The ultimate upgrade to Amazon’s Alexa

In a recent post, I shared 8 ways to make Amazon’s Alexa even more awesome, covering everything from better communications to easier setup and skills creation. I believe those suggestions could help Alexa become even more useful than it already is. But for voice assistants to truly fulfill their destiny, they need something a bit more radical and transformative.They need the human touch.As noted in my previous post, while Alexa does a few things really well, she doesn’t even try to deal with the vast, vast, majority of tasks and questions you might want to pose to a voice-powered assistant. That’s because the current state of AI simply doesn’t support even a tiny fraction of the questions you might want answered or tasks you might want help with. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US FCC stays data security regulations for broadband providers

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has halted new rules that would require high-speed internet providers to take 'reasonable' steps to protect customer data.In a 2-1 vote that went along party lines, the FCC voted Wednesday to stay temporarily one part of privacy rules passed in October that would give consumers the right to decide how their data is used and shared by broadband providers.The rules include the requirement that internet service providers should obtain "opt-in" consent from consumers to use and share sensitive information such as geolocation and web browsing history, and also give customers the option to opt out from the sharing of non-sensitive information such as email addresses or service tier information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US FCC stays data security regulations for broadband providers

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has halted new rules that would require high-speed internet providers to take 'reasonable' steps to protect customer data.In a 2-1 vote that went along party lines, the FCC voted Wednesday to stay temporarily one part of privacy rules passed in October that would give consumers the right to decide how their data is used and shared by broadband providers.The rules include the requirement that internet service providers should obtain "opt-in" consent from consumers to use and share sensitive information such as geolocation and web browsing history, and also give customers the option to opt out from the sharing of non-sensitive information such as email addresses or service tier information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo execs botched its response to 2014 breach, investigation finds

If your company has experienced a data breach, it's probably a good idea to thoroughly investigate it promptly.Unfortunately, Yahoo didn't, according to a new internal investigation. The internet pioneer, which reported a massive data breach involving 500 million user accounts in September, actually knew an intrusion had occurred back in 2014, but allegedly botched its response.The findings were made in a Yahoo securities exchange filing on Wednesday that offered more details about the 2014 breach, which the company has blamed on a state-sponsored hacker.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo execs botched its response to 2014 breach, investigation finds

If your company has experienced a data breach, it's probably a good idea to thoroughly investigate it promptly.Unfortunately, Yahoo didn't, according to a new internal investigation. The internet pioneer, which reported a massive data breach involving 500 million user accounts in September, actually knew an intrusion had occurred back in 2014, but allegedly botched its response.The findings were made in a Yahoo securities exchange filing on Wednesday that offered more details about the 2014 breach, which the company has blamed on a state-sponsored hacker.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Customizing Docker Engine on CentOS Atomic Host

I’ve been spending some time recently with CentOS Atomic Host, the container-optimized version of CentOS (part of Project Atomic). By default, the Docker Engine on CentOS Atomic Host listens only to a local UNIX socket, and is not accessible over the network. While CentOS has its own particular way of configuring the Docker Engine, I wanted to see if I could—in a very “systemd-like” fashion—make Docker Engine on CentOS listen on a network socket as well as a local UNIX socket. So, I set out with an instance of CentOS Atomic Host and the Docker systemd docs to see what I could do.

The default configuration of Docker Engine on CentOS Atomic Host uses a systemd unit file that references an external environment file; specifically, it references values set in /etc/sysconfig/docker, as you can see from this snippet of the docker.service unit file:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd-current \
          --add-runtime docker-runc=/usr/libexec/docker/docker-runc-current \
          --default-runtime=docker-runc \
          --exec-opt native.cgroupdriver=systemd \
          --userland-proxy-path=/usr/libexec/docker/docker-proxy-current \
          $OPTIONS \
          $DOCKER_STORAGE_OPTIONS \
          $DOCKER_NETWORK_OPTIONS \
          $ADD_REGISTRY \
          $BLOCK_REGISTRY \
          $INSECURE_REGISTRY

