No, Microsoft hasn’t backtracked from zealous Windows 10 upgrade tactics

Contrary to scattered reports, Microsoft has not backpedaled from its latest aggressive tactic to boost Windows 10 adoption.Accounts claiming that Microsoft has only now introduced a new warning dialog are incorrect: That secondary notice has been part of Microsoft's campaign since at least the first week of May -- before word spread about the company's unusual interpretation of a click on the red "X" in the upper-right corner of a notification that a pre-scheduled upgrade to Windows 10 was imminent.Since at least March 23, and probably as far back as February, Microsoft has been defining a click-the-X as approving the scheduled upgrade, rather than the expected behavior of ignoring the notice and closing the window. Microsoft's interpretation of clicking the X runs counter to its own design rules.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s investing arm is back on the market, but will entrepreneurs bite?

After laying dormant for quite some time, Microsoft has announced that it is getting back into directly investing in startups. Microsoft Ventures has been overhauled, though it’s not clear why Microsoft has decided to get back into investing — or if the company is in it for the long haul.Nagraj Kashyap, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Ventures, laid out his vision for the investing arm in a blog post Monday, saying that the fund will be used to support early-stage companies and help Microsoft be more involved in new technology developments.Microsoft’s existing series of startup accelerators, and its BizSpark program to offer discounts on software, will be rolled into a new Microsoft Accelerator organization. For larger business partnerships and acquisitions, Microsoft will rely on a different team. This version of Ventures is supposed to fill in a gap Microsoft left open when it stopped directly investing in companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

When prepend fails, what next? (1)

So you want to load share better on your inbound ‘net links. If you look around the ‘web, it won’t take long to find a site that explains how to configure AS Path Prepending. So the next time you have downtime, you configure it up, turn everything back on, and… Well, it moved some traffic, but not as much as you’d like. So you wait ’til the next scheduled maintenance window and configure a couple of extra prepends into the mix. Now you fire it all back up and… not much happens. Why not? There are a couple of reasons prepending isn’t always that effective—but it primarily has to do with the way the Internet itself tends to be built. Let’s use the figure below as an example network.

as-path-prepend

You’re sitting at AS65000, and you’re trying to get the traffic to be relatively balanced across the 65001->65000 and the 65004->65000 links. Say you’ve prepended towards AS65001, as that’s the provider sending you more traffic. Assume, for a moment, that AS65003 accepts routes from both AS65001 and AS65004 on an equal basis. When you prepend, you’re causing the route towards your destinations to appear to be longer from AS65003’s perspective. This Continue reading

Review: The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop is nearly perfect

I'm a portable man—I like laptops and tablets. It's been years since I've owned a desktop PC. Between frequent travel to tech conferences and my predilection for doing my work done from the comforts of donut and coffee shops, I just can't be tethered to a desk.That means I ask a lot of my mobile gear. I need them to perform with desktop power. Compile code, edit video, play games—they need to do it all. And do it well.Enter the newly updated Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.The model I got for review comes with a 6th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM, a half a terabyte solid state drive and Intel's Iris 540 GPU. Port wise, it has two USB 3 slots, an SD card reader and a Thunderbolt port (which I will only ever use with an HDMI adapter because, seriously, does anyone actually use Thunderbolt ports?). The machine is pretty doggone beefy by anyone's standards.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPE wants Oracle to pay $3 billion for breach of Itanium contract

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is asking a jury to award the company US$3billion from Oracle after the database giant stopped supporting HPE's Itanium-based hardware, even though it allegedly signed a contract to do so.A jury trial in the 5-year-old legal dispute between the tech giants is scheduled to begin Tuesday, nearly four years after a California judge first ruled that Oracle must continue porting its software to HPE's Itanium platform. The new trial is scheduled in Santa Clara Superior Court in California.HP, which has since split into two companies, sued Oracle in 2011, saying the database company's decision to stop offering future versions of its popular database software for Itanium violated a deal the partners signed in 2010. Oracle argued parts of the deal were "a corporate handshake" and didn't impose long-term support obligations. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tor Browser 6.0: Ditches SHA-1 support, uses DuckDuckGo for default search results

Tor Browser 6.0 is out. If you have been using Tor, you can upgrade it via its built-in updater. The Tor Project said the “updater is not relying on the signature alone, but is checking the hash of the downloaded update file as well before applying it.” Additionally, the Tor Browser Windows installer is no longer vulnerable to DLL hijacking.DuckDuckGo for default search resultsThe Tor Browser Team is still using Disconnect as its search provider, but it switched to DuckDuckGo to provide the default search results. In short, the reason is that Bing search results were simply not cutting it. The team explained:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tor Browser 6.0: Ditches SHA-1 support, uses DuckDuckGo for default search results

Tor Browser 6.0 is out. If you have been using Tor, you can upgrade it via its built-in updater. The Tor Project said the “updater is not relying on the signature alone, but is checking the hash of the downloaded update file as well before applying it.” Additionally, the Tor Browser Windows installer is no longer vulnerable to DLL hijacking.DuckDuckGo for default search resultsThe Tor Browser Team is still using Disconnect as its search provider, but it switched to DuckDuckGo to provide the default search results. In short, the reason is that Bing search results were simply not cutting it. The team explained:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Public USB-charging hacks back on the radar

