Microsoft bought LinkedIn for your relationship data

If you think of LinkedIn as a social network or an online recruitment service, then you may well be scratching your head about why Microsoft would spend more on it than it has on any other acquisition. But consider that Microsoft has a graph that covers how you’re connected to people by email, documents, messages, meetings and address books, while LinkedIn has a graph that covers jobs, skills, colleagues, and professional connections. That’s two separate sets of information that would be much more useful together.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has already talked about how the Microsoft Graph and the Office Graph are some of the company’s most valuable assets. Think about what you could get by combining those with the graph that represents the professional networks of your employees and partners and adding machine learning that can pick out who and what is actually relevant to you in the sea of all the people and resources you’re connected to.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Sapho wants to resolve that enterprise mobile app barrier

No one argues against the contention that enterprises and, more importantly, their stakeholders (both internal and external) are increasingly demanding access to core systems on a remote/mobile basis. Still, there is much debate about the best way to actually deliver that mobile access.Several schools of thought exist. First, we have the revolutionaries who suggest that existing applications are fundamentally flawed, inflexible and large, meaning they're unable to deliver what enterprise customers need. Proponents of this perspective say enterprises should pretty much take an entirely new look at how they work from a technology paradigm. These organizations take a Netflix-like approach to the problem space, deciding to re-architect from the ground up to meet their needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco unearths its inner startup culture via companywide innovation contest

For a giant 30-plus-year-old company, Cisco has a reputation for keeping things fresh via spin-ins, buyouts and venture investments. But late last year, the vendor launched the Innovate Everywhere Challenge just to make sure it wasn’t overlooking any great new ideas among its 74,000 employees. “We have phenomenal innovation programs for engineers, IT people, marketing people and sales, but what we’ve never really done is mix them up across functions and geographies,” says Cisco Director of Innovation Strategy & Programs Alex Goryachev, who counts Napster, Liquid Audio, IBM and Pfizer among his previous employers. “If you think about a true startup you have to have a great engineer, a great marketing/PR person, a business person, a finance person and a product person.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco unearths its inner startup culture via companywide innovation contest

For a giant 30-plus-year-old company, Cisco has a reputation for keeping things fresh via spin-ins, buyouts and venture investments. But late last year, the vendor launched the Innovate Everywhere Challenge just to make sure it wasn’t overlooking any great new ideas among its 74,000 employees. “We have phenomenal innovation programs for engineers, IT people, marketing people and sales, but what we’ve never really done is mix them up across functions and geographies,” says Cisco Director of Innovation Strategy & Programs Alex Goryachev, who counts Napster, Liquid Audio, IBM and Pfizer among his previous employers. “If you think about a true startup you have to have a great engineer, a great marketing/PR person, a business person, a finance person and a product person.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Virtual reality no longer just a hobby for these Cisco employees

It might surprise you that Cisco, one of the more acquisitive network companies around, hasn’t yet joined the fray of multi-million and multi-billion dollar virtual and augmented reality acquisitions and investments. Then again, Cisco now can look internally for a growing amount expertise in that field. Cisco’s recently completed Innovation Everywhere Challenge surfaced the Enterprise Virtual and Augmented Reality (EVAR) team, an ad hoc group with user experience, IT engineering and system analysis chops that was among the Challenge’s three $50K winners. And yes, the team incorporated virtual reality into its live pitch at the competition finals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco unearths its inner startup culture via companywide innovation contest

For a giant 30-plus-year-old company, Cisco has a reputation for keeping things fresh via spin-ins, buyouts and venture investments. But late last year, the vendor launched the Innovate Everywhere Challenge just to make sure it wasn’t overlooking any great new ideas among its 74,000 employees. “We have phenomenal innovation programs for engineers, IT people, marketing people and sales, but what we’ve never really done is mix them up across functions and geographies,” says Cisco Director of Innovation Strategy & Programs Alex Goryachev, who counts Napster, Liquid Audio, IBM and Pfizer among his previous employers. “If you think about a true startup you have to have a great engineer, a great marketing/PR person, a business person, a finance person and a product person.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Know Your Virtual Workloads: Data Location & A Holistic View

Cost of a data breach: $4 million. Benefits of responding quickly: Priceless.

The bad news is that data breaches are becoming ever more common. The worse news is that the cost they represent for companies is going through the roof.Those are two conclusions from a study released Wednesday by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute, which found that the average cost of a data breach has grown to US $4 million. That's a hefty jump compared with last year's $3.79 million, and it represents an increase of almost 30 percent since 2013."Data breaches are now a consistent 'cost of doing business' in the cybercrime era," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm focused on security. "The evidence shows that this is a permanent cost organizations need to be prepared to deal with and incorporate in their data protection strategies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cost of a data breach: $4 million. Benefits of responding quickly: Priceless.

The bad news is that data breaches are becoming ever more common. The worse news is that the cost they represent for companies is going through the roof.Those are two conclusions from a study released Wednesday by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute, which found that the average cost of a data breach has grown to US $4 million. That's a hefty jump compared with last year's $3.79 million, and it represents an increase of almost 30 percent since 2013."Data breaches are now a consistent 'cost of doing business' in the cybercrime era," said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research firm focused on security. "The evidence shows that this is a permanent cost organizations need to be prepared to deal with and incorporate in their data protection strategies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flash Player zero-day exploit is being used in the wild by a cyberespionage group

