2016 will be 1 second longer: Google can help you cope

Like a man eager to show off his new watch, Google is encouraging anyone running IT operations to ask it for the time.The company will let anyone use its NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers, a move to help IT shops cope with the next “leap second,” which will be tacked onto 2016 just after midnight on Dec. 31.Leap seconds help to keep clocks aligned with Earth’s rotation, which can vary due to geologic and even weather conditions. But an extra second can wreak havoc with applications and services that depend on systems being tightly synchronized.Most Internet-connected devices get their time through NTP, an open-source technology that's used all over the world. NTP has its own problems, mainly around funding, but it's long been the standard. Google runs its own NTP servers and uses them to ease its systems through leap seconds, according to Michael Shields, technical lead on the company’s Time Team, in a blog post on Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s what your hardware needs for the AWS Greengrass IoT service

Amazon is bringing a bit of its AWS magic to devices and board computers with its Greengrass IoT service, which will help boost offline data collection and analysis.The goal of Greengrass, an AWS software tool, is to make IoT devices and maker boards smarter. Even underpowered devices collecting data won't be "dumb" anymore, Amazon says.Amazon has kept in mind that smart devices can't always be connected to the cloud for data analysis, and Greengrass brings some AWS software tools to devices to aid in better collection and analysis of data.Developer boards are strongly tied to cloud services, which add more functionality to smart devices. Data collected from sensors are typically dispatched and collected in the cloud, where it can be analyzed and can define the next steps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM warns of rising VoIP cyber-attacks

Cyber-attacks using the VoIP protocol Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) have been growing this year accounting for over 51% of the security event activity analyzed in the last 12 months, according to a report from IBM’s Security Intelligence group this week.“SIP is one of the most commonly used application layer protocols in VoIP technology… we found that there has been an upward trend in attacks targeting the SIP protocol, with the most notable uptick occurring in the second half of 2016,” IBM wrote. “In actual attacks on VoIP communications, we note various types of disruption. Spikes in July and September were mostly the result of specially crafted SIP messages that were terminated incorrectly. Persistent, invalid messages are known to cause vulnerable servers and equipment to fail. The spike in October 2016 was largely influenced by SIP messages with invalid characters in the SIP “To” field. These could be reflective of suspicious activity, necessitating further investigation.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM warns of rising VoIP cyber-attacks

Cyber-attacks using the VoIP protocol Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) have been growing this year accounting for over 51% of the security event activity analyzed in the last 12 months, according to a report from IBM’s Security Intelligence group this week.“SIP is one of the most commonly used application layer protocols in VoIP technology… we found that there has been an upward trend in attacks targeting the SIP protocol, with the most notable uptick occurring in the second half of 2016,” IBM wrote. “In actual attacks on VoIP communications, we note various types of disruption. Spikes in July and September were mostly the result of specially crafted SIP messages that were terminated incorrectly. Persistent, invalid messages are known to cause vulnerable servers and equipment to fail. The spike in October 2016 was largely influenced by SIP messages with invalid characters in the SIP “To” field. These could be reflective of suspicious activity, necessitating further investigation.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

18% off GoPro HERO+ LCD HD Video Camera – Deal Alert

The perfect entry-level GoPro + Wi-Fi and touch display is currently discounted 18% on Amazon. HERO+ LCD delivers 1080p60 video and 8MP photos, and features the convenience of a touch display. Built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connect to the GoPro App to allow for shot preview, total camera control and easy content sharing to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more from your phone or tablet. Rugged and waterproof to 131 feet (40 meter), with the ability to power up and record at the press of a button. The GoPro HERO+ is a #1 best seller with 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews), where its list price of $300 has been reduced 18% to $245. See the discounted GoPro HERO+ on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS Greengrass weds IoT devices with cloud

AWS CEO Andy Jassy predicts that as more workloads move to the public IaaS cloud, companies will reduce the number of servers they will manage and the new definition of on-premises infrastructure will increasingly be Internet of Things (IoT) devices.“More and more companies are deploying connect IoT devices,” he notes, from factories, ships, cars, oil rigs and agricultural machines. “Every place they have assets, they want to be able to collect and analyze data.”+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cool tech from AWS re:Invent | A peek inside Amazon’s cloud – from global scale to custom silicon +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Post-gift guide gadgets to consider for the holidays

