Boston Globe publishes pictures taken by lawyer of suspect in famous art heist

The Boston Globe, whose Pulitzer-winning work behind the Oscar-honored movie “Spotlight” earned it a shout-out from President Obama this weekend, today is relying upon the photographic skills of a mobster’s attorney to illustrate a breaking news story about the FBI’s latest attempt to solve the famous Gardner Museum art heist.The photos, credited to attorney A. Ryan McGuigan, show FBI vehicles and work tents in front of the Connecticut home of McGuigan’s client. And while it is my opinion that a screen capture would represent fair use in this instance … did I mention that the photos were taken by an attorney?From the Globe story, which is behind a pay wall:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Big Is The Ecosystem Growing On Clouds?

Letting go of infrastructure is hard, but once you do – or perhaps more precisely, once you can – picking it back up again is a whole lot harder.

This is perhaps going to be the long-term lesson that cloud computing teaches the information technology industry as it moves back in time to data processing, as it used to be called, and back towards a rental model that got IBM sued by the US government in the nascent days of computing and compelled changes in Big Blue’s behavior that made it possible for others to create and sell systems against

How Big Is The Ecosystem Growing On Clouds? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Microsoft Surface Phone is expected in 2017

Microsoft's rumored Surface Phone, the replacement for its disastrous Windows Phone line, is rumored to be one year away. The April 2017 launch is expected to coincide with Redstone 2, the second major upgrade to Windows 10 for PC and mobile.The source of the rumors is Windows Central, which has been quite tenacious in pursuing this story. It notes a big gap between the quality of the Surface tablet and Lunia 950 phones, both launched last year, with glowing reviews for the tablet and thumbs-down for Lumia. The result has been dismal sales, just 23 million phones sold in FY 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

14% off Fitbit Charge HR Wireless Activity Wristband – Deal Alert

Track workouts, heart rate, distance, calories burned, floors climbed, active minutes, and steps with the popular Fitbit Charge HR. Sync data wirelessly and automatically back to your computer or smartphone, where it can be viewed and analyzed securely online. Fitbit Charge HR also tracks your sleep, and can wake you with a silent alarm. The unit averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 24,000 people (read reviews). With a regular list price of $149.99, you can save $21 and pick it up now for $128.71. See the discounted Fitbit Charge HR Wireless Activity Wristband now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell plus EMC has a name: Dell Technologies

Dell’s planned US$67 billion acquisition of EMC will create a broad collection of businesses called Dell Technologies.Under that umbrella, the pure Dell name will live on in the company’s client business, including its PCs, while its enterprise infrastructure division will be called Dell EMC, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell announced on Monday at EMC World in Las Vegas.Dell Technologies will be the only company selling everything from edge devices to core data centers and cloud infrastructure, a mission that rival HP backed away from when it split into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc., Dell said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle is paying $532 million to snatch up another cloud service provider

Hard on the heels of a similar purchase last week, Oracle has announced it will pay $532 million to buy Opower, a provider of cloud services to the utilities industry.Once a die-hard cloud holdout, Oracle has been making up for lost time by buying a foothold in specific industries through acquisitions such as this one. Last week's Textura buy gave it a leg up in engineering and construction."It’s a good move on Oracle’s part, and it definitely strengthens Oracle’s cloud story," said Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google buys Synergyse to teach customers how to use Apps

Google Apps is getting a new set of tutorials. The tech giant announced Monday that it has acquired Synergyse, a startup that offered businesses a guided tutorial for Google Apps.Synergyse's technology allowed businesses to give their users step-by-step interactive guides to doing things inside Google Apps like sending emails in Gmail, setting up appointments in Calendar and getting started with Docs. The tutorials are frequently updated with new features that Google releases, so users can stay current with new functionality that gets added to the different services. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Securing BGP: A Case Study (9)

There are a number of systems that have been proposed to validate (or secure) the path in BGP. To finish off this series on BGP as a case study, I only want to look at three of them. At some point in the future, I will probably write a couple of posts on what actually seems to be making it to some sort of deployment stage, but for now I just want to compare various proposals against the requirements outlined in the last post on this topic (you can find that post here).securing-bgp

The first of these systems is BGPSEC—or as it was known before it was called BGPSEC, S-BGP. I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining how S-BGP works, as I’ve written a series of posts over at Packet Pushers on this very topic:

Part 1: Basic Operation
Part 2: Protections Offered
Part 3: Replays, Timers, and Performance
Part 4: Signatures and Performance
Part 5: Leaks

Considering S-BGP against the requirements:

