Scammers scare iPhone users into paying to unlock not-really-locked Safari

Apple yesterday patched a bug in the iOS version of Safari that had been used by criminals to spook users into paying $125 or more because they assumed the browser was broken.The flaw, fixed in Monday's iOS 10.3 update, had been reported to Apple a month ago by researchers at San Francisco-based mobile security firm Lookout."One of our users alerted us to this campaign, and said he had lost control of Safari on his iPhone," Andrew Blaich, a Lookout security researcher, said in a Tuesday interview. "He said, 'I can't use my browser anymore.'"The criminal campaign, Blaich and two colleagues reported in a Monday post to Lookout's blog, exploited a bug in how Safari displayed JavaScript pop-ups. When the browser reached a malicious site implanted with the attack code, the browser went into an endless loop of dialogs that refused to close no matter who many times "OK" was tapped. The result: Safari was unusable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to create a repair/recovery partition in Windows 10

From time to time, Windows 10 will go off the rails. A failed update, a problematic program install, a driver problem or what-have-you can cause Windows to crash and then refuse to boot normally thereafter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Future Intel CPUs could be cobbled together using different parts

Today’s processors, made using a single continuous slab of silicon, may soon give way to multiple chips interconnected at high speeds, Intel said Tuesday morning.Intel said its new Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge, or EMIB, technology would let a 22nm chip connect to a 10nm chip and a 14nm chip, all on the same processor.“For example, we can mix high-performance blocks of silicon and IP together with low-power elements made from different nodes for extreme optimization,” said Intel’s Murthy Renduchintala, who heads the Client, IoT, and Systems Architecture Group.That’s a radical departure from how the company has constructed most CPUs and SoCs, where all components of a CPU or SoC are built on the same process. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Future Intel CPUs could be cobbled together using different parts

Today’s processors, made using a single continuous slab of silicon, may soon give way to multiple chips interconnected at high speeds, Intel said Tuesday morning.Intel said its new Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge, or EMIB, technology would let a 22nm chip connect to a 10nm chip and a 14nm chip, all on the same processor.“For example, we can mix high-performance blocks of silicon and IP together with low-power elements made from different nodes for extreme optimization,” said Intel’s Murthy Renduchintala, who heads the Client, IoT, and Systems Architecture Group.That’s a radical departure from how the company has constructed most CPUs and SoCs, where all components of a CPU or SoC are built on the same process. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 things you need to know about the security risks of wearables

The risks from corporate use of activity trackers and other wearables is low, some experts say -- especially in comparison to all the other security and privacy risks CISOs, CIOs and IT folks must worry about.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

10 things you need to know about the security risks of wearables

The risks from corporate use of activity trackers and other wearables is low, some experts say -- especially in comparison to all the other security and privacy risks CISOs, CIOs and IT folks must worry about.That said, as with any connected device, there is risk potential. For example, recent research suggests that devices such as Fitbits can be hacked (when the hacker is within close proximity). By focusing on accelerometers and other motion sensors, researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of South Carolina found that it’s possible to, among other things, use sound waves at different frequencies to add thousands of steps to a Fitbit. (Scroll down to read Fitbit’s response to the research results.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

IDG Contributor Network: Cloud Foundry Foundation launches developer certification

Many years ago I created and ran the CloudU program, a vendor-neutral cloud education initiative that, in its day, had many thousands of individuals participate and graduate from the program. The rationale for creating the program back then was what I saw occurring in the industry: much interest in cloud as a concept, but little understanding of what it actually is and how to use it. Bear in mind this was years ago, before cloud became the default position for everything.RELATED: 10 tech skills that will boost your salary The idea of providing education programs to help individuals transition into a new way of thinking and working is a good one. A similar situation exists today with the move away from server-based infrastructures (be they physical or virtual) and into container or serverless-based approaches. Essentially we’re seeing challenges around the understanding and implementation of new “cloud native” ways of building applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10’s next major update arrives April 11

After months of waiting, beta tests, and trickles of information about new features, the next major update for Windows 10 will arrive on April 11. Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Creators Update, as it’s known, will start rolling out to users of the company’s latest operating system in roughly two weeks.The update includes a slew of new features, including changes to the Microsoft Edge browser, improvements to gaming on Windows 10 and more features for devices with touch screens. As the name implies, the Creators Update includes new tools for people who make and consume media on their PCs, including a new Paint3D app that updates Microsoft’s classic drawing tool to create three-dimensional models.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pajama-wearing remote worker stereotypes shattered

A recent satirical piece in the New Yorker played the stereotypical remote worker for laughs -- disheveled, disoriented, starved for human contact, still in his pajamas after who-knows-how-many-days. Unproductive, he calls 911 for help. While it's hilarious -- and for those who work from home, there's certainly a few grains of truth buried within -- new research from Future Workplace and Polycom might finally put to rest the perception that remote workers are lazy, anti-social and unproductive.The report, The Human Face of Remote Working, polled 25,234 employees across 12 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Japan, the UK, India, Singapore, Germany, Russia, France, Australia and China. Of the respondents, 55 percent held managerial or higher job titles; 58 percent are responsible for care in some capacity and 68 percent are parents. The study found that despite the remote working stigma of laziness and isolation, remote workers are more empathetic, desire human connection and pick up the phone more than their in-office counterparts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Windows 10 Creators Update is worth waiting for