The $OPTIONS variable, along with the other variables at the end of the ExecStart line, are defined in /etc/sysconfig/docker. That value, by default, looks like this:

OPTIONS='--selinux-enabled --log-driver=journald --signature-verification=false'

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Creating an IXP in Denver, Colorado, USA

Looking Down The Long Enterprise Road With Hadoop

Just five years ago, the infrastructure space was awash in stories about the capabilities cooked into the Hadoop platform—something that was, even then, only a few pieces of code cobbled onto the core HDFS distributed storage with MapReduce serving as the processing engine for analytics at scale.

At the center of many of the stories was Cloudera, the startup that took Hadoop to the enterprise with its commercial distribution of the open source framework. As we described in a conversation last year marking the ten-year anniversary of Hadoop with Doug Cutting, one of its creators at Yahoo, the platform …

Looking Down The Long Enterprise Road With Hadoop was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Old Windows malware may have tampered with 132 Android apps

More than 130 Android apps on the Google Play store have been found to contain malicious coding, possibly because the developers were using infected computers, according to security researchers.The 132 apps were found generating hidden iframes, or an HTML document embedded inside a webpage, linking to two domains that have hosted malware, according to security firm Palo Alto Networks.Google has already removed the apps from its Play store. But what's interesting is the developers behind the apps probably aren't to blame for including the malicious code, Palo Alto Networks said in a Wednesday blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Old Windows malware may have tampered with 132 Android apps

More than 130 Android apps on the Google Play store have been found to contain malicious coding, possibly because the developers were using infected computers, according to security researchers.The 132 apps were found generating hidden iframes, or an HTML document embedded inside a webpage, linking to two domains that have hosted malware, according to security firm Palo Alto Networks.Google has already removed the apps from its Play store. But what's interesting is the developers behind the apps probably aren't to blame for including the malicious code, Palo Alto Networks said in a Wednesday blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Edge computing will blow away the cloud

SAN FRANCISCO -- The ubiquitous cloud computing craze may not be long for this world if venture capitalist Peter Levine is right. The Andreessen Horowitz general partner said that as more computing capabilities move to so-called "edge" devices, including anything from driverless cars and drones to the boundless devices that make up the internet of things (IoT), the cloud will slowly evaporate."A large portion of computation that gets done in the cloud today will return to the edge," said Levine at the Wall Street Journal's CIO Network event here Tuesday.Levine said the driverless car, whose 200-plus CPUs effectively make it a "data center on wheels," is a prime example of an edge device whose computing capabilities must be self-contained. Levine said that an autonomous vehicle relying on the cloud foTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The rise of SSL based threats

The majority of Internet traffic is now encrypted. With the advent of free SSL providers like Let’s Encrypt, the move to encryption has become easy and free. On any given day in the Zscaler cloud, more than half of the traffic that inspected uses SSL. It is no surprise, then, that malicious actors have also been using the SSL protocol in their activities over the last several years. The increasing use of SSL creates problems for organizations that are unable to monitor SSL traffic, as they must rely on less-effective techniques like IP and domain blocking in an attempt to identify and block threats. —CSA

The post Worth Reading: The rise of SSL based threats appeared first on 'net work.

Bouncing Back To Private Clouds With OpenStack

There is an adage, not quite yet old, suggesting that compute is free but storage is not. Perhaps a more accurate and, as far as public clouds are concerned, apt adaptation of this saying might be that computing and storage are free, and so are inbound networking within a region, but moving data across regions in a public cloud is brutally expensive, and it is even more costly spanning regions.

