Open source users: It’s time for extreme vetting

Open source software is the norm these days rather than the exception. The code is being written in high volumes and turning up in critical applications. While having this code available can offer big benefits, users also must be wary of issues the code can present and implement proper vetting. Josh Bressers, cybersecurity strategist at Red Hat, emphasized this point during a recent talk with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill.[ Expand your security career horizons with these essential certifications for smart security pros. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security Report newsletter. ] InfoWorld: Why is Red Hat getting on the soapbox about open source security?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

AMD reveals another edge for Ryzen vs. Intel’s Skylake: It will be smaller

AMD’s upcoming Ryzen CPU will occupy less space and offer twice the amount of cache of Intel’s 6th-generation CPU, according a news report. Oh, and there will indeed be a quad-core model.AMD engineers made the disclosure in a paper this week during the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, according to EE Times' Rick Merritt.The engineering paper said a quad-core Ryzen chip built on a 14nm process would be about 10 percent smaller than a comparable 6th-generation Intel Skylake CPU built on a 14nm process, while offering twice the L2 cache of the Intel chip. The paper appears to count only the amount of space used for the x86 cores on an Intel CPU in its comparison. Like other mainstream CPUs, Intel’s Skylake chips also include graphics cores aboard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What company execs can learn from Trump’s tweeting

Like him or hate him, there's no debating that President Trump loves to tweet. What is up for debate, though, is whether his tweet storms will complicate what is already stressful work for the Secret Service. Enormous effort goes into protecting the President and his staff from hackers, and any tweets that could be deemed argumentative, hostile, or reactionary could elevate the risk of a targeted cyber attack on the White House. In the same way, executives at major enterprises also need to be cautious in how they choose to represent the company through social media. This type of security, said Larry Johnson, ex Secret Service agent and CSO of CyberSponse, is not just protecting the individual. Whether it's the Secret Service or the security team, "They’re protecting the company, the country, the assets."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What company execs can learn from Trump’s tweeting

Like him or hate him, there's no debating that President Trump loves to tweet. What is up for debate, though, is whether his tweet storms will complicate what is already stressful work for the Secret Service. Enormous effort goes into protecting the President and his staff from hackers, and any tweets that could be deemed argumentative, hostile, or reactionary could elevate the risk of a targeted cyber attack on the White House. In the same way, executives at major enterprises also need to be cautious in how they choose to represent the company through social media. This type of security, said Larry Johnson, ex Secret Service agent and CSO of CyberSponse, is not just protecting the individual. Whether it's the Secret Service or the security team, "They’re protecting the company, the country, the assets."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Our favorite Android apps for tracking and trading stocks

You don’t have to be a day trader to keep a close eye on the stock market. With the Dow crossing the 20,000 threshhold and tech stocks hitting record highs on a seemingly daily basis, watching the market can be as exciting as the Super Bowl, with ebbs, flows, peaks, valleys, and of course, a whole lot of money to be made (or lost!).While Google doesn’t supply a standalone stocks app in Android, it does provide a way to track stocks in Google Now (or, if you prefer, the Google app). To monitor a particular stock, tap the menu button in the top left corner, then select Customize, and finally, Stocks. From there you can search for the symbols you want to follow, and they’ll be added to a new card.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Datanomics 101: The economics of data in a digital enterprise

The transformation of businesses to digital enterprises was supposed to create an enormous market opportunity for the storage industry.As companies such as Netflix and Rosetta Stone transformed from DVDs and CDs to online data delivery models, their data footprint increased exponentially every year. In fact, digital transformation is increasing the data we store by over 2.5 exabytes every day. That’s equivalent to 530 million songs or 250,000 libraries of congress or 90 years of HD video! Each and every day. 100% growth every year.+ Also on Network World: How the 'digitization of everything' will become a reality + Conventional wisdom held that all this data needed to be stored somewhere, and the market outlook for the storage industry never looked better. Instead, there has been a rapid commoditization, consolidation and implosion of the storage market over the past three years, culminating in Dell’s acquisition of the market leader, EMC, in September of last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Save the date for 3 days of sharing, learning and networking at the 5th Africa Domain Name System- DNS Forum 2017!

Date: 26-28 July 2017

Location: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Venue: TBC

What is the Africa DNS Forum?

The Africa Domain Name System Forum is an annual open event for stakeholders in the Domain Name Industry in Africa organized by Africa Top Level Domains Organization (AfTLD), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Society. The objective of the three-day event is to help the African domain name industry in Africa to grow at a competitive rate and ensure that the continent is on par with the rest of the world.

Who should attend?

Betel Hailu

How to root out bias in your data

Human beings are inherently biased. So when companies began using computer algorithms to guide their critical business processes, many people believed the days of discriminatory hiring practices, emotion-fuelled performance reviews and partisan product development were coming to an end.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Connecting people across Africa to do valuable things in their community

Community established networks are emerging and evolving in Africa as a sustainable solution to address the existing connectivity gaps. 37 community networks initiatives have so far been identified in 12 African countries, of which 25 are considered active trying to set up or improve their own telecommunications infrastructure to connect the unconnected.

