IDG Contributor Network: Smartphones track you—without location services on

Smartphones can disclose locations through non-location sensors when combined with algorithms and iffy apps, researchers say. And the device doesn’t need to have traditional location services such as GPS and network positioning turned on, or even ask your permission.The scientists from Northeastern University documented a number of roads and then drove real and simulated routes on them. They found that the phones in use knew where they were, without using the GPS or the other radios traditionally used for location reporting.“Changing positions, including the angles of turns and the trajectory of curves” derived from sensors, which include the accelerometer, were enough to provide data that gave locations away sometimes, the scientists from Northeastern University claim.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

High technology: How IT is fueling the budding cannabis industry

The cannabis industry is growing up, and it would be tough to imagine more convincing proof than Microsoft's recent announcement that it's getting involved.Though the software giant will stay very much in the background -- its role will focus primarily on providing Azure cloud services for a compliance-focused software push -- the move is still widely viewed as a telling sign."Having them come out and say, 'we're willing to have our name in the same sentence as the word cannabis,' adds to the legitimacy of our industry," said Kyle Sherman, cofounder and CEO of software maker Flowhub.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 Anniversary Update broke millions of webcams

If your webcam is freezing after about a minute when using Skype or another app, then you can thank Microsoft.The Redmond giant meant to allow multiple apps to access the camera at the same time, but it didn’t want users to suffer poor performance as those apps concurrently accessed the webcam and the MJPEG or H264 encoding processes. So, Microsoft decided the best plan was to stop USB webcams from using MJPEG or H264 and instead to only support webcams that use YUY2 encoding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 Anniversary Update broke millions of webcams

If your webcam is freezing after about a minute when using Skype, or another app, then you can thank Microsoft.The Redmond giant meant to allow multiple apps to access the camera at the same time, but didn’t want users to suffer poor performance as those apps concurrently accessed the webcam and the MJPEG or H264 encoding processes. So Microsoft decided the best plan was to stop USB webcams from using MJPEG or H264 and instead to only support webcams that use YUY2 encoding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why liberal arts degrees are valuable in tech

In a technology-driven, increasingly digital world, you might think you need a computer science, engineering, technology, mathematics or other degree to succeed. Turns out that's far from the truth.Arijit Sengupta, CEO of advanced analytics firm BeyondCore, holds a bachelor of science in computer science and a bachelor of arts in economics and fell one class short of having a minor in dance. He brings elements of all three to his daily work with BeyondCore, and some of the most valuable lessons he's learned have come from his liberal arts education and his dance training, he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to get your network and security teams working together

It's not surprising that network and security teams aren't always on the same page. After all, networks need to be fast and efficient, while security is about slowing things down and implementing extra steps to help meet security measures. While both teams are a part of the IT department, and need to work together in the event of a breach, each group has its own objectives and expectations. But when a data breach or security threat strikes, businesses need both teams working together to help get it fixed as soon as possible, especially as networks become more intricate."It's more important to get these two teams on the same page than it has ever been in the past. Enterprise networks are becoming more complex, and at the same time security issues are more common," says David Vigna, Cisco practice director at Softchoice.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to get your network and security teams working together

It's not surprising that network and security teams aren't always on the same page. After all, networks need to be fast and efficient, while security is about slowing things down and implementing extra steps to help meet security measures. While both teams are a part of the IT department, and need to work together in the event of a breach, each group has its own objectives and expectations. But when a data breach or security threat strikes, businesses need both teams working together to help get it fixed as soon as possible, especially as networks become more intricate."It's more important to get these two teams on the same page than it has ever been in the past. Enterprise networks are becoming more complex, and at the same time security issues are more common," says David Vigna, Cisco practice director at Softchoice.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automate, integrate, collaborate: Devops lessons for security

Enterprise security pros are often seen as heavy-handed gatekeepers obsessed with reducing risk. They'd rather be viewed as enablers who help the organization complete tasks and gain access to needed data.To make that transformation, security teams must become faster, more efficient, and more adaptable to change. That sounds a lot like devops.[ Also on InfoWorld: 19 open source GitHub projects for security pros. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security newsletter. ] Indeed, security can derive inspiration from devops, says Haiyan Song, VP of security markets at Splunk. Devops encourages automation and better integration among tools, two trends security professionals are increasingly exploring to make security more transparent throughout the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 tools for producing a great mobile app experience

Mobile app performance management (APM) software provides visibility into mobile app performance and helps pinpoint and resolve issues that affect end-user experience. It typically provides crash reporting, network monitoring and user interaction monitoring to keep users active and satisfied with the app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Why Google plans to stop supporting your Chromebook after five years

