Companies pay out billions to fake-CEO email scams

Email scammers, often pretending to be CEOs, have duped businesses into giving away at least $3.1 billion, according to new data from the FBI.The email schemes, which trick companies into wiring funds to the hacker, continue to bedevil companies across the world, the FBI warned in a posting on Tuesday.The amount of money they've tried to steal has grown by 1,300 percent since January 2015, it said.In the U.S. alone, victims have lost $960 million to the schemes over approximately the past three years, FBI figures show. That figure reaches $3.1 billion when global data from international law enforcement and financial groups is included. The number of victims: 22,143.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Companies pay out billions to fake-CEO email scams

Email scammers, often pretending to be CEOs, have duped businesses into giving away at least $3.1 billion, according to new data from the FBI.The email schemes, which trick companies into wiring funds to the hacker, continue to bedevil companies across the world, the FBI warned in a posting on Tuesday.The amount of money they've tried to steal has grown by 1,300 percent since January 2015, it said.In the U.S. alone, victims have lost $960 million to the schemes over approximately the past three years, FBI figures show. That figure reaches $3.1 billion when global data from international law enforcement and financial groups is included. The number of victims: 22,143.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech culture still pushing out women, study finds

Social dynamics and “culture fit” are a big reason that female engineers tend to stay in the profession at a lower rate than their male counterparts, according to a study released today by authors at MIT, University of California – Irvine, Michigan, and McGill.The research was conducted by having more than 40 undergraduate engineering students keep bi-monthly diaries, providing the study with more than 3,000 entries to analyze.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Chef’s open source tool lets applications automate infrastructure provisioning + This startup may have built the world's fastest networking switch chipTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

34% off Jabra Freeway Bluetooth Car Speakerphone – Deal Alert

The Freeway speakerphone from Jabra is designed for the car, clipping neatly to your sun visor. It has 3 built-in speakers and virtual surround sound technology to deliver rich crisp sound while driving, and Blackout extreme noise reduction ensures your callers will hear clearly as well. You can use your voice to make and take calls, and the speaker can also be used to stream music or podcasts from your Bluetooth-enabled device. The Freeway even announces the name of the incoming caller. Battery life is 14 hours in-use and up to 40 days standby. It currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,600 customers (read reviews) and with the current 34% discount, its typical list price of $82.97 has been reduced to $54.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Use Office 365 or Outlook.com? X.ai’s ‘Amy’ bot is ready to assist

Ever since its beta launch two years ago, x.ai's "Amy Ingram" virtual assistant has been scheduling meetings through Google Calendar. Now, the bot -- along with her gender opposite, Andrew Ingram -- can work with Office 365 and Outlook.com, bringing the promise of automated scheduling to a vastly broader audience.“We knew from the start that enabling Amy and Andrew to work across the Outlook.com and Office 365 calendars would be one of the first things we did once we had trained the machine to schedule meetings nearly autonomously,” said Dennis Mortensen, x.ai's founder and CEO.The wider reach means x.ai can now target its beta service at a potential 90 million U.S. knowledge workers, the company reckons, who schedule roughly 10 billion meetings a year. The technology is due out of beta this fall. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quick look: Cisco Tetration Analytics

Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quick look: Cisco Tetration Analytics

Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quick look: Cisco Tetration Analytics

Deeper understandingTetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. The system promises to give IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources as well as simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security montoring. (Read the full story to Cisco's new platform.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Apple’s Photos announcement should offend you

The new Apple Photos now labels photos based on facial recognition and content such as landscapes and objects so that users can search and sort photos. Apple copied what Google announced last year. This is good news for Apple users. No one wants to deny iPhone users a better experience organizing their photos. But any of them with a lick of sense about scientific research should also be offended.Apple stood on the shoulders of giants to produce Photos. Photo labeling isn’t new. It was one of the first areas of machine learning research to be tackled by machine learning researchers after character recognition. Almost all the software or concepts used to do this could be open source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT worker at Panama Papers firm arrested in Geneva

