Google’s biggest hits, misses, and WTF moments of 2016

Hardware and AI lead the wayImage by Martyn WilliamsWith last year’s corporate restructuring out of the way, 2016 was a year of rebuilding for Google and its parent company Alphabet.This year, Google got much more serious about hardware, while placing big bets on artificial intelligence as the heart of its software. Products that fit this mission got revamped, while those that didn’t got axed or ignored. Read on for a review of what went right and wrong at Google in 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A: Hortonworks CTO unfolds the big data road map

Hortonworks has built its business on big data and Hadoop, but the Hortonworks Data Platform provides analytics and features support for a range of technologies beyond Hadoop, including MapReduce, Pig, Hive, and Spark. Hortonworks DataFlow, meanwhile, offers streaming analytics and uses technologies like Apache Nifi and Kafka.InfoWorld Executive Editor Doug Dineley and Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Hortonworks CTO Scott Gnau about how the company sees the data business shaking out, the Spark vs. Hadoop face-off, and Hortonworks' release strategy and efforts to build out the DataFlow platform for data in motion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s tariff threat may speed cloud adoption

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on goods manufactured in Mexico and offshore may accelerate the movement to cloud computing, analysts said.IT managers may seek to protect their companies from higher hardware or capital expenditure costs by shifting more of their IT spending to services. This shift is well underway, and the new administration may push it along, even before Trump takes office next month.At this point, industry analysts are uncertain as to what Trump has planned. His statements regarding tariffs are short, vague and sometimes delivered by tweets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google open-sources test suite to find crypto bugs

Working with cryptographic libraries is hard, and a single implementation mistake can result in serious security problems. To help developers check their code for implementation errors and find weaknesses in cryptographic software libraries, Google has released a test suite as part of Project Wycheproof."In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, and mistakes in open source cryptographic software libraries repeat too often and remain undiscovered for too long," Google security engineers Daniel Bleichenbacher and Thai Duong, wrote in a post announcing the project on the Google Security blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google open-sources test suite to find crypto bugs

Working with cryptographic libraries is hard, and a single implementation mistake can result in serious security problems. To help developers check their code for implementation errors and find weaknesses in cryptographic software libraries, Google has released a test suite as part of Project Wycheproof."In cryptography, subtle mistakes can have catastrophic consequences, and mistakes in open source cryptographic software libraries repeat too often and remain undiscovered for too long," Google security engineers Daniel Bleichenbacher and Thai Duong, wrote in a post announcing the project on the Google Security blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft announces multiple location-based services deals

Microsoft announced a series of partnerships with location-based services in the hopes of creating what it calls a "world graph," covering all kinds of locations and objects and how they work together. The first was a multi-year deal to use HERE mapping data across a number of its own services, such as Cortana and Bing Maps. Audi, BMW and Daimler purchased HERE from Nokia last year for €2.8 billion and use it in their GPS systems. Microsoft also announced a partnership with a number of mapping technology leaders, including HERE, TomTom and EsriI, to create what it describes as a "world graph" that details "a new data index of physical places, objects and devices and their interconnectivity." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: IoT could be our downfall

The internet of things (IoT) is all about connecting devices to the internet so that they can talk to each other and to us, to make life more convenient. That might mean turning on the lights when we get up, or allowing us to use our phones to see who’s at the front door, even when we're at the office. The potential applications are endless. There are already more than 6 billion connected "things," and that's set to rise to more than 20 billion by 2020, according to Gartner. But the enthusiasm for all things IoT has blinded us to the potential risks. Too many companies, keen to gain a foothold in the market, have rushed out products that lack basic security protocols. The risks here are enormous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: IoT could be our downfall

The internet of things (IoT) is all about connecting devices to the internet so that they can talk to each other and to us, to make life more convenient. That might mean turning on the lights when we get up, or allowing us to use our phones to see who’s at the front door, even when we're at the office. The potential applications are endless. There are already more than 6 billion connected "things," and that's set to rise to more than 20 billion by 2020, according to Gartner. But the enthusiasm for all things IoT has blinded us to the potential risks. Too many companies, keen to gain a foothold in the market, have rushed out products that lack basic security protocols. The risks here are enormous.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to tell if the Trump administration is serious about tech innovation

Last week’s tech news cycle was dominated by coverage of the high-profile meeting between the incoming Trump administration and a star-studded roster of tech leaders. Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet’s (Google)’s Larry Page, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Oracle’s Sasha Catz,, IBM’s Ginny Rommety and others were summoned to Trump Tower for a heavily hyped sitdown that provided some amazing optics. (Who can forget the meme of Bezos, Page, and Sandberg looking incredibly glum at the table?) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to get more from your security budget

Infosec budgets. They are small, they largely come from IT, and CISOs/CSOs often complain they are not nearly big enough.It’s a constant subject of debate and rightly so; a security budget will indirectly influence how well a CISO protects their business and its assets - and frankly, how well they do their job (which, in turn, will determine how long they stay in it).This isn’t meant to be all doom and gloom however; clever CISOs/CSOs and CIOs understand they have to resource more carefully in today’s economically challenging times. For CISOs, that involves using money effectively, and making do with solutions they already have, in order to protect the assets they truly care about. It can also involve upskilling staff, and rolling out cost effective security awareness campaigns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

CI Please Build—How to build your oVirt project on-demand

All projects in oVirt CI are built today post merge, using the 'build-artifacts' stage from oVirt's CI standards. This ensures that all oVirt projects are built and deployed to oVirt repositories and can be consumed by CI jobs, developers or oVirt users.

However, on some occasions a developer might need to build his project from an open patch. Developers need this capability in order to to examine the effects of their changes on a full oVirt installation before merging those changes. On some cases developers may even want to hand over packages based on un-merged patches to the QE team to verify that a given change will fix some complex issue or to preview a new feature on its early stages of development.

The Current Build Option

Until now, to build rpms from a patch, a developer needed to use a custom Jenkins job, which was only available to ovirt-engine and only for master branch. Another option was to try and build it locally using standard CI 'mock runner.sh' script which will use the same configuration as in CI. For full documentation on how to use 'mock-runner', checkout the Standard CI page.

The New Build Option

To ease Continue reading

Privacy groups complain to FTC over Google’s ‘deceptive’ policy change

Privacy groups have complained to the Federal Trade Commission that Google is encroaching on user privacy through a policy change in June that allows it to combine personally-identifiable information with browsing data collected by its DoubleClick digital advertising service.The complaint by Consumer Watchdog and Privacy Rights Clearing House alleged that Google has created “super-profiles” as it can track user activity on Android mobile phones, with an 88 percent market share of smartphones worldwide, "and from any website that uses Google Analytics, hosts YouTube videos, or displays ads served by DoubleClick or AdSense."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy groups complain to FTC over Google’s ‘deceptive’ policy change

Privacy groups have complained to the Federal Trade Commission that Google is encroaching on user privacy through a policy change in June that allows it to combine personally-identifiable information with browsing data collected by its DoubleClick digital advertising service.The complaint by Consumer Watchdog and Privacy Rights Clearing House alleged that Google has created “super-profiles” as it can track user activity on Android mobile phones, with an 88 percent market share of smartphones worldwide, "and from any website that uses Google Analytics, hosts YouTube videos, or displays ads served by DoubleClick or AdSense."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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