Alphabet looks to take on the iPhone with a Google branded smartphone

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone for the first time back in 2007, he boldly proclaimed that the device was a leapfrog product that would take competitors 5 years to catch up to. And, as it turns out, Jobs was right.With the release of the iPhone, many in the smarpthone market realized that they had to completely rethink the way they envisioned the smartphone experience. Specifically, Google (now Alphabet) completely retooled its Android mobile OS and, as Jobs predicted, Android began to give iOS a run for its money right around the 2012-2013 time frame.While the iPhone's chief competition these days comes from third-party manufacturers who make use of Android (Samsung, LG, HTC etc.), a recent report relays that Alphabet has plans to take on the iPhone directly with a Google branded phone of its own.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM just found a way to turn toxic old smartphones into medical-grade plastic

The technology industry's e-waste problem isn't expected to go away anytime soon, but IBM just made a discovery that could help. Researchers there have discovered a new recycling process that can turn the polycarbonates used to make smartphones and CDs into a nontoxic plastic that's safe and strong enough for medical use.Polycarbonates are found not just in smartphones and CDs but also LED screens, Blu-ray players, eyeglass lenses, kitchen utensils, and household storage gear. Unfortunately, they're known to leach BPA as they decompose over time, and there's considerable concern about the effects of that chemical on the brain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Novel Architectures on the Far Horizon for Weather Prediction

Weather modeling and forecasting centers are among some of the top users of supercomputing systems and are at the top of the list when it comes to areas that could benefit from exascale-class compute power.

However, for modeling centers, even those with the most powerful machines, there is a great deal of leg work on the code front in particular to scale to that potential. Still, many, including most recently the UK Met Office, have planted a stake in the ground for exascale—and they are looking beyond traditional architectures to meet the power and scalability demands they’ll be facing …

Novel Architectures on the Far Horizon for Weather Prediction was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Y Combinator wants to build a tech city, too

This whole “tech-companies-think-big-with-plans-to-build-entire-cities” thing is getting out of hand.Earlier this year, I reported on (OK, ridiculed) Google’s silliest moonshot, a plan by Google's parent company, Alphabet, to create Project Sidewalk, a city with hundreds of thousands of residents, intended to act as a proving ground for new technology. I asked “what could possibly go wrong” with a plan like that? I was thinking, well, just about everything.+ Also on Network World: Google’s biggest, craziest ‘moonshot’ yet+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Sway gets its first paid features

After a year on the market, Microsoft’s Sway presentation software has received features available to paying customers.Office 365 subscribers will be able to lock their Sway presentations with passwords, load them up with more multimedia content, and conceal the software they used to make them with an update that Microsoft announced Tuesday.That last feature will be an important change for users who don’t want to have a big banner at the end of their presentations saying they were made with Microsoft Sway. This change means that the presentation software will be more useful for creating shareable, public-facing documents that are either presented live or published to the web.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: How to be an open source good citizen

Let me start by saying that no company can truly “own” an open source project. When the decision is made to open source a project, it should be understood that the code truly is being “shared” with a larger community outside of your company’s walls. That community now “owns” the project. You may be part of it; you may even be its biggest contributor and its current custodian. But it is no longer yours, and with time, you may become a minority stakeholder. Even if you decide to discontinue using an open sourced project internally and no longer contribute to it, it does not mean that the project has come to an end. -The New Stack

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IDG Contributor Network: Did Europe just fix emergency cellular call location?

The biggest challenge cellular mobile phones introduce for 911 is location accuracy—especially during an emergency call. The problem is a global one, inherited with any wireless technology. Getting the location wrong directly impacts the level of safety provided to citizens, as routing the call to the most appropriate Public Safety Answer Position (PSAP) specifically relies on this critical piece of data.Can you find me now? Many of us don't stop and think how our mobile devices determine where we are on the planet, and most of us will assume GPS plays a significant role in providing that answer. While GPS remains an important piece of the location puzzle, quite often it is not the answer by itself. Fundamentally, there are three sources for location information used by cellular phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thousands of hacked CCTV devices used in DDoS attacks

Attackers have compromised more than 25,000 digital video recorders and CCTV cameras and are using them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.One such attack, recently observed by researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, targeted the website of one of the company's customers: a small bricks-and-mortar jewelry shop.The attack flooded the website with about 50,000 HTTP requests per second at its peak, targeting what specialists call the application layer, or layer 7. These attacks can easily cripple a small website because the infrastructure typically provisioned for such websites can handle only a few hundred or thousand connections at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thousands of hacked CCTV devices used in DDoS attacks

Attackers have compromised more than 25,000 digital video recorders and CCTV cameras and are using them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.One such attack, recently observed by researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, targeted the website of one of the company's customers: a small bricks-and-mortar jewelry shop.The attack flooded the website with about 50,000 HTTP requests per second at its peak, targeting what specialists call the application layer, or layer 7. These attacks can easily cripple a small website because the infrastructure typically provisioned for such websites can handle only a few hundred or thousand connections at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thousands of hacked CCTV devices used in DDoS attacks