So much so that, at a certain scale, it makes sense to build your own datacenter and create your own infrastructure hardware and software stack that mimics the salient characteristics …

Bouncing Back To Private Clouds With OpenStack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Microsoft employees donate $650 million in cash, services and software

Microsoft formed Microsoft Philanthropies a little over a year ago with a plan to donate money, time, cloud computing services and software around the globe. In its first year, it has done a lot of that. Mary Snapp, corporate vice president of Microsoft Philanthropies, provided an update to the program's progress after its first year, and it's impressive. The company's contributions to various nonprofits and schools include donations worth $465 million to 71,000 organizations and more than $30 million in technology and cash donations to organizations serving refugees and displaced people. Plus, company employees raised $142 million for 19,000 nonprofits and schools. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Half of the top 100 retail sites had slow load times during AWS’s S3 outage, vendor finds

Yesterday Amazon Web Services had a bad day. And when AWS has a bad day, so do a lot of other sites.Vendor Apica is a website monitoring services that keeps a close eye on some of the top retail websites around the country. All in all, the retail website Apica tracks had trouble dealing with the elevated errors rates AWS reported in S3 starting around mid-day Eastern Time.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 5 Lessons from Amazon's S3 cloud blunder, and how to protect yourself from the next outage +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fave Raves 2017 call for submissions

Fave Raves is Network World’s annual roundup of the best products, as chosen by IT pros. Do you have a favorite enterprise IT product you can't live without? Tell us about it and we'll share your raves with our readers.Please send your submissions to Ann Bednarz at Network World ([email protected]) by Friday, March 17. Please note: Submissions must be received directly from IT professionals, not through a third party.Items to address:1. Please provide your name, title and employer.2. What's your favorite product? (vendor name and product name)3. Why do you like it?4. How has it helped you and/or your company?5. How many years have you worked in IT?6. What upcoming IT projects are you most excited about and why?7. Please include a picture of yourself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fave Raves 2017 call for submissions

Fave Raves is Network World’s annual roundup of the best products, as chosen by IT pros. Do you have a favorite enterprise IT product you can't live without? Tell us about it and we'll share your raves with our readers.Please send your submissions to Ann Bednarz at Network World ([email protected]) by Friday, March 17. Please note: Submissions must be received directly from IT professionals, not through a third party.Items to address:1. Please provide your name, title and employer.2. What's your favorite product? (vendor name and product name)3. Why do you like it?4. How has it helped you and/or your company?5. How many years have you worked in IT?6. What upcoming IT projects are you most excited about and why?7. Please include a picture of yourself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US surveillance law may see no new protections for foreign targets

Any reform of a controversial U.S. law allowing the National Security Agency to spy on people overseas will likely focus on its impact on U.S. residents, without curbing its use elsewhere.Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires on Dec. 31, and some digital rights groups are calling on Congress to overhaul the law to protect the privacy of residents of both the U.S. and other countries. Congress will almost certainly extend the provision in some form. But a congressional hearing on Wednesday focused largely on the NSA's "inadvertent" collection of U.S. residents' data, with little time given to the privacy concerns of people overseas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US surveillance law may see no new protections for foreign targets

Any reform of a controversial U.S. law allowing the National Security Agency to spy on people overseas will likely focus on its impact on U.S. residents, without curbing its use elsewhere.Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires on Dec. 31, and some digital rights groups are calling on Congress to overhaul the law to protect the privacy of residents of both the U.S. and other countries. Congress will almost certainly extend the provision in some form. But a congressional hearing on Wednesday focused largely on the NSA's "inadvertent" collection of U.S. residents' data, with little time given to the privacy concerns of people overseas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft to end its paid Wi-Fi service for Skype

Microsoft is pulling the plug on its Wi-Fi service for Skype users, which let users buy Wi-Fi access in paid public hotspots for a reduced fee over what the hotspot owner would charge. The company has sent notice to its subscribers that the service will be discontinued at the end of this month and they should use up whatever credits they have.Originally called Skype WiFi and later rebranded as Microsoft WiFi, the service dates back to 2009 when Skype was still an independent company. Following the purchase by Microsoft, the service was restructured and rebranded several times before being integrated into Windows 10. However, a promised integration with Office 365 never happened. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here