Slideshow: Take a peek inside ‘Area 404,’ Facebook’s brand new hardware lab

Facebook's Silicon Valley headquartersImage by Martyn WilliamsFacebook used to design its servers and other hardware at labs scattered across the company, but they've now been consolidated in a state of the art facility at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. The new lab is called Area 404, a play on the 404 error message seen on the web and, presumably, the U.S. military's Area 51 research base. It covers 22,000 square feet and has 50 workbenches where engineers design, build and test their protptype hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Deploying VMware VSAN in minutes with Big Cloud Fabric

Dropbox Paper is now available to all as an open beta

Ten months after Dropbox first unveiled Paper, the collaborative writing tool entered open beta on Wednesday and is getting mobile versions for iOS and Android.Paper allows teams to work on documents together in the cloud. It makes it easy to add text, images, and embedded videos from YouTube, Google, or Dropbox itself. Users can also add programming code, which gets formatted automatically. And they can create to-do lists and assign tasks on those lists using the @ symbol. Since its debut in private beta, Paper has been used to create more than a million documents for tasks like brainstorming ideas and capturing meeting notes, Dropbox said. Based on lessons learned along the way, Dropbox has improved the software with better tables and image galleries, more powerful search, and notifications via desktop and mobile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 moves closer to smart-home centerpiece with IoT deal

Lazy people will love Windows 10 and its ability to automate home tasks, and the operating system's smart-home credentials are getting a serious boost with a recent internet of things pact.Microsoft wants to put Windows 10 at the center of smart homes. The company wants users to be able to tell the operating system's Cortana voice assistant to switch on a light, open a door, release food for a cat, and even check the contents of a refrigerator.For Windows 10 to be successful, the OS will have to work with a wide range of smart home and IoT devices, and that goal has taken a big step forward thanks to a recent agreement between standards bodies the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) and the Thread Group. The two organizations will work together on improving interoperability between smart home and IoT devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First Look: Firefox 48

Firefox 48Image by PixabayFirefox, for years now, has been an also-ran in large chunks of the browser market – yet, in terms of its technology, has been catching up to the bigger players fast. Firefox 48 continues the process of making the browser more streamlined, robust and powerful. Take a look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Could this hacker’s tool slow down phishing?

At the BSides Las Vegas event (a precursor to Black Hat), CSO's Steve Ragan sat down with a hacker named Munin to chat about a tool that could help administrators defend their networks from phishing attacks and other threats.

Think older workers struggle with technology? Think again

Conventional thinking assumes that older workers have trouble adapting to new technologies.That notion is nothing more than a stereotype, but it’s a harmful one that could make life difficult for IT professionals over the age of 50 who are searching for new jobs. And now the results of a new survey suggest that the stereotype might not be accurate after all.Cloud storage provider Dropbox and Ipsos Mori, a London-based market research firm, surveyed more than 4,000 information workers in the U.S. and Europe about their use of technology in the workplace and found that people 55 and up use 4.9 forms of technology per week, on average — a smidge above the overall average of 4.7 per week. More importantly, the survey also revealed that older workers are less likely than their younger colleagues to find using technology in the workplace stressful. Just one-quarter of the respondents who are 55 or older said that they find tech in the workplace stressful. Meanwhile, 36 percent of the respondents who are 18 to 34 years old — the ones who supposedly grew up with technology — said they find tech in the workplace stressful.To read this Continue reading

HPE’s Whitman endorses Clinton; will Trump retaliate if he wins?

In 2011, Hewlett-Packard ranked seventh in federal contracting. Barack Obama, a Democrat, was president. In 2012, HP CEO Meg Whitman publicly backed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for president, and even served as a California "statewide honorary chairman" for him.Did Whitman's backing of Romney help or hurt HP? Will her particularly brutal condemnation Tuesday of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hurt the firm, should he win the election?If Whitman's support for Romney caused any corporate damage it is not apparent in its federal contracting. In 2011, HP's total federal contracting was pegged at $3.83 billion by Washington Technology in its annual ranking of federal contractors, putting it in seventh place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Black Hat: 5 Ways to Avoid Losing the Internet We Love

Black Hat keynoter Dan Kaminsky has a few rants on his mind.