Attackers have compromised more than 25,000 digital video recorders and CCTV cameras and are using them to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.One such attack, recently observed by researchers from Web security firm Sucuri, targeted the website of one of the company's customers: a small bricks-and-mortar jewelry shop.The attack flooded the website with about 50,000 HTTP requests per second at its peak, targeting what specialists call the application layer, or layer 7. These attacks can easily cripple a small website because the infrastructure typically provisioned for such websites can handle only a few hundred or thousand connections at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco reinforces cloud security technology with $293M CloudLock buy

Cisco today said it would make its fifth acquisition of the year by acquiring cyber security provider CloudLock for $293 million.The move should bolster Cisco’s overarching cloud security offerings and the CloudLock team will join Cisco’s Networking and Security Business Group under Senior Vice President and General Manager David Goeckeler, Cisco stated.+More on Network World: Cisco: IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte level in 2016+In a blog post announcing the deal, Cisco’s Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Business Development, said: “CloudLock specializes in Cloud Access Security Broker, or CASB, technology and helps organizations move faster to the cloud. CloudLock delivers cloud security to help track and manage user behavior and sensitive data in SaaS applications, such as Office365, Google Drive, and Salesforce. Enterprise IT can then enforce a granular security policy within these cloud applications. For example, CloudLock can help protect data and enforce access rules when an employee tries to access sensitive data stored in a SaaS application from an unprotected device, in a defined geography, at a specific time of the day – essentially, ‘security anywhere, anytime’ for content in the cloud. CloudLock extends these security controls to the IaaS and PaaS Continue reading

Cloud consortium says simpler EU electronic signature rules aren’t simple enough

European Union rules for electronic signatures change on Friday to make a clear distinction between the identity of the person signing, and that of the authority guaranteeing the integrity of the data, but the technology needs to be still simpler, vendors say.The new rules are intended to simplify the process of electronically signing contracts between businesses, or between businesses and persons, and across international borders where different and often incompatible electronic signature rules apply today.But while the new rules will simplify the legal environment, today's technical environment makes it too difficult to create and securely manage digital identities, according to the Cloud Signature Consortium.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

America’s data centers are getting a lot more efficient

U.S. data centers have used about the same amount of energy annually over the past five years or so, despite substantial growth in the sector, according to a new report published by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.In the Berkeley Lab’s previous analysis, which was presented to Congress in 2008, it was found that energy usage by data centers was quadrupling every decade – an unsurprising figure given the explosive overall growth in the sector. Data centers in the U.S. consumed 70 billion kilowatt-hours in 2014, the researchers estimated.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows 10’s biggest controversies + HPE's CTO is leaving amid more change at the companyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

America’s data centers are getting a lot more efficient

U.S. data centers have used about the same amount of energy annually over the past five years or so, despite substantial growth in the sector, according to a new report published by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.In the Berkeley Lab’s previous analysis, which was presented to Congress in 2008, it was found that energy usage by data centers was quadrupling every decade – an unsurprising figure given the explosive overall growth in the sector. Data centers in the U.S. consumed 70 billion kilowatt-hours in 2014, the researchers estimated.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows 10’s biggest controversies + HPE's CTO is leaving amid more change at the companyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT botnet: 25,513 CCTV cameras used in crushing DDoS attacks

Over 25,000 hacked internet-connected CCTV cameras are being used for a denial-of-service botnet, according to researchers from the security firm Sucuri.The discovery came after Sucuri mitigated a DDoS attack against a jewelry store site; it had been generating 35,000 HTTP requests per second. But after bringing the website back up, researchers said the attacks increased to nearly 50,000 HTTP requests per second. When the attack continued for days, the researchers discovered the attack botnet was leveraging only IoT CCTV devices, which were located across the globe.Although this is not the first CCTV-based DDoS botnet discovered (900 had been used in attacks last year), it is the largest yet to be discovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT botnet: 25,513 CCTV cameras used in crushing DDoS attacks

Over 25,000 hacked internet-connected CCTV cameras are being used for a denial-of-service botnet, according the researchers from the security firm Sucuri.The discovery came after Sucuri mitigated a DDoS attack against a jewelry store site; it had been generating 35,000 HTTP requests per second. But after bringing the website back up, researchers said the attacks increased to nearly 50,000 HTTP requests per second. When the attack continued for days, the researchers discovered the attack botnet was leveraging only IoT CCTV devices which were located across the globe.Although this is not the first CCTV-based DDoS botnet discovered, since 900 had been used in attacks last year, it is the largest yet to be discovered. “It is not new that attackers have been using IoT devices to start their DDoS campaigns,” Sucuri wrote, “however, we have not analyzed one that leveraged only CCTV devices and was still able to generate this quantity of requests for so long.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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