Microsoft confirms Windows 10 adoption slowdown

Microsoft today acknowledged that the Windows 10 adoption pace had slowed when it claimed the new operating system was running on approximately 400 million devices.The company reset the Windows 10 uptake status on the same day it kicked off the 2016 edition of its Ignite conference in Atlanta.Microsoft's last Windows 10 update was at the end of June, a month before it halted the free upgrade for consumers and small businesses running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. Then Microsoft pegged the number of "active devices" -- a metric of those machines that ran the OS at least once in the past four weeks -- at 350 million.The increase of 50 million over more than 12 weeks -- or about 17 million every four weeks -- was lower than during the free upgrade offer period. For example, in the eight weeks from May 5 to June 29, Microsoft claimed 50 million active users were added to the Windows 10 rolls, or 25 million every four weeks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft commits to running data centers off 50% renewable energy by 2018

Microsoft announced it plans to power its data centers around the world using 50% renewable energy by 2018.The company also plans to boost its use of renewable power for its data centers to 60% by the early 2020s.Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental & cities strategist, made the announcement at the VERGE16 conference last week.Bernard's comments during a conference keynote were a reiteration of a commitment earlier this year by the company to increase its use of clean energy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft commits to running data centers off 50% renewable energy by 2018

Microsoft announced it plans to power its data centers around the world using 50% renewable energy by 2018.The company also plans to boost its use of renewable power for its data centers to 60% by the early 2020s.Rob Bernard, Microsoft's chief environmental & cities strategist, made the announcement at the VERGE16 conference last week.Bernard's comments during a conference keynote were a reiteration of a commitment earlier this year by the company to increase its use of clean energy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

34% off Master Lock Bluetooth Keyless Outdoor Padlock – Deal Alert

Use your smartphone to open this padlock from Master Lock. Share access, monitor access history and receive alerts if someone is tampering. Designed for outdoor use, its shackle offers 2 inch vertical clearance and is made of boron for maximum resistance to cutting and sawing. The lock features alternate methods of access for when Bluetooth isn't available or the replaceable battery dies. Its typical list price of $89 has been reduced 34% to $59 (see on Amazon). An indoor version is available, also at a discount (28% off, $50 -- See on Amazon).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

34% off Master Lock Bluetooth Keyless Outdoor Padlock – Deal Alert

Use your smartphone to open this padlock from Master Lock. Share access, monitor access history and receive alerts if someone is tampering. Designed for outdoor use, its shackle offers 2 inch vertical clearance and is made of boron for maximum resistance to cutting and sawing. The lock features alternate methods of access for when Bluetooth isn't available or the replaceable battery dies. Its typical list price of $89 has been reduced 34% to $59 (see on Amazon). An indoor version is available, also at a discount (28% off, $50 -- See on Amazon).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As Adobe, Microsoft Azure ink cloud partnership, Amazon looms

To kick off his company’s Ignite conference in Atlanta this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Adobe will run three of its most popular software as a service apps on the Microsoft Azure IaaS cloud.The move is a power play by Microsoft and Adobe on multiple fronts, analysts say. But, it should also be taken with a grain of salt: A spokesperson for Adobe confirmed that the company has a “large footprint” with AWS and it expects to use both AWS and Azure moving forward. In that sense, it shows the dynamic nature of partnerships across the cloud market.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Docker containers are coming to Windows | Review: Windows Server 2016 steps up security, cloud support +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Baidu’s New Yardstick for Deep Learning Hardware Makers

When it comes to deep learning innovation on the hardware front, few other research centers have been as forthcoming with their results as Baidu. Specifically, the company’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) has been the center of some noteworthy work on GPU-based deep learning as well as exploratory efforts using novel architectures specifically for ultra-fast training and inference.

It stands to reason that teams at SVAIL don’t simply throw hardware at the wall to see what sticks, even though they seem to have more to toss around than most. Over the last couple of years, they have broken down …

Baidu’s New Yardstick for Deep Learning Hardware Makers was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

New Mac Trojan uses the Russian space program as a front

Security researchers have found a new Mac OS X malware that appears to be targeting the aerospace industry.The Trojan, called Komplex, can download, execute, and delete files from an infected Mac, according to security firm Palo Alto Networks. Interestingly, the Trojan will also save a PDF document to the infected system concerning the Russian space program.The PDF document details planned Russian space projects from 2016 to 2025, but it acts as a decoy, Palo Alto Networks said in Monday blog post.In reality, the Trojan is a package of tools that will attempt to secretly communicate with its creators' command-and-control servers. This includes sending back data on the version, username, and process list running on the infected system. The Trojan can also receive instructions, and it will forward the results to the control servers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Mac Trojan uses the Russian space program as a front

Security researchers have found a new Mac OS X malware that appears to be targeting the aerospace industry.The Trojan, called Komplex, can download, execute, and delete files from an infected Mac, according to security firm Palo Alto Networks. Interestingly, the Trojan will also save a PDF document to the infected system concerning the Russian space program.The PDF document details planned Russian space projects from 2016 to 2025, but it acts as a decoy, Palo Alto Networks said in Monday blog post.In reality, the Trojan is a package of tools that will attempt to secretly communicate with its creators' command-and-control servers. This includes sending back data on the version, username, and process list running on the infected system. The Trojan can also receive instructions, and it will forward the results to the control servers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The Internet revolution is nothing to email home about

