Are tech companies responsible for negative outcomes?

America’s largest tech companies face a growing backlash over the potentially negative impacts of their strategic decisions and innovations. For example, companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are investing in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and product roadmaps that will replace millions of jobs during the coming years. Experts in marketing, technology and social awareness say it’s time for technology providers to assume greater responsibility for the personal pain that comes along with the collective gain.Emerging technology is at almost perpetual odds with the status quo, but U.S. society is coming to realize that dynamic can lead to job losses, unfair treatment of social services and a stain on civic engagement. The power and influence that some tech companies command is being reevaluated in light of the myriad ways people are being disenfranchised in some way by their actions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China goes after unauthorized VPN access from local ISPs

China is going after unauthorized internet connections, including tools known as VPNs (virtual private networks) that can bypass China’s efforts to control the web.The crackdown is part of 14-month campaign from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that's meant to clean up the country’s internet service provider marketUnless authorized, internet service providers are forbidden from operating any “cross-border” channel business, including VPNs, the ministry said in a Sunday notice.  The announcement is a bit of rarity. The country has usually withheld from openly campaigning against VPN use, even as government censors have intermittently tried to squelch access to them in the past.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China goes after unauthorized VPN access from local ISPs

China is going after unauthorized internet connections, including tools known as VPNs (virtual private networks) that can bypass China’s efforts to control the web.The crackdown is part of 14-month campaign from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that's meant to clean up the country’s internet service provider marketUnless authorized, internet service providers are forbidden from operating any “cross-border” channel business, including VPNs, the ministry said in a Sunday notice.  The announcement is a bit of rarity. The country has usually withheld from openly campaigning against VPN use, even as government censors have intermittently tried to squelch access to them in the past.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft revives free Windows 10 upgrade for SMBs

Microsoft last week resurrected its free Windows 10 upgrade, but aimed the deal at small- and mid-sized businesses that had passed on the earlier offer."They're extending the free upgrade to this segment of customers to help them get to Windows 10," said Wes Miller, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft who specializes in the technology company's complex licensing rules and practices.Like the 12-month upgrade deal that ended last August, the new offer applies to personal computers running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. But the new program is limited to a select group of customers. Only businesses that have signed up for one of the Windows Enterprise subscription plans can take advantage of the free upgrade.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud monitoring: Users review 5 top tools

Cloud technology is becoming a “staple” in the enterprise -- 70% have at least one application in the cloud – and may become the “default option” for software deployment by 2020. That makes it even more important that systems administrators can monitor, manage and optimize data-processing workloads in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The latest database attacks: Tips of the icebergs

MongoDB wasn’t the first database hit by ransomware, just a rich target for attacks. Now, ElasticSearch and Hadoop have become ransomware targets. They won’t be the last. Were these three database products insanely simple to secure? Yes. Were they secured by their installers? Statistics and BitCoin sales would indicate otherwise. And no, they won’t be the last. Every hour of every day, websites get pounded with probes. A few are for actual research. When the probe is a fake logon, like the dozens of hourly WordPress admin fails I get on my various websites, you have some idea that the sender isn’t friendly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The latest database attacks: Tips of the icebergs

MongoDB wasn’t the first database hit by ransomware, just a rich target for attacks. Now, ElasticSearch and Hadoop have become ransomware targets. They won’t be the last. Were these three database products insanely simple to secure? Yes. Were they secured by their installers? Statistics and BitCoin sales would indicate otherwise. And no, they won’t be the last. Every hour of every day, websites get pounded with probes. A few are for actual research. When the probe is a fake logon, like the dozens of hourly WordPress admin fails I get on my various websites, you have some idea that the sender isn’t friendly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Videos from ION Bucharest

We held ION Bucharest last year alongside the Romanian Network Operators’ Group (RONOG). It took a little longer than usual, but now all the presentations and video archives are available online. As we gear up for ION Islamabad next week on 25 January, this is a chance to get a sneak peak at the type of content we’ll be presenting! Bucharest was filled with IPv6, DNSSEC, DANE, TLS, IETF, and Routing Security information, and now you can watch it all from the comfort of your own device. —The Internet Society

The post Worth Reading: Videos from ION Bucharest appeared first on 'net work.

