Review: The Starry Station Wi-Fi router sticks with simplicity (+video)

If you've reviewed tech products for as long as I have, you'll have learned that categories of products have archetypes. These days, for example, laptops are (for the most part) slim black boxes and monitors are thin glass rectangles. Mobile phones, which used to have clamshell designs, are now all metal (or metal-looking) slabs with a glass front. And home wireless routers tend to be small black boxes bristling with more antennas than an NSA surveillance van.The Starry Station wireless router breaks the mold. A white polycarbonate-over-metal triangular prism with a base measuring 7 x 3 in. and standing 6.25 in. high, it has a 3.8-in. LCD touchscreen you can use to see and control the device's operational status. The device retails for $350 (Amazon price - What's this?).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s pricey Surface Book is getting stomped by the ancient Surface Pro 3

Though deciding between the Surface Book and the Surface Pro 4 was an agonizing choice for PCWorld editors, customers apparently know what they want: The Surface Pro 3—yes, the older one.AdDuplex, a Windows-specific ad network which compiles data on Windows machines, estimates that an even third of all Surface users are using a Surface Pro 3, a convertible tablet Microsoft phased out when its successor, the Surface Pro 4, began shipping in late 2015. SP4 sales are closing fast, though: AdDuplex said they’re about 30.9 percent of all Surface tablets that it detected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Seagate targets storage for drones and robots

Seagate is targeting drones and robots as it looks to add its storage technologies to new devices. "There's a huge opportunity there," said Patrick Ferguson, a product manager at Seagate. "I'm really excited about it." Manufacturers make drones easy to fly, but storage isn't a heavy consideration, Ferguson said. Robots and drones generate a lot of data, but have limited internal storage to retain all that information. For example, drones with multiple cameras generate a lot of video, but just one CompactFlash or SD card to store all that data may not be enough. "In a 20 minute flight you're talking hundreds of gigabytes, not tens of gigabytes," Ferguson said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 ways to beef up your resume over the summer

In today's digital world, companies are struggling to find IT professionals with the cutting-edge skills they need to drive innovation and growth. If you're an IT professional looking to land a new role or a professional looking to make a career change, summer's the perfect time to brush up on new skills. And the availability and affordability of online learning has made it easier than ever to add critical hard and soft skills, even those from elite learning institutions like Harvard, MIT and Columbia University, says Anant Agarwal, CEO of online learning provider edX. "Talking to CIOs and hiring managers, we find that they're struggling to find talent with the needed skills to grow their business and remain competitive -- a prime example of this is in data science and analytics which, as a career, has only evolved in the last few years. Traditional educational institutions can't keep up with that," Agarwal says. If you're looking to beef up your IT resume, Agarwal suggests focusing on five areas: introduction to computer science; business and management including entrepreneurship; Java programming; data science and analytics; and agile software development. [ Related story: 10 top-ranked tech-focused MBA programs ] "These are a great Continue reading

Show 294: NETSAS Enigma Network Monitoring Solution (Sponsored)

Todays show is sponsored by NETSAS, maker of the Enigma Network Monitoring Solution. With a single license, Enigma gives you access to dozens of network, server, and application monitoring tools. The post Show 294: NETSAS Enigma Network Monitoring Solution (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Why the UK’s vote to leave the EU will have little effect on its data protection rules

With the haircut that the sterling-euro exchange rate has taken in the wake of the U.K.'s vote to leave the European Union, the U.K. has suddenly become a low-cost country for companies wishing to host or process the personal information of EU citizens.EU businesses will need to weigh that price cut against the regulatory uncertainty Thursday's vote introduced -- but it turns out that's surprisingly small, at least in the short to medium term.As for U.K. businesses hoping for more relaxed data protection rules in the wake of the referendum vote, they will have to wait -- perhaps for a very long while.That's because many of the rules that the 51.9 percent who voted to leave the EU hoped to escape are, in fact, firmly part of U.K. law, and will only go away if the U.K. parliament votes to repeal them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tempered Networks simplifies network security

I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that IT security has become exponentially more complex over the past five years. It seems every month there’s a new startup that solves a specific security issue but addresses only that one issue.This leads to an increasing number of security vendors causing security solution sprawl. A recent ZK Research survey revealed that large enterprises have an average of 32 security vendors deployed, which is a ridiculously high number. It’s hard enough to build a strategy around two to three vendors, but 32?One startup trying to simplify security is Tempered Networks. I recently spoke with Marc Kaplan, vice president of security architecture for the company, about how Tempered Networks makes network security simpler. Below is our conversation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tempered Networks simplifies network security

I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that IT security has become exponentially more complex over the past five years. It seems every month there’s a new startup that solves a specific security issue but addresses only that one issue.This leads to an increasing number of security vendors causing security solution sprawl. A recent ZK Research survey revealed that large enterprises have an average of 32 security vendors deployed, which is a ridiculously high number. It’s hard enough to build a strategy around two to three vendors, but 32?One startup trying to simplify security is Tempered Networks. I recently spoke with Marc Kaplan, vice president of security architecture for the company, about how Tempered Networks makes network security simpler. Below is our conversation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How SD-WAN Supports Videoconferencing

Build Your Own Service Provider Gear on Software Gone Wild

A few days after I published a blog post arguing that most service providers cannot possibly copy Google’s ideas Giacomo Bernardi wrote a comment saying “well, we managed to build our own gear.”

