ServiceNow enables businesses to embrace the cloud

The cloud has been mainstream now for over a decade, but adoption has been spotty as businesses experimented and learned what kind of benefits it can provide. Over the past couple of years, digital transformation has become a top initiative for business leaders, causing IT executives to look for ways to be more agile and dynamic. This has increased the adoption of cloud as not just a cheaper alternative to traditional, on-premises computing but rather a strategic alternative that can pay big dividends. We are rapidly approaching a cloud “tipping point” where there will be more workloads and applications in the cloud than in an organization’s private data center. This week ServiceNow, a company that has enabled many organizations to make the shift to cloud, announced some interesting survey data, as well as a new solution for businesses that are thinking cloud-first. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

No need to shoot down drones! Many of them can now be hijacked

A security researcher has devised a method of hijacking a wide variety of radio- controlled airplanes, helicopters, cars, boats and other devices that use a popular wireless transmission technology.The attack was developed by Jonathan Andersson, manager of the Advanced Security Research Group at Trend Micro DVLabs, and targets a "wideband, frequency-agile 2.4GHz signal protocol" called DSMx. This protocol is used in radio-control (R/C) toys, including in drones, that are owned by millions of users.Andersson's attack exploits weaknesses in DSMx and was presented in detail Wednesday at the PacSec security conference in Tokyo. The researcher built a device that he dubbed Icarus, using off-the-shelf electronic components and software-defined radio (SDR). With it, he can take over the control of drones or other R/C devices and lock out their real owners in seconds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

No need to shoot down drones! Many of them can now be hijacked

A security researcher has devised a method of hijacking a wide variety of radio- controlled airplanes, helicopters, cars, boats and other devices that use a popular wireless transmission technology.The attack was developed by Jonathan Andersson, manager of the Advanced Security Research Group at Trend Micro DVLabs, and targets a "wideband, frequency-agile 2.4GHz signal protocol" called DSMx. This protocol is used in radio-control (R/C) toys, including in drones, that are owned by millions of users.Andersson's attack exploits weaknesses in DSMx and was presented in detail Wednesday at the PacSec security conference in Tokyo. The researcher built a device that he dubbed Icarus, using off-the-shelf electronic components and software-defined radio (SDR). With it, he can take over the control of drones or other R/C devices and lock out their real owners in seconds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA looking to develop drone destroying, personnel protection system

Looking to protect military personnel from a swarming drone attack is the goal behind a new system that the researchers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are set to develop.The three-phase program, called Mobile Force Protection will in the next few years potentially develop a prototype system that could sense an attack, identify the attacker and then use a number of techniques, from communications jamming to capturing mid-flight any attacking drones. DARPA says it will offer $3 million for each phase 1 developer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA looking to develop drone destroying, personnel protection system

Looking to protect military personnel from a swarming drone attack is the goal behind a new system that the researchers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are set to develop.The three-phase program, called Mobile Force Protection will in the next few years potentially develop a prototype system that could sense an attack, identify the attacker and then use a number of techniques, from communications jamming to capturing mid-flight any attacking drones. DARPA says it will offer $3 million for each phase 1 developer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm agrees to buy NXP for over $37 billion

Microprocessor maker Qualcomm is spending its way out of a stagnating mobile phone industry, offering to buy NXP Semiconductors, a company with a strong position in automotive chips, for more than US$37 billion.Qualcomm formalized its offer Thursday, barely a month after rumors began circulating that a deal was in the offing.NXP has only just digested its own multibillion acquisition, of Freescale Semiconductor, which closed in December 2015.The combination of Qualcomm and NXP will have annual revenue of around $35 billion, Qualcomm said. That's still well behind the $55 billion Intel reported for its full fiscal year 2015, although catching up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT spending on ‘innovation’ is now a priority

Businesses are increasing their spending on technology, with cloud services as the big beneficiary. Hardware and software spending is declining as spending on cloud services rises, particularly on SaaS, according to the most recent annual survey from the Society for Information Management (SIM). Analytics/business intelligence and cybersecurity are the top two IT spending priorities, something that has been true for the several years. But marching into this mix now is "innovation" spending, an IT category signaling business expectations for IT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: 7 PDF editing tools for iOS and Android

The PDF format has long been the standard for legal papers, forms and other documents -- as a result, iOS and Android phones and tablets tend to come with basic PDF readers. However, many users need to do more than just read PDFs -- they need to create and edit PDFs on the move. In this roundup, I look at what I consider the most useful PDF editors for mobile devices.PDF Expert 5To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