Even though we tried more than 50 different tech devices and gadgets for our annual Cool Yule Tools holiday gift guide, there are still a ton of other products that we didn’t get to try. Most of these were because they either came out after our deadline, or they were late in shipping to us.We’ve had a few weeks to try out some additional items, these would make excellent gifts for anyone on your list:Dart laptop charger$100More info: https://finsix.com/shop/dart/ There are a bunch of mobile power batteries aimed at recharging your smartphone or tablet while you’re on the go (or traveling), but when it comes to recharging your laptop, you’re left with a big, bulky power brick with a cable. The Dart laptop charger aims to lighten the load here a bit – it claims to be the “world’s smallest laptop charger”.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The FPGA Accelerated Cloud Push Just Got Stronger

FPGAs have been an emerging topic on the application acceleration front over the last couple of years, but despite increased attention around use cases in machine learning and other hot areas, hands have been tied due to simply on-boarding with both the hardware and software.

As we have covered here, this is changing, especially with the addition of OpenCL and other higher-level interfaces to let developers talk to FPGAs for both network and application double-duty and for that matter, getting systems that have integrated capabilities to handle FPGAs just as they do with GPUs (PCIe) takes extra footwork as well. …

The FPGA Accelerated Cloud Push Just Got Stronger was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Amazon will literally truck your data into its cloud

It can be hard moving large amounts of data to the cloud. Even with consistent 10 Gbps of data transfer, it would take years to get hundreds of petabytes from an on-premises data center to a public cloud provider.Amazon is aiming to speed that process up with a high-capacity data transfer product: a literal truck. The Snowmobile is a big, white semi-trailer that can hold 100PB of data. It will then get driven to an Amazon endpoint, and the data will be loaded into its public cloud storage.For smaller migrations that can also benefit from processing at the edge, Amazon also announced a new Snowball Edge appliance that provides 100TB of storage, local compute power, and migration for handling data transfer and processing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 tips to help developers keep up with changing technologies

"One thing you realize early on," says Luke Tillman, technical evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax, "is that things are constantly changing."That's a fact of life for developers and their managers. It's true whether you're working with JavaScript front-end frameworks or databases."You almost feel bad for front-end developers," Tillman says. "A front-end framework gets hot for a year or two and then you've got to change."So first, Tillman says, you've got to accept that change is constant. That's the easy part.Finding their motivation (Hint: it may be $$$) "Once you accept that change is constant, the question is not only how do you stay relevant, but also what is your motivation for staying relevant," Tillman says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New supercomputer will unite x86, Power9 and ARM chips

For once, there will be a ceasefire in the war between major chip architectures x86, ARM and Power9, which will all be used in a supercomputer being built in Barcelona.The MareNostrum 4 is being built by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and will have three clusters, each of which will house Intel x86, ARM and Power9 chips. Those clusters will be linked to form a supercomputer that will deliver up to 13.7 petaflops of performance.All three architectures have never been implemented together in a supercomputer, let alone PCs or servers. It raises questions on how the architectures will interoperate.The three chip architectures are fundamentally different. An application written to take advantage of a specific architecture won't work on another, but server architectures are changing so different types of systems can coexist. Linux supports x86, ARM and Power, so it's possible to write applications to work across architectures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft declares summer’s Windows 10 upgrade fit for business

Microsoft today promoted its Windows 10 August upgrade to the Current Branch for Business release track, putting the "Anniversary Update" in the queue for automatic download and installation on enterprise PCs.The move will also set in motion a two-month countdown clock on support for the original mid-2015 version of Windows 10."Windows 10 1607, also known as the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, has been declared as Current Branch for Business (CBB) and is ready for deployment," Michael Niehaus, a director of product marketing, said in a post to a company blog that used similar wording to the first upgrade to the CBB. In April, Microsoft moved the November 2015 upgrade to the corporate delivery track.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Finland’s largest airline inks iOS deal with Apple and IBM

