Apple shortens annual iTunes Connect holiday shutdown

Apple has alerted app developers that it will not be accepting new app or app update submissions from Dec. 23-27, so the clock is ticking... Apple annual announces a holiday schedule, presumably to give some of the real people behind the app management process some time off. However, this year the break is only 5 days vs. 7 the past couple of years. While developers won't be able to submit new apps or updates during the break, they will have access to other iTunes connect features. Apple recently announced its Best of 2016 list, highlighting top apps and developers. Statista shows that about 2 million mobile apps are available for download on the Apple App Store, including the top new free app (well, it costs $10 to activate the good stuff), Super Mario Run. Nintendo says Super Mario Run was downloaded 40 million times in its first 4 days of availability, and Apple confirmed that is a record-breaker.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Event-driven infrastructure and the move to higher worlds

At Amazon Web Services' (AWS) re:Invent conference two years ago, the company introduced AWS Lambda, a mind-blowing service that allows developers to specify and set up specific functions that would run in the event of particular events.This was a remarkable development, for it heralded the ability to move beyond servers for specific processes and move to a model where the operation was the unit of measure. Functions would run only in the event of the particular triggers and would set in a idle state for eternity in the absence of those triggers. Developers would pay only when the particular functions were running.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat Falls 11% on Flat Q4 Forecast

Shares of Red Hat fell 10.6 percent in after-hours trading today as the company’s fourth-quarter forecast disappointed investors. Red Hat’s fourth-quarter projection of $614 million to $622 million in revenues means sales will be just about flat quarter-to-quarter. Revenues for the company’s third quarter, which ended Nov. 30, were $615 million. Investors expected third-quarter revenues... Read more →

Worth Reading: The coming era of edge computing

Edge computing is a natural next step from cloud computing. The computer industry shifts back and forth from centralized computing, which has lots of power but is far away from the person or device using it, to local computing, which is close to the action but messy and hard for a user to harness all of its capacity. For instance, mainframes (centralized computing) gave rise to PCs and client/server (decentralized), which gave rise to the cloud (centralized). So decentralized is due next. This is the breathing in and out of the computer industry. —Business Insider

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IDG Contributor Network: Surprise! Polar codes are coming in from the cold

As the festive season approaches, there is nothing better than a good surprise. If you follow my blog regularly, you’ll have read my position on Polar codes—great technology, but perhaps not quite ready for prime time.Well, I guess I was wrong, or maybe not? Recently, 3GPP selected Polar codes as the official coding method for the control channel functions in the 5G enhanced mobile broadband use case (one of the three main use cases being developed), and the LDPC method was crowned as the channel code for the data channels in the same use case. Turbo codes are not in the game yet, at least in this round. So, what happened?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encrypted messaging app Signal uses Google to bypass censorship

Developers of the popular Signal secure messaging app have started to use Google's domain as a front to hide traffic to their service and to sidestep blocking attempts.Bypassing online censorship in countries where internet access is controlled by the government can be very hard for users. It typically requires the use of virtual private networking (VPN) services or complex solutions like Tor, which can be banned too.Open Whisper Systems, the company that develops Signal -- a free, open-source app -- faced this problem recently when access to its service started being censored in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Some users reported that VPNs, Apple's FaceTime and other voice-over-IP apps were also being blocked.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encrypted messaging app Signal uses Google to bypass censorship

Developers of the popular Signal secure messaging app have started to use Google's domain as a front to hide traffic to their service and to sidestep blocking attempts.Bypassing online censorship in countries where internet access is controlled by the government can be very hard for users. It typically requires the use of virtual private networking (VPN) services or complex solutions like Tor, which can be banned too.Open Whisper Systems, the company that develops Signal -- a free, open-source app -- faced this problem recently when access to its service started being censored in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Some users reported that VPNs, Apple's FaceTime and other voice-over-IP apps were also being blocked.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Predicting the end of cloud computing

Here’s a prediction you don’t hear very often: The cloud computing market, as we know it, will be obsolete in a matter of years.The provocateur is Peter Levine, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He believes that the increased computing power of intelligent Internet of Things devices, combined with ever-increasingly accurate machine learning technologies, will largely replace the infrastructure as a service public cloud market.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 10 IaaS trends to watch in 2017 | 5 Enterprise Tech Trends that will shake things up in 2017 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why monitoring needs to be reinvented

Why do we monitor things (user experience, transactions, applications, virtual servers, physical servers, datastores, etc.)? Because we want them to work well all of the time.Does everything in your environment work well as you expect it to all of the time?Well, of course not. What if we reinvent monitoring so that we can help make that happen?Consider the following analogy: An airplane can fly itself from its origination to its destination and land itself without human intervention. If we flew commercial airliners the way we run enterprise IT, planes would be dropping out of the sky left and right—and only be 30 percent full (maybe this would be a good thing).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why monitoring needs to be reinvented

Why do we monitor things (user experience, transactions, applications, virtual servers, physical servers, datastores, etc.)? Because we want them to work well all of the time.Does everything in your environment work well as you expect it to all of the time?Well, of course not. What if we reinvent monitoring so that we can help make that happen?Consider the following analogy: An airplane can fly itself from its origination to its destination and land itself without human intervention. If we flew commercial airliners the way we run enterprise IT, planes would be dropping out of the sky left and right—and only be 30 percent full (maybe this would be a good thing).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Despite big data, Alibaba’s Taobao back in US blacklist

