Consumer Office 365 subscription growth slows

Microsoft this week said that consumer subscriptions to Office 365 topped 23 million, signaling that the segment's once prodigious year-over-year growth had slowed significantly.The Redmond, Wash. company regularly talks up the latest subscription numbers for the consumer-grade Office 365 plans -- the $100 a year Home and the $70 Personal -- and did so again this week during an earnings call with Wall Street analysts."We also see momentum amongst consumers, with now more than 23 million Office 365 subscribers," CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday.But analysis of Microsoft's consumer Office 365 numbers showed that the rate of growth -- or as Nadella put it, "momentum" -- has slowed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Protecting your assets

With emerging trends such as big data, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mobility and global online collaboration sparking an explosion of data, the data center will only become more important to your organization and will continue to be the target of not only breaches, but advanced malware and other cyberattacks. —Data Center Journal

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AMD mulls a CPU+GPU super-chip in a server reboot

AMD emerged as a serious threat to Intel in servers more than a decade ago, but after a series of missteps and bad chips, the company's server business is hanging on by a thread.Now, AMD is rebooting its server chip business with the upcoming Zen CPU, which will also be used in PCs. AMD is getting creative with Zen and considering merging the CPU with a high-performance GPU to create a mega-chip for high-performance tasks."It's fair to say we do believe we can combine a high-performance CPU with the high-performance GPU," AMD CEO Lisa Su said during an earnings call on Thursday.Su's comment was in response to a question on whether AMD would ultimately combine its Zen CPU with a GPU based on the upcoming Vega architecture into one big chip for enterprise servers and supercomputing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon will cut off unlimited data users who use too much unlimited data

Verizon's continuing its ongoing mission to pare down the number of customers on unlimited data plans by migrating them to ones with hard limits. Recently, the company came up with a way to get rid of its biggest data hogs. Verizon is notifying customers using an “extraordinary” amount of data per month that they must move off their unlimited data plan by August 31. If they don’t switch, the carrier will disconnect their accounts, though they’ll have 50 days to reactivate them on a limited plan, as first reported by Droid Life. Verizon ceased offering unlimited data plans in 2011.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft touts data harvesting tool as aid to enterprises upgrading to Windows 10

Microsoft will preview a new service today that lets enterprises mine data that Windows collects, including software usage statistics, to accelerate adoption of Windows 10.The service, called Upgrade Analytics, was announced Tuesday by Marc-Andrea Klimaschewski, a company program manager, in a brief post to a company blog. He said that it would launch as a public preview Friday.Klimaschewski characterized the service as a tool that businesses can use to determine whether PCs -- in general or individually -- were eligible for upgrading to Windows 10. Upgrade Analytics, Klimaschewski wrote, "Provide[s] customers with insights which allow them to quickly evaluate application and driver readiness and mitigate potential problems."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner Says IT Spending Will Jump More Than $1T

Cloud shift affects IT spending directly and indirectly.

Show 298: Listener Stories – Live Nation UK Rocks Networking

The Packet Pushers talk with Jamie Wilson, senior network specialist at Live Nation UK, to talk about the networking involved in putting on live music festivals. The post Show 298: Listener Stories – Live Nation UK Rocks Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers.

This Tinder scam promises to verify your account, but actually sells porn

Tinder users beware. The popular dating app generally doesn’t verify most user accounts, but that hasn’t stopped spammers from pretending to offer the service.In recent weeks, automated bots masquerading as Tinder profiles have been telling real users to get “verified,” as part of a clever scam to sell them porn, security firm Symantec said on Thursday.The spam bots first send off flirty messages, like “Wanna eat cookie dough together some time?” only to then ask whether Tinder has verified the user.It’s a free service, the spam bot will claim, and done “to verify the person you wanna meet isn’t a serial killer lol.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This Tinder scam promises to verify your account, but actually sells porn

Tinder users beware. The popular dating app generally doesn’t verify most user accounts, but that hasn’t stopped spammers from pretending to offer the service.In recent weeks, automated bots masquerading as Tinder profiles have been telling real users to get “verified,” as part of a clever scam to sell them porn, security firm Symantec said on Thursday.The spam bots first send off flirty messages, like “Wanna eat cookie dough together some time?” only to then ask whether Tinder has verified the user.It’s a free service, the spam bot will claim, and done “to verify the person you wanna meet isn’t a serial killer lol.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nick

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Speed Bumps Ahead for Network Security

Traffic volumes are growing exponentially across every segment.