Apple this week signed on another large business customer through its partnership with IBM. The deal that will see Finland's largest airline use iOS apps for technical operations and customer experience. Finnair says it carries more than 10 million customers each year between 70 cities in Europe, 17 in Asia and three cities in North America. Finnair has a team in place at IBM's "MobileFirst for iOS Garage," which operates as a collaborative development hub for iOS enterprise apps. IBM says its MobileFirst for iOS customers have direct access to the world's largest concentration of developers that use Swift (Apple's programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS), designers, integration experts and enterprise iOS consultants. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: When will SD-WAN be Adopted?

The survey respondents were given a wide range of options and asked to indicate which options described their company’s approach to implementing an SD-WAN. Their responses, which are shown in Figure 1, show that there is broad interest in SD-WANs. For example, only a quarter of the respondents (26%) work for companies that have not yet made any analysis of SD-WANs and only a tenth of the respondents work for companies that have looked at SD-WANs but decided to not take any additional steps over the next year. However, that broad interest has not yet translated into broad adoption as only 5% of the survey respondents indicated that they currently have SD-WAN functionality running in their production networks. —ECI

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16% off Nest Cam Indoor Security Camera – Deal Alert

Look after your home 24/7 in crisp 1080p HD. With Nest Cam Indoor, you can check in, even when you’re out, and even at night with its built-in high-quality night vision. Nest Cam features a versatile magnetic stand that lets you put it anywhere. See who’s there, listen in and speak up to get their attention. With Nest Aware, you can get a special alert if Nest Cam sees a person, and save 10 or 30 days of continuous video history in the cloud. Then speed through it in seconds and quickly find the moment you’re looking for in Sightline. Nest's indoor camera is a best-seller on Amazon with 4 out of 5 stars from over 4,300 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $199 has been reduced 16% to $178 on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10% off Nest Cam Indoor Security Camera – Deal Alert

Look after your home 24/7 in crisp 1080p HD. With Nest Cam Indoor, you can check in, even when you’re out, and even at night with its built-in high-quality night vision. Nest Cam features a versatile magnetic stand that lets you put it anywhere. See who’s there, listen in and speak up to get their attention. With Nest Aware, you can get a special alert if Nest Cam sees a person, and save 10 or 30 days of continuous video history in the cloud. Then speed through it in seconds and quickly find the moment you’re looking for in Sightline. Nest's indoor camera is a best-seller on Amazon with 4 out of 5 stars from over 4,300 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $199 has been reduced 10% to $179.97 on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12% off Nest Cam Indoor Security Camera – Deal Alert

Look after your home 24/7 in crisp 1080p HD. With Nest Cam Indoor, you can check in, even when you’re out, and even at night with its built-in high-quality night vision. Nest Cam features a versatile magnetic stand that lets you put it anywhere. See who’s there, listen in and speak up to get their attention. With Nest Aware, you can get a special alert if Nest Cam sees a person, and save 10 or 30 days of continuous video history in the cloud. Then speed through it in seconds and quickly find the moment you’re looking for in Sightline. Nest's indoor camera is a best-seller on Amazon with 4 out of 5 stars from over 4,300 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $199 has been reduced 12% to $174.60 on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12% off Nest Cam Indoor Security Camera – Deal Alert

Look after your home 24/7 in crisp 1080p HD. With Nest Cam Indoor, you can check in, even when you’re out, and even at night with its built-in high-quality night vision. Nest Cam features a versatile magnetic stand that lets you put it anywhere. See who’s there, listen in and speak up to get their attention. With Nest Aware, you can get a special alert if Nest Cam sees a person, and save 10 or 30 days of continuous video history in the cloud. Then speed through it in seconds and quickly find the moment you’re looking for in Sightline. Nest's indoor camera is a best-seller on Amazon with 4 out of 5 stars from over 4,300 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $199 has been reduced 12% to $174.60 on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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