Uber to drop $500 million into mapping

Uber may not plan to reinvent the wheel, but the company will drop $500 million to re-map parts of the world. The company has been using Google Maps, but now that’s not good enough…especially if the maps need to be extremely precise for self-driving cars.“Uber wouldn’t exist if comprehensive interactive digital maps hadn’t been created first,” said Brian McClendon, vice president of advanced technologies at Uber. McClendon, who was previously the head of Google Maps, believes, “Existing maps are a good starting point, but some information isn’t that relevant to Uber, like ocean topography.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud computing just had another amazing, awesome, over-the-top good week

Cloud computing has been on a roll for a while now, and instead of slowing down, it just keeps speeding up. Last week, for example, the cloud hit the accelerator big time, as demonstrated by a pair of key developments:First, Amazon announced record quarterly results for Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS simply blew through its Q2 numbers, hitting $2.9 billion in revenue, which was up more than $1 billion from the same quarter in 2015. Yes, quarterly revenue increased by a billion dollars in just one year.Second, Oracle announced a $9.3 billion takeover of cloud ERP provider NetSuite. That’s a huge investment in the cloud from a company that not so long ago went out of its way to ridicule the very concept of cloud computing. (Sure, NetSuite had deep Oracle ties, but almost $10 billion to buy into the cloud is serious money.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Game of Thrones can teach you valuable security lessons

With new hacking techniques, malware, viruses and threats being created faster than Melisandre’s demon babies, the web is indeed dark and full of terrors. Here are seven lessons for security managers pulled straight out of Westeros.1. Small things can become huge problemsIn the age of big data, risk once deemed minimal may pose serious threats to companies concerned with keeping the information they’ve collected private, but that begins and ends within the companies and the parameters and protocols they have in place to keep data secure.Nobody took the dragons or dire wolves seriously in the beginning of Game of Thrones, but by season 3 they were capable of wreaking havoc and wiping out armies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT career roadmap: The journey to certified scrum trainer

Angela Johnson's career began at a call center where she performed technical and customer support and end-user training for legal clients having trouble with the online legal research and database service WestLaw. But after a few years, during which time parent company West was acquired by Thomson Reuters, Johnson moved to Rockwell Automation, a manufacturing automation company whose products gathered and analyzed data about specific parts being machined on factory and plant floors."I am one of a rare breed whose brain seems to intuitively understand the linear nature and thinking required to work with relational databases, I guess, and Rockwell recognized that. We had so many clients on so many different databases, but I was able to help with the technical aspects of extracting that data from Oracle, SQL, Sybase, all these different databases and analyzing it," Johnson says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Spies planted malware on critical infrastructure, Russian security service says

Russian military networks and other critical infrastructure have been hit by tailor-made malware, according to government officials.Networks at some 20 organizations in Russia -- including scientific and military institutions, defense contractors, and public authorities -- were found to be infected with the malware, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said Saturday.The range of infected sites suggests that the targets were deliberately selected as part of a cyber-espionage operation, the FSB said.Analysis of the attack showed that filenames, parameters and infection methods used in the malware are similar to those involved in other high-profile cyber-espionage operations around the world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Spies planted malware on critical infrastructure, Russian security service says

Russian military networks and other critical infrastructure have been hit by tailor-made malware, according to government officials. Networks at some 20 organizations in Russia -- including scientific and military institutions, defense contractors, and public authorities -- were found to be infected with the malware, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said Saturday. The range of infected sites suggests that the targets were deliberately selected as part of a cyber-espionage operation, the FSB said. Analysis of the attack showed that filenames, parameters and infection methods used in the malware are similar to those involved in other high-profile cyber-espionage operations around the world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lumia sales plummet as Microsoft fires more staffers

Microsoft had a pretty good earnings report last month as it closed out fiscal year 2016 (its fiscal year ends June 30 of each year). Now people are digging through the financial reports to see what the company didn't disclose in its press release or earnings call, and one unfortunate number has emerged: the pitiful sales of Lumia phones.It's the latest in the sad story behind former CEO Steve Ballmer's final debacle, the purchase of Nokia's handset business. Nokia was the strongest supporter of Windows Phone, but beyond Ballmer and some Finnish shareholders, no one thought this $7.2 billion acquisition was a good idea. In the end, it cost more than $10 billion in write-downs, which means paper losses, not actual money out the door, but many employees from Nokia have been cut loose as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Securing the SDDC with VMware NSX – Light Board Series

Is VMware the first company that springs to mind when you think about securing your software-defined data center (SDDC)? It should be.

