Google’s AI is learning how to save your life

AlphaGo's uncanny success at the game of Go was taken by many as a death knell for the dominance of the human intellect, but Google researcher David Silver doesn't see it that way. Instead, he sees a world of potential benefits.As one of the lead architects behind Google DeepMind's AlphaGo system, which defeated South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol 4 games to 1 in March, Silver believes the technology's next role should be to help advance human health.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft amps up Windows-as-a-subscription effort

Microsoft today announced that this fall its partners will start selling subscriptions to Windows 10 Enterprise, the edition that targets businesses, for $7 per month per user.Dubbed Windows 10 Enterprise E3 -- the last part of the label a nod to Office 365's nomenclature -- the subscription program will be offered from a select group of resellers already on the Redmond, Wash. company's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) list.The approved CSP resellers -- Microsoft did not identify which partners would participate -- will sell Windows 10 Enterprise E3 for $7 per user per month, or $84 per user per year.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10 Yusuf Mehdi, an executive in the Windows and Devices Group, briefly mentioned Windows 10 Enterprise E3 in his time on stage Tuesday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto, and provided a bit more information in a post to a company blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s how to star in Apple’s new TV show about app creation

Apple is co-producing a TV show about app design and development, and you might be able to play a starring role.On Tuesday, the production company working with Apple on the show, Propagate, announced an open casting call for people who want to be on "Planet of the Apps."The show is Apple's first foray into TV series production and is described as "a new unscripted series about the world of apps and the developers who create them."Applications are being accepted through the show's website until Aug. 26. The producers will then travel to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and New York to meet with app developers and tech entrepreneurs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pokémon Go is making people take leave of their senses

Pokémon Go, the new augmented reality smartphone game, has players showing up in some strange places looking for virtual cartoon creatures. Several players have shown up at a sex products store in the U.K., according to some news reports. In New Zealand, players have gone to the headquarters of the Hells Angels biker gang, reports the Guardian. The game is aimed at players aged 10 and up, according to information on Pokémon Go's Google Play download page. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Measuring IPv6 from the Internet’s core

Measuring the state of IPv6 deployment is difficult, particularly when there are so many different measurement tools out there offering different stats. APNIC Labs shows global IPv6 deployment at 6% while Google shows it at 12%, why such disparity? The answer is because they are measuring from different vantage points on the network. —APNIC

The post Worth Reading: Measuring IPv6 from the Internet’s core appeared first on 'net work.

5 Takeaways From Chuck Robbins’ First Cisco Live Keynote

News flash: No one wakes up wanting to buy switches.

IDG Contributor Network: Using brain signals instead of passwords to unlock computers

System authentication could one day be widely achieved through brainwaves, scientists say. Simply thinking of certain things, such as a person's face, or a rotating displayed cube would be enough to unlock a device.Electro-encephalography (EEC) sensors are behind the technique. That’s where electrical activity in certain parts of the brain is recorded. We know it as the wavy, graphical lines on charts created from wired electrodes placed on the scalp, as seen in hospitals and TV shows. They're used in that environment to diagnose epilepsy, among other things.+ Also on Network World: 5 things you should know about two-factor authentication +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Optimization Tests Confirm Knights Landing Performance Projections

Close to a year ago when more information was becoming available about the Knights Landing processor, Intel released projections for its relative performance against two-socket Haswell machines. As one might image, the performance improvements were impressive, but now that there are systems on the ground that can be optimized and benchmarked, we are finally getting a more boots-on-the-ground view into the performance bump.

As it turns out, optimization and benchmarking on the “Cori” supercomputer at NERSC are showing that those figures were right on target. In a conversation with one of the co-authors of a new report highlighting the optimization …

Optimization Tests Confirm Knights Landing Performance Projections was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

July 2016 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft releases 11 security updates, 6 rated critical

For July, Microsoft released 11 security bulletins, six of which were rated critical due to remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities.CriticalMS16-084 is the cumulative patch for Internet Explorer, fixing a plethora of RCE problems that an attacker could exploit if a victim viewed a maliciously crafted webpage using IE. The security update also addresses spoofing vulnerabilities, security feature bypass and information disclosure flaws.MS16-085 is the monthly cumulative security update for Microsoft’s Edge browser. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow RCE. The patch also resolves security feature bypass issues, information disclosure problems and many memory corruption flaws.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

July 2016 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft releases 11 security updates, 6 rated critical

For July, Microsoft released 11 security bulletins, six of which were rated critical due to remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities.CriticalMS16-084 is the cumulative patch for Internet Explorer, fixing a plethora of RCE problems that an attacker could exploit if a victim viewed a maliciously crafted webpage using IE. The security update also addresses spoofing vulnerabilities, security feature bypass and information disclosure flaws.MS16-085 is the monthly cumulative security update for Microsoft’s Edge browser. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow RCE. The patch also resolves security feature bypass issues, information disclosure problems and many memory corruption flaws.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Shifting the cost of security

If you deal with enterprise systems security, you likely have an idea what your annual expenditure for security and forensic security is. It’s huge. It’s a time and resource suck like few others. The licensing costs will vary, but they’re a considerable fraction of most organizations’ annual IT spend. Ready-made modular costs are platform-dependent. In Windows, it might be a framework from Symantec, Intel Security, or a host of others. Integration into Active Directory isn’t so much difficult as it is tedious. If you start or add Linux, the cost shifts towards any number of frameworks that require at least a moderate amount of labor costs in customization, maintenance and ongoing platform mods.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Killing the password: FIDO says long journey will be worth it

The FIDO (formerly Fast Identity Online) Alliance is out to kill the password.It wouldn’t seem to be a tough sales job. There is little debate among security experts that passwords are a lousy, obsolete form of authentication.The evidence is overwhelming. Most people in spite of exhortations to use long, complicated passwords, to change them at least monthly and to avoid using the same one for multiple sites, don’t.The latest Verizon Data Breach Incident Report (DBIR) found that 63 percent of all data breaches involved the use of stolen, weak or default passwords.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP Code Dive (3)

This week, I want to do a little more housekeeping before we get into actually asking questions of the bgp code. First there is the little matter of an editor. I use two different editors most of the time, Notepad++ and Atom.

