Worth Reading: Insurance companies and free stuff

When your “smart” home is hacked, who is to blame — and importantly — who pays for it? As connected items in our homes move beyond laptops and mobile phones to baby monitors, refrigerators, door locks, intruder alarms and thermostats, insurance companies are evolving along with them. The insurance industry is increasingly incorporating these devices into home coverage. According to new figures from research firm Accenture, insurance pilot projects for connected homes increased from 9% in 2014 to 22% in 2015. —Market Watch

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IDG Contributor Network: Novelty seeking and networking

You’re seated in a restaurant you’ve never visited before, and the waiter hands you the menu. As you scan the items, do you look for something familiar you know you’ll like? Or do you want something you’ve never tried before?People respond differently to new situations and opportunities, sometimes with opposite reactions. “Better safe than sorry,” caution some, while others urge, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”+ Also on Network World: 3 tips to foster a culture of innovation + Such reactions, engrained deep in our temperament, are described by psychologist and neuroscientists as our degree of novelty seeking. The trait is associated with positive aspects, such as curiosity, and negative aspects, such as impulsivity. It follows a normal distribution in the population, and scientific research even suggests a genetic basis, which makes sense considering our species has sought novelty strongly enough to inhabit almost every part of the planet and beyond.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kindle Discount Ends Tonight: Up To 36% off Various Models – Deal Alert

Amazon has quietly released another good set of deals on its popular Kindle series of e-readers, but the deal is scheduled to end tonight at 6pm ET.  Kindle's price sinks from $80 to $60, Kindle Paperwhite from $120 down to $100, the Kindle Voyage drops from $200 to just $180, and the worry-free Kindle for Kids Bundle is reduced from $125 to just $80. The Kindle discounts are almost over for now, so if you're in the market for one right now, you may want to consider pulling the trigger soon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HTC pushes VR arcades with new Vive software

One of the biggest issues with high-end virtual reality experiences right now is that they often require people invest thousands of dollars in powerful computers in order to work. One solution to this is the VR arcade, where operators buy machines and then rent time on them to the public.HTC announced a new software platform Thursday that aims to help with the creation of such arcades. Viveport Arcade is designed to help arcade operators find games that are well-suited to the sort of public experience that they're building, while also helping developers better monetize their creations. It's built for the Taiwanese hardware maker's Vive headset, one of the leading offerings in the realm of high-end virtual reality headgear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New smartphone attachment can detect cancer

Researchers at Washington State University have developed a portable sensor that uses a smartphone's camera to detect a biological indicator for several types of cancers with 99% accuracy, yielding laboratory quality results.The sensor, a light spectrometer, can process up to eight blood or tissue samples at the same time (or one sample in eight wells) and can detect the human protein  interleukin-6 (IL-6). That protein is a known biological marker for lung, prostate, liver, breast and epithelial cancers. Washington State University The spectrometer attached to an iPhone 5.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 AWS security blunders and how to avoid them

The cloud has made it dead simple to quickly spin up a new server without waiting for IT. But the ease of deploying new servers -- and the democratic nature of cloud management -- can be a security nightmare, as a simple configuration error or administrative mistake can compromise the security of your organization's entire cloud environment.With sensitive data increasingly heading to the cloud, how your organization secures its instances and overall cloud infrastructure is of paramount importance. Cloud providers, like Amazon, secure the server hardware your instances run on, but the security of the cloud infrastructure your organization sets up on that infrastructure is all on you. A broad array of built-in security services and third-party tools are available to secure practically any workload, but you have to know how to use them. And it all starts with proper configuration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 AWS security blunders and how to avoid them

The cloud has made it dead simple to quickly spin up a new server without waiting for IT. But the ease of deploying new servers -- and the democratic nature of cloud management -- can be a security nightmare, as a simple configuration error or administrative mistake can compromise the security of your organization's entire cloud environment.With sensitive data increasingly heading to the cloud, how your organization secures its instances and overall cloud infrastructure is of paramount importance. Cloud providers, like Amazon, secure the server hardware your instances run on, but the security of the cloud infrastructure your organization sets up on that infrastructure is all on you. A broad array of built-in security services and third-party tools are available to secure practically any workload, but you have to know how to use them. And it all starts with proper configuration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 AWS security blunders and how to avoid them

