IDG Contributor Network: All of our clocks are wrong

The gold-standard for time measurement—the 500 or so atomic clocks in use—might be on its way out. The clocks' days, if not their hours or seconds, are numbered.Optical clocks are a better way to measure time, say researchers who published their findings in Optica, the Optical Society's journal. The scientists say the optical technology is more accurate than the previous best-tech, which uses microwave frequency atomic oscillations.“Clocks work by counting a recurrent event with a known frequency, such as the swinging of a pendulum,” the society explains in a press release. Atomic clocks use the natural movement of a cesium atom.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why the Salesforce-Amazon cloud partnership is a big deal

This week SaaS giant Salesforce.com and IaaS behemoth Amazon Web Services codified a partnership that the two have been discussing for months.The move is a coup by Amazon in the public cloud market, particularly against Microsoft Azure, and could turn out to be a big kick in the pants to Oracle.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Is Salesforce planning a post-Oracle future? +Salesforce and AWS actually have a long partnership that goes back years. In 2010 Salesforce.com bought an application development platform named Heroku, which was hosted in AWS and continues to be to this day. Salesforce could have chosen to bring Heroku’s underlying infrastructure in-house post acquisition, but it chose to keep its toe in AWS’s cloud through Heroku.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senators want warrant protections for US email stored overseas

A new bill in Congress would require U.S. law enforcement agencies to obtain court-ordered warrants before demanding the emails of the country's residents when they are stored overseas.The International Communications Privacy Act, introduced Wednesday by three senators, would close a loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to request emails and other electronic documents without warrants. Congress has been working since 2010 to rework the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a law that sets down rules for law enforcement access to electronic communications, but the focus has been on requiring warrants for emails and other communications stored in the cloud for longer than 180 days.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senators want warrant protections for US email stored overseas

A new bill in Congress would require U.S. law enforcement agencies to obtain court-ordered warrants before demanding the emails of the country's residents when they are stored overseas.The International Communications Privacy Act, introduced Wednesday by three senators, would close a loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to request emails and other electronic documents without warrants. Congress has been working since 2010 to rework the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a law that sets down rules for law enforcement access to electronic communications, but the focus has been on requiring warrants for emails and other communications stored in the cloud for longer than 180 days.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Celebrity hacker Guccifer’s confession gives us all a lesson in security

The activity of Romanian hacker Guccifer, who has admitted to compromising almost 100 email and social media accounts belonging to U.S. government officials, politicians and other high-profile individuals, is the latest proof that humans are the weakest link in computer security.Marcel Lehel Lazar, 44, is not a hacker in the technical sense of the word. He's a social engineer: a clever and persistent individual with a lot of patience who a Romanian prosecutor once described as "the obsessive-compulsive type."By his own admission, Lazar has no programming skills. He didn't find vulnerabilities or write exploits. Instead, he's good at investigating, finding information online and making connections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Celebrity hacker Guccifer’s confession gives us all a lesson in security

The activity of Romanian hacker Guccifer, who has admitted to compromising almost 100 email and social media accounts belonging to U.S. government officials, politicians and other high-profile individuals, is the latest proof that humans are the weakest link in computer security.Marcel Lehel Lazar, 44, is not a hacker in the technical sense of the word. He's a social engineer: a clever and persistent individual with a lot of patience who a Romanian prosecutor once described as "the obsessive-compulsive type."By his own admission, Lazar has no programming skills. He didn't find vulnerabilities or write exploits. Instead, he's good at investigating, finding information online and making connections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Hyperscale Effect: Tracking the Newest High-Growth IT Segment

Don’t just call it “the cloud.” Even if you think you know what cloud means, the word is fraught with too many different interpretations for too many people. Nevertheless, the effect of cloud computing, the web, and their assorted massive datacenters has had a profound impact on enterprise computing, creating new application segments and consolidating IT resources into a smaller number of mega-players with tremendous buying power and influence.