In this new light board series, learn about the unique capabilities that VMware NSX brings to your SDDC for securing your virtualized environment.

Start out with some context on why networking and security go hand-in hand with the Network Virtualization is Inevitable video. Then, move on to the NSX as a Security Platform video, to learn why VMware can offer security options not possible in tradition environments.

But how to install NSX in an environment? Check out Hadar Freehling’s Castle Security with VMware NSX video. Curious about why the firewall in NSX is special? Watch the VMware NSX Distributed Firewall video. And finally, secure a VDI environment with Hadar’s VMware NSX and VDI video.

As your SDDC evolves, stay up-to-date with NSX and how it can help secure your assets. Any burning questions on securing your virtualized environment you don’t see addressed in the videos, and want to see? Let us know; and don’t be surprised if you see it addressed in a future video.

Julie

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Google and Apple: Apple could be the next AOL

Apple announced its financial results on July 25 and Alphabet/Google on July 26. After-hours trading drove Alphabet’s market cap up over Apple’s. The chart above is a non-scientific indicator of expectations about the future of both companies. The expectations favor Google’s continued growth.Apple reported a drop in iPhone shipments and a drop in Mac shipments, both confirmed by IDC, as well as a decline in the average selling price of iPhones as the company struggles to compete with Android phones with the new low-cost iPhone SE. Every financial report places Apple’s hopes for renewed growth on the iPhone 7, which is due to be announced in September.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SIGFOX-connected fire hydrants help ensure water for firefighting

There’s nothing worse than rushing to put out a fire only to find the hydrant isn’t working. How do you make sure the hundreds of fire hydrants in a city are working properly?Typically hydrants are inspected manually, but that is a slow and costly process whose results are often out of date. It's now possible, though, to remotely monitor hydrants for malfunctions or vandalism without having to spend a fortune.Designing IoT-enabled hydrant system Consider a small city such as Des Plaines, Illinois, which illustrates the challenges involved with monitoring and repairing hydrants. The city extends over 14 square miles and has 3,600 fire hydrants. It could take a few months for a small team of inspectors to manually inspect each hydrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SIGFOX-connected fire hydrants help ensure water for firefighting

There’s nothing worse than rushing to put out a fire only to find the hydrant isn’t working. How do you make sure the hundreds of fire hydrants in a city are working properly?Typically hydrants are inspected manually, but that is a slow and costly process whose results are often out of date. It's now possible, though, to remotely monitor hydrants for malfunctions or vandalism without having to spend a fortune.Designing IoT-enabled hydrant system Consider a small city such as Des Plaines, Illinois, which illustrates the challenges involved with monitoring and repairing hydrants. The city extends over 14 square miles and has 3,600 fire hydrants. It could take a few months for a small team of inspectors to manually inspect each hydrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to solve Windows 10 crashes in less than a minute

When I began to work with Windows 10, I was able to shut the laptop down without Googling to find the power button icon; a great improvement over Windows 8. My next interest was determining what to do when the OS falls over, generating a Blue Screen of Death. This article will describe how to set your system up so that, when it does, you’ll be able to find the cause of most crashes in less than a minute for no cost. In Windows 10, the Blue Screen looks the same as in Windows 8/8.1. It’s that screen with the frown emoticon and the message “Your PC ran into a problem . . .” This screen appears more friendly than the original Blue Screens, but a truly friendly screen would tell you what caused the problem and how to fix it; something that would not be difficult since most BSODs are caused by misbehaved third party drivers that are often easily identified by the MS Windows debugger.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to detect buggy device drivers in Windows 10

When buggy third-party drivers crash a system and invoke a blue screen of death, it can be difficult to pinpoint the source among all the active running software. An alternative method to using WinDbg is to identify any device driver addition or change that occurred prior to the Blue Screen of Death event.Windows device drivers are just one part of the broader Windows operating environment function called Autorun Settings. Windows’ Autorun Settings identify Windows auto-starting software, including all Windows device drivers, during system bootup or login. In this image, AutorunCheck Forensic v1.0.1 displays the BEFORE and AFTER state of a driver. When chasing down the cause of a system crash, knowing what changed is valuable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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