11 things Android phone makers should copy from the Pixel

School is in sessionGoogle has turned up the heat on its Android partners by controlling every aspect of software and hardware for its Pixel line. While it doesn't have every single feature you'd find in comparably-priced phones from LG, Samsung, HTC, or Sony, it does so many things right that it's currently the phone to beat.Here are some of the things we like about the Pixel that we hope to see in future premium phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM: In 5 years, Watson A.I. will be behind your every decision

LAS VEGAS -- In the next five years, every important decision, whether it's business or personal, will be made with the assistance of IBM Watson. That's the vision of IBM president and CEO Ginni Rometty, in a keynote speech at IBM's World of Watson conference Wednesday. Watson, the company's artificial intelligence-fueled system, is working in fields like health care, finance, entertainment and retail, connecting businesses more easily with their customers, making sense of big data and helping doctors find treatments for cancer patients. The Watson system is set to transform how businesses function and how people live their lives. "Our goal is augmenting intelligence," Rometty said. "It is man and machine. This is all about extending your expertise. A teacher. A doctor. A lawyer. It doesn't matter what you do. We will extend it."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How the Dyn outage affected Cloudflare

Last Friday the popular DNS service Dyn suffered three waves of DDoS attacks that affected users first on the East Coast of the US, and later users worldwide. Popular websites, some of which are also Cloudflare customers, were inaccessible. Although Cloudflare was not attacked, joint Dyn/Cloudflare customers were affected.

Almost as soon as Dyn came under attack we noticed a sudden jump in DNS errors on our edge machines and alerted our SRE and support teams that Dyn was in trouble. Support was ready to help joint customers and we began looking in detail at the effect the Dyn outage was having on our systems.

An immediate concern internally was that since our DNS servers were unable to reach Dyn they would be consuming resources waiting on timeouts and retrying. The first question I asked the DNS team was: “Are we seeing increased DNS response latency?” rapidly followed by “If this gets worse are we likely to?”. Happily, the response to both those questions (after the team analyzed the situation) was no.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by tracyshaun

However, that didn’t mean we had nothing to do. Operating a large scale system like Cloudflare that Continue reading

Privacy group shoots legal arrow at Privacy Shield

Privacy Shield, the legal agreement allowing businesses to export Europeans' personal information to the U.S., is under fire.An Irish privacy advocacy group has challenged the adoption of the decision in the EU's second-highest court, Reuters reported Thursday, citing sources familiar with the case.Privacy Shield entered effect in July, replacing the Safe Harbor framework, which had itself fallen victim to a legal challenge in October 2015. The new agreement supports transatlantic commerce worth US$260 billion, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker has said, and has consequences for many companies offering cloud services to consumers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Happy 15th Birthday, iPod!

The iPod celebrates 15 yearsFifteen years ago this week, Apple released the original iPod, and the tech and music world was never the same.The iPod wasn’t an immediate hit, but it eventually helped kick-start the digital music revolution. In addition to changing the way the world listened to and eventually would buy music, the iPod helped transform Apple into a force to be reckoned with in the tech world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

To API or Not To API

One of my readers left this comment (slightly rephrased) on my Network Automation RFP Requirements blog post:

Given that we look up to our *nix pioneers as standard bearers for system automation, why do we demand an API from network devices? The API requirement would make sense if the vendor OS is a closed system. If an open system vendor creates APIs for applications running on their system (say for BGP configs) - kudos to them, but I no longer think that should be mandated.

He’s right - API is not a mandatory prerequisite for reliable network automation.

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Samsung’s smartphone share hit by Note7 debacle, stiff competition

Samsung Electronics continued on top of the smartphone market in the third quarter but was battered by the impact of the Galaxy Note7 recall and increased competition in India, China and the U.S., according to Strategy Analytics.Overall the market grew by 6 percent annually to reach over 375 million units in the quarter, which was the smartphone industry’s fastest growth rate for a year, according to the research firm. Chinese brands Huawei, Oppo and Vivo posted strong growth rates in shipments even as Samsung and Apple saw volumes drop.“Samsung's worldwide slowdown is due to the sizeable loss of several million Note 7 shipments, combined with fierce competition from Chinese brands like OPPO in the huge China and India markets,” wrote Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics in an email. “Samsung is filling some, but not all, of the Note 7 gap with increased S7 and S7 edge promotions.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle takes Java copyright dispute with Google to appeals court

Oracle has taken its bid for up to US$9 billion in damages to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit after a judge in a federal court in California recently struck down its bid for a retrial in a copyright infringement suit against Google over the use of Java code in the Android operating system.A jury had cleared Google of copyright infringement in May this year, upholding the company’s stand that its use of 37 Java APIs (application programming interfaces) in the Android mobile operating system constituted "fair use" under the Copyright Act, which allows copying of creative works under certain circumstances. Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California entered a final judgment in favor of Google on June 8.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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