  • Centralized versus decentralized balance:S-BGP distributes path validation information throughout the internetwork, as this information is actually contained in a new attribute carried with route advertisements. Authorization and authentication are implicitly centralized, however, with the Continue reading

Yes, a weasel knocked out the Large Hadron Collider … but, no, a weasel is not a rodent

The worst part of this mistake – other than the pain caused to innocent weasels – is that it should have been avoided, at least here. After all, as I was typing last Friday’s post about an electrocution-sparked electrical outage at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the question did occur to me: Is a weasel actually a rodent, as I am about to allege?Unfortunately, I failed to act upon that inquisitive impulse and the answer to the question is no, a weasel is not a rodent. And I am hearing about it from those who know better.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yes, a weasel knocked out the Large Hadron Collider … but, no, a weasel is not a rodent

The worst part of this mistake – other than the pain caused to innocent weasels – is that it should have been avoided, at least here. After all, as I was typing last Friday’s post about an electrocution-sparked electrical outage at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the question did occur to me: Is a weasel actually a rodent, as I am about to allege?Unfortunately, I failed to act upon that inquisitive impulse and the answer to the question is no, a weasel is not a rodent. And I am hearing about it from those who know better.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft to begin SHA-1 crypto shutoff with Windows 10’s summer upgrade

Microsoft last week outlined the timetable it will use to drop browser support for sites that secure traffic with SHA-1 certificates, part of an Internet-wide plan to rid the Internet of the weaker encryption.With the delivery of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update -- slated to ship sometime this summer -- both Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge will stop displaying a lock icon for sites that reply on a SHA-1 certificate. That icon signals that the bits back and forth between browser and website are encrypted, and so not vulnerable to spying.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft to begin SHA-1 crypto shutoff with Windows 10’s summer upgrade

Microsoft last week outlined the timetable it will use to drop browser support for sites that secure traffic with SHA-1 certificates, part of an Internet-wide plan to rid the Internet of the weaker encryption.With the delivery of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update -- slated to ship sometime this summer -- both Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge will stop displaying a lock icon for sites that reply on a SHA-1 certificate. That icon signals that the bits back and forth between browser and website are encrypted, and so not vulnerable to spying.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Match security plans to your company’s ‘risk appetite’

This report from the CIO Executive Council (CEC), based on a webcast featuring Scott Angelo, CIO at K&L Gates, and Mike Plantinga, CIO at CIBC Mellon, explores CIO-level strategies for dealing with cybersecurity threats – before and after a data breach.One step the report recommends is developing a “risk appetite statement” that identifies how much the organization is willing to spend on certain security threats.The report also encourages CIOs to develop a plan for how to communicate with various stakeholders, such as the board of directors and outsiders, in case of a data breach.To learn more, download the free report, which includes a link to the full CEC webcast.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Stronger protection and more control over security settings with CloudFlare’s new cPanel plugin

CloudFlare has released a new version of our plugin for cPanel with two new features and more control over the security settings of your website.

The new plugin (v6.0) uses the latest cPanel PHP-based APIs, and is completely re-architected to make adding new features easier, allowing for more frequent updates.

We’ve always focused on making integration with CloudFlare as easy as possible. As a customer of one of our hosting partners you can quickly start using CloudFlare features and routing your website traffic through CloudFlare’s global network by clicking on the CloudFlare icon from your cPanel interface.

New features offering stronger protection

Add domains to CloudFlare through Full Zone Provisioning. A huge benefit of Full Zone Provisioning is that it enables all of CloudFlare’s protection, including DDoS mitigation, at the root domain (yourdomain.com) as well the subdomain (www.yourdomain.com).

If your website is experiencing Layer 7 DDoS attacks, you can now click on the 'Enable “I'm under attack" mode ’ button to filter out malicious traffic while allowing legitimate visitors to reach your site. When this is in place, visitors will receive a temporary page for about five seconds while we analyze the traffic to make Continue reading

Where have all the MacBooks gone at Linux conferences?

Back in 2007, I went to O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). That particular year Canonical had a mini-summit, which happened in the two days before OSCON, called Ubuntu Live.I honestly don't remember much about any of the sessions I attended all those years ago. But one memory stands out like a spotlight pointed straight at my face: almost every single laptop I saw in use at Ubuntu Live was a MacBook.Nearly every single one. Row after row of little glowing Apple logos filling every conference room. And this was at Ubuntu's first big conference—a conference filled to the brim with Linux (and Ubuntu) developers and power users.We're not talking Apple hardware running Linux, either. I made a point of asking people what they were running (or just glancing at the screens as I walked by). Were a few running Linux? Yes. A few. But the majority were running Mac OS X. The vast majority. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here