US Courts wiretap report: Smartphones impact, encryption confounds

After dropping slightly in the previous year, the number of federal and state wiretaps increased nearly 17% in 2105 over 2014, according to an annual report submitted to Congress by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. +More on Network World: NASA’s hot Juno Jupiter mission+ A total of 4,148 wiretaps were reported in 2015 versus 3,554 the previous year. Of those, 1,403 were authorized by federal judges, 10% more than in 2014, and 2,745 were authorized by state judges, an increase of 21%.   The report said 4,448 persons had been arrested in wiretap investigations, a 26% increase from 2014. The number of convictions rose 7%, to 590. Federal wiretaps were responsible for 29 %of the arrests, and 19 % of the convictions, according to the report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft ends its deceptive Windows 10 upgrades

After spending the better part of a year aggressively pushing consumers to upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft is finally taking a step back with the acknowledgment it went too far.Customers have endured unwanted downloading of the software onto their PC without being told, then unwanted upgrades. And finally, the Get Windows 10 (GWX) application was changed so if you clicked the red “X” at the corner of the window thinking it would opt out, Microsoft treated this click as a confirmation of a scheduled update.The outcry has been very loud, and it recently cost Microsoft $10,000 in the form of a court loss over one small business user's forced upgrade that left her work PC unusable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Launch

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CIOs combat messaging overload with mobile ‘micro apps’

Thanks to cloud and mobile applications, companies have eliminated tedious paper shuffling but this has created a new problem -- application fatigue. Enterprise software is cramming email inboxes with messages prompting workers to manage expense reports, purchase orders and other business processes. The very software designed to enhance your productivity is taking more of your time than was originally intended.The situation is especially challenging for managers who oversee hundreds or even thousands of workers. On a typical work day, VMware CIO Bask Iyer approves salary increases in Workday and IT requests in ServiceNow, signs off on procurement requests in Coupa and expenses in Concur. The demand on Iyer’s attention makes him feel like a clerk and has him longing for the days of signing paper approvals by hand. “It’s become so tedious that what we did 20 years ago was more efficient,” Iyer tells CIO.com.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Critics denounce Windows 10 upgrade changes as PR ploy

Commenters have scoffed at Microsoft's backtracking from a widely-criticized practice to trick users into upgrading to Windows 10, arguing that it was nothing more than a public relations ploy employed when the free upgrade was just weeks from expiring."People have been complaining about GWX [Get Windows 10] since last October. To finally admit there's a problem 1 month before the end of the promotion (and it'll be another week before everyone has this update) is really sad," wrote someone identified as Rossco1337 on a Reddit thread Wednesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PQ Show 84: Cloud Network Complexity Vs. Romana.io

Todays Priority Queue takes a visit to Romana, an open-source project that tackles network and security issues for cloud-native applications. Well explore just what the Romana project is about, drill into its major components, and look at its integration with OpenStack and Kubernetes. The post PQ Show 84: Cloud Network Complexity Vs. Romana.io appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Microsoft expands cloud management licensing to include on-premises tools too

Microsoft Monday announced that customers can now purchase a joint licensing agreement for its cloud-based Operations Management Suite and its on-premises Systems Center infrastructure manager.Packaging these separate but related management platforms will encourage customers to use public cloud resources and make it easier to manage hybrid clouds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Why Brexit could be a data management headache for US companies | Microsoft appears to be building a business app marketplace +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell stops selling Android devices

Dell has stopped selling Android devices as it steps away from slate-style tablets to focus on Windows 2-in-1 devices.The company isn't refreshing the Venue line of Android tablets, and will no longer offer the Android-based Wyse Cloud Connect, a thumb-size computer that can turn a display into a PC. Other Android devices were discontinued some time ago."The slate tablet market is over-saturated and is experiencing declining demand from consumers, so we’ve decided to discontinue the Android-based Venue tablet line," a Dell spokesman said in an e-mail.Though Dell has killed its Android devices, it made interesting products with the OS. One was the Venue 8 7000 tablet, which had an OLED screen and a 3D RealSense camera. Meanwhile, 2-in-1s can serve as both tablets and laptops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle Takes On Xeons With Sparc S7

It is an accepted principle of modern infrastructure that at a certain scale, customization like that done by Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Baidu pays off. While Oracle is building its own public cloud, it does not have the kind of scale that these companies do, but it does have something else that warrants customization and co-design up and down its stack: more than 420,000 customers who generate $38.5 billion in sales.

This, in a nutshell, is why Oracle continues to invest in its Sparc processors even though many of its customers deploy Oracle’s middleware, database, and application software …

Oracle Takes On Xeons With Sparc S7 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

84% of IoT Data Comes From Data Center Equipment

65 percent of organizations are using IoT.