Windows 10 Creators Update is coming for you, and it will get you sooner or later. The question is whether to embrace Creators Update immediately or to wait a few months until the bugs get worked out—because, as we learned with Anniversary Update, there will be bugs.Many who rushed to Anniversary Update paid the price with inexplicable freezes, broken antivirus utilities, stalled or disabled apps, disappearing volumes and drives, changed settings, and a legion of installation problems. No doubt many of those users wished they had waited the four months for Anniversary Update to reach Current Branch for Business status—Microsoft’s designation for builds that are finally stable enough for enterprise deployment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AI will transform information security, but it won’t happen overnight

Although it dates as far back as the 1950s, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the hottest thing in technology today.An overarching term used to describe a set of technologies such as text-to-speech, natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision, AI essentially enables computers to do things normally done by people.Machine learning, the most prominent subset of AI, is about recognizing patterns in data and computer learning from them like a human. These algorithms draw inferences without being explicitly programmed to do so. The idea is the more data you collect, the smarter the machine becomes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds to battle cybersecurity with analytics

For the federal government to better secure its information systems and support cybersecurity in the private sector, departments and agencies will need to dramatically improve the way they collect, analyze and share information about emerging threats, current and former government officials are cautioning.At a government IT conference convened by Akamai, a content delivery and cloud service provider, officials stressed the importance of casting a wide net for gathering information about cyberthreats, calling for the advancement of new standards and protocols to automate information sharing across the public and private sectors."The more participants we have in our process, the better that process is going to be," said Danny Toler, acting assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Cybersecurity and Communications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Expert: NY breach report highlights third-party risk

New York reported a record high number of breaches last year, just after a new set of cybersecurity regulations went into effect in the state."In 2016, New Yorkers were the victims of one of the highest data exposure rates in our state’s history," said Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a statement released last week. "The total annual number of reported security breaches increased by 60% and the number of exposed personal records tripled."According to the report, the stolen data consisted overwhelmingly of Social Security numbers and financial account information, and hacking was the leading cause of the breaches. The 1,300 breaches involved the private data of 1.6 million state residents, and 81 percent of the breaches involved the loss of Social Security numbers or financial information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interop ITX: 9 Bonus Events

IDG Contributor Network: How to bring true interoperability to the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an incredibly diverse space, encompassing a large variety of hardware form factors and software ecosystems unlike anything we have seen in technology. Smartwatches, connected cameras, drones, thermostats, voice-enabled speakers, smart appliances and more—they all live together within the IoT.RELATED: 8 tips for building a cost-effective IoT sensor network But the diversity and innovation that excites many IoT fans is a big challenge not just for manufacturers and developers, but also (and most importantly) consumers. Which technology options should be used when designing or deploying IoT devices? How do they keep up with updated or new operating systems? What about new software and connectivity technologies coming up? Those are just some of today’s challenges.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How to bring true interoperability to the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an incredibly diverse space, encompassing a large variety of hardware form factors and software ecosystems unlike anything we have seen in technology. Smartwatches, connected cameras, drones, thermostats, voice-enabled speakers, smart appliances and more—they all live together within the IoT.RELATED: 8 tips for building a cost-effective IoT sensor network But the diversity and innovation that excites many IoT fans is a big challenge not just for manufacturers and developers, but also (and most importantly) consumers. Which technology options should be used when designing or deploying IoT devices? How do they keep up with updated or new operating systems? What about new software and connectivity technologies coming up? Those are just some of today’s challenges.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Digital India threatened by Internet shutdowns

containerd joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Today, we’re excited to announce that containerd – Docker’s core container runtime – has been accepted by the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) as an incubating project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). containerd’s acceptance into the CNCF alongside projects such as Kubernetes, gRPC and Prometheus comes three months after Docker, with support from the five largest cloud providers, announced its intent to contribute the project to a neutral foundation in the first quarter of this year.

In the process of spinning containerd out of Docker and contributing it to CNCF there are a few changes that come along with it.  For starters, containerd now has a logo; see below. In addition, we have a new @containerd twitter handle. In the next few days, we’ll be moving the containerd GitHub repository to a separate GitHub organization. Similarly, the containerd slack channel will be moved to separate slack team which will soon available at containerd.slack.com

containerd has been extracted from Docker’s container platform and includes methods for transferring container images, container execution and supervision and low-level local storage, across both Linux and Windows. containerd is an essential upstream component of the Docker platform used by millions of end users that  also provides the industry with an open, Continue reading

Railroads and Cars: a Fairy Tale

Imagine a Flatworld in which railways are the main means of transportation. They were using horses and pigeons in the past, and experimenting with underwater airplanes, but railways won because they were cheaper than anything else (for whatever reason, price always wins over quality or convenience in that world).

As always, there were multiple railroad tracks and trains manufacturers, and everyone tried to use all sorts of interesting tricks to force the customers to buy tracks and trains from the same vendor. Different track gauges and heptagonal wheels that worked best with grooved rails were the usual tricks.

Tell Policy Makers to Think Twice Before Blocking Content or Flipping the Internet Kill Switch