Apple is behind with its taxes, but the tax inspector doesn't mind.Last August, the European Commission closed a three-year investigation of Apple's tax affairs with an order to the Irish government that it should recover about €13 billion (US$14.5 billion) in taxes that it believed Apple had underpaid over the last decade.Ireland has missed the deadline for recovering the billions, but Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who gave the Irish government four months to collect the taxes, is proving very understanding about the delay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One year ago, in the first quarter of 2016, Apple reported a record-breaking profit: $18.4 billion on $75.9 billion in revenue. That was great news, but setting the bar so high was a mixed blessing—Apple’s huge uptick in growth ended there, with declining iPhone sales and profits in the three quarters since.But the company turned that around with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in Apple’s Q1 earnings report on Tuesday. The company broke its own record with $78.4 billion in revenue for the quarter ending December 31—and $54.3 billion of that came from iPhones, of which Apple sold 78.3 million. That’s another record, in case you were wondering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tablet might be struggling to find a place amongst hybrids, but there are still plenty of devices to get excited about in the coming year. These five tablets are slated to be some of the most exciting devices of 2017, and each offers a traditional tablet experience.
iPad Air 3
Apple
Apple typically announced iPads in the fall, but last spring it surprised everyone by announcing the 9.7-inch iPad Pro. But come fall, Apple was mum on a third generation iPad Air. That has some speculating that Apple will ditch the Air lineup, instead offering a third, entry-level iPad Pro.
However, NeuroGadget reports it's likely Apple will release a 16GB iPad Air 3, with a thinner, water-resistant design, for $600. Either way, sources are confident that Apple plans to announce three tablets - a 9.7, 10.5 and 12.9-inch model - in Spring of this year. NeuroGadget also reports that, to compete with the Microsoft Surface, the iPad Air 3 is expected to ship with the Apple Pencil.
Galaxy Tab S3
Samsung
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 took a strong swing at the Apple iPad Air 2, offering a similar design and level of performance. It became Continue reading
Read professional reviews of Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup, and you’ll come away thinking the new laptops have great battery life.Dive into a customer forum, though, and the upshot will be exactly the opposite: The new MacBook Pros have “piss poor” battery life.That characterization came from user yillbs on MacRumors.com. “I don’t think anyone can convince me that this thing isn’t just flat out the worst battery life ever on a MacBook,” yillbs wrote, clearly frustrated. “I’ve been defending it like mad, but at this point... how can you? 4.42 hours is just bad.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Macs are really no more secure than a PC, but for many years there just weren’t as many out there because of the expense of the hardware and other issues. They've historically been a much less popular choice among both consumers, enterprises, and hackers alike.The PC attack surface is much wider; therefore, criminals develop malware that works on PCs because the payout is much higher. James Plouffe, lead solutions architect at mobile-security company MobileIron, said there are, however, a couple of oft-overlooked things that also protect Macs.First, Plouffe said, "MacOS is actually BSD Unix derivative. Granted, it's heavily customized but this meant that, unlike Windows (which had a long tail of viruses reaching back to the days of MS-DOS), bad actors had a lot more heavy lifting to do to be able to attack macOS."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Macs are really no more secure than a PC, but for many years there just weren’t as many out there because of the expense of the hardware and other issues. They've historically been a much less popular choice among both consumers, enterprises, and hackers alike.The PC attack surface is much wider; therefore, criminals develop malware that works on PCs because the payout is much higher. James Plouffe, lead solutions architect at mobile-security company MobileIron, said there are, however, a couple of oft-overlooked things that also protect Macs.First, Plouffe said, "MacOS is actually BSD Unix derivative. Granted, it's heavily customized but this meant that, unlike Windows (which had a long tail of viruses reaching back to the days of MS-DOS), bad actors had a lot more heavy lifting to do to be able to attack macOS."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Continued high demand following a record year of breachesImage by ThinkstockLast year was a record one for data breaches, with some 1,093 breaches reported. That represented a 40 percent increase over the prior year, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. It is no wonder that information security remains one of the most top-of-mind issues for CIOs, CISOs, and CEOs. The result is continued high demand for IT security pros. “The market for IT security professionals is poised for another strong year,” notes CompTIA Senior Vice President Tim Herbert. “The security job category was one of the faster growing IT occupations during 2016. During the last 90 days, U.S. employers posted nearly 25,000 job openings for security positions.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
No single antimalware engine can keep up with all the malware out there. But how about 57 of 'em?[ 18 surprising tips for security pros. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security Report newsletter. ]
In this video, you'll learn how to download and run Windows Sysinternals Process Explorer to test all currently running executables on your Windows system against VirusTotal's 57 antivirus engines, which together offer the best accuracy you can ever get (with a small percentage of false positives that are pretty easy to spot).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No single antimalware engine can keep up with all the malware out there. But how about 57 of 'em?[ 18 surprising tips for security pros. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security Report newsletter. ]
