Microsoft’s Slack competitor is coming March 14

Microsoft’s entry into the modern workplace chat app market will be generally available in a week. The company announced Tuesday it will be marking the occasion with a webcast to discuss what’s new since the service was announced last year.The Teams product is Microsoft’s answer to group chat apps like Slack and HipChat. The service provides Office 365 customers with shared workspaces they can use to discuss work with one another. It connects with Office 365 to let users collaborate on notes, documents, spreadsheets, and more while discussing work in the same place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi roundup: Happy 5th birthday, baby! Also, new software, a tough piano, and, well, Windows 98

I am a shameful forgetter of important dates, as family and ex-girlfriends will be happy to tell you. They can detail the brainless “duh?” expression, with tinges of dawning comprehension, that I make when I am reminded that, yes, it’s today, and yes, I have forgotten.It’s a different story, professionally – I did remember that the Raspberry Pi’s fifth birthday took place this weekend, but I was traveling to cover a wireless company’s annual conference for work, and I simply couldn’t fit it in. So, to the little tiny computer that was one of the very first stories I covered for Network World, I’m sorry. I really did have other stuff to do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off Corsair Gaming MM300 Anti-Fray Cloth Gaming Mouse Pad – Deal Alert

The MM300 is a high endurance, pro-grade cloth mouse pad for high-DPI gaming mice. Reinforced stitched edges guard against surface peeling, and the optimized textile-weaved surface design gives superior control and precision tracking for absolutely lethal in-game accuracy. With multiple sizes available, from small to extended, the MM300 has just the right size to fit your needs.  This gaming pad currently averages 4.7 out of 5 stars from over 700 people (read reviews) on Amazon, where the extended version's typical list price of $29.99 has been recently dropped 50% to just $14.99.  See this deal now on Amazon To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Trust in our systems: Chapter 11 and Avaya’s prognosis

In times of uncertainty, it is best to trust our systems. There are systems that keep us safe such as air traffic control, providing that we arrive at safely distant destinations. There are street light systems that help us cross at busy intersections. In our government, we must have faith in systems, including our separation of powers and a free press.For the business world, other systems such as the Chapter 11 processes, may not be well understood, but many experts argue are critical.The Chapter 11 set of processes are especially important at this period of time for the universe of stakeholders that I wrote about recently in "Avaya’s Chapter 11 filing sends waves of disruption." In this follow-up post, I’ll talk a bit about the Chapter 11 processes and provide some information I gained recently that makes me feel just a bit more comfortable about the future for that universe that surrounds Avaya. Part of this is some recent research and part is due to a briefing that I participated in with Avaya corporate treasurer John Sullivan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Can we trust the public cloud vendors?

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) outage on Feb. 28 took down many well-known websites and web services. For the complete post-mortem from Amazon Web Services (AWS), read this lengthy explanation of what went wrong and what AWS is doing to address the issue.If the full explanation too long and too complicated, here is a short version: An administrator was going to perform maintenance on a set of S3 servers. He mis-typed the command to take a set of servers offline, and more servers than intended were taken off line This took the entire S3 environment in the U.S. East Zone closer to the edge in capacity than the system was designed for and caused widespread availability issues in web services that relied upon the S3 environment.  More instructive and more worrisome are the steps Amazon took to prevent this issue from happening again:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Can we trust the public cloud vendors?

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) outage on Feb. 28 took down many well-known websites and web services. For the complete post-mortem from Amazon Web Services (AWS), read this lengthy explanation of what went wrong and what AWS is doing to address the issue.If the full explanation too long and too complicated, here is a short version: An administrator was going to perform maintenance on a set of S3 servers. He mis-typed the command to take a set of servers offline, and more servers than intended were taken off line This took the entire S3 environment in the U.S. East Zone closer to the edge in capacity than the system was designed for and caused widespread availability issues in web services that relied upon the S3 environment.  More instructive and more worrisome are the steps Amazon took to prevent this issue from happening again:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ZTE pays $892M settlement to US over illegal sales to Iran

Chinese smartphone maker ZTE has agreed to pay US$892 million to the U.S. government for illegally selling networking technology to Iran.   ZTE entered a guilty plea over the charges, which include violating export controls meant to keep sensitive U.S. technology away from the Iranian government, the U.S Department of Justice said on Tuesday. "They (ZTE) lied to federal investigators and even deceived their own counsel and internal investigators about their illegal acts," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ZTE pays $892M settlement to US over illegal sales to Iran

Chinese smartphone maker ZTE has agreed to pay US$892 million to the U.S. government for illegally selling networking technology to Iran.   ZTE entered a guilty plea over the charges, which include violating export controls meant to keep sensitive U.S. technology away from the Iranian government, the U.S Department of Justice said on Tuesday. "They (ZTE) lied to federal investigators and even deceived their own counsel and internal investigators about their illegal acts," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Digital Transformation Impact on Enterprise Architecture

Digital transformation is a top business initiative for CIO’s. What does it really mean for IT and how does it impact the business itself?  In this post, we will try to cover some of the basics.