One of the best things about Chromebooks is that they’re built to last. Thanks to automatic security and feature updates from Google, along with a lightweight browser-based operating system, longtime users may find that their laptops run as well, if not better, than they did on day one.But despite Chromebooks’ theoretical longevity, it’s possible for Google to cut their lives short. Per the company’s End of Life policy, Chromebooks and other Chrome OS devices are only entitled to five years of feature and security updates. After that, Google doesn’t guarantee that these systems will run safely or properly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

8 tips for keeping your data safe with Identity and Access Management

Safe and soundImage by ThinkstockNew web applications are making their way into the workplace at an unprecedented rate. By 2017, enterprises are projected to rely on an average of 52 cloud applications at work, leaving employees with a pool of credentials to keep track of. If you don’t take the necessary precautions to keep your credentials secure, your accounts and data are at risk of being compromised. With these tips for good password hygiene and deploying an identity and access management (IAM) solution, you can keep your data safe from the rapidly evolving threat landscape. Richard Walters, senior vice president of security products at Intermedia, offers these tips.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Intel Is Tweaking Xeon Phi For Deep Learning

If there is anything that chip giant Intel has learned over the past two decades as it has gradually climbed to dominance in processing in the datacenter, it is ironically that one size most definitely does not fit all. Quite the opposite, and increasingly so.

As the tight co-design of hardware and software continues in all parts of the IT industry, we can expect fine-grained customization for very precise – and lucrative – workloads, like data analytics and machine learning, just to name two of the hottest areas today.

Software will run most efficiently on hardware that is tuned for …

Why Intel Is Tweaking Xeon Phi For Deep Learning was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

My two cents about my two cents

Before we start the work week, here’s a tiny personal tale from the weekend that has me puzzled.I’m at the local liquor store buying wine and my tab is $21.98. I hand the clerk $22 cash and patiently wait for my two pennies change, as I always do, because I like putting them in the “leave a penny, take a penny” (LAPTAP) container that you’ll see at all of your finer  booze stores.That’s what I did, left my two pennies.There had been zero pennies in the container before I donated my two. As I was walking out, my back to the check-out, I distinctly heard the clerk slide the two pennies out of the LAPTAP container, open the cash register, and drop them in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Context, Visibility and Containment – NSX Securing “Anywhere” Part V

window-1231894_1280Welcome to part 5 of the Micro-Segmentation Defined– NSX Securing “Anywhere”  blog series. Previous topics covered in this series includes

In this post we describe how NSX micro-segmentation enables fundamental changes to security architectures which in turn facilitate the identification of breaches:

  • By increasing visibility throughout the SDDC, eliminating all blind spots
  • By making it feasible and simple to migrate to a whitelisting / least privileges / zero-trust security model
  • By providing rich contextual events and eliminating false positives to SIEMs
  • By providing inherent containment even for Zero Day attacks

Threat analysis is the new trend of the security landscape and established vendors as well as startups are proposing many tools to complement the current perimeter logging approach.  The attraction for these tools is based on the assumption that by correlating flows from different sources within a perimeter, threat contexts will emerge and compromised systems will be uncovered.  Currently, these systems go unnoticed for long periods of times because the suspicious traffic moves laterally inside the perimeter and does not traverse a security device: you can’t Continue reading

Evenly Distributed Future

Traveling back and forth between the UK and US I often find myself answering the question “What does CloudFlare do?”. That question gets posed by USCIS on arrival and I’ve honed a short and accurate answer: “CloudFlare protects web sites from hackers, makes web sites faster and ensures they work on your computer, phone or tablet.”

CC BY 2.0 image by d26b73

If anyone, border agents or others, wants more detail I usually say: “If you run a web site or API for an app and you are Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo or one of a handful of major Internet sites you have the expertise to stay on top of the latest technologies and attacks; you have the staff to accelerate your web site and keep it fully patched. Anyone else, and that’s almost every web site on the Internet, simply will not have the money, people, or knowledge to ‘be a Google’. That’s where CloudFlare comes in: we make sure to stay on top of the latest trends in the Internet so that every web site can ‘be Google’."

The author William Gibson has said many times: “The future is already here Continue reading

Growing Hyperconverged Platforms Takes Patience, Time, And Money

In this day and age when the X86 server has pretty much taken over compute in the datacenter, enterprise customers still have their preferences and prejudices when it comes to the make and model of X86 machine that they deploy to run their applications. So a company that is trying to get its software into the datacenter, as server-storage hybrid Nutanix is, needs to befriend the big incumbent server makers and get its software onto their boxes.

This is not always an easy task, given that some of these companies have their own hyperconverged storage products or they have a …

Growing Hyperconverged Platforms Takes Patience, Time, And Money was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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