Microsoft eats another $1B as phone strategy shrinks to enterprise-only

Microsoft's announcement yesterday that it would eat nearly $1 billion and lay off another 1,850 workers, three-quarters of them from its phone division, prompted analysts to call the company's consumer smartphone business dead, deceased, departed.They agreed that Microsoft's only remaining shot at phones is the enterprise, probably with a "Surface"-branded model that apes the Surface Pro as a design benchmark that struts Windows' capabilities."They've discarded consumer," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an interview. "They just tossed out the Windows fan. It's now all about business."Moorhead and others based their opinions on statements made in mid-2015 by CEO Satya Nadella, who spelled out three markets for Microsoft's smartphones after he announced a retrenchment and a massive $7.6 billion write-off for the failed acquisition of Nokia under his predecessor, Steve Ballmer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google may publicly shame phone makers who deliver tardy Android updates: report says

Google may have finally had enough.According to a Bloomberg report, the company is thinking about turning to public shaming as a way to entice handset manufacturers to step up their Android updates. Google has apparently collected considerable data (something it’s very good at) regarding manufacturers and carriers’ update performance and shared this information with OEMs and carriers. A Sprint executive said he’d seen the details and had been feeling the pressure from Google to push things along.Even without access to this information, we can assure you it isn’t a pretty picture: only 7.5 percent of the current Android devices are running Marshmallow, which is the latest major version. This after about half a year on the market. Some are slower than others, while the wireless providers have also been known to hold things up for “carrier testing.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup CEO agrees to $560K settlement to make long list of fraud allegations go away

Bob Ambrogi, who writes a terrific blog about technology and the law, today has posted remarkable details of a lawsuit settlement involving the head of a legal startup and a couple who allege he scammed them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars through, among other means, falsely claiming to be a lawyer, forging legal documents, fabricating court cases and even conjuring up a non-existent judge. The executive, Derek Bluford – CEO of California Legal Pros and QuickLegal – says in the settlement document that he “does not admit that any of the allegations set forth in the complaint are true or valid.” Ambrogi made that point twice so I will, too. Bluford did agree to pay the plaintiffs, Changming Liu and Aimei Wei, $559,330. The couple had enlisted the services of Bluford and California Legal Pros in 2014 to help them evict a tenant.    To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hilton Head

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IDG Contributor Network: All of our clocks are wrong

The gold-standard for time measurement—the 500 or so atomic clocks in use—might be on its way out. The clocks' days, if not their hours or seconds, are numbered.Optical clocks are a better way to measure time, say researchers who published their findings in Optica, the Optical Society's journal. The scientists say the optical technology is more accurate than the previous best-tech, which uses microwave frequency atomic oscillations.“Clocks work by counting a recurrent event with a known frequency, such as the swinging of a pendulum,” the society explains in a press release. Atomic clocks use the natural movement of a cesium atom.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why the Salesforce-Amazon cloud partnership is a big deal

This week SaaS giant Salesforce.com and IaaS behemoth Amazon Web Services codified a partnership that the two have been discussing for months.The move is a coup by Amazon in the public cloud market, particularly against Microsoft Azure, and could turn out to be a big kick in the pants to Oracle.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Is Salesforce planning a post-Oracle future? +Salesforce and AWS actually have a long partnership that goes back years. In 2010 Salesforce.com bought an application development platform named Heroku, which was hosted in AWS and continues to be to this day. Salesforce could have chosen to bring Heroku’s underlying infrastructure in-house post acquisition, but it chose to keep its toe in AWS’s cloud through Heroku.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Margaret Chiosi Retires From AT&T

She has been active in NFV open source groups.

Useful Tools for Firewall Rules Checking

This app looks useful for testing firewall rules after they have been applied

The post Useful Tools for Firewall Rules Checking appeared first on EtherealMind.

Senators want warrant protections for US email stored overseas

A new bill in Congress would require U.S. law enforcement agencies to obtain court-ordered warrants before demanding the emails of the country's residents when they are stored overseas.The International Communications Privacy Act, introduced Wednesday by three senators, would close a loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to request emails and other electronic documents without warrants. Congress has been working since 2010 to rework the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a law that sets down rules for law enforcement access to electronic communications, but the focus has been on requiring warrants for emails and other communications stored in the cloud for longer than 180 days.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senators want warrant protections for US email stored overseas

A new bill in Congress would require U.S. law enforcement agencies to obtain court-ordered warrants before demanding the emails of the country's residents when they are stored overseas.The International Communications Privacy Act, introduced Wednesday by three senators, would close a loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to request emails and other electronic documents without warrants. Congress has been working since 2010 to rework the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a law that sets down rules for law enforcement access to electronic communications, but the focus has been on requiring warrants for emails and other communications stored in the cloud for longer than 180 days.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Celebrity hacker Guccifer’s confession gives us all a lesson in security