Digital transformation is a fundamental change to an organization’s product development and product delivery process to deliver a highly personalized product or service. This often involves using technology such as big data analytics, social, mobile and cloud as a means to deliver these services to the consumer. Digital transformation also implies the ability to create sustainable business differentiation with software and the ability to rapidly introduce new products and services to meet new customer needs.

Industry veterans and incumbent giants are facing significant competitive pressure and potential disruption from new market players. Startups (such as Uber, Tesla, and many others) have moved quickly from being niche players to be a dominant force in many verticals such as auto, banking, manufacturing, healthcare. Industry leaders from large enterprises acknowledge this trend and are now looking to transform their product development process and customer engagement to compete with new players –

  • Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMC – 2015 Annual Report to shareholders

Is Google pushing Apple out of U.S. classrooms?

Google continues to gain share in the education market at Apple’s expense. Chrome OS powers almost six out of 10 computing devices shipped to K-12 schools in the United States last year, according to a new report from research firm Futuresource Consulting.[ Related: How Google overtook Apple in education ]A growing number of inexpensive Chromebooks are making their way into U.S. classrooms while iOS -- and to a lesser extent MacOS -- devices are losing considerable share. Google’s Chrome OS comprised 58 percent of the 12.6 million units shipped to primary and secondary schools in the United States last year, up from 50 percent in 2015 and 38 percent in 2014, according to the report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why email is safer in Office 365 than on your Exchange server

Running your own email servers doesn’t do anything to differentiate your business from the competition (except in a bad way, if you get hacked). But avoiding the effort of managing and monitoring your own mail server isn’t the only advantage of a cloud service. The scale of a cloud mail provider like Office 365 means that malware and phishing attacks are easier to spot — and the protections extend beyond your inbox.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Why email is safer in Office 365 than on your Exchange server

Running your own email servers doesn’t do anything to differentiate your business from the competition (except in a bad way, if you get hacked). But avoiding the effort of managing and monitoring your own mail server isn’t the only advantage of a cloud service. The scale of a cloud mail provider like Office 365 means that malware and phishing attacks are easier to spot — and the protections extend beyond your inbox.Email protection isn’t just about blocking spam anymore. It’s about blocking malicious messages aimed at infecting computers and stealing credentials. Traditional antivirus scanning isn’t the solution either, because attachments aren’t just executable files you can recognize with a signature. Often, scammers use JavaScript and macros (including PowerShell) to trigger a secondary download with the malicious payload. And embedded links often go to legitimate but compromised sites, so you also can’t rely on site reputation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

InfraKit and Docker Swarm Mode: A Fault-Tolerant and Self-Healing Cluster

Back in October 2016, Docker released Infrakit, an open source toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure. This is the second in a two part series that dives more deeply into the internals of InfraKit.

Introduction

In the first installment of this two part series about the internals of InfraKit, we presented InfraKit’s design, architecture, and approach to high availability.  We also discussed how it can be combined with other systems to give distributed computing clusters self-healing and self-managing properties. In this installment, we present an example of leveraging Docker Engine in Swarm Mode to achieve high availability for InfraKit, which in turn enhances the Docker Swarm cluster by making it self-healing.  

Docker Swarm Mode and InfraKit

One of the key architectural features of Docker in Swarm Mode is the manager quorum powered by SwarmKit.  The manager quorum stores information about the cluster, and the consistency of information is achieved through consensus via the Raft consensus algorithm, which is also at the heart of other systems like Etcd. This guide gives an overview of the architecture of Docker Swarm Mode and how the manager quorum maintains the state of the cluster.

One aspect of the cluster state Continue reading

Honeypot catches social engineering scams on social media

Say you just got laid off from your job. Bills are piling up and the pressure to get a new job quickly is building. Your desperation has you taking chances you wouldn’t normally take, such as clicking on a link to a job offer — even if something about it doesn't quite look right.Research firm ZeroFOX has found that unless a company has a verified recruiting account, it can be difficult for an applicant to decipher a legitimate account from an impersonator. One way to spot an impersonator is that they commonly provide Gmail, Yahoo, and other free email provider addresses through which applicants can inquire about a job and send their resumes (more advanced scammers can spoof company email domains). Some also include links to official job sites and LinkedIn for follow-up. In most cases, the impersonator uses the company logo to portray themselves as an official recruiter for the company. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Honeypot catches social engineering scams on social media

Say you just got laid off from your job. Bills are piling up and the pressure to get a new job quickly is building. Your desperation has you taking chances you wouldn’t normally take, such as clicking on a link to a job offer — even if something about it doesn't quite look right.Research firm ZeroFOX has found that unless a company has a verified recruiting account, it can be difficult for an applicant to decipher a legitimate account from an impersonator. One way to spot an impersonator is that they commonly provide Gmail, Yahoo, and other free email provider addresses through which applicants can inquire about a job and send their resumes (more advanced scammers can spoof company email domains). Some also include links to official job sites and LinkedIn for follow-up. In most cases, the impersonator uses the company logo to portray themselves as an official recruiter for the company. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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