Man who hijacked HBO’s satellite signal 30 years ago would face far different fate today

On April 27, 1986, a Florida man with workplace access to a satellite transmission dish – and a financial beef with HBO -- pulled off the kind of audacious stunt that were it to happen today would likely land him in prison for a long, long time.From a 2011 Buzzblog post: John MacDougall, then 25, was the lonely pamphleteer of lore, only instead of paper and ink he was armed with a 30-foot transmission dish, an electronic keyboard, and a burning objection to HBO's decision in 1986 to begin scrambling its satellite signal and charging viewers $12.95 a month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Are inter-container communications the Achilles’ heel of latency-sensitive cloud apps?

Containerization exploits the idea that cloud applications should be developed on a microservices architecture and be decoupled from their underlying infrastructure.That is not a new concept; software componentization dates back to Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the client-server paradigm. De-coupling applications from their underlying infrastructure aligns with today’s vision that efficient data centers should provide an on-demand resource pool that offers instances of various software-definable resource types spawned as needed. As demand for an application grows, requiring additional resources to support it, the services could span over multiple servers (a cluster) distributed within a data center or across a globally distributed infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Building the simplest Go static analysis tool

Go native vendoring (a.k.a. GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT) allows you to freeze dependencies by putting them in a vendor folder in your project. The compiler will then look there before searching the GOPATH.

The only annoyance compared to using a per-project GOPATH, which is what we used to do, is that you might forget to vendor a package that you have in your GOPATH. The program will build for you, but it won't for anyone else. Back to the WFM times!

I decided I wanted something, a tool, to check that all my (non-stdlib) dependencies were vendored.

At first I thought of using go list, which Dave Cheney appropriately called a swiss army knife, but while it can show the entire recursive dependency tree (format .Deps), there's no way to know from the templating engine if a dependency is in the standard library.

We could just pass each output back into go list to check for .Standard, but I thought this would be a good occasion to build a very simple static analysis tool. Go's simplicity and libraries make it a very easy task, as you will see.

First, loading the program

We use golang.org/x/tools/go/loader to Continue reading

Introducing the Docker Captains

We receive many requests from the Docker community for help identifying experts who can answer questions on different forums like Stack Overflow, share their knowledge in blog posts and online tutorials, and present at industry events like conferences and meetups. Today, … Continued

IDG Contributor Network: KubeCon donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a Linux Foundation project and organization dedicated to advancing the development of cloud-native applications and services, announced it accepted another "project" under its governance—KubeCon, the Kubernetes community conference. The donation of KubeCon to the CNCF is unique in that this isn't a software project, but a community conference, which will benefit from the "well-oiled (community conference) machine" that the Linux Foundation provides, according to Joseph Jacks of Kismatic, the original organizer of KubeCon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ISPs see big ingress by mobile operators for internet, study finds

A massive drop in the numbers of those using desktop computers is shown among the datasets released by the Commerce Department last month.That data, based on July 2015 figures, is just one facet of the extraordinary data dump.More juicy stuff includes that well over half of households (60 percent) who use the internet at home use "mobile internet service" while in the home.The government numbers come from a massive, 53,000-household Computer and Internet Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau last year. The large size of the sample means the numbers are representative of the entire population, the department says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cyberespionage group abuses Windows hotpatching mechanism for malware stealth

A cyberespionage group active in Asia has been leveraging a Windows feature known as hotpatching in order to better hide its malware from security products.The group, which malware researchers from Microsoft call Platinum, has been active since at least 2009 and has primarily targeted government organizations, defense institutes, intelligence agencies and telecommunications providers in South and Southeast Asia, especially from Malaysia, Indonesia and China.So far the group has used spear phishing -- fraudulent emails that target specific organizations or individuals -- as its main attack method, often combining it with exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities that install custom malware. It places great importance on remaining undetected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cyberespionage group abuses Windows hotpatching mechanism for malware stealth

A cyberespionage group active in Asia has been leveraging a Windows feature known as hotpatching in order to better hide its malware from security products.The group, which malware researchers from Microsoft call Platinum, has been active since at least 2009 and has primarily targeted government organizations, defense institutes, intelligence agencies and telecommunications providers in South and Southeast Asia, especially from Malaysia, Indonesia and China.So far the group has used spear phishing -- fraudulent emails that target specific organizations or individuals -- as its main attack method, often combining it with exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities that install custom malware. It places great importance on remaining undetected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A mobile-first strategy improves employee productivity, study finds