EU dual-use tech ban plan could classify smartphones as weapons

European Union plans to extend export controls on so-called "dual-use" technologies to include cyber-surveillance tools could put the brakes on sales of smartphones.Dual-use technologies are those that can serve civil or military purposes, and some countries impose restrictions on their sale because of fears that they could be used to abuse human rights in the destination country. A draft of new EU export regulations could put smartphones in that category because of their location-tracking capabilities.The potential for some technologies to be misused has been a concern in the EU since documents leaked following a compromise of Italian company Hacking Team revealed that it had sold its cyber-surveillance tools to repressive regimes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gaming desktops with AMD Zen chips will be hard to come by this year

If you're expecting widespread availability of gaming desktops with AMD's Zen chips by year-end, don't hold your breath.It's been a long wait for Zen since it was first announced in mid-2015. It's shaping up to be the best CPU from the company in more than a decade, and the AMD faithful are hungry to get their hands on a desktop with the chip.High-end desktops with Zen will be available, but in "limited volume towards the end of the fourth quarter," said Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, during an earnings call Thursday. The number of available Zen-based desktops will depend on how testing of the chips goes and how ready PC makers are to ship the machines, Su noted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The CIA, NSA and Pokémon Go

With Pokémon Go currently enjoying, what I would call, a wee-bit-o-success, now seems like a good time to talk about a few things people may not know about the world's favorite new smartphone game.This is not an opinion piece. I am not going to tell you Pokémon Go is bad or that it invades your privacy. I’m merely presenting verifiable facts about the biggest, most talked about game out there.+ Also on Network World: The Pokémon Go effect on the network +Let’s start with a little history.Way back in 2001, Keyhole, Inc. was founded by John Hanke (who previously worked in a “foreign affairs” position within the U.S. government). The company was named after the old “eye-in-the-sky” military satellites. One of the key, early backers of Keyhole was a firm called In-Q-Tel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From Farms to Homes: AT&T Tests Drones For Industrial IoT Apps

Will AT&T play a role in the government's drone tracking system?

A hackable election: 5 things you need to know about e-voting machines

As the U.S. heads toward an especially contentious national election in November, 15 states are still clinging to outdated electronic voting machines that don't support paper printouts used to audit their internal vote counts. E-voting machines without attached printers are still being used in a handful of presidential swing states, leading some voting security advocates to worry about the potential of a hacked election. Some makers of e-voting machines, often called direct-recording electronic machines or DREs, are now focusing on other sorts of voting technology, including optical scanners. They seem reluctant to talk about DREs; three major DRE vendors didn't respond to questions about security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A hackable election: 5 things you need to know about e-voting machines

As the U.S. heads toward an especially contentious national election in November, 15 states are still clinging to outdated electronic voting machines that don't support paper printouts used to audit their internal vote counts. E-voting machines without attached printers are still being used in a handful of presidential swing states, leading some voting security advocates to worry about the potential of a hacked election. Some makers of e-voting machines, often called direct-recording electronic machines or DREs, are now focusing on other sorts of voting technology, including optical scanners. They seem reluctant to talk about DREs; three major DRE vendors didn't respond to questions about security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cybersecurity: A vertical industry application?

Cybersecurity has always been a horizontal technology practice that’s roughly the same across all industry sectors. Yes, some industries have different regulations, use cases or business processes that demand specific security controls, but overall every company needs things like firewalls, IDS/IPS, threat management gateways and antivirus software regardless.Generic security requirements will remain forever, but I see a burgeoning trend transforming cybersecurity from a set of horizontal technologies to a vertical industry application. These drivers include: Increasing business focus on cybersecurity. While it sounds like industry hype, cybersecurity has actually become a boardroom issue and corporate boards understand industry-specific risks much better than technology gibberish about malware and exploits. To accommodate these corporate executives, CISOs will need communications skills, as well as tools and technologies that help translate cybersecurity data into meaningful industry and corporate risk intelligence that can drive investment and decision making. Security intelligence vendors like BitSight and SecurityScorecard are already exploiting this need, offering industry-centric cybersecurity metrics for business use. CISO progression. The present generation of CISOs grew up through the ranks of IT and security with career development responsibilities such as network operations and firewall administration. Yes, the next generation of CISOs will still need some Continue reading

Cybersecurity: A vertical industry application?

Cybersecurity has always been a horizontal technology practice that’s roughly the same across all industry sectors. Yes, some industries have different regulations, use cases or business processes that demand specific security controls, but overall every company needs things like firewalls, IDS/IPS, threat management gateways and antivirus software regardless.Generic security requirements will remain forever, but I see a burgeoning trend transforming cybersecurity from a set of horizontal technologies to a vertical industry application. These drivers include: Increasing business focus on cybersecurity. While it sounds like industry hype, cybersecurity has actually become a boardroom issue and corporate boards understand industry-specific risks much better than technology gibberish about malware and exploits. To accommodate these corporate executives, CISOs will need communications skills, as well as tools and technologies that help translate cybersecurity data into meaningful industry and corporate risk intelligence that can drive investment and decision making. Security intelligence vendors like BitSight and SecurityScorecard are already exploiting this need, offering industry-centric cybersecurity metrics for business use. CISO progression. The present generation of CISOs grew up through the ranks of IT and security with career development responsibilities such as network operations and firewall administration. Yes, the next generation of CISOs will still need some Continue reading

Worth Reading: Microsoft’s Bid for LinkedIn

It’s time for all organizations and their investors to realize that the tools that they provide to customers — products such as cars, telephones, health-care, or finance — and to their employees in the form of benefits, training, software, and the like — need to be combined with the network to which that group belongs. —MarketWatch

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