Apple to introduce three new iPad models next year

Apple’s iPad lineup may have lost sales momentum in recent years, but the relatively recent rollout of “Pro” models have helped inject a bit of much-needed life into the device. Now comes word via analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via MacRumors) that Apple has some interesting changes in store for its tablet lineup.According to Kuo, Apple has plans to unveil a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro model sometime next year. Kuo adds that the new pro model will be a complement to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro model and will sit in between a more affordable 9.7-inch iPad model. That being the case, it remains to be seen how Apple plans to position the 10.5-inch iPad Pro model and how it will stand apart from the slightly smaller and more affordable 9.7-inch model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off Vimtag VT-361 Pan&Tilt HD WiFi Video Security Camera with Night Vision – Deal Alert

This full-featured camera broadcasts over wifi, allowing you to view live from multiple mobile devices at once. Its footage records to micro SD where it is stored and accessible remotely as well. Remote pan/tilt/zoom, 2-way voice, motion-detection alert, and night vision capabilities are all onboard. This model averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 4,100 people (read reviews). Amazon indicates that its typical list price of $200 has been reduced 50% to $100.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off Vimtag VT-361 Pan&Tilt HD WiFi Video Security Camera with Night Vision – Deal Alert

This full-featured camera broadcasts over wifi, allowing you to view live from multiple mobile devices at once. Its footage records to micro SD where it is stored and accessible remotely as well. Remote pan/tilt/zoom, 2-way voice, motion-detection alert, and night vision capabilities are all onboard. This model averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 4,100 people (read reviews). Amazon indicates that its typical list price of $200 has been reduced 50% to $100.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DRAM will live on as DDR5 memory is slated to reach computers in 2020

Hardware experts believed the last DRAM would be the current DDR4, but that's not the case, with DDR5 memory now under development.Specifications for DDR5 memory will be released this year, and deployment of the DRAM will begin in 2020, according to a slide deck presented at the Intel Developer Forum this week.DDR5 DRAM will have many benefits: Users will be able to cram more memory into PCs, and applications will run faster. DDR5 memory will be denser than earlier DRAM, and also consume less power, which could extend battery life in laptops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sage data breach highlights the risk of the insider threat

A suspect in a recent data breach at Sage, a U.K. provider of business software, has been arrested. On Wednesday, police in London detained a company employee.The 32-year-old woman was held for alleged fraud against the company, London City Police said. She has since been released on bail.It’s still unclear what information, if any, may have been leaked. However, Sage, a supplier of accounting and payroll software, began notifying customers about the breach last week.Between 200 and 300 business clients in the U.K. may have been affected. At the time, Sage said the breach had come from unauthorized access to internal login data.Security firm the Antisocial Engineer has been in contact with Sage and said a company insider was the prime suspect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sage data breach highlights the risk of the insider threat

A suspect in a recent data breach at Sage, a U.K. provider of business software, has been arrested. On Wednesday, police in London detained a company employee.The 32-year-old woman was held for alleged fraud against the company, London City Police said. She has since been released on bail.It’s still unclear what information, if any, may have been leaked. However, Sage, a supplier of accounting and payroll software, began notifying customers about the breach last week.Between 200 and 300 business clients in the U.K. may have been affected. At the time, Sage said the breach had come from unauthorized access to internal login data.Security firm the Antisocial Engineer has been in contact with Sage and said a company insider was the prime suspect.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off Anker Compact Car Jump Starter with USB Power Bank – Deal Alert

This device from Anker is compact enough to fit in your glovebox, and powerful enough to jump start any 3L gas or 2.5L diesel engine many many times over on a single charge (Anker claims around 15 times). Surge protection and an incorrect setup alarm included for peace of mind. Almost 1,000 reviewers on Amazon rate it 4.5 out of 5 stars, reporting many successful jumps of cars, motorcycles, and giant trucks -- many with completely dead batteries (read reviews). Also includes 2 USB charging ports for your portable USB devices, and a built-in flashlight. It's typical list price of $160 has been reduced 50% to $80, making it a good consideration for yourself, or a gift for someone else's glove box/emergency kit. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber’s self-driving cars will start picking up passengers this month

Uber's rushing to replace its million-plus drivers with robots, and the company's early forays towards that effort start in Pennsylvania later in August. The ride-sharing service plans to roll out self-driving cars in Pittsburgh that will accept real world passengers right from the get-go, according to Bloomberg.The cars, while fully autonomous, won’t be unleashed onto Pittsburgh streets without human supervision. The cars will have a specially-trained engineer ready to take the wheel should something go wrong. There will also be a co-pilot taking notes on how each ride goes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

T-Mobile shifts to unlimited plans in the latest bid to stand out from the competition