Smartphones can indeed be hacked via public USB-charging ports found around public facilities such as airports, parks and coffee shops, says a computer security firm. Additionally, any PC used for charging can perform the exploit.Hacks of this kind, first publicly written about in 2011, and called "juice-hacking" then, are not a myth, Kaspersky Lab says. That’s despite an apparent lack of reported cases.The security company, known for its antivirus products, says it has proven that forms of the hack can variously make illicit calls, suck files off a device and in its simplest rendition, capture a phone’s unique identifiers, such as a serial number.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Public USB-charging hacks back on the radar

Smartphones can indeed be hacked via public USB-charging ports found around public facilities such as airports, parks and coffee shops, says a computer security firm. Additionally, any PC used for charging can perform the exploit.Hacks of this kind, first publicly written about in 2011, and called "juice-hacking" then, are not a myth, Kaspersky Lab says. That’s despite an apparent lack of reported cases.The security company, known for its antivirus products, says it has proven that forms of the hack can variously make illicit calls, suck files off a device and in its simplest rendition, capture a phone’s unique identifiers, such as a serial number.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Age of the GPU is Upon Us

Having made the improbable jump from the game console to the supercomputer, GPUs are now invading the datacenter.  This movement is led by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, Baidu and others who have quietly but rapidly shifted their hardware philosophy over the past twelve months.  Each of these companies have significantly upgraded their investment in GPU hardware and in doing so have put legacy CPU infrastructure on notice.

The driver of this change has been deep learning and machine intelligence, but the movement continues to downstream into more and more enterprise-grade applications – led in part by the explosion …

The Age of the GPU is Upon Us was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Otis Elevator looking to IoT, digital transformation to provide a business lift

Marcus Galafassi was named VP of Information Technology and CIO at Otis Elevator last October, joining the company at a critical time as the venerable firm is looking to make a large investment in technology to improve customer service and pave the way for new capabilities.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently talked to Galafassi about the big picture plans. Marcus Galafassi, VP of Information Technology and CIO, Otis Elevator To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bloodiest tech industry layoffs of 2016 so far

The number of non-farm jobs added in the United States in recent months has inched up, and the unemployment rate has held steady at 5%, but that’s not to say the computer and networking industry hasn’t suffered its share of layoffs in 2016 to date.Here’s a rundown of some of the more notable layoffs, workforce reductions, resizings or whatever companies want to call them.MORE: Laid-off Abbott IT workers won’t have to train their replacements | Looking back at 2015 tech industry layoffsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s really new in SharePoint 2016?

The SharePoint community has reacted with enthusiasm to Microsoft’s roadmap for SharePoint 2016, even though much of it is familiar to anyone who’s been using SharePoint for a while. It’s so confusingly familiar, in fact, that you may find yourself asking whether that wasn’t what SharePoint already did or wondering what else SharePoint was trying to do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Apple is said to be extending iPhone refreshes to once every three years

Apple is looking to make evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes to its iPhone this year as it extends the major refresh cycle to once every three years, according to a report in Tuesday's Nikkei newspaper. The change, which the newspaper said Apple is "likely" to make, is due to there being little room left for major advances in smartphone hardware -- at least until an entirely new technology comes on the scene. As chips get faster and software gets better, the benefits seen by annual upgrades are getting smaller.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch Nikkei said this year's model will look "almost identical" to the iPhone 6 and have minor changes such as improved camera quality, water resistance and a better battery. The headphone jack is also slated to be removed, it said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Effective IT security habits of highly secure companies

When you get paid to assess computer security practices, you get a lot of visibility into what does and doesn’t work across the corporate spectrum. I’ve been fortunate enough to do exactly that as a security consultant for more than 20 years, analyzing anywhere between 20 to 50 companies of varying sizes each year. If there’s a single conclusion I can draw from that experience, it’s that successful security strategies are not about tools -- it's about teams. With very good people in the right places, supportive management, and well-executed protective processes, you have the makings of a very secure company, regardless of the tools you use. Companies that have an understanding of the importance and value of computer security as a crucial part of the business, not merely as a necessary evil, are those least likely to suffer catastrophic breaches. Every company thinks they have this culture; few do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Effective IT security habits of highly secure companies

When you get paid to assess computer security practices, you get a lot of visibility into what does and doesn’t work across the corporate spectrum. I’ve been fortunate enough to do exactly that as a security consultant for more than 20 years, analyzing anywhere between 20 to 50 companies of varying sizes each year. If there’s a single conclusion I can draw from that experience, it’s that successful security strategies are not about tools -- it's about teams. With very good people in the right places, supportive management, and well-executed protective processes, you have the makings of a very secure company, regardless of the tools you use. Companies that have an understanding of the importance and value of computer security as a crucial part of the business, not merely as a necessary evil, are those least likely to suffer catastrophic breaches. Every company thinks they have this culture; few do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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