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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

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.

And 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

NSA zero days and encryption backdoors need clear disclosure policies

Microsoft’s attempts to steal Evernote users moves to the Mac

Microsoft is now giving Mac users an easy path to get their notes out of Evernote and into its OneNote note-taking service. The company on Thursday announced a OneNote Importer beta, which lets users copy their notes over from one service to the other with a few clicks. The importer looks for Evernote notebooks on a computer, and then prompts users to log in with either their personal Microsoft accounts or one controlled by an organization like the company they work for. After that, the importer does the heavy lifting to bring files into OneNote. The importer requires users to run OS X El Capitan, the latest version of Apple's operating system, and have all of the Evernote files they want to import already sitting on their computers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Disaster Recovery Planning: Are You Prepared?

Peter Welcher offers advice on what to consider when developing a DR strategy.

Seven Years Later, SGI Finds a New Ending

Seven years ago, it was the end for SGI. The legendary company had gone bankrupt, its remains were up for liquidation, and its relatively few remaining loyal customers were left in limbo.

This week, SGI reached a new ending, significantly different from its last one, as HPE announced an intended deal to purchase the company for approximately $275 million.

SGI was reincarnated in 2009 when Rackable bought its assets, including its brand, off the scrap heap, for only $42.5 million (originally reported as $25 million at the time, but later updated). Rackable—that is to say, the new SGI—protected employees, key …

Seven Years Later, SGI Finds a New Ending was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Americans want passwords, not biometrics, survey finds

Most people aren’t interested in fingerprint authentication and other biometric logins, a study has found.Free email portal mail.com and Yougov surveyed over a thousand folks around the world in July and discovered over half (58 percent) prefer traditional passwords.A significant proportion of the respondents also said biometry was too hazardous, with “only 9 percent finding the use of biometric methods risk-free,” the mail provider said in its press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac Gives Mac Users More Windows Functionality

Parallels has been known for years making virtual machine software that allows Mac users to run a Windows instance on their Macs. As enterprises have opened up their support for Apple Mac users in addition to typical Windows systems, Macs have proliferated in common work environments. However inevitably, there’s “some app” that only runs on a Windows system where Mac users need the ability to run both a Mac and a Windows operating system, which has driven the ongoing demand for a solution like Parallels Desktop. I’ve had an opportunity to work with the latest release of Parallels Desktop 12, and have found Parallels enhanced the latest edition with functionality that is making my cross-platform usage easier and better. I’ve been a Mac user for many years, and like with most Mac users, there are occasions when I have core business apps that require me to run Internet Explorer for a browser, or run Visual Studio for app development work, or even run Microsoft Project and Visio that just aren’t available on a Mac. And while Apple provides BootCamp where I can switch between booting from a Mac to booting as a Windows system, that means I have to constantly Continue reading

PQ Show 90: What Is I2RS & Why Do We Love It?

This Priority Queue episode was recorded live at IETF 96 & focuses on I2RS, an IETF effort to create an interface to interact with the routing system. Guests Sue Hares and Russ White join Greg Ferro to talk about how I2RF works and its benefits. The post PQ Show 90: What Is I2RS & Why Do We Love It? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Worth Reading: Container defense in depth

The new age of image-based containers exploded onto the scene in early to mid-2013. Since the early days of the Docker container engine, we heard questions of whether they were secure enough. Our very own Dan Walsh was heard many times saying, “Docker containers don’t contain” — so the question is, can we safely use them? Especially in production? —The New Stack

The post Worth Reading: Container defense in depth appeared first on 'net work.

Microsoft PowerShell goes open source and lands on Linux and Mac

Sysadmins, rejoice: PowerShell is coming to Linux and Mac. Microsoft announced Thursday that its automation and scripting system is breaking out of the confines of Windows and going open source.The company is also releasing alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Ubuntu, Centos and Redhat) and Mac OS X. A new PowerShell GitHub page gives people the ability to download binaries of the software, as well as access to the app's source code. PowerShell on Linux and Mac will let people who have already built proficiency with Microsoft's scripting language take those skills and bring them to new platforms. Meanwhile, people who are used to working on those platforms will have access to a new and very powerful tool for getting work done. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

34% off Lumsing 5 Port 40W USB Charging Station, with Quick Charge Port – Deal Alert

Inexpensive, highly rated and discounted. That's the situation with this Lumsing charging station. This compact device will be the central charging hub in your dorm room, kitchen, bedroom, etc, and can charge up to 5 devices simultaneously. Each port intelligently detects your device's needs and delivers the maximum charging rate, whether its iOS, Android, or any other USB powered gadget. A quick charging port has been included for when you need an even faster charge, and Lumsing claims it can charge up to 75% faster. The charging station has built-in safety features to protect your device, and comes with a 12-month warranty. It currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from 900+ people (read reviews) and its list price of $29 has been reduced to $19.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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