T-Mobile is hoping to make a another splash by ditching traditional smartphone plans in favor of one, unlimited offer.Called T-Mobile One, the new plan charges $70 per month for the first line, $50 per month for a second, and then $20 for additional lines (stopping with eight). The plan includes unlimited talk, text, and 4G LTE data. Of course, there are caveats buried in the fine print. T-Mobile says video playback is limited to 480p, the same speed as you’d get with Binge On. Tethering is capped at 2G speeds, which makes it essentially worthless for all but emergency connectivity. To get around the video limitation you’ll need to pay $25 per month extra per line. It’ll cost you $15 for any month in which you want to add on 5GB of tethering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T Mobile Share Advantage mimics T-Mobile, dropping overages in favor of throttling

With AT&T’s Mobile Share Advantage, the telecom giant follows a new trend: Customers who switch to this new shared mobile plan (available August 21) will be spared bandwidth overage fees. Instead, the firm said, after available bandwidth is used up, its Mobile Share Advantage customers will be throttled to 128Kbps for the rest of the current billing cycle. The Mobile Share plans pool bandwith among devices that can include smartphones, feature phones, tablets, gaming devices, wearables, laptops, hotspots, and other hardware. A monthly charge per device is paired with a charge for a tier of bandwidth.  Why this matters: AT&T joins T-Mobile and Sprint among the big four U.S. carriers in shifting to throttling instead of causing customers to rack up fees at $10 per gigabyte above plan totals. That’s good news for consumers, though it’ll be interesting to see whether they’ll tolerate throttling or break down and buy more bandwidth, sending more money to the carriers after all.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MIT Media Lab sponsors hackathon pushing limits of VR and AR

The MIT Media Lab is backing a hackathon on the MIT campus to promote new applications for augmented reality (AR) and virtual Reality (VR). Students from MIT and other universities, developers, designers, and video and audio engineers are invited to apply to participate in the event being held Oct. 7-10, 2016. The Reality, Virtually, Hackathon will stretch the amazing VR and AR advancements made and expertise gained from building popular gaming and entertainment apps into new fields such as VR/AR “for good,” health/medicine, education, industry, productivity, advertising, social networking and other vertical applications about which participants feel passionate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows smartphone sales collapse

Sales of Windows smartphones plunged 76% in the second quarter, plummeting from 8.2 million in 2015 to less than 2 million this year, researcher Gartner said today. The dramatic decline was more fallout from Microsoft's botched acquisition of Nokia's handset business, the writing off of more than $10 billion and the subsequent decision to back out of the consumer smartphone market. According to Gartner, global sales of Windows-powered smartphones in the June quarter came to just under 2 million units. In a filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) last month, Microsoft put its smartphone sales at around 1.2 million. The difference between Gartner's and Microsoft's numbers -- about 750,000 smartphones -- represented what the former believed other device makers sold during the quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PowerShell for Linux makes it easier to mix clients, servers and clouds

Microsoft’s key, .NET-based scripting and management framework is now open source and available for Linux (initially Ubuntu, RedHat and CentOS) and Mac OS, and both cloud and traditional infrastructure companies are stepping up to support it.Open source, Linux and Mac OS announcements from Microsoft are becoming routine under CEO Satya Nadella, but making PowerShell fully open source and making it cross-platform is particularly significant — and not just because PowerShell for Linux is something that customers have been requesting for a long time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PowerShell for Linux makes it easier to mix clients, servers and clouds

Microsoft’s key, .NET-based scripting and management framework is now open source and available for Linux (initially Ubuntu, RedHat and CentOS) and Mac OS, and both cloud and traditional infrastructure companies are stepping up to support it.Open source, Linux and Mac OS announcements from Microsoft are becoming routine under CEO Satya Nadella, but making PowerShell fully open source and making it cross-platform is particularly significant — and not just because PowerShell for Linux is something that customers have been requesting for a long time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Beware the network without an operator

A lot of people seem to be looking forward to the day we build a network without an operator; to wit—

Containerized solutions and machine learning may soon be more than tangentially related. Containerized solutions will usher in an era of operations that don’t require human intervention. Once humans are taken out of operations, we will be free to apply machine learning techniques to what is left. —The New Stack

I hope not, because machines are more brittle than humans. Totally automated security fails much more often than security that uses a blend of people and algorithms. Machines do well at repetitive tasks, humans at catching the things that don’t fit into the algorithm’s state machine. Taking the person out of the network just means there’s no-one there to see when the state machine fails.

reaction-02And it will fail—at some point. I know we like to believe that machines break less often, but I’m pretty certain there’s a counterpoint to this: when machines break, it’s more likely to be catastrophic. I’m not convinced replacing people with algorithms always reduces damage so much as move the potential damage around.

I hope not, because machines separate the decision from the decision maker. Continue reading

NSA zero days and encryption backdoors need clear disclosure policies

The government has another public balancing act on its hands with the disclosure this week of exploits against commercial security products that were purportedly cooked up by the NSA.These attack tools revealed by a group called Shadow Brokers date from sometime before June 2013 and some of them were still effective this week, which means the NSA never told the vendors about them.That helps flesh out what the Obama administration meant two years ago when it said that under most circumstances the NSA would tell vendors if it exploits vulnerabilities in their security products. The exception: the disclosure policy wouldn’t apply if there were a clear national security or law enforcement need.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here