European Union plans to offer free Wi-Fi to all

Free Wi-Fi for all: That was one of the proposals to come out of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker's annual State of the European Union address on Wednesday.The project, WIFI4EU (Wi-Fi for you), aims to put free Wi-Fi hotspots open to all EU citizens in parks, squares, libraries and other public buildings.The Commission will provide €120 million (US$135 million) through 2019 to subsidize the purchase and installation of Wi-Fi hotspots in 6,000 or more locations, but the provision of bandwidth and ongoing maintenance will be left to the local community.The hotspots will be open to all EU citizens -- although given the budget, it's unlikely many of them will be able to get a signal without a long walk.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bonuses, stocks, perks lift CIO compensation

A $10 million pay package. A $3.4 million signing bonus. Equity awards valued at $4.7 million. CIO compensation is on the rise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

25 CIO pay packages revealed

Deep dive into CIO pay packagesTo find out how much CIOs at giant global companies really earn, we scoured the proxy statements of the 500 largest U.S. companies and found 25 that disclosed CIO pay. Here are the details on their 2015 pay packages, organized from lowest to highest paid.To see all the data in one place, check out our sortable chart of CIO compensation. See the last slide for details about how we compiled the data. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Want to boost your CIO pay? Switch jobs

The four highest-paid CIOs in our tally all have something in common: a major job transition. Three of the four CIOs started new jobs, and one left his CIO position but stayed on as a consultant. Each of these tech leaders negotiated an extremely lucrative transition. Tim Theriault, who stepped down last June from his position as global CIO for Walgreens Boots Alliance, earned the largest of the 25 CIO pay packages we studied. Theriault received a $13.6 million compensation package that included a giant parting payment of $8.5 million, as per his employment agreement with the $103 billion pharmacy giant. (Walgreens merged with Alliance Boots in December 2014 to become the largest retail pharmacy in the U.S. and Europe; the company has a presence in 23 countries.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Case study: How LinkedIn uses containers to run its professional network

When LinkedIn started in 2003 it was a simple Java application with a web server.Today the company that calls itself the world’s largest professional network is a powerhouse network that Microsoft earlier this summer spent $26.2 billion to acquire. LinkedIn Steve Ihde “Growing the site has been a journey,” says LinkedIn’s director of engineering Steve Ihde. And recently, application containers have played a big role.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Source Code Is Not Standards

One of the oft-repeated messages of the Software-Defined Pundits is “Standard bodies are broken, (open) source code is king”… and I’d guess that anyone who was too idealistic before being exposed to how the sausage is being made within IETF has no problems agreeing with them. However…

IoT keeps pushing analytics closer to the edge

As the internet of things starts to generate data from far-flung sensors and automate remote equipment, it doesn’t always make sense to house all the intelligence for these systems in data centers. The alternative is edge computing, where smaller systems located on site in factories or other facilities can make sense of IoT data and act on it. Edge computing components like gateways can shorten response times or just filter out sensor readings that don’t matter so they won’t burden the network. But how to build edge computing systems and write their software, like so much else in IoT, is still a work in progress. The constraints on things like size and power are unique to this new field.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers smear Olympic athletes with data dump of medical files

Hackers are trying to tarnish the U.S. Olympic team by releasing documents they claim show athletes including gymnast Simone Biles and tennis players Venus and Serena Williams used illegal substances during the Rio Games.The medical files, allegedly from the World Anti-Doping Agency, were posted Tuesday on a site bearing the name of the hacking group Fancy Bears. “Today we'd like to tell you about the U.S. Olympic team and their dirty methods to win,” said a message on the hackers' site.The World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed it had been hacked and blamed Fancy Bears, a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage team that is also known as APT 28 -- the very same group that may have recently breached the Democratic National Committee.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers smear Olympic athletes with data dump of medical files

Hackers are trying to tarnish the U.S. Olympic team by releasing documents they claim show athletes including gymnast Simone Biles and tennis players Venus and Serena Williams used illegal substances during the Rio Games.The medical files, allegedly from the World Anti-Doping Agency, were posted Tuesday on a site bearing the name of the hacking group Fancy Bears. “Today we'd like to tell you about the U.S. Olympic team and their dirty methods to win,” said a message on the hackers' site.The World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed it had been hacked and blamed Fancy Bears, a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage team that is also known as APT 28 -- the very same group that may have recently breached the Democratic National Committee.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

For new characters, it’s Pokémon Wait

People who are hoping to get their hands on some new Pokémon should be prepared to wait a while longer. John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic Labs, told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt that players should expect to see new creatures arrive in the game at events that bring players together, but only after the company has finished its long global rollout. "The introduction of new Pokémon into the world, and having events where that might be showcased, those concepts go together really well," he said. "So, I think you can expect to see that happen in kind of a synchronized way going forward."  It's a move from the playbook that Niantic has developed running Ingress, the augmented reality game that it launched prior to Pokémon Go while it was a part of Google. Over the past several years, Niantic has hosted events for players of that game, which often host thousands of players. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russian hackers allegedly target the World Anti-Doping Agency

The same Russian state-sponsored hackers that allegedly breached the Democratic National Committee may have also targeted the World Anti-Doping Agency.On Tuesday, the sports drug-testing agency blamed a recent breach of its network on a Russian hacking group known as APT 28 or Fancy Bear.The hackers gained access to the agency’s database and stole information about  athletes including confidential medical data. Some of that data has already been publicly released, and the hackers have threatened to release more, the agency said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russian hackers allegedly target the World Anti-Doping Agency