The cloud has made it dead simple to quickly spin up a new server without waiting for IT. But the ease of deploying new servers -- and the democratic nature of cloud management -- can be a security nightmare, as a simple configuration error or administrative mistake can compromise the security of your organization's entire cloud environment.With sensitive data increasingly heading to the cloud, how your organization secures its instances and overall cloud infrastructure is of paramount importance. Cloud providers, like Amazon, secure the server hardware your instances run on, but the security of the cloud infrastructure your organization sets up on that infrastructure is all on you. A broad array of built-in security services and third-party tools are available to secure practically any workload, but you have to know how to use them. And it all starts with proper configuration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ex-Facebook, Dropbox engineers offer debugging as a service

A group of former Facebook and Dropbox engineers is developing a service for debugging complex systems and answering ad hoc questions in real time.Honeycomb, currently in an open beta cycle, is a SaaS platform that reduces MTTR (mean time to repair) for outages and degraded services, identifies bugs and performance regressions, isolates contributing factors to failures, and reproduces user bug reports.[ Find out how to get ahead with our career development guide for developers. | The art of programming is changing rapidly. We help you navigate what's hot in programming and what's going cold. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ] The collective debugging skills of teams would be captured and preserved, according to the project website. Rather than relying on a dashboard, Honeycomb is for interactive debugging.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ex-Facebook, Dropbox engineers offer debugging as a service

A group of former Facebook and Dropbox engineers is developing a service for debugging complex systems and answering ad hoc questions in real time.Honeycomb, currently in an open beta cycle, is a SaaS platform that reduces MTTR (mean time to repair) for outages and degraded services, identifies bugs and performance regressions, isolates contributing factors to failures, and reproduces user bug reports.[ Find out how to get ahead with our career development guide for developers. | The art of programming is changing rapidly. We help you navigate what's hot in programming and what's going cold. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ] The collective debugging skills of teams would be captured and preserved, according to the project website. Rather than relying on a dashboard, Honeycomb is for interactive debugging.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Battling gender bias in IT

Kate Flathers was having a bad day. Between meetings, phone calls and projects going off the rails, the last thing she wanted to do was a candidate interview. So her first thought when she glanced at the résumé and cover letter that crossed her desk was, “Whew — I’m glad I don’t have to get involved in this one.”In her role as director of product development at DrugDev, a provider of a clinical trials operations platform, Flathers was pulled into the interviewing process only after the first few rounds, when things were going well and a candidate had passed a number of initial screenings. And the candidate she was looking at certainly didn’t fit the usual profile of a software developer: A woman in her 40s who was making a late-stage career change.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How secure are home robots?

They have blinking lights and tend to chirp constantly. One of them can vacuum your living room carpet on a schedule. Another can play games with the kids using artificial intelligence.Yet, for homeowners (and security professionals) there’s a question about whether home robots could become an attack vector for hackers. Tapping into a live webcam feed and recording it? Stealing Wi-Fi information from an unprotected signal so you can transmit illegal wares? What makes a home robot such an ingenious ploy is that few of us think a vacuum could possibly become anything remotely viable for criminal use. Yet, that’s exactly the danger.“Homeowners never change the default passwords or use simple passwords which can be broken thus allowing hackers to leverage their way onto a home network and use the robot as a pivot point for further exfiltration of sensitive data or plant malware,” says Kevin Curran, a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Ulster and IEEE member.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How secure are home robots?

They have blinking lights and tend to chirp constantly. One of them can vacuum your living room carpet on a schedule. Another can play games with the kids using artificial intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Twitter’s impact on 2016 presidential election is unmistakable

Twitter has played an outsized role in a 2016 presidential election that continues to test the electorate. Despite Twitter's ongoing business problems, the ability of a single tweet to shape political conversation and drive media coverage has never been greater. A marked contrast exists between Twitter's business acumen (or lack thereof) and the sometimes seemingly unintentional influence it wields on the current election.The leading candidates for America's next presidency use Twitter to energize their supporters and draw citizens who wouldn't otherwise follow political discourse. Twitter's simple and personal messages resonate in a way that more traditional means of communication — mail robocalls and yard signs — no longer can.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flood of threat intelligence overwhelming for many firms

Three years after Target missed alerts warning them about a massive data breach, the amount of threat information coming in from security systems is still overwhelming for many companies, according to new reports, due to a lack of expertise and integration issues.Seventy percent of security pros said that their companies have problems taking actions based on threat intelligence because there is too much of it, or it is too complex, according to a report by Ponemon Research released on Monday. In particular, 69 percent said that their companies lacked staff expertise. As a result, only 46 percent said that incident responders used threat data when deciding how to respond to threats, and only 27 percent said that they were effective in using the data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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