• Notepad++ is a lightweight, general purpose text editor that I use for a lot of different things, from writing things in XML, HTML, CSS, Python Javascript, C, and just about anything else. This is an open source project hosted on the Notepad++ web site with the code hosted at github.
• Atom is a more GUI oriented “programmer’s editor.” This is a more full featured editor, going beyond basic syntax highlighting into projects, plugins that pull diffs in side by side windows, and the like. I don’t really have a build environment set up right now, so I don’t know how it would interact with compiled code, but I assume it would probably have a lot of the tricks I’m used to, like being able to trace calls through the code, etc. Atom is available here.

I haven’t actually chosen one or the other—I tend to use both pretty interchangeably, so you’re likely to see screen shots from Continue reading

GE’s Predix IoT Platform Will Be Available On Microsoft Azure

Predix on Azure will be available in Q2 2017.

More data, more data

"multas per gentes et multa per aequora" ¹

The life of a request to CloudFlare begins and ends at the edge. But the afterlife! Like Catullus to Bithynia, the log generated by an HTTP request or a DNS query has much, much further to go.

This post comes from CloudFlare's Data Team. It reports the state of processing these sort of edge logs, including what's worked well for us and what remains a challenge in the time since our last post from April 2015.

Numbers, sense

In an edge network, where HTTP and DNS clients connect to thousands of servers distributed across the world, the key is to distribute those servers across many carefully picked points of presence—and with over 80 PoPs, no network has better representation than CloudFlare. The reverse, however, has to happen for that network's logs. After anycast has scattered requests (and queries) to thousands of nodes at the edge, it's the Data Team's job to gather the resulting logs to a small number of central points and consolidate them for easy use by our customers.

The charts above depict (with some artifacts due to counter resets) the total structured logs sent from the edge to one Continue reading

China loads up on chip technology with new ARM license

China already has the world's fastest computer with its homegrown chip, but the country hasn't stopped loading up on technology to make more of its own chips.ARM announced Tuesday it has licensed the ARMv8-A architecture to Huaxintong Semiconductor Technology, a joint venture between China's Guizhou province and a subsidiary of Qualcomm.The Chinese company will make ARM-based chipsets for servers in data centers. The small Guizhou province is considered a big data hub, and the province hosts 2.5 million servers, including some used by China's top telecom companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vertical Scaling Works for Bits and Bites

This is just to delicious a parallel to pass up. 

Here we have Google building a new four story datacenter Scaling Up: Google Building Four-Story Data Centers:

And here we have a new vertical farm from AeroFarms: 

Both have racks of consumables. One is a rack of bits, the other is a rack of bites. Both used to sprawl horizontally across huge swaths of land and now are building up. Both designs are driven by economic efficiency, extracting the most value per square foot. Both are expanding to meet increased demand. It's a strange sort of convergence.

IDG Contributor Network: Does ‘share-nothing’ NoSQL signal the end to system resources sharing?

Driven by the need to partition databases into independent data sets to facilitate concurrent data access, NoSQL databases have been at the forefront of the “share-nothing” resource movement. But if NoSQL’s share-nothing philosophy is correct, then how do you explain the explosive growth and acceptance of Linux containers that share resources on the same host and the clusters and data center operating systems that run over them?On the surface, these two movements appear to be at odds, but a deeper look shows merits for both.+ Also on Network World: Containers: Most developers still don’t understand how to use them +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is Wi-Fi finally ‘fast enough?’

Wi-Fi has become so ubiquitous over the past decade and a half that we talk about it – and complain about it – like it’s part of the weather. Be honest, average user – the first thing you think when your connection starts acting up is “damn it, what’s wrong with the Wi-Fi now?” But the degree to which Wi-Fi is likely to be the limiting factor for any given connection is shrinking. Wi-Fi has evolved quickly over the past few years, so much so that it can seem like wireless is outstripping wired networks in terms of raw capability. + ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD:Why one Cisco shop is willing to give Wi-Fi startup Mist a shot +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft delays its Azure Stack software until mid-2017

Azure Stack, Microsoft's system for building private clouds that run the same software it uses in its public cloud, has been delayed until the middle of 2017, the company announced Tuesday.Microsoft has changed its strategy and will provide Azure Stack through integrated systems built by hardware partners, rather than allowing companies to deploy the software on any compatible hardware they choose. Microsoft has been pushing Azure Stack as a differentiator of its cloud platform compared to many of its competitors in the public cloud arena -- especially Amazon. The change came about because the company wants to give businesses prevalidated hardware to simplify deployments of Azure Stack, according to Mike Schutz, the general manager of product marketing for Microsoft's Server and Tools division. At launch, Microsoft will be working with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Dell, and Lenovo. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here