802.11ac Wi-Fi gear driving strong WLAN equipment sales

The first quarter of 2016 has seen a 20% increase in wireless LAN equipment sales compared to the same period a year ago, according to a study released by IHS Technology, which credited the proliferation of 802.11ac wireless gear for the uptick.While the $1.2 billion in total sales represents a quarter-on-quarter downturn of 14%, that’s merely a seasonal demand issue, said IHS. Yet the year-on-year sales increase has been accomplished with equipment prices remaining relatively flat.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Top 5 storage vendors shows massive shift to the cloud + Resold hard drives on eBay, Craigslist are often still ripe with leftover dataTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

802.11ac Wi-Fi gear driving strong WLAN equipment sales

The first quarter of 2016 has seen a 20% increase in wireless LAN equipment sales compared to the same period a year ago, according to a study released by IHS Technology, which credited the proliferation of 802.11ac wireless gear for the uptick.While the $1.2 billion in total sales represents a quarter-on-quarter downturn of 14%, that’s merely a seasonal demand issue, said IHS. Yet the year-on-year sales increase has been accomplished with equipment prices remaining relatively flat.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Top 5 storage vendors shows massive shift to the cloud + Resold hard drives on eBay, Craigslist are often still ripe with leftover dataTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce now accessible from Outlook

The lovefest between Microsoft and Salesforce.com continues, this time with a new connector for Outlook that links Salesforce connections to the Outlook contact and calendar manager.Microsoft made the announcement via the Office blog, noting that sales reps rely on two primary tools Customer Relational Management (CRM) and email. "Yet, CRM and email have traditionally been disconnected tools, and sales reps have had to spend valuable time toggling between these apps," the company noted.Manually adding contacts or calendar events from email to CRM or having to move back and forth between the two waste a lot of time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Need to integrate a few apps to solve a business problem? There is recipe for that

 Vijay Tella has been neck deep in application integration technology for years, first as the SVP of engineering at TIBCO, the company that introduced the information bus, and then at Oracle, where he helped launch the company’s booming middleware platform. Today Tella is founder and CEO of Workato, a company that is putting integration tools directly into the hands of app users.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Tella to learn more about how he is trying to democratize the world of app integration. Workato founder and CEO Vijay TellaTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Avaya’s edge network adapter is an IoT onramp

Avaya today released the 1.0 version of its Open Networking Adapter (ONA), a device the size of a deck of cards that plugs into any Ethernet-enabled machine and automatically connects it to a broader network while enforcing strict security policies on network traffic.Avaya’s ONA is a network edge device meant to usher in an era of connected devices to create an internet of things environment. The first use case Avaya is targeting with ONA is the health care industry with a custom software GUI for controlling the ONAs.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Top 5 Storage vendors shows a massive shift to the cloud | Why Brexit could cause major data privacy headaches for US companies + ONA is a small proxy device with two Ethernet inputs on each end. The aluminum casing holds a dual core CPU running Open vSwitch. It’s equipped with two-factor authentication so that when the device is on boarded for the first time there’s a key that’s shared between the ONA and a software defined networking (SDN) controller to verify it. The device doesn't store any data, so if it were stolen, it would be a brick without the 2FA connection. “It Continue reading

Wave 2 Wi-Fi may be a sleeper, but it’s great for some

As the Wi-Fi Alliance starts certifying the latest gigabit-speed products to work together, users may not get as excited as they did for some earlier standards.On Wednesday, the industry group launched its certification program for IEEE 802.11ac Wave 2, a technology that’s been on the market for more than a year.Wave 2 can deliver up to 6.8Gbps (bits per second) and lets an access point talk to more than one device at a time. But due to issues like timing and wired backhaul, Wave 2 adoption has been relatively slow.The new technology builds on the first wave of 802.11ac, which started to emerge in 2013 and now makes up nearly three-quarters of the Wi-Fi market in terms of revenue. The new wave adds a few features with real advantages, at least for some users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wave 2 Wi-Fi may be a sleeper, but it’s great for some

As the Wi-Fi Alliance starts certifying the latest gigabit-speed products to work together, users may not get as excited as they did for some earlier standards.On Wednesday, the industry group launched its certification program for IEEE 802.11ac Wave 2, a technology that’s been on the market for more than a year.Wave 2 can deliver up to 6.8Gbps (bits per second) and lets an access point talk to more than one device at a time. But due to issues like timing and wired backhaul, Wave 2 adoption has been relatively slow.The new technology builds on the first wave of 802.11ac, which started to emerge in 2013 and now makes up nearly three-quarters of the Wi-Fi market in terms of revenue. The new wave adds a few features with real advantages, at least for some users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 hidden iOS 10 features that are instant game changers