An IT worker at Mossak Fonseca, the company at the heart of the "Panama Papers" leak, was arrested Wednesday in Geneva.The arrest was made as part of the investigation into the leak, which saw 11.5 million documents from the law firm leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.The documents detailed thousands of offshore companies set up by Mossak Fonseca on behalf of rich clients, sometimes for the purpose of tax avoidance.The identity of the worker has not been released, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter who led a year-long investigation into the documents said he did not believe the arrested worker was his source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT worker at Panama Papers firm arrested in Geneva

An IT worker at Mossak Fonseca, the company at the heart of the "Panama Papers" leak, was arrested Wednesday in Geneva.The arrest was made as part of the investigation into the leak, which saw 11.5 million documents from the law firm leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.The documents detailed thousands of offshore companies set up by Mossak Fonseca on behalf of rich clients, sometimes for the purpose of tax avoidance.The identity of the worker has not been released, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter who led a year-long investigation into the documents said he did not believe the arrested worker was his source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco platform lets IT rein-in disruptive data center operations, security, applications

Two years in the making, Cisco today rolled out a turnkey, full-rack appliance that promises to do just about everything it takes to control a data center -- from easing IT operations and controlling security to application monitoring.The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring, said Yogesh Kaushik, Cisco senior director of product management, Tetration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco platform lets IT rein-in disruptive data center operations, security, applications

Two years in the making, Cisco today rolled out a turnkey, full-rack appliance that promises to do just about everything it takes to control a data center -- from easing IT operations and controlling security to application monitoring.The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring, said Yogesh Kaushik, Cisco senior director of product management, Tetration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco platform lets IT rein-in disruptive data center operations, security, applications

Two years in the making, Cisco today rolled out a turnkey, full-rack appliance that promises to do just about everything it takes to control a data center -- from easing IT operations and controlling security to application monitoring.The platform, Cisco Tetration Analytics gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The system will dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring, said Yogesh Kaushik, Cisco senior director of product management, Tetration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Huge FBI facial recognition database falls short on privacy and accuracy, auditor says

The FBI has fallen short on assessing the privacy risks and accuracy of a huge facial recognition database used by several law enforcement agencies, a government auditor has said.A new report, released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office Wednesday, shows the FBI's use of facial recognition technology is "far greater" than previously understood, said Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who requested the GAO report.The FBI's Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS), which allows law enforcement agencies to search a database of more than 30 million photos of 16.9 million people, raises serious privacy concerns, Franken added in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Huge FBI facial recognition database falls short on privacy and accuracy, auditor says

The FBI has fallen short on assessing the privacy risks and accuracy of a huge facial recognition database used by several law enforcement agencies, a government auditor has said.A new report, released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office Wednesday, shows the FBI's use of facial recognition technology is "far greater" than previously understood, said Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who requested the GAO report.The FBI's Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS), which allows law enforcement agencies to search a database of more than 30 million photos of 16.9 million people, raises serious privacy concerns, Franken added in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Programmable hardware: Barefoot Networks, PISA, and P4

Barefoot Networks recently came out of stealth to reveal their  Tofino 6.5Tbit/second (65 X 100GE or 260 X 25GE) fully user-programmable switch. The diagram above, from the talk Programming The Network Data Plane by Changhoon Kim of Barefoot Networks, shows the Protocol Independent Switch Architecture (PISA) of the programmable switch silicon.
A logical switch data-plane described in the P4 language is compiled to program the general purpose PISA hardware. For example, the following P4 code snippet is part of a P4 sFlow implementation:
table sflow_ing_take_sample {
/* take_sample > MAX_VAL_31 and valid sflow_session_id => take the sample */
reads {
ingress_metadata.sflow_take_sample : ternary;
sflow_metadata.sflow_session_id : exact;
}
actions {
nop;
sflow_ing_pkt_to_cpu;
}
}
Network visibility is one of the major use cases for P4 based switches. Improving Network Monitoring and Management with Programmable Data Planes describes how P4 can be used to collect information about latency and queueing in the switch forwarding pipeline.
The document also describes an architecture for In-band Network Telemetry (INT) in which the ingress switch is programmed to insert a header containing measurements to packets entering the network. Each switch in the path is programmed to append additional measurements to the packet header. The Continue reading