Microsoft touts data harvesting tool as aid to enterprises upgrading to Windows 10

Microsoft will preview a new service today that lets enterprises mine data that Windows collects, including software usage statistics, to accelerate adoption of Windows 10.The service, called Upgrade Analytics, was announced Tuesday by Marc-Andrea Klimaschewski, a company program manager, in a brief post to a company blog. He said that it would launch as a public preview Friday.Klimaschewski characterized the service as a tool that businesses can use to determine whether PCs -- in general or individually -- were eligible for upgrading to Windows 10. Upgrade Analytics, Klimaschewski wrote, "Provide[s] customers with insights which allow them to quickly evaluate application and driver readiness and mitigate potential problems."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This Tinder scam promises to verify your account, but actually sells porn

Tinder users beware. The popular dating app generally doesn’t verify most user accounts, but that hasn’t stopped spammers from pretending to offer the service.In recent weeks, automated bots masquerading as Tinder profiles have been telling real users to get “verified,” as part of a clever scam to sell them porn, security firm Symantec said on Thursday.The spam bots first send off flirty messages, like “Wanna eat cookie dough together some time?” only to then ask whether Tinder has verified the user.It’s a free service, the spam bot will claim, and done “to verify the person you wanna meet isn’t a serial killer lol.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

This Tinder scam promises to verify your account, but actually sells porn

Tinder users beware. The popular dating app generally doesn’t verify most user accounts, but that hasn’t stopped spammers from pretending to offer the service.In recent weeks, automated bots masquerading as Tinder profiles have been telling real users to get “verified,” as part of a clever scam to sell them porn, security firm Symantec said on Thursday.The spam bots first send off flirty messages, like “Wanna eat cookie dough together some time?” only to then ask whether Tinder has verified the user.It’s a free service, the spam bot will claim, and done “to verify the person you wanna meet isn’t a serial killer lol.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU dual-use tech ban plan could classify smartphones as weapons

European Union plans to extend export controls on so-called "dual-use" technologies to include cyber-surveillance tools could put the brakes on sales of smartphones.Dual-use technologies are those that can serve civil or military purposes, and some countries impose restrictions on their sale because of fears that they could be used to abuse human rights in the destination country. A draft of new EU export regulations could put smartphones in that category because of their location-tracking capabilities.The potential for some technologies to be misused has been a concern in the EU since documents leaked following a compromise of Italian company Hacking Team revealed that it had sold its cyber-surveillance tools to repressive regimes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gaming desktops with AMD Zen chips will be hard to come by this year

If you're expecting widespread availability of gaming desktops with AMD's Zen chips by year-end, don't hold your breath.It's been a long wait for Zen since it was first announced in mid-2015. It's shaping up to be the best CPU from the company in more than a decade, and the AMD faithful are hungry to get their hands on a desktop with the chip.High-end desktops with Zen will be available, but in "limited volume towards the end of the fourth quarter," said Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, during an earnings call Thursday. The number of available Zen-based desktops will depend on how testing of the chips goes and how ready PC makers are to ship the machines, Su noted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The CIA, NSA and Pokémon Go

With Pokémon Go currently enjoying, what I would call, a wee-bit-o-success, now seems like a good time to talk about a few things people may not know about the world's favorite new smartphone game.This is not an opinion piece. I am not going to tell you Pokémon Go is bad or that it invades your privacy. I’m merely presenting verifiable facts about the biggest, most talked about game out there.+ Also on Network World: The Pokémon Go effect on the network +Let’s start with a little history.Way back in 2001, Keyhole, Inc. was founded by John Hanke (who previously worked in a “foreign affairs” position within the U.S. government). The company was named after the old “eye-in-the-sky” military satellites. One of the key, early backers of Keyhole was a firm called In-Q-Tel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 22nd, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


It's not too late London. There's still time to make this happen. 

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.
  • 40%: energy Google saves in datacenters using machine learning; 2.3: times more energy knights in armor spend than when walking; 1000x: energy efficiency of 3D carbon nanotubes over silicon chips; 176,000: searchable documents from the Founding Fathers of the US; 93 petaflops: China’s Sunway TaihuLight; $800m: Azure's quarterly revenue; 500 Terabits per square inch: density when storing a bit with an atom; 2 billion: Uber rides; 46 months: jail time for accessing a database; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Lenin: There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
    • Nitsan Wakart: I have it from reliable sources that incorrectly measuring latency can lead to losing ones job, loved ones, will to live and control of bowel movements.
    • Margaret Hamilton~ part of the culture on the Apollo program “was to learn from everyone and everything, including from that which one would least expect.”
    • @DShankar: Basically @elonmusk plans to compete with -all vehicle manufacturers (cars/trucks/buses) -all ridesharing companies -all Continue reading

