Microsoft makes Windows 10 hardware change for PC security

Microsoft is rolling out a change in minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 PCs and mobile devices, and expects hardware makers to comply in order to make their devices more secure.Starting Thursday, PC makers should include a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 in Windows 10 PCs, smartphones and tablets.The TPM 2.0 feature will be beneficial for users as it will do a better job of protecting sensitive information on a PC. A TPM 2.0 security layer -- which can be in the form of a chip or firmware -- can safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft makes Windows 10 hardware change for PC security

Microsoft is rolling out a change in minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 PCs and mobile devices, and expects hardware makers to comply in order to make their devices more secure.Starting Thursday, PC makers should include a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 in Windows 10 PCs, smartphones and tablets.The TPM 2.0 feature will be beneficial for users as it will do a better job of protecting sensitive information on a PC. A TPM 2.0 security layer -- which can be in the form of a chip or firmware -- can safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix & LogMeIn complete complicated, tax-free sort-of merger

LogMeIn, the makers of the popular remote desktop software as well as IT security and conferencing offerings, will become part of a Citrix subsidiary in the wake of a complicated, $1.8 billion transaction announced Tuesday by the two companies.The transaction is what’s called a Reverse Morris Trust, which apparently allows the untaxed transfer of a subsidiary to new ownership by spinning off a new company and completing a merger. In this case, Citrix has created a wholly-owned subsidiary called GetGo, which owns its GoToMeeting products.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dropbox aims for enterprise with new team and IT admin features | Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix & LogMeIn complete complicated, tax-free sort-of merger

LogMeIn, the makers of the popular remote desktop software as well as IT security and conferencing offerings, will become part of a Citrix subsidiary in the wake of a complicated, $1.8 billion transaction announced Tuesday by the two companies.The transaction is what’s called a Reverse Morris Trust, which apparently allows the untaxed transfer of a subsidiary to new ownership by spinning off a new company and completing a merger. In this case, Citrix has created a wholly-owned subsidiary called GetGo, which owns its GoToMeeting products.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dropbox aims for enterprise with new team and IT admin features | Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wondering where common actions got moved in Modern Document Libraries? Use this handy guide!

One of the best things about SharePoint on Office 365 is that you are able to take advantage of all of the great new features that Microsoft is developing as part of the future of SharePoint as they become available. While some updates have only minimal impact on end user experiences, modern document libraries introduce some pretty significant differences that might make users uncomfortable for a little while. After all, all change is disruptive when it’s unfamiliar! To help both me and my clients quickly find where common document library actions have moved, I created a feature comparison table that I’m sharing in this post. This is my “dude, where’s my car?” or “where did my cheese go?” summary.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

94% off the Complete Machine Learning Course Bundle – Deal Alert

Machine learning is hot, and with good reason. For the uninitiated: it’s the use of pattern recognition and prediction that underlies important technologies like self-driving cars and speech recognition.Want to dive into the field? From learning to build financial models and utilizing Big Data, to coding Java and Python--the 10 courses in The Complete Machine Learning Bundle will get you up to speed on all things machine learning.Here are the courses included in your bundle:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaw with password manager LastPass could hand over control to hackers

Even password manager LastPass can be fooled. A Google security researcher has found a way to remotely hijack the software.It works by first luring the user to a malicious site. The site will then exploit a flaw in a LastPass add-on for the Firefox browser, giving it control over the password management software.LastPass wrote about the vulnerability on Wednesday and said that a fix is already out for Firefox users.Google security research Tavis Ormandy first discovered the issue. When examining the password manager, he tweeted on Tuesday, "Are people really using this lastpass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaw with password manager LastPass could hand over control to hackers

Even password manager LastPass can be fooled. A Google security researcher has found a way to remotely hijack the software.It works by first luring the user to a malicious site. The site will then exploit a flaw in a LastPass add-on for the Firefox browser, giving it control over the password management software.LastPass wrote about the vulnerability on Wednesday and said that a fix is already out for Firefox users.Google security research Tavis Ormandy first discovered the issue. When examining the password manager, he tweeted on Tuesday, "Are people really using this lastpass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Get $200 off Samsung KU6600 Curved 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD TV and a $100 Gift Card – Deal Alert

Amazon is currently discounting the UN55KU6600 Curved 55-inch TV from Samsung, taking its typical list price of $1,148 down by 17% to just $947.99. And on top of that, they're giving you a $100 Amazon.com gift card along with it. The UN55KU6600 delivers 4K Ultra HD resolution and High Dynamic Range (HDR) content, with greater depth and clarity and a fuller spectrum of color with PurColor. It lets you access your favorite content quicker and easier with the new Samsung Smart TV platform powered by a Quad-Core Processor. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from 275 people (read reviews). See the discounted Samsung 55-inch 4K Ultra HD TV bundle (TV+$100 gift card) now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AI just co-wrote its first horror movie, and you can help make it real