The essential guide to anti-malware tools

It's a sad fact of life in IT nowadays that some form of preparation for dealing with malware is part and parcel of what systems and network administrators must do. This goes above and beyond normal due diligence in warding off malware. It includes a proper appreciation of the work and risks involved in handling malware infections, and acquiring a toolkit of repair and cleanup tools to complement protective measures involved in exercising due diligence. It should also include at least two forms of insurance – one literal, the other metaphorical – that can help avert or cover an organization against costs and liabilities that malware could otherwise force the organization to incur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The essential guide to anti-malware tools

It's a sad fact of life in IT nowadays that some form of preparation for dealing with malware is part and parcel of what systems and network administrators must do. This goes above and beyond normal due diligence in warding off malware. It includes a proper appreciation of the work and risks involved in handling malware infections, and acquiring a toolkit of repair and cleanup tools to complement protective measures involved in exercising due diligence. It should also include at least two forms of insurance – one literal, the other metaphorical – that can help avert or cover an organization against costs and liabilities that malware could otherwise force the organization to incur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Sprint takes a 33 percent stake in Tidal

Mobile phone service provider Sprint announced this morning that it has taken a 33 percent stake in Tidal, one of the few music-streaming services to offer high-resolution audio streams. As part of the deal, Sprint says its customers will get exclusive access to certain content. Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure will also join Tidal’s board of directors.“Sprint shares our view of revolutionizing the creative industry to allow artists to connect directly with their fans and reach their fullest, shared potential,” Tidal owner Jay Z (née Shawn Carter) said in a press release. “Marcelo understood our goal right away and together we are excited to bring Sprint’s 45 million customers an unmatched entertainment experience.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reports: Apple, Foxconn considering a $7 billion manufacturing plant in the U.S.

Apple is reportedly considering moving some of its iPhone production to the United States. Taiwanese iPhone producer Foxconn is considering a $7 billion joint investment in a display production facility, the company’s chairman told reporters.According to the Nikkei Asian Review, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou said “Apple is willing to invest in the facility together” because it needs display panels for its products. The plant could create 30,000 to 50,000 jobs.But Gou said U.S.-made iPhones would likely cost more than those produced at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou, China facility, which churns out more than 100 million iPhones per year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Game over for Solaris and SPARC?

When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company inherited a venerable Unix solution that was already in decline. The Solaris operating system on Sun’s SPARC hardware was losing ground to x86 running Linux (or Windows Server) already, and IBM was cleaning its clock by stealing away SPARC customers to its Power series of servers. Larry Ellison promised to stop the bleeding. He promised investment in the line, and by and large has kept his promise, especially on the chip side. The SPARC line has seen considerable investment and some impressive new releases. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to turn things around. Solaris on Sparc continued to lose ground to competitors and Oracle’s own hardware, the x86-based Exadata and Exalogic. One thing Oracle would never own up to was SPARC sales to new customers vs. existing customers replacing aging hardware. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

33% off HP 23er 23-inch IPS LED Backlit Bezel-less Monitor – Deal Alert

IPS panel technology for ultra wide viewing, from almost any angle. 1920 x 1080 resolution for a sharp, detailed view. Bezel-less design maximizes your viewing area and makes for seamless multi-monitor set-ups. And LED backlighting enables high screen performance. Ultra slim and Energy-Star compliant design. The HP 23er 23-inch IPS LED backlit monitor is currently super-affordable ($119.99) with a 33% off deal happening now on Amazon, where it's averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 270 reviewers. See the deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dispersing a DDoS: Initial thoughts on DDoS protection

Distributed Denial of Service is a big deal—huge pools of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as security cameras, are compromised by botnets and being used for large scale DDoS attacks. What are the tools in hand to fend these attacks off? The first misconception is that you can actually fend off a DDoS attack. There is no magical tool you can deploy that will allow you to go to sleep every night thinking, “tonight my network will not be impacted by a DDoS attack.” There are tools and services that deploy various mechanisms that will do the engineering and work for you, but there is no solution for DDoS attacks.

One such reaction tool is spreading the attack. In the network below, the network under attack has six entry points.

Assume the attacker has IoT devices scattered throughout AS65002 which they are using to launch an attack. Due to policies within AS65002, the DDoS attack streams are being forwarded into AS65001, and thence to A and B. It would be easy to shut these two links down, forcing the traffic to disperse across five entries rather than two (B, C, D, E, and F). By splitting the Continue reading

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