Economist Robert Gordon argues that the Second Industrial Revolution, entailing developments in electricity, internal combustion engines, modern communications, entertainment, petroleum/hydrocarbons, and chemicals, has had the most impact on productivity and living standards. By comparison, the Third Industrial Revolution, based around computing and the internet, appears to be less important. —Market Watch

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42% off Corsair Waterproof Shockproof 256GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive – Deal Alert

Military-style data transportation. That's how Corsair describes their Flash Survivor Stealth series of USB flash drives. Its anodized, aircraft-grade aluminum housing is waterproof to 200 meters, vibration-resistant, and shock-resistant while small enough to fit on your keychain. USB 3.0 offers read speeds up to four times faster than traditional USB 2.0 drives, so it's fast enough to play most videos directly from it, without having to transfer to a hard drive first. The drive is backwards compatible to 2.0 as well. Just plug it in, and it works with Windows, Mac OS and Linux without any additional software or drivers. This product also comes with a limited 5 year warranty. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 170 people on Amazon (read reviews), many of which report it's still alive after years of hard use. The 256GB model's list price of $156 has been reduced 42% to $91.30. If 256GB is more storage than you need, they have a 32GB model that's currently discounted 25% ($20.73 -- See it on Amazon).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Auto-Adding Routes When Mac PPTP Connection Comes Up

Before you read this post, understand that PPTP is insecure. Don’t use PPTP to create a VPN to anything you care about.

TL;DR

Skip to Solution #3.

Problem

When successfully making a PPTP connection to a remote VPN server with the built-in Mac OS X client, you find that you can’t connect to hosts on the other side of the VPN tunnel. You can still connect to the Internet and LAN hosts.

The root issue is that, by default, OS X has no reason to send traffic across the VPN tunnel. A reason must be provided.

Solution #1 – Setting Service Order

In System Preferences > Network, perform “Set Service Order” (the drop down gear icon), and move the PPTP connection to the top of the list.

This means that when the PPTP tunnel is up, traffic will flow through it before other network connections. This will gain you access to hosts on the other side of the VPN tunnel. It will also break everything else, unless the network on the other side of the PPTP tunnel can also service your Internet traffic. This is going to be a function of the VPN termination device as well as the firewall configuration at the remote site.

The issue here Continue reading

MIT Twitter dashboard muffles election news echo chamber

The Twitter dashboard Electome project at MIT, which charts Twitter in unique detail for journalists, announced its collaboration with the Commission on Presidential Debates. Electome will give journalists covering the debates near real-time feedback about the sentiments of people in the Twitter-sphere. It is a feedback loop for journalists to measure public sentiment to balance the attention given to subjects that sometimes receive copy-cat coverage of a lead story by a major news outlet in which the public has little interest.Electome was produced by Deb Roy, director and chief scientist at the MIT Media Lab, Laboratory for Social Machines; William Powers, longtime journalist and author turned Media Lab Electome research scientist; and Russell Stevens, project leader. Roy is also Twitter’s chief media scientist. He came to Twitter through the acquisition of Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company he co-founded.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Forget the robocalypse — ‘Homo connecticus’ may be what’s coming

Robots' potential to take over the world is a commonly expressed fear in the world of AI, but at least one Turing Award winner doesn't see it happening that way. Rather than replacing mankind, technology will create a new kind of human that will coexist with its predecessors while taking advantage of new tech-enabled tools.So argued Raj Reddy, former founding director of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and 1994 winner of the Turing Award, at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany last week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

39% off iClever Backlight Bluetooth Folding Keyboard for Smartphone, PC, or Tablet – Deal Alert

This lightweight and super portable keyboard from iClever features a compact design with full standard-size keys, but folds down into ⅓ of the size. This model has a convenient backlight feature with red, blue, or green selectable at two brightness levels, so you can type in every environment from a dimly-lit classroom to a dark airplane cabin. Its Broadcom Bluetooth module has a generous operating range of 30 feet, and connects quickly with your devices when you simply unfold the keyboard. The iClever backlit folding keyboard averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from nearly 150 people (read reviews) and its typical list price of $89.99 has been reduced 39% to $54.99. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Build and run your first Docker Windows Server container

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2016, and with it, Docker engine running containers natively on Windows. This blog post describes how to get setup to run Docker Windows Containers on Windows 10 or using a Windows Server 2016 VM. Check out the companion blog posts on the technical improvements that have made Docker containers on Windows possible and the post announcing the Docker Inc. and Microsoft partnership.

Before getting started, It’s important to understand that Windows Containers run Windows executables compiled for the Windows Server kernel and userland (either windowsservercore or nanoserver). To build and run Windows containers, you have to have a Windows system with container support.

Windows 10 with Anniversary Update

For developers, Windows 10 is a great place to run Docker Windows containers and containerization support was added to the the Windows 10 kernel with the Anniversary Update (note that container images can only be based on Windows Server Core and Nanoserver, not Windows 10). All that’s missing is the Windows-native Docker Engine and some image base layers.

The simplest way to get a Windows Docker Engine is by installing the Docker for Windows public beta (direct download link). Docker for Continue reading

A shout out to Akamai for candor in IoT botnet attack

Akamai deserves credit for the way it disclosed why it stopped protecting the Krebs on Security Web site last week after defending it for three days from the largest botnet it had ever encountered.It must have been embarrassing for the company to acknowledge that it was a business decision it was forced to make because of the expense and consumption of resources to keep the site up was too great.But the company did so and addressed a more important issue, namely that the attack was generated by a botnet of Internet of Things devices, mainly cameras, routers and DVRs, according to Krebs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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