Adobe Systems warned users Tuesday that an unpatched Flash Player vulnerability is currently being exploited in targeted attacks. The company expects to deliver a patch as soon as Thursday. The exploit was discovered by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab in attacks attributed to a cyberespionage group known in the security industry as ScarCruft. The group is relatively new, but is apparently quite resourceful, as this is possibly the second zero-day -- previously unknown and unpatched -- exploit that it used this year. The other exploit targeted a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was tracked as CVE-2016-0147 and was patched by Microsoft in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flash Player zero-day exploit is being used in the wild by a cyberespionage group

Adobe Systems warned users Tuesday that an unpatched Flash Player vulnerability is currently being exploited in targeted attacks. The company expects to deliver a patch as soon as Thursday. The exploit was discovered by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab in attacks attributed to a cyberespionage group known in the security industry as ScarCruft. The group is relatively new, but is apparently quite resourceful, as this is possibly the second zero-day -- previously unknown and unpatched -- exploit that it used this year. The other exploit targeted a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services that was tracked as CVE-2016-0147 and was patched by Microsoft in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Directed ARP and ICMP Redirects

One of my readers sent me this question:

When I did my ***redacted*** I encountered a question about Directed ARP. The RFC (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1433) is in the "experimental" stage, and I found it really weird from ***** to include such a hidden gem in the ***redacted***.

Directed ARP is clearly one of those weird things that people were trying out in the early days of networking when packet forwarding and bandwidth were still expensive (read the RFC for more details), but I kept wondering “what exactly is going on when a host receives an ICMP redirect?” Time for a hands-on test.

Safari 10 to turn off Flash by default

Apple's Safari is driving another nail in the coffin of Adobe Flash by no longer telling websites that offer both Flash and HTML5 that the plug-in is installed on users' Macs.The Mac maker is planning similar measures with other plug-ins like Java, Silverlight and QuickTime. This move will force websites with both plug-in and HTML5-based media implementations to use their HTML5, it said.When Safari 10, the new version of its browser,  ships this fall, it will by default behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed, wrote Apple software engineer Ricky Mondello in a post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Safari 10 to turn off Flash by default

Apple's Safari is driving another nail in the coffin of Adobe Flash by no longer telling websites that offer both Flash and HTML5 that the plug-in is installed on users' Macs. The Mac maker is planning similar measures with other plug-ins like Java, Silverlight and QuickTime. This move will force websites with both plug-in and HTML5-based media implementations to use their HTML5, it said. When Safari 10, the new version of its browser,  ships this fall, it will by default behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed, wrote Apple software engineer Ricky Mondello in a post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US company’s China employee allegedly stole code to help local government

The U.S. has charged a Chinese national, Xu Jiaqiang, with economic espionage and theft of the source code of a clustered file system belonging to his former U.S. employer, which he is alleged to have stolen for his own benefit and that of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in China.The charges against Xu highlight the intellectual property risks faced in other countries by development operations of U.S. companies, particularly in those countries the U.S. suspects could be involved in economic espionage.Xu, who was initially arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in December and was charged with one count of theft of trade secrets, is scheduled to be arraigned on a superseding indictment of charges of economic espionage on Thursday in a federal court in New York, the Department of Justice said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US company’s China employee allegedly stole code to help local government

The U.S. has charged a Chinese national, Xu Jiaqiang, with economic espionage and theft of the source code of a clustered file system belonging to his former U.S. employer, which he is alleged to have stolen for his own benefit and that of the National Health and Family Planning Commission in China.The charges against Xu highlight the intellectual property risks faced in other countries by development operations of U.S. companies, particularly in those countries the U.S. suspects could be involved in economic espionage.Xu, who was initially arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in December and was charged with one count of theft of trade secrets, is scheduled to be arraigned on a superseding indictment of charges of economic espionage on Thursday in a federal court in New York, the Department of Justice said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Major Windows 10 update nears as Microsoft stops adding features

Microsoft is hurtling towards the consumer release of its big Windows 10 Anniversary Update with the latest beta build for its operating system that launched on Tuesday. The launch of build 14366 signals a temporary end to Microsoft releasing new features for Windows 10, according to a blog post by Dona Sarkar, the voice of the Windows Insider Program. The focus of this update is on a "Bug Bash" event this week that's supposed to help beta testers find bugs so Microsoft can fix them before broadly releasing its big Anniversary Update. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The future of Office may lie in ‘decomposable’ documents

Microsoft wants you to spend less time thinking about Office and more time getting things done.An executive who helped design one of Office's most iconic features outlined a plan for its future on Tuesday, one that calls for smarter software assisted by AI and "decomposable" documents that are easier to find."No one wants to necessarily learn about the ins and outs of the tool; they have something that they're trying to get done," said Julie Larson-Green, chief experience officer for Microsoft Office, when asked about the future of the software at a Bloomberg conference.Microsoft has already added AI-powered features to the latest versions of Office that help people find functions they're looking for, and more AI is coming. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi maker gets bought for $867 million

A key manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi is being acquired for US$867 million, but the foundation that develops the ultra-cheap computers says it hopes that business will continue as usual.Premier Farnell of the U.K. has manufactured the Raspberry Pi under contract to the Raspberry Pi Foundation since the product first shipped about four years ago. The boards start for as low as $5, and more than 8 million have been sold. They're particularly popular among hobbyists, who use them to build cheap gaming consoles, laptops and smart glasses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi maker gets bought for $867 million

A key manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi is being acquired for $867 million, but the foundation that develops the ultra-cheap computers says it hopes that business will continue as usual.Premier Farnell of the U.K. has manufactured the Raspberry Pi under contract to the Raspberry Pi Foundation since the product first shipped about four years ago. The boards start for as low as $5, and more than 8 million have been sold. They're particularly popular among hobbyists, who use them to build cheap gaming consoles, laptops and smart glasses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here