Microsoft’s custom voice recognition service hits public beta

Companies building applications that leverage speech recognition have a new machine-learning based tool to improve their work. Microsoft is opening the public beta for its Custom Speech Service, the company said Tuesday.The service, formerly known as CRIS, allows customers to train a speech recognition system to work in a specific scenario, allowing it to produce more accurate results. For example, the Custom Speech Service can be trained to provide better results in a noisy airport or set up to work better with voices from a particular group, like kids or people with different accents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Upcoming Webinar: Open Networking for Large Scale Networks

Shawn Zandi and I are doing a two part webinar over at ipspace.net—

Most modern data centers are still using vendor-driven “future proof” routers and switches with offering lots of (often unnecessary) capabilities. To build large, however, it is often better to build simple—radically simple. This webinar will cover the design components involved in building a data center or cloud fabric using a single, disaggregated device—the way some hyperscale and web scale operators build their networks. The first live session of the webinar will consider the benefits of disaggregated switch, focusing on the components, sources, and challenges in using disaggregated hardware and software in data center fabrics. The second live session will focus on the topologies and design concepts used in large scale data center fabrics using a single switching device as a leaf, spine and superspine switch.

Jump over to ipspace if you want to learn more.

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One Small Shop, One Extreme HPC Storage Challenge

Being at the bleeding edge of computing in the life sciences does not always mean operating at extreme scale. For some shops, advancements in new data-generating scientific tools requires forward thinking at the infrastructure level—even if it doesn’t require a massive cluster with exotic architectures. We tend to cover much of what happens at the extreme scale of computing here, but it’s worth stepping back and observing how dramatic problems in HPC are addressed in much smaller environments.

This “small shop, big problem” situation is familiar to the Van Andel Research Institute (VARI), which recently moved from a genomics and …

One Small Shop, One Extreme HPC Storage Challenge was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Adventures in GELF

If you are running apps in containers and are using Docker’s GELF logging driver (or are considering using it), the following musings might be relevant to your interests.

Some context

When you run applications in containers, the easiest logging method is to write on standard output. You can’t get simpler than that: just echo, print, write (or the equivalent in your programming language!) and the container engine will capture your application’s output.

Other approaches are still possible, of course; for instance:

In the last scenario, this service can be:

  • a proprietary logging mechanism operated by your cloud provider, e.g. AWS CloudWatch or Google Stackdriver;
  • provided by a third-party specialized in managing logs or events, e.g. Honeycomb, Loggly, Splunk, etc.;
  • something running in-house, that you deploy and maintain yourself.

If your application is very terse, or Continue reading

Polish banks on alert after mystery malware found on computers

The discovery of malware on computers and servers of several Polish banks has put the country's financial sector on alert over potential compromises.Polish media reported last week that the IT security teams at many Polish banks have been busy recently searching their systems for a particular strain of malware after several unnamed banks found it on their computers.It's not clear what the malware's end goal is, but in at least one case it was used to exfiltrate data from a bank's computer to an external server. The nature of the stolen information could not be immediately determined because it was encrypted, Polish IT news blog Zaufana Trzecia Strona reported Friday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vizio to pay $2.2 million for spying on what customers watch without consent

Whether or not Vizio is “sorry” for spying on more than 11 million people while they watch TV in the privacy of their homes is debatable – the company was proud of its ability to capture “highly specific viewing behavior data on a massive scale with great accuracy” in its Oct. 2015 IPO – but Vizio has agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle charges by the FTC. The data collection about what people were watching was occurring without users’ consent and Vizio was then sharing the data with advertisers and other companies.In the FTC’s words, “The data generated when you watch television can reveal a lot about you and your household. So, before a company pulls up a chair next to you and starts taking careful notes on everything you watch (and then shares it with its partners), it should ask if that’s O.K. with you. VIZIO wasn’t doing that, and the FTC stepped in.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Shopping for tax information

The 2016 tax season is now in full swing in the United States, which means scammers are once again assembling vast dossiers of personal data and preparing to file fraudulent tax refund requests on behalf of millions of Americans. But for those lazy identity thieves who can’t be bothered to phish or steal the needed data, there is now another option: Buying stolen W-2 tax forms from other crooks who have phished the documents wholesale from corporations. —Krebs on Security

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They are young and passionate. They will rule the future Internet.