Welcome to the hyperscale market.

At the top end of the market, ten companies – behemoths like Google, Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba – each spend over $1 billion per year on …

The Hyperscale Effect: Tracking the Newest High-Growth IT Segment was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Google alums rollout Simility fraud-detection platform

A team from Google’s fraud-detection group has started its own software as a service venture for spotting transaction fraud quickly based on rule sets and that also learns as it goes to improve its hit rate.Simility examines online transactions to identify indicators of foul play and assigns them risk scores from 0 to 1. Customers can use the information to shut down transactions it deems suspect.The Simility Fraud Prevention Platform service is available starting next week after a six-month private beta. Rahul PangamTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google alums rollout Simility fraud-detection platform

A team from Google’s fraud-detection group has started its own software as a service venture for spotting transaction fraud quickly based on rule sets and that also learns as it goes to improve its hit rate.Simility examines online transactions to identify indicators of foul play and assigns them risk scores from 0 to 1. Customers can use the information to shut down transactions it deems suspect.The Simility Fraud Prevention Platform service is available starting next week after a six-month private beta. Rahul PangamTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CD-ROMs were the training wheels for the internet, but no one remembers them now

Believe it or not, back in the 1990s, a lot of people thought CD-ROMs were going to the change the world.I was one of them. I was absolutely convinced that titles like Total Distortion, The Daedalus Encounter, Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World and Charlton Heston’s The Bible were going to redefine entertainment and information retrieval.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

15 signs you’re doing agile wrong

It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon and end up in a ditch. Nowhere is this maxim more evident than in agile development. Plenty of organizations jump into agile in pursuit of its advantages -- ease of embracing change, decreased cycle times, evolutionary architecture, and so on -- only to find their best agile practitioners leaving the company, and the uneasy remainder unable to fix a development process gone wrong.The problem with most approaches to agile is not a problem with agile; it's a problem with Agile, the Capitalized Methodology. Agile isn't a methodology. Treating it as one confuses process with philosophy and culture, and that’s a one-way ticket back into waterfall -- or worse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hands on: What’s new and noteworthy with Android N

With Google's I/O developers' conference behind us, it's time to start looking forward to what's next in the world of Android.The most prominent thing is Google's rapidly approaching Android release, currently known only as Android "N." (The company has yet to reveal the full name or version number.) While the software itself isn't expected to arrive until sometime this summer, we're getting an increasingly clear picture of the fresh features and improvements it'll provide.I've been using the pre-release versions of Android N since Google's first developer preview back in March and all the way through the most recent update put out last week (which is available to anyone with an eligible device, though be warned that it isn't entirely stable). While the software is still in flux and its elements aren't guaranteed to remain unchanged, we've seen enough at this point to get a pretty good idea of what's in the works.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

State Department argues against ‘cyber arms’ treaty

Even as top U.S. diplomats press issues of cybersecurity and Internet freedom in virtually every top-level meeting with their foreign counterparts, it's too soon to begin contemplating a formal, multilateral treaty laying out parameters for digital rules of the road, according to a senior State Department official.That's in part because it remains early days in cyber-diplomacy, but also because the U.S. approach of framing Internet issues within the context of existing international law and pushing to develop generally accepted norms is netting some encouraging results, Christopher Painter, the State Department's coordinator for cyber issues, testified Wednesday during a Senate hearing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

State Department argues against ‘cyber arms’ treaty

Even as top U.S. diplomats press issues of cybersecurity and Internet freedom in virtually every top-level meeting with their foreign counterparts, it's too soon to begin contemplating a formal, multilateral treaty laying out parameters for digital rules of the road, according to a senior State Department official.That's in part because it remains early days in cyber-diplomacy, but also because the U.S. approach of framing Internet issues within the context of existing international law and pushing to develop generally accepted norms is netting some encouraging results, Christopher Painter, the State Department's coordinator for cyber issues, testified Wednesday during a Senate hearing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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