One of the goals of the Internet Society is to help expand connectivity and promote increased collaboration between community network operators in the region as well as provide an opportunity for them to engage with other stakeholders.

Betel Hailu

Google Cloud Search helps enterprise users find data quickly

Google is wooing enterprise customers with the forthcoming launch of a service that will let employees find information they need from multiple sources.Cloud Search is a new service that will allow users to find content from their company email, cloud storage and directory. Directory lookup provides users not only with their colleagues’ contact details, but also information about shared files and calendar events. More than that, Cloud Search is also built to proactively help users access information they need.When users log into Cloud Search either on the web or on their Android device, they’ll be greeted by “assist cards” that are supposed to highlight key files. At launch, those cards are built to show users files that are relevant for their upcoming calendar events, as well as those that require attention based on recent edits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Linux Migration: Virtualization Provider

As part of my migration to Linux as my primary laptop OS, I needed to revisit my choice of virtualization provider. Long-time readers probably know that I was an early adopter of VMware Fusion, starting way back in 2006 with the very first “friends and family” release (before it was even publicly available). Obviously I can’t use Fusion on Linux, but do I use VMware Workstation for Linux? VirtualBox? Or something else? That’s what I set out to determine, and in this post I’ll share what I selected and the reasoning behind my selection.

So what were the options to consider? While there may be some other solutions, these are the three I primarily assessed:

  • VMware Workstation for Linux 12.5.2
  • VirtualBox 5.1.14
  • “Native” Linux KVM, supplemented by Libvirt and a GUI like GNOME Boxes (installed by default in Fedora 25)

Since I have been using Vagrant quite a bit over the last few years, whatever solution I selected needed to work reasonably well with Vagrant.

I’m pretty familiar with KVM and Libvirt, so I started there. Given that KVM and Libvirt are “native” to Linux, it felt like it would be a clean solution. While Continue reading

Write your own terminal emulator

I was an happy user of rxvt-unicode until I got a laptop with an HiDPI display. Switching from a LoDPI to a HiDPI screen and back was a pain: I had to manually adjust the font size on all terminals or restart them.

VTE is a library to build a terminal emulator using the GTK+ toolkit, which handles DPI changes. It is used by many terminal emulators, like GNOME Terminal, evilvte, sakura, termit and ROXTerm. The library is quite straightforward and writing a terminal doesn’t take much time if you don’t need many features.

Let’s see how to write a simple one.

A simple terminal

Let’s start small with a terminal with the default settings. We’ll write that in C. Another supported option is Vala.

#include <vte/vte.h>

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    GtkWidget *window, *terminal;

    /* Initialise GTK, the window and the terminal */
    gtk_init(&argc, &argv);
    terminal = vte_terminal_new();
    window = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
    gtk_window_set_title(GTK_WINDOW(window), "myterm");

    /* Start a new shell */
    gchar **envp = g_get_environ();
    gchar **command = (gchar * Continue reading

The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox

We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass.

It is with this in mind, and as more of a thought experiment than a desire, that we consider the fate of International Business Machines in the datacenter. In many ways, other companies have long …

The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

As IoT sales surge, consumers still lead the way

The internet of things will have nearly one-third more devices by the end of this year, though many of them won’t exactly be exotic.There will be 8.4 billion IoT devices in use at the end of 2017, up 31 percent from the end of 2016, Gartner estimated on Tuesday. That's slightly faster than the growth rate last year. The number will keep growing at about the same pace until 2020, when there will be just over 20 billion devices, the research company says.Nearly two-thirds of the connected objects in use this year will be consumer products, especially smart TVs, set-top boxes, and in-car devices such as entertainment systems and sensors that help insurance companies monitor driving. Home IoT gadgets like connected door locks and lightbulbs are still popular mostly among tech-focused early adopters, analysts say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

27% off HAVIT 3-Fan USB Powered Laptop Cooling Pad – Deal Alert

With a thin body and light weight design, the USB-powered Havit HV-F2056 cooling pad allows you to take it wherever you go and cool your laptop anytime you want. Three ultra-quiet fans create a noise-free environment, and a high-quality multi-directional metal mesh provides your laptop with a wear-resistant and stable laptop carrying surface. A built-in dual-USB hub allows for connecting more USB devices. The cooling pad from HAVIT averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 3,500 people on Amazon (read reviews). Its typical list price of $29.49 has been reduced 27% to $21.49. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung Galaxy S7 hardware will come to the DragonBoard 820c computer

Meet DragonBoard 820c, a supercharged board computer that will make Raspberry Pi 3 look like a turtle.The computer can be used as an Android OS computer and is based on components in premium smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy S7.The board is now listed on the website of Arrow Electronics but isn't commercially available so far. The price isn't yet available. The board has Qualcomm's 820 chip, which is used some premium smartphones today. Qualcomm recently announced the Snapdragon 835, which succeeds the 820 and 821 chips, and next round of premium smartphones with the new chip will be announced in the coming months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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