Apple’s latest version of iOS is only available for developers right now, but we’ve already found plenty of reasons to get excited about iOS 10. The big features in iOS 10 are impressive: Photos has facial recognition, Messages gets an emoji overload, and Siri will be able to hail you a Lyft.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch But iOS 10 is exciting not only because of the major makeovers. Apple’s upcoming mobile OS also has a lot of small, dare-we-say hidden surprises, too. Here are five of the best-kept secret features coming to your iPhone this fall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple sued for $10 billion for ‘stealing’ his iPhone invention from 1992

A Florida man has accused Apple of infringing a 1992 patent on an “electronic reading device” that, in our view, looks nothing like the iPhone. He’s asking for $10 billion in damages. No, this isn’t an article from The Onion. It’s real life.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch Thomas Ross included drawings of his device, a boxy rectangle with a screen and physical keyboard, in his court filing in Florida Southern District Court, which was obtained by The Telegraph. As you may recall, the original iPhone was the first smartphone without a physical keyboard. No matter, Ross says he was the first person “to have created a novel combination of media and communication tools.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why CIOs should care about click fraud

The ancient Chinese military strategy guide The Art of War says that if you want to have a chance of prevailing in battle, you need to know your enemy. It’s good advice for the battlefield, and it's also good advice if you want to beat hackers in their constant attempts to take over your network.But in order to know these hackers you need to understand their motivations, and in many cases those motivations may not be what you expect. That's according to Dan Kaminski, the security expert who discovered a fundamental flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) protocol in 2008 and who discovered flaws in the widely used SSL protocol a year later. Kaminski is a frequent speaker at Black Hat Briefings, and now works as Chief Scientist at White Ops, a security firm specializing in detecting bot and malware fraud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why CIOs should care about click fraud

The ancient Chinese military strategy guide The Art of War says that if you want to have a chance of prevailing in battle, you need to know your enemy. It’s good advice for the battlefield, and it's also good advice if you want to beat hackers in their constant attempts to take over your network.But in order to know these hackers you need to understand their motivations, and in many cases those motivations may not be what you expect. That's according to Dan Kaminski, the security expert who discovered a fundamental flaw in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) protocol in 2008 and who discovered flaws in the widely used SSL protocol a year later. Kaminski is a frequent speaker at Black Hat Briefings, and now works as Chief Scientist at White Ops, a security firm specializing in detecting bot and malware fraud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rio’s airport preps for Olympics with new Wi-Fi network and mobile app

The 2016 Olympics Games are already off to a rough start -- and we haven’t even seen opening ceremonies yet. Worries about the Zika virus, polluted competition waters, doping scandals and Rio’s precarious finances could mean a complicated time in August for the Summer Games.[ Related: Jumping hurdles on the road to Rio 2016: AOC's head of IT Anthony Soulsby ]One thing thing poised to go well: communication at Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport, Brazil’s biggest airport and how most people will get into the country for the games.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rio’s airport preps for Olympics with new Wi-Fi network and mobile app

The 2016 Olympics Games are already off to a rough start -- and we haven’t even seen opening ceremonies yet. Worries about the Zika virus, polluted competition waters, doping scandals and Rio’s precarious finances could mean a complicated time in August for the Summer Games.[ Related: Jumping hurdles on the road to Rio 2016: AOC's head of IT Anthony Soulsby ]One thing thing poised to go well: communication at Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport, Brazil’s biggest airport and how most people will get into the country for the games.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Lizard Brain of LizardStresser

LizardStresser is a botnet originally written by the infamous Lizard Squad DDoS group. The source code was released publicly in early 2015, an act that encouraged aspiring DDoS actors to build their own botnets. Arbor Networks’ ASERT group has been tracking LizardStresser activity and observed two disturbing trends: The number of unique LizardStresser command-and-control (C2) […]

Researchers dismantle decade-long Iranian cyberespionage operation

The infrastructure used by an Iranian cyberespionage group to control infected computers around the world has been hijacked by security researchers.Researchers from Palo Alto Networks came across the group's activities earlier this year, but found evidence that it has been operating since at least 2007. Its main tool is a custom malware program dubbed Infy, which was repeatedly improved over the years.The researchers have worked with domain registrars to seize the domains used by the attackers to control Infy-infected computers and to direct victims' traffic to a sinkhole server -- a server the researchers controlled.Control of the server was then transferred to the Shadowserver Foundation, an industry group that tracks botnets and works with ISPs and other parties to notify victims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers dismantle decade-long Iranian cyberespionage operation

The infrastructure used by an Iranian cyberespionage group to control infected computers around the world has been hijacked by security researchers.Researchers from Palo Alto Networks came across the group's activities earlier this year, but found evidence that it has been operating since at least 2007. Its main tool is a custom malware program dubbed Infy, which was repeatedly improved over the years.The researchers have worked with domain registrars to seize the domains used by the attackers to control Infy-infected computers and to direct victims' traffic to a sinkhole server -- a server the researchers controlled.Control of the server was then transferred to the Shadowserver Foundation, an industry group that tracks botnets and works with ISPs and other parties to notify victims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here