AI has already been dabbling in the arts for some time, but recently it took a big step further and helped write its first feature-length horror film. Now its co-creators are seeking funding to bring the movie to life.Titled "Impossible Things," the story focuses on a family that moves to a secluded country home following the death of a young daughter. Madeline, the mother, stays home to renovate the house and care for her remaining two children, but she begins to hear voices. She also sees visions of a deranged woman and the ghost of a child remarkably similar to the one she lost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft gives Office 365 a major upgrade

Microsoft has announced a number of features to be added to Office 365 users as part of the July 2016 update that are a group of "cloud-powered intelligent services" designed to save time and improve productivity for users of Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. The news came in an Office blog post by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.New to Word Word is getting two significant new features, called Researcher and Editor. As its name implies, Researcher is designed to help the user find reliable sources of information by using the Bing Knowledge Graph to search for sources, and it will properly cite them in the Word document.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft just launched an iPhone camera app

There's a new iPhone camera application on the block that's supposed to be better at taking pictures than the one Apple ships with its phones ... and it's built by Microsoft. The company's research arm launched Pix, which enhances the photos that users take in a variety of ways, on Wednesday morning. The app is  designed to make photos look better and even improves on Apple's Live Photos ability to capture scenes that have moving elements in them. It's part of Microsoft's continued push to build applications for platforms beyond those that it controls directly, especially iOS and Android. The free app was built by members of Microsoft Research, and released for free on the iOS App Store.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NYTimes vs. DNCleaks

People keep citing this New York Times article by David Sanger that attributes the DNCleaks to Russia. As I've written before, this is propaganda, not journalism. It's against basic journalistic ethics to quote anonymous "federal officials" in a story like this. The Society of Professional Journalists repudiates this [1] [2]. The NYTime's own ombudsman has itself criticized David Sanger for this practice, and written guidelines to specifically ban it.

Quoting anonymous federal officials is great, when they disagree with government, when revealing government malfeasance, when it's something that people will get fired over.

But the opposite is happening here. It's either Obama himself or some faction within the administration that wants us to believe Russia is involved. They want us to believe the propaganda, then hide behind anonymity so we can't question them. This evades obvious questions, like whether all their information comes from the same public sources that already point to Russia, or whether they have their own information from the CIA or NSA that points to Russia.

Everyone knows the Washington press works this way, and that David Sanger in particular is a journalistic whore. The NetFlix series House of Cards portrays this accurately in its Continue reading

Dropbox aims for enterprise with new team and IT admin features

Continuing its effort to better appeal to enterprise users, Dropbox Wednesday announced new features aimed at making its cloud-based storage and collaboration platform easier for teams of workers to use and IT administrators to centrally control. +MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The CIA, NSA and Pokémon Go | 10 ways to celebrate Sysadmin Day + Dropbox was one of the pioneers of the cloud computing market, beginning in 2007 as a consumer-oriented storage service with a simple user interface and automatic synchronization across devices. In 2013 the company launched Dropbox Business, it’s foray into the business market. Two years later Dropbox introduced its Enterprise edition. In the past few years Dropbox has hired an entire enterprise sales team and has devoted a portion of its engineering team to build products specifically for the enterprise market. The fruits of that work were announced today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kaspersky researchers love “Mr. Robot” hacker but claim no Snowden ties

Malware researchers for Kaspersky Lab took to Reddit’s IAmA chat today and pronounced an affection for the hacker-hero TV show “Mr. Robot” but not NSA hacker Edward Snowden.Responding to a question about how they like it, the team’s global director Costin Raiu says, “Mr Robot is a strong 9.5 for me. Most of the scenes are top class and the usage of tools, operating systems and other tiny details, from social engineering to opsec is very good. I guess having help from some real world security experts (the folks at Avast did a great job!”+More on Network World: Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kaspersky researchers love “Mr. Robot” hacker but claim no Snowden ties

Malware researchers for Kaspersky Lab took to Reddit’s IAmA chat today and pronounced an affection for the hacker-hero TV show “Mr. Robot” but not NSA hacker Edward Snowden.Responding to a question about how they like it, the team’s global director Costin Raiu says, “Mr Robot is a strong 9.5 for me. Most of the scenes are top class and the usage of tools, operating systems and other tiny details, from social engineering to opsec is very good. I guess having help from some real world security experts (the folks at Avast did a great job!”+More on Network World: Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How ‘citizen developers’ are closing the skills gap

Everyone's learning to code nowadays, but the rise of low-code development platforms are putting application and solution creation capabilities in the hands of even the least programming-savvy employees to help close the IT skills gap, drive efficiency and greater productivity. Welcome to the world of the "citizen developers."Power to the people In September 2015, QuickBase, an organization that has developed a low-code platform to allow for citizen development of enterprisurveyed 140 IT companiesse software, at its annual user conference and found that they were tapping into the expertise of "citizen developers," business pros who create apps and technology solutions for their organization, without any prior traditional coding skills. These professionals work together with IT to design apps tailored to their unique set of business and job role requirements to enable digital transformation and help reduce IT's growing application backlog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here