IBM and Cisco will make Watson into a virtual workmate

Watson might schedule your meetings someday if a partnership between IBM and Cisco Systems bears the fruit they’re hoping to grow.In the meantime, the companies hope to save employees from some of the meaningless tasks they have to carry out just to work with their colleagues.IBM’s Verge email platform and Connections collaboration suite are a good match for Cisco products like the Spark messaging app and WebEx conferencing service, so the two vendors have found ways to integrate them, company officials say. All this will happen in the cloud. They’ll demonstrate the first examples next month at the Cisco Live conference.The collaboration could have particular value for enterprise Apple users. Both IBM and Cisco have partnerships with Apple for enterprise applications and communications on the company's devices. Details on that aspect of the IBM-Cisco partnership will come later, they said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM and Cisco will make Watson into a virtual workmate

Watson might schedule your meetings someday if a partnership between IBM and Cisco Systems bears the fruit they’re hoping to grow.In the meantime, the companies hope to save employees from some of the meaningless tasks they have to carry out just to work with their colleagues.IBM’s Verse email platform (see also: "In search of IBM Verse") and Connections collaboration suite are a good match for Cisco products like the Spark messaging app and WebEx conferencing service, so the two vendors have found ways to integrate them, company officials say. All this will happen in the cloud. They’ll demonstrate the first examples next month at the Cisco Live conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

30 days in a terminal: Day 10 — The experiment is over

When I set out to spend 30 days living entirely in a Linux terminal, I knew there was a distinct possibility I would fail utterly. I mean, 30 days? No GUI software? No Xorg? Just describing it sounds like torture.And torture it was. Mostly. Some moments, though, were pretty damned amazing. Not amazing enough to help me reach my 30-day goal, mind you. I fell short—only making it to day 10.The Lesson of the Shell What did my “10 Days in sHell” teach me? First and foremost, it reminded me that being left out is no fun. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Time is short to stop expansion of FBI hacking, senator says

The U.S. Congress has a small window of time to stop proposed changes in federal court rules that will expand the FBI's authority to hack into computers during criminal investigations, a senator said Thursday.The rule changes allowing expanded FBI searches of computers, approved by the Supreme Court in April, go into effect in December unless Congress votes against them, and getting Congress to move in a contentious election year will be difficult, said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a critic of the changes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Time is short to stop expansion of FBI hacking, senator says

The U.S. Congress has a small window of time to stop proposed changes in federal court rules that will expand the FBI's authority to hack into computers during criminal investigations, a senator said Thursday.The rule changes allowing expanded FBI searches of computers, approved by the Supreme Court in April, go into effect in December unless Congress votes against them, and getting Congress to move in a contentious election year will be difficult, said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a critic of the changes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kaspersky: Ransomware that encrypts is booming

Over the past year the number of machines hit by ransomware that encrypts all or part of the hard drive is five-and-a-half times what it was the year before, according to Kaspersky Lab.The number in 2014-2015 was 131,111 compared to 718,536 in 2015-2016, according to the company’s report Ransomware in 2014-2016.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Finally reason to hope in fight against ransomware | 5 things to know about ransomware +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kaspersky: Ransomware that encrypts is booming

Over the past year the number of machines hit by ransomware that encrypts all or part of the hard drive is five-and-a-half times what it was the year before, according to Kaspersky Lab.The number in 2014-2015 was 131,111 compared to 718,536 in 2015-2016, according to the company’s report Ransomware in 2014-2016.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Finally reason to hope in fight against ransomware | 5 things to know about ransomware +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Over 100 DDoS botnets built using Linux malware for embedded devices

LizardStresser, the DDoS malware for Linux systems written by the infamous Lizard Squad attacker group, was used over the past year to create over 100 botnets, some built almost exclusively from compromised Internet-of-Things devices.LizardStresser has two components: A client that runs on hacked Linux-based machines and a server used by attackers to control the clients. It can launch several types of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, execute shell commands and propagate to other systems over the telnet protocol by trying default or hard-coded credentials.The code for LizardStresser was published online in early 2015, giving less-skilled attackers an easy way to build new DDoS botnets of their own. The number of unique LizardStresser command-and-control servers has steadily increased since then, especially this year, reaching over 100 by June, according to researchers from DDoS mitigation provider Arbor Networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Over 100 DDoS botnets built using Linux malware for embedded devices

LizardStresser, the DDoS malware for Linux systems written by the infamous Lizard Squad attacker group, was used over the past year to create over 100 botnets, some built almost exclusively from compromised Internet-of-Things devices.LizardStresser has two components: A client that runs on hacked Linux-based machines and a server used by attackers to control the clients. It can launch several types of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, execute shell commands and propagate to other systems over the telnet protocol by trying default or hard-coded credentials.The code for LizardStresser was published online in early 2015, giving less-skilled attackers an easy way to build new DDoS botnets of their own. The number of unique LizardStresser command-and-control servers has steadily increased since then, especially this year, reaching over 100 by June, according to researchers from DDoS mitigation provider Arbor Networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Fishing for a cure to DDoS attacks

There is no way you can equate the importance of the Internet to a vital source of daily nutrients for billions of people. Yet the Internet is no doubt a critical ingredient of modern society. And it’s far from being “overfished.” In fact, the Internet is exploding with promising new use cases. Sadly, the Internet is also exploding with menace. -Data Center Journal

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