The same Russian state-sponsored hackers that allegedly breached the Democratic National Committee may have also targeted the World Anti-Doping Agency.On Tuesday, the sports drug-testing agency blamed a recent breach of its network on a Russian hacking group known as APT 28 or Fancy Bear.The hackers gained access to the agency’s database and stole information about  athletes including confidential medical data. Some of that data has already been publicly released, and the hackers have threatened to release more, the agency said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel will be at 10nm for many years

For more than a decade, Intel was driven by a "tick/tock" development model. The "tick" took place one year and was a manufacturing process shrink, from 45nm to 32nm, for example. The "tock," which took place one year later, was a whole new microarchitecture, such as Penryn to Nehalem.For about a decade, tick/tock worked well. Intel choked the life out of the insurgent AMD and dominated the x86 market for a long time—and still does. But the limitations of physics have caught up with the company, and ticks are becoming much harder to come by. As it is, Intel delayed the move to 10nm by adding a third generation of 14nm chips called Kaby Lake. The shrink to 10nm was planned for next year's Cannonlake processor. Now word is that might be delayed another year, with 10nm coming in 2018. And the next shrink, down to 7nm, won't take place until after 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When Will Containers Be the Total Package for HPC?

While containers are old news in enterprise circles, by and large, high performance computing centers have just recently begun to consider packaging up their complex applications. A few centers are known for their rapid progress in this area, but for smaller sites, especially those that serve users from a diverse domain base via medium-sized HPC clusters, progress has been slower—even though containers could zap some serious deployment woes and make collaboration simpler.

When it comes to containers in HPC, there are a couple of noteworthy efforts that go beyond the more enterprise-geared Docker and CoreOS options. These include Shifter out …

When Will Containers Be the Total Package for HPC? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Mergers create greater security risk

Corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) can be fraught with risks related to financial matters, company culture, personnel, IT systems integration and other areas.Security risks, both cyber and physical, certainly belong on the list of concerns. And with the ongoing shortage of professionals who are expert in various aspects of data protection—coupled with the seemingly endless stream of reports about data breaches and other security threats—this has become an even bigger concern for companies that are considering or in the midst of M&A deals.“Any M&A activity involves an assumption of risk,” says Ariel Silverstone, vice president of security strategy, privacy and trust at GoDaddy, a provider of domain name registrations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mergers create greater security risk

Corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) can be fraught with risks related to financial matters, company culture, personnel, IT systems integration and other areas.Security risks, both cyber and physical, certainly belong on the list of concerns. And with the ongoing shortage of professionals who are expert in various aspects of data protection—coupled with the seemingly endless stream of reports about data breaches and other security threats—this has become an even bigger concern for companies that are considering or in the midst of M&A deals.“Any M&A activity involves an assumption of risk,” says Ariel Silverstone, vice president of security strategy, privacy and trust at GoDaddy, a provider of domain name registrations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Ditch the pitfalls of layer 2 in the data center

If you’re operating on the IT side, you’re likely all too familiar with troubleshooting an unexpected outage caused by what should be a simple upgrade to a switch, or bringing a new server onto the network. While modern data center design for private and public clouds has been rapidly evolving from traditional Layer 2 networks to Layer 3 centric leaf-spine architecture, too many of us are still dealing with the headaches that come from L2 technologies such as Multichassis Link Aggregation (MLAG), First Hop Redundancy Protocol (FHRP), and Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). —The New Stack

The post Worth Reading: Ditch the pitfalls of layer 2 in the data center appeared first on 'net work.

Watch out: iOS 10 install is reportedly bricking some iPhones

iOS 10 is now available, and if you’re like us, you’re champing at the bit to start playing around with all of its fab new features. However, you may want to hold off just a bit, if you haven’t installed it already: Numerous users are reporting that installing iOS 10 over Wi-Fi is bricking their iPhones and iPads, rendering them useless and stuck in Recovery Mode until they are wiped with a factory reset.  The iOS 10 update just did this to ten of my @wsj colleagues' iPhones. Definitely stand by before upgrading. pic.twitter.com/Mv87cFkHSMTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Could machine learning help Google’s cloud catch up to AWS and Azure?

Google has been offering public cloud services for several years now, but the company has continued to lag behind Amazon and Microsoft in customer growth. Under the leadership of VMware co-founder Diane Greene, who serves as the executive vice president of Google Cloud Enterprise, the tech titan has focused harder on forging partnerships and developing products to appeal to large customers. It has added a number of key customers under Greene's tenure, including Spotify.  One such win is Evernote, which announced Tuesday it would be migrating its service away from its private data centers and to Google's public cloud. When Evernote was looking for a public cloud provider, the company was interested in not only the base level infrastructure available, but also high-level machine learning services and services for building machine learning-driven systems, said Anirban Kundu, Evernote's CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who knew Edward Snowden would become such a musical inspiration?

Many would like to see famed whistleblower Edward Snowden face the music for releasing classified information from the NSA a few years back, but who knew his actions would wind up having an impact on the music world itself?A slew of Snowden-inspired songs emerged from the DIY set in the immediate wake of the leaks back in 2013. But 2016 is shaping up to be another big year with fresh material.The latest Snowden song comes courtesy of Peter Gabriel for the new Oliver Stone biopic featuring Joseph Gordon-Leveitt called "Snowden." Gabriel's song, "The Veil," plays during the end credits of the film, and basically tells the Snowden story, as the former Genesis band member sings about Snowden being a hero to some and a traitor to others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here