The activity of Romanian hacker Guccifer, who has admitted to compromising almost 100 email and social media accounts belonging to U.S. government officials, politicians and other high-profile individuals, is the latest proof that humans are the weakest link in computer security.Marcel Lehel Lazar, 44, is not a hacker in the technical sense of the word. He's a social engineer: a clever and persistent individual with a lot of patience who a Romanian prosecutor once described as "the obsessive-compulsive type."By his own admission, Lazar has no programming skills. He didn't find vulnerabilities or write exploits. Instead, he's good at investigating, finding information online and making connections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Celebrity hacker Guccifer’s confession gives us all a lesson in security

The activity of Romanian hacker Guccifer, who has admitted to compromising almost 100 email and social media accounts belonging to U.S. government officials, politicians and other high-profile individuals, is the latest proof that humans are the weakest link in computer security.Marcel Lehel Lazar, 44, is not a hacker in the technical sense of the word. He's a social engineer: a clever and persistent individual with a lot of patience who a Romanian prosecutor once described as "the obsessive-compulsive type."By his own admission, Lazar has no programming skills. He didn't find vulnerabilities or write exploits. Instead, he's good at investigating, finding information online and making connections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: You can’t do everything yourself

You’ve become an operational bottleneck, slowing down all of IT. Projects and change requests stack up at your desk because you have reached your scaling limit. You’re overworked and stressed out from all the things you’ve taken on. —Packet Pushers

The post Worth Reading: You can’t do everything yourself appeared first on 'net work.

PQ Show 79: Building The Digital Workplace With Aruba

This episode of Priority Queue, sponsored by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, explores the ongoing evolution of the digital workplace and the key role that mobility plays.

The post PQ Show 79: Building The Digital Workplace With Aruba appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Google alums rollout Simility fraud-detection platform

A team from Google’s fraud-detection group has started its own software as a service venture for spotting transaction fraud quickly based on rule sets and that also learns as it goes to improve its hit rate.Simility examines online transactions to identify indicators of foul play and assigns them risk scores from 0 to 1. Customers can use the information to shut down transactions it deems suspect.The Simility Fraud Prevention Platform service is available starting next week after a six-month private beta. Rahul PangamTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google alums rollout Simility fraud-detection platform

A team from Google’s fraud-detection group has started its own software as a service venture for spotting transaction fraud quickly based on rule sets and that also learns as it goes to improve its hit rate.Simility examines online transactions to identify indicators of foul play and assigns them risk scores from 0 to 1. Customers can use the information to shut down transactions it deems suspect.The Simility Fraud Prevention Platform service is available starting next week after a six-month private beta. Rahul PangamTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CD-ROMs were the training wheels for the internet, but no one remembers them now

Believe it or not, back in the 1990s, a lot of people thought CD-ROMs were going to the change the world.I was one of them. I was absolutely convinced that titles like Total Distortion, The Daedalus Encounter, Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World and Charlton Heston’s The Bible were going to redefine entertainment and information retrieval.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT’s new imperative: Partnering to shape the future

Anyone who's spent any time in IT has heard the call to partner with the business. Here's some advice on what that means, why it's crucial for IT going forward and how to do it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

15 signs you’re doing agile wrong

It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon and end up in a ditch. Nowhere is this maxim more evident than in agile development. Plenty of organizations jump into agile in pursuit of its advantages -- ease of embracing change, decreased cycle times, evolutionary architecture, and so on -- only to find their best agile practitioners leaving the company, and the uneasy remainder unable to fix a development process gone wrong.The problem with most approaches to agile is not a problem with agile; it's a problem with Agile, the Capitalized Methodology. Agile isn't a methodology. Treating it as one confuses process with philosophy and culture, and that’s a one-way ticket back into waterfall -- or worse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hands on: What’s new and noteworthy with Android N

With Google's I/O developers' conference behind us, it's time to start looking forward to what's next in the world of Android.The most prominent thing is Google's rapidly approaching Android release, currently known only as Android "N." (The company has yet to reveal the full name or version number.) While the software itself isn't expected to arrive until sometime this summer, we're getting an increasingly clear picture of the fresh features and improvements it'll provide.I've been using the pre-release versions of Android N since Google's first developer preview back in March and all the way through the most recent update put out last week (which is available to anyone with an eligible device, though be warned that it isn't entirely stable). While the software is still in flux and its elements aren't guaranteed to remain unchanged, we've seen enough at this point to get a pretty good idea of what's in the works.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here