Initially I thought they built their own Linux distribution on top of x86 server, but what Giacomo Bernardi described in Episode 59 of Software Gone Wild goes way beyond that:

U.S. court rules that FBI can hack into a computer without a warrant

A U.S. court has ruled that the FBI can hack into a computer without a warrant -- a move which is troubling privacy advocates.The criminal case involves a child pornography site, Playpen, that had been accessible through Tor, a browser designed for anonymous web surfing.The FBI, however, managed to take over the site in 2014, and then tracked down and arrested its members by hacking their computers. This allowed law enforcement to secretly collect their IP addresses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US court rules that FBI can hack into a computer without a warrant

A U.S. court has ruled that the FBI can hack into a computer without a warrant -- a move which is troubling privacy advocates. The criminal case involves a child pornography site, Playpen, that had been accessible through Tor, a browser designed for anonymous web surfing. The FBI, however, managed to take over the site in 2014, and then tracked down and arrested its members by hacking their computers. This allowed law enforcement to secretly collect their IP addresses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US court rules that FBI can hack into a computer without a warrant

A U.S. court has ruled that the FBI can hack into a computer without a warrant -- a move which is troubling privacy advocates. The criminal case involves a child pornography site, Playpen, that had been accessible through Tor, a browser designed for anonymous web surfing. The FBI, however, managed to take over the site in 2014, and then tracked down and arrested its members by hacking their computers. This allowed law enforcement to secretly collect their IP addresses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista Infringes Cisco Patents, Says Trade Commission

Arista infringes on Cisco networking patents, trade agency says

In a move that could lead to a ban on selling its products in the United States, the US International Trade Commission has ruled that Arista does in fact infringe on a number of Cisco’s technology patents.Arista now must decide if it wants to ask the US government to overturn a so-called “import ban” or ask that an appeals court toss the decision, observers say. It could also decide to build products in the US – a move that Cisco says would “not only would violate the ITC orders, but the federal court has the authority to enjoin local manufacturing of infringing products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista infringes on Cisco networking patents, trade agency says

In a move that could lead to a ban on selling its products in the United States, the US International Trade Commission has ruled that Arista does in fact infringe on a number of Cisco’s technology patents.Arista now must decide if it wants to ask the US government to overturn a so-called “import ban” or ask that an appeals court toss the decision, observers say. It could also decide to build products in the US – a move that Cisco says would “not only would violate the ITC orders, but the federal court has the authority to enjoin local manufacturing of infringing products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista infringes on Cisco networking patents, trade agency says

In a move that could lead to a ban on selling its products in the United States, the US International Trade Commission has ruled that Arista does in fact infringe on a number of Cisco’s technology patents.Arista now must decide if it wants to ask the US government to overturn the so-called “import ban” or ask that an appeals court toss the decision, observers say. It could also decide to build products in the US – a move that Cisco says would “not only would violate the ITC orders, but the federal court has the authority to enjoin local manufacturing of infringing products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista infringes on Cisco networking patents, trade agency says

In a move that could lead to a ban on selling its products in the United States, the US International Trade Commission has ruled that Arista does in fact infringe on a number of Cisco’s technology patents.Arista now must decide if it wants to ask the US government to overturn the so-called “import ban” or ask that an appeals court toss the decision, observers say. It could also decide to build products in the US – a move that Cisco says would “not only would violate the ITC orders, but the federal court has the authority to enjoin local manufacturing of infringing products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA is looking to make huge strides in machine learning

The U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm is offering to fund projects that will simplify the massively complex task of building models for machine learning applications.Models are a fundamental part of machine learning. Similar to algorithms, they help teach computers to, say, identify a cat in a photo, forecast weather from historical data or sort spam from legitimate email.But writing the models takes time and requires many skills. Typically, data scientists, subject matter experts and software engineers all have to come together to develop the model.When New York University researchers wanted to model block-by-block traffic flow data for the city, it took 60 person-months of work by data scientists to prepare the data for use and an additional 30 person-months to develop the model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slideshow: Check out the sensors that make IoT click

Slideshow: Check out the sensors that make IoT clickImage by Stephen LawsonSensors are at the heart of the Internet of Things, collecting the data that powers wearables and smart cities alike. This week in San Jose, makers of sensors and related gear gathered for the Sensors Expo & Conference. Here's a look at some of these components.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here