Technology Partners is one of many companies that help customers adopt public IaaS cloud computing resources. CloudTP says the following 10 tips are key for a successful cloud rollout.1. Alignment workshopsAfter a company has made a decision to use IaaS cloud computing services, it’s helpful to have a level-set meeting with important stakeholders at the company to get everyone on the same page. Typical groups involved in this meeting would be security managers, finance and procurement professionals, infrastructure engineers, operations workers and third-party consultants. Typically a senior IT manager or CIO leads the process. It’s important to have a clear message to this group of why the cloud is being explored.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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