In this video, you'll learn how to download and run Windows Sysinternals Process Explorer to test all currently running executables on your Windows system against VirusTotal's 57 antivirus engines, which together offer the best accuracy you can ever get (with a small percentage of false positives that are pretty easy to spot).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President Donald Trump may face protests from scientists and technologists like no other president before him.It's not just the tech industry that may battle Trump. New forces are arising, some grassroots, such as Neveragain.tech and a planned massive "March for Science," in Washington and elsewhere. The tech industry protest over the seven-country immigration ban is just a preview.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is open-sourcing its Chrome browser on the Apple iOS platform, after making changes enabling the code to be part of Google’s Chromium browser project.The code will be moved to the open source Chromium repository, which lets developers build their own Chrome-like browsers. It had been kept separate from Chromium because of Apple's requirement that all iOS browsers be built on the Apple-controlled WebKit rendering engine.[ Safeguard your browsers; InfoWorld's experts tell you how in the "Web Browser Security Deep Dive" PDF guide. | Cut to the key news in technology trends and IT breakthroughs with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter, our summary of the top tech happenings. ]
But after years of refactoring to cleanly separate WebKit from the Chrome for iOS code, the Chrome for iOS code is rejoining Chromium, Google said in a bulletin. (Chrome on other operating systems uses Google's own Blink browser engine.) Developers can compile the iOS version of Chromium like they can for other Chromium versions. Google said it had spent a lot of time during the past several years making changes required to move the code for Chrome for iOS into Chromium.To read this article Continue reading
Over the past year I've reviewed half a dozen open source machine learning and/or deep learning frameworks: Caffe, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (aka CNTK 2), MXNet, Scikit-learn, Spark MLlib, and TensorFlow. If I had cast my net even wider, I might well have covered a few other popular frameworks, including Theano (a 10-year-old Python deep learning and machine learning framework), Keras (a deep learning front end for Theano and TensorFlow), and DeepLearning4j (deep learning software for Java and Scala on Hadoop and Spark). If you’re interested in working with machine learning and neural networks, you’ve never had a richer array of options. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Can’t we all get alongImage by PixabayDo deepening adoption and broader deployment of container technologies (from the likes of Docker, CoreOS and others) threaten to escalate into the latest skirmish between operations, developers and information security? Certainly, the potential exists to widen the rift, but in fact there is far more common ground than would initially suggest. Containerization introduces new infrastructure that operates dynamically and is open in nature, with more potential for cross-container activity. Containerization presents an almost unprecedented opportunity to embed security into the software delivery pipeline – rather than graft on security checks, container monitoring and policy for access controls as an afterthought.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Can’t we all get alongImage by PixabayDo deepening adoption and broader deployment of container technologies (from the likes of Docker, CoreOS and others) threaten to escalate into the latest skirmish between operations, developers and information security? Certainly, the potential exists to widen the rift, but in fact there is far more common ground than would initially suggest. Containerization introduces new infrastructure that operates dynamically and is open in nature, with more potential for cross-container activity. Containerization presents an almost unprecedented opportunity to embed security into the software delivery pipeline – rather than graft on security checks, container monitoring and policy for access controls as an afterthought.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies are asking why the enterprise applications that their employees, customers and partners use every day can't be as simple and intuitive to use as the apps on their smartphones.They can be.In fact, corporate IT is already taking many cues from mobile consumer apps for improving user experience and speeding development of business applications.It's working. By focusing development on specific tasks, enterprise developers are producing apps faster while using fewer IT resources and less code. Even better, the simplicity and ease-of-use of the apps -- little or no training required -- can make them less intimidating for users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last summer at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge pitted automated systems against one another, trying to find weaknesses in the others' code and exploit them."This is a great example of how easily machines can find and exploit new vulnerabilities, something we'll likely see increase and become more sophisticated over time," said David Gibson, vice president of strategy and market development at Varonis Systems.His company hasn't seen any examples of hackers leveraging artificial intelligence technology or machine learning, but nobody adopts new technologies faster than the sin and hacking industries, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last summer at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge pitted automated systems against one another, trying to find weaknesses in the others' code and exploit them."This is a great example of how easily machines can find and exploit new vulnerabilities, something we'll likely see increase and become more sophisticated over time," said David Gibson, vice president of strategy and market development at Varonis Systems.His company hasn't seen any examples of hackers leveraging artificial intelligence technology or machine learning, but nobody adopts new technologies faster than the sin and hacking industries, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The cloud conversation is not new. We know by now that the cloud is a prerequisite to shaping scalable and resource-elastic, variable cost-based businesses. However, companies and their CIOs continue to struggle with how to work effectively in this new model, perhaps because they have underestimated the required changes.Successful migration to the cloud is not a trivial milestone. In fact, it may be one of the most significant journeys the IT organization embarks upon. It requires changes to the way the organization functions and delivers – and the speed at which it does so. It calls for a full-scale mindset shift as well as new ways of working - no small feat for most companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here