A silent killer is running through companies today that most business leaders don’t know exists—employee disengagement.According to a recent Gallup survey, each disengaged employee costs an organization about $3,400 for every $10,000 in annual salary. Another interesting data point is that actively disengaged employees cost the American economy somewhere between $450 billion and $550 billion in productivity annually. This shows that creating more engaged employees needs to be at the top of every business leader’s priority list.Now that the problem is understood, how does an organization create a more engaged workforce? The answer is to become mobile-first. A new global study by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), sponsored by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, discovered a measurable link between a mobile-first work environment and an increase in employee engagement. This should be no surprise, as the majority of digital officers I have interviewed have correlated mobility to customer engagement, so extending that paradigm to employees is logical.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel declares independence from the PC

The message has trickled down in speeches, earnings calls, and analyst presentations, but on Tuesday, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich drew a line in the sand: Intel is not a PC company any more. In what only can be called a manifesto of Intel’s new values, Krzanich described how Intel is transforming itself “from a PC company to a company that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices.” To drive the point home, Krzanich noted that the PC is just one among many connected devices.What might be called the “new” Intel will be built upon five pillars, Krzanich said:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI isn’t code savvy enough to explain iPhone hack to Apple

The FBI claims that being forced to share its iPhone-hacking tool with Apple wouldn’t be worth it–because the government agency doesn’t actually know how it works. This week, the FBI will notify the White House that it doesn’t actually know the underlying code that facilitated hacking into the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters. Because of this, the FBI claims that it doesn’t make sense to launch an internal government investigation to decide whether to share the information with Apple.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI isn’t code savvy enough to explain iPhone hack to Apple

The FBI claims that being forced to share its iPhone-hacking tool with Apple wouldn’t be worth it–because the government agency doesn’t actually know how it works.This week, the FBI will notify the White House that it doesn’t actually know the underlying code that facilitated hacking into the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters. Because of this, the FBI claims that it doesn’t make sense to launch an internal government investigation to decide whether to share the information with Apple.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 password managers that make online security effortless

There’s a reason “123456” remains the most popular password. We tend to use passwords we can easily recall. And that means they’re easy to hack.A good password manager is the best way to relieve the burden of memorizing complex logins and keep your data secure. These tools encrypt your login info in a virtual vault—either locally or in the cloud—and lock it with a single master password.Considering that the security of sensitive data is at stake, you shouldn’t take choosing a password manager lightly. This guide will tell you what features to look for in a password manager and compare four of the best.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 password managers that make online security effortless

There’s a reason “123456” remains the most popular password. We tend to use passwords we can easily recall. And that means they’re easy to hack.A good password manager is the best way to relieve the burden of memorizing complex logins and keep your data secure. These tools encrypt your login info in a virtual vault—either locally or in the cloud—and lock it with a single master password.Considering that the security of sensitive data is at stake, you shouldn’t take choosing a password manager lightly. This guide will tell you what features to look for in a password manager and compare four of the best.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ubuntu 16.04: A desktop for Linux diehards

Every two years a release of Ubuntu is designated Long-Term Support (LTS). Ubuntu 16.04, code-named Xenial Xerus, is the latest in that line. LTS releases are supported for five years instead of the usual nine months, but they also have less obvious implications. LTS releases are usually geared toward the enterprise, which means they generally include fewer new features and more testing. Both qualities are attractive to risk-averse companies running production software on Ubuntu servers, but provide comparatively little to the desktop user.Installation and setupTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

10 essential pen-friendly Windows apps

Get your pen readyForget about limiting yourself to typing and touchpads alone. Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, as well as the legion of touch-enabled Windows laptops now available, are built to do far more than your standard run-of-the-mill notebooks. Whether it’s sketching out illustrations, signing documents on the fly, or jotting down quick notes, embracing the Surface Pen and Windows 10’s deep-rooted inking features truly opens another door to enhanced productivity. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First look: Microsoft’s Windows 10 Anniversary Update preview

The first big update to Windows 10 will come this summer, a year after the operating system's initial launch, with the release of what Microsoft is calling the Windows 10 Anniversary Update.The update's exact release date hasn't been set yet. Windows 10 was officially released on July 29, 2015 -- but that doesn't mean that the Anniversary Update will hit on the exact date.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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