Alibaba’s Taobao.com marketplace is in the eye of a storm after the U.S. Trade Representative included the vastly popular online Chinese marketplace in the list of ‘Notorious Markets’ for 2016, after a long break.The list identifies markets that are allegedly "engaging in and facilitating substantial copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting.” The listing carries no penalties but will likely be an embarrassment for Alibaba, which has been trying to burnish its image in international markets.The move by the USTR comes even as the company claims to have used “big data” technologies to zero in, for example, on 13 factories and shops that were selling knockoff RAM modules under Kingston and Samsung brands, according to Alibaba's news hub Alizila.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How artificial intelligence can eliminate bias in hiring

Diversity (or lack of it) is still a major challenge for tech companies. Poised to revolutionize the world of work in general, some organizations are leveraging technology to root out bias, better identify and screen candidates and help close the diversity gap.That starts with understanding the nature of bias, and acknowledging that unconscious bias is a major problem, says Kevin Mulcahy, an analyst with Future Workplace and co-author of The Future Workplace Experience: 10 Rules for Managing Disruption in Recruiting and Engaging Employees. AI and machine learning can be an objective observer to screen for bias patterns, Mulcahy says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump threatens electronic rights, EFF warns

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is keenly worried that President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will step up surveillance activities and pass laws to curtail electronic rights.As a result, the EFF is advising the tech sector to use end-to-end encryption for every transaction by default, and to scrub logs. "You cannot be made to surrender data you do not have," the EFF said.[To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page.]"We need to start securing our systems now," said Rainey Reitman, director of the EFF's activism team, in an interview. "If we wait until he [Trump] starts putting overbroad government demands on tech companies, they won't have the time to clean up their logs and encrypt data."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Virtual reality, one year out: What went right, what didn’t

After years of teases, tantalizing promises, and Kickstarter campaigns, virtual reality finally became actual reality in 2016, with VR’s mere existence thrusting the entire PC industry into glorious, wonderful turmoil. Despite being around for just a handful of months, virtual reality has already inspired totally new genres of computers, wormed its way deep into Windows, and sent the price of graphics cards plummeting.Not too shabby for VR’s first real year on the streets, though the implementations could still use some fine-tuning. Let’s look back at how this wild new frontier blossomed in 2016.The birth of consumer virtual reality From the very start of 2016 it was clear that the dawn of proper PC-powered VR had arrived. You could see evidence of this fact all over CES 2016 in January, where EVGA introduced a specialized graphics card designed to fit VR headset ergonomics; Nvidia rolled out a VR certification program; and seemingly every booth boasted some sort of virtual-reality hook, from VR treadmills to VR porn and VR Everest climbs (the latter two being mind-blowing in their own ways).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Outlook vs. native apps in Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android

Microsoft is now more than a year into reworking its Outlook clients and server software to truly support its mission to bring its Office communications tools everywhere: the Mail, Calendar, People (contacts), and Notes components in Outlook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

What the infosec jobs sector will look like in 2017

Shortage still?Image by EthanMany reports touted the fact that there are not enough workers with the proper cybersecurity skills necessary to fill all the vacant jobs. Forrester suggests looking to external expertise and automation for a quarter of the work. The complexity curve facing enterprises hasn’t reached its peak yet, which leaves security stuck solving problems of capacity and capability with limited resources already burdened with too many technologies, too many alerts, and too much to do. This combined spending will include security outsourcing, managed security services, security consultants and integrators, and security automation technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

What the infosec jobs sector will look like in 2017

(Insider Story)

Free security tools to support cyber security efforts

There are more free information security tools out there than you can highlight with a fist full of whiteboard pointers. While many are trial ware-based enticements designed to lure decision makers to purchase the pricey premium counterparts of these freebies, many are full-blown utilities. A few important categories include threat intelligence tools, tools to build security in during the development stage, penetration testers, and forensics tools.Threat intelligence tools include AlienVault’s Open Threat Exchange, which collects and shares online threat intelligence as well as the Hailataxii and Cymon.io threat exchanges. There are a variety of SAST (Static Application Security Testing) tools for security testing software applications that developers write using different languages whether C/C++, Ruby on Rails, or Python. For penetration testing, we present the Nmap Security Scanner and the broadly useful Wireshark network protocol analyzer. Specific forensics products include the GRR remote forensic framework, and Autopsy and SleuthKit, which analyze hard drives and smartphones, and the Volatility Foundation’s open source framework for memory analysis/forensics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Free security tools to support cyber security efforts

There are more free information security tools out there than you can highlight with a fist full of whiteboard pointers. While many are trial ware-based enticements designed to lure decision makers to purchase the pricey premium counterparts of these freebies, many are full-blown utilities. A few important categories include threat intelligence tools, tools to build security in during the development stage, penetration testers, and forensics tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Experts split on how soon quantum computing is coming, but say we should start preparing now

Whether quantum computing is 10 years away -- or is already here -- it promises to make current encryption methods obsolete, so enterprises need to start laying the groundwork for new encryption methods.A quantum computer uses qubits instead of bits. A bit can be a zero or a one, but a qubit can be both simultaneously, which is weird and hard to program but once folks get it working, it has the potential to be significantly more powerful than any of today's computers.And it will make many of today's public key algorithms obsolete, said Kevin Curran, IEEE senior member and a professor at the University of Ulster, where he heads up the Ambient Intelligence Research Group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here