The Inevitability Of Private Public Clouds

Call it a phase that companies will have to go through to get to the promised land of the public cloud. Call it a temporary inevitability, as Microsoft does. Call it stupid if you want to be ungenerous to IT shops used to controlling their own infrastructure. Call it what you will, but it sure does look like all of the big public clouds are going to have to figure out how to offer private cloud versions of their public cloud infrastructure, and Amazon Web Services be no exception if it hopes to capture dominant market share as it …

The Inevitability Of Private Public Clouds was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: The Self Taught Engineers of the Erie Canal

We often assume that a workforce needs to be highly educated to propel an economy forward. Often, it is the opposite, it is economic opportunity that compels a workforce toward more education. So it was with the Erie Canal, by far the greatest engineering project of its day, and one of the greatest in history to that point. The problem was that there were very few trained engineers… —Delaney Place

The post Worth Reading: The Self Taught Engineers of the Erie Canal appeared first on 'net work.

Top cities not tops in wireless networks, testing shows

Each of the nation's largest wireless carriers brag about having a great network, but comprehensive testing shows that network performance varies significantly from city to city.RootMetrics recently posted its latest rankings for the top 125 U.S. metro areas, which show that the two biggest U.S. cities rank pretty low. New York came in at 59th, while Los Angeles came it at 99th.The nation's third-largest city, Chicago, did well for a big city and was ranked fifth. Atlanta, the ninth-largest city, ranked third. No other top-10 city finished in the top 10 rankings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Black Hat: Kaminsky says Trump is a troll.

Donald Trump is a troll looking to say whatever will stir up the most people, according to security expert Dan Kaminsky who delivered the keynote at Black Hat today.“Don figures out what people don’t want to hear,” and then he says it, Kaminsky said in an interview after his speech.+More on Network World: Black Hat: Be wary of HTTP/2 on Web servers | Follow all the stories from Black Hat +“It’s not that Donald Trump is the worst troll ever, it’s just that the American public has never been trolled so effectively. The reaction is the point.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Black Hat: Kaminsky says Trump is a troll.

Donald Trump is a troll looking to say whatever will stir up the most people, according to security expert Dan Kaminsky who delivered the keynote at Black Hat today.“Don figures out what people don’t want to hear,” and then he says it, Kaminsky said in an interview after his speech.+More on Network World: Black Hat: Be wary of HTTP/2 on Web servers | Follow all the stories from Black Hat +“It’s not that Donald Trump is the worst troll ever, it’s just that the American public has never been trolled so effectively. The reaction is the point.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Edge browser gets extensions and Adblock Plus support

It's quite a day for Microsoft Edge and the few people who use it. Thanks to the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Edge will finally gain support for extensions. And by supporting extensions, one of the first out of the gate is Adblock Plus, that bane of advertisers everywhere.Edge can now use extensions for both Chrome and Firefox. To get extensions, open Edge and click on the menu icon, the three horizontal dots in the upper-right corner. Next, select Extensions from the drop-down menu. It's near the bottom. This will open a new window with extensions you already have installed and a link labeled "Get Extensions from the Store."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why compliance is a necessary evil

At the BSides Las Vegas event (a precursor to Black Hat), CSO's Steve Ragan chats with Yvette Johnson, the Governance, Risk & Compliance Lead at Pindrop, about how security compliance needs to be more than just another box to check.

AT&T Selects Radcom’s Virtual Probe for its Integrated Cloud

AT&T moves service assurance to the cloud.

Mobile Broadband – Trending Technologies

For me and for most of Mobile broadband professionals, we are used to meeting the Telco Vendors such as Ericsson, Huawei, Cisco, Nokia, etc. It was a mind-shift for me personally when I started to meet RedHat, Mirantis, & Vmware as a part of the NFV talks and I was really surprised that a company like RedHat […]

The post Mobile Broadband – Trending Technologies appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

How companies are training tomorrow’s IT leaders

Companies face demographic change as Baby Boomers continue their steady departure from the workplace. At the same time, recruiting and retaining employees to work in large companies is becoming more difficult as freelance and entrepreneurial ventures become more popular, especially among Millennials. These challenges make attracting and developing talent critical for organizations that seek to keep pace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

IDG Contributor Network: Machine learning, automation and human ‘ramp-up’ coming

Tech industry CEOs are extremely concerned about their products’ relevancies in the next few years, so they are concentrating on innovation as a strategy, according to a new survey.The way they intend to move forward is by developing a combined human and digital labor force, says accountancy and advisor KPMG, which conducted the survey.By that, it means deploying automation and cognitive machine learning digitization, but also building a human workforce geared towards constant innovation.+ Also on Network World: Turns out machine learning is a champ at fixing buggy code +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here