A hackable election: 5 things you need to know about e-voting machines

As the U.S. heads toward an especially contentious national election in November, 15 states are still clinging to outdated electronic voting machines that don't support paper printouts used to audit their internal vote counts. E-voting machines without attached printers are still being used in a handful of presidential swing states, leading some voting security advocates to worry about the potential of a hacked election. Some makers of e-voting machines, often called direct-recording electronic machines or DREs, are now focusing on other sorts of voting technology, including optical scanners. They seem reluctant to talk about DREs; three major DRE vendors didn't respond to questions about security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A hackable election: 5 things you need to know about e-voting machines

As the U.S. heads toward an especially contentious national election in November, 15 states are still clinging to outdated electronic voting machines that don't support paper printouts used to audit their internal vote counts. E-voting machines without attached printers are still being used in a handful of presidential swing states, leading some voting security advocates to worry about the potential of a hacked election. Some makers of e-voting machines, often called direct-recording electronic machines or DREs, are now focusing on other sorts of voting technology, including optical scanners. They seem reluctant to talk about DREs; three major DRE vendors didn't respond to questions about security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Are ARM Virtualization Woes Overstated?

As we have seen with gathering force, ARM is making a solid bid for datacenters of the future. However, a key feature of many serer farms that will be looking exploit the energy efficiency benefits of 64-bit ARM is the ability to maintain performance in a virtualized environment.

Neither X86 or ARM were built with virtualization in mind, which meant an uphill battle for Intel to build hardware support for hypervisors into its chips. VMware led the charge here beginning in the late 1990s, and over time, Intel made it its business to ensure an ability to support several different …

Are ARM Virtualization Woes Overstated? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Cybersecurity: A vertical industry application?

Cybersecurity has always been a horizontal technology practice that’s roughly the same across all industry sectors. Yes, some industries have different regulations, use cases or business processes that demand specific security controls, but overall every company needs things like firewalls, IDS/IPS, threat management gateways and antivirus software regardless.Generic security requirements will remain forever, but I see a burgeoning trend transforming cybersecurity from a set of horizontal technologies to a vertical industry application. These drivers include: Increasing business focus on cybersecurity. While it sounds like industry hype, cybersecurity has actually become a boardroom issue and corporate boards understand industry-specific risks much better than technology gibberish about malware and exploits. To accommodate these corporate executives, CISOs will need communications skills, as well as tools and technologies that help translate cybersecurity data into meaningful industry and corporate risk intelligence that can drive investment and decision making. Security intelligence vendors like BitSight and SecurityScorecard are already exploiting this need, offering industry-centric cybersecurity metrics for business use. CISO progression. The present generation of CISOs grew up through the ranks of IT and security with career development responsibilities such as network operations and firewall administration. Yes, the next generation of CISOs will still need some Continue reading

Cybersecurity: A vertical industry application?

Cybersecurity has always been a horizontal technology practice that’s roughly the same across all industry sectors. Yes, some industries have different regulations, use cases or business processes that demand specific security controls, but overall every company needs things like firewalls, IDS/IPS, threat management gateways and antivirus software regardless.Generic security requirements will remain forever, but I see a burgeoning trend transforming cybersecurity from a set of horizontal technologies to a vertical industry application. These drivers include: Increasing business focus on cybersecurity. While it sounds like industry hype, cybersecurity has actually become a boardroom issue and corporate boards understand industry-specific risks much better than technology gibberish about malware and exploits. To accommodate these corporate executives, CISOs will need communications skills, as well as tools and technologies that help translate cybersecurity data into meaningful industry and corporate risk intelligence that can drive investment and decision making. Security intelligence vendors like BitSight and SecurityScorecard are already exploiting this need, offering industry-centric cybersecurity metrics for business use. CISO progression. The present generation of CISOs grew up through the ranks of IT and security with career development responsibilities such as network operations and firewall administration. Yes, the next generation of CISOs will still need some Continue reading

Worth Reading: Microsoft’s Bid for LinkedIn

It’s time for all organizations and their investors to realize that the tools that they provide to customers — products such as cars, telephones, health-care, or finance — and to their employees in the form of benefits, training, software, and the like — need to be combined with the network to which that group belongs. —MarketWatch

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The post Worth Reading: Microsoft’s Bid for LinkedIn appeared first on 'net work.

Sift Security helps SecOps teams analyze and visualize patterns of threats and speed up investigations  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.   There's a powerful new generation of security operations (SecOps) tools coming to market designed to help SecOps teams find and react to threats much quicker than before. The best of these tools also enable security analysts to proactively hunt for threats that might be present in their enterprise environment. These tools bring data together from disparate sources and begin to connect the dots so analysts can dive right into the investigation without having to search for relevant data points. The products tend to eliminate the manual work of sifting through logs, finding all the relevant data, and trying to find correlations among the events.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sift Security helps SecOps teams analyze and visualize patterns of threats and speed up investigations  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.   There's a powerful new generation of security operations (SecOps) tools coming to market designed to help SecOps teams find and react to threats much quicker than before. The best of these tools also enable security analysts to proactively hunt for threats that might be present in their enterprise environment. These tools bring data together from disparate sources and begin to connect the dots so analysts can dive right into the investigation without having to search for relevant data points. The products tend to eliminate the manual work of sifting through logs, finding all the relevant data, and trying to find correlations among the events.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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