Beyond the Net Journal: Youth Observatory #1 Episode

 “The voices of young people are not heard when it comes to Internet policy” said Carlos Guerrero, project manager of the Youth Observatory. “We are the generation that has been using the Internet since we were children, and we are the ones who will be using it for the next 50 years. Our voice matters.”

Nicoletta Metri

IDG Contributor Network: How a rebirth at the edge will change the cloud

For enterprise IT, the cloud has finally reached the tipping point. It is no longer a question of whether cloud is part of the strategic plan for most organizations, but simply when and how they will realize the move to cloud.If you’re an IT leader, however, you may not want to get too comfortable with your cloud strategy.Despite having just fully arrived in the cloud era, we are about to move on—at least according to Peter Levine of Andreessen Horowitz.As 2016 wrapped up, Levine gave a talk in which he made his provocative prediction: Cloud computing is coming to an end.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech stance against immigration ban aims to protect employees

The 97 tech firms who have joined forces to oppose President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration say they are looking to protect their employees as well as their business interests."The order makes it more difficult and expensive for U.S. companies to recruit, hire, and retain some of the world's best employees," the court brief reads. "It disrupts ongoing business operations. And it threatens companies' ability to attract talent, business, and investment to the United States."INSIDER 12 habits of successful tech CEO The list of firms who signed onto the friend-of-the-court brief includes Airbnb, Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter and Yelp. The move comes in response to the executive order signed on Jan. 27 that temporarily bars citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, as well as all refugees, from entering the United States.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump’s ban becomes an H-1B fight

The U.S. technology industry warned President Donald Trump that his immigration order will hurt the U.S. economy by making it more difficult for businesses to attract overseas workers. The administration's seven-country ban is, for the tech industry, a blinking caution sign to the world's highly skilled population delivering this message: Come here at your own risk.Tech firms see the market for highly skilled workers as being "globally competitive," and any changes to immigration rules may inhibit their ability to recruit overseas. Most of these companies hire Indian nationals, who account for as many 70 percent of the H-1B visa holders.[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's H-1B & IT Outsourcing Facebook group. ] Two hundred and fifty-one H-1B visa applications for people born in the seven banned countries were approved in fiscal year 2015 for computer-related jobs, according to a Computerworld analysis of government immigration data for that year. If new and renewed H-1B visas are counted for multiple years, the number will rise. The seven countries where the immigration ban would apply are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

60% off YOCOU 5-Channel Cable Management System, 6-piece – Deal Alert

Twisted, tangled cords and wires are an eyesore. Organize your space with this simple 6-piece cable management system that works for power cords, charging cables, USB cords, phone chargers, audio cables, headphones, or any other wire up to 1/4-inch diameter. The cord organizers are made of a soft, flexibile material, will not damage your desk and cables, also you can remove it easily without damage or residue. The bundle includes four 5-channel clips (two black and two white), one single-slot clip and one double-slot clip as well. Its list price of $20 is discounted to $8. See it on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5G starts with chips like IBM and Ericsson’s silicon antenna

A piece of silicon less than three inches across may speed up the arrival of 5G mobile networks in the next few years.IBM Research and Ericsson have developed a compact antenna array that can aim high-frequency radio signals at mobile devices and shoot them farther than they otherwise could reach, the companies said. Silicon integration makes it thin and energy efficient so it’s more commercially viable.Carriers expect 5G networks to deliver cellular data speeds in the gigabits per second, far faster than what today’s LTE services offer. They also expect benefits like less power consumption, lower latency and the ability to serve a lot more devices at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Millennials can thrive by adding mainframe skills

As older IT workers retire, the industry is in danger of losing critical mainframe technology skills. But tapping millennials to fill these critical roles is helping to keep innovation alive."Credit cards, insurance companies, banks, government systems -- for any kind of large batch systems that use transactions like that, the mainframe is still the best at what it does from a processing speed and security perspective. That's why it lives on. And it sustains within large enterprises because there's no comparable cloud derivative, for one, and there's often millions of lines of proprietary, unique code that would be unreasonable to rework for another type of platform," says Chris O'Malley, president and CEO, Compuware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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