IDG Contributor Network: Subdermal wearables could unlock real possibilities for enterprise IoT

It looks like a slick Jedi move, but it's actually the Internet of Things: When Hannes Sjöblad wants to pay for coffee, he waves his hand in front of the pay station. When he wants to open a door, he waves his hand in front of the digital lock. When he wants to start his car, he waves his hand in front of the ignition. No, he's not Obi-Wan Kenobi saving two rebel droids; Sjöblad is a famous Swedish bodyhacker who has implanted electronics, including a passive Near-Field Communications (NFC) transmitter, into his own hand. So, instead of using his smartphone or smartwatch to activate a payment terminal, a wave of the hand gets the job done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Privacy-conscious users rejoice: You can now use Facebook’s Android app over Tor

Facebook has added the option to route traffic from its Android mobile app over the Tor anonymity network. This will come as good news for privacy-conscious users or those living in countries where the service is censored.Users can enable the new feature, which is still experimental, from the Facebook app's settings. However, they first need to install a separate application from Google Play called Orbot that functions as a proxy for routing traffic through Tor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds seek balance between privacy and data collection

Authorities at the Federal Trade Commission are working overtime to keep up with the ever-changing online privacy landscape, a fast-moving environment that is highly technical but also keys into the core consumer-protection functions of the agency.FTC officials recently hosted a day-long privacy conference that saw a parade of academics present their latest research on the ways that online companies are collecting and using their customers' personal information.FTC Chair Edith Ramirez has made no secret of her worry that some companies may be stepping over the line in their information-gathering practices, deliberately obscuring the details of what data they collect, how long they hold onto it and what they do with it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell serves up its own disaggregated OS

Dell, one of the industry’s first disaggregators, this week began an initiative to decouple its software.The company unveiled an operating system that separates the applications and services from the base OS platform. Called OS10, Dell plans to make it its strategic operating systems offering, extending from Dell switches to also power its servers and storage products.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Enterprise disaggregation is inevitable+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Building An Infinitely Scaleable Online Recording Campaign For David Guetta

This is a guest repost of an interview posted by Ryan S. Brown that originally appeared on serverlesscode.com. It continues our exploration of building systems on top of Lambda.

Paging David Guetta fans: this week we have an interview with the team that built the site behind his latest ad campaign. On the site, fans can record themselves singing along to his single, “This One’s For You” and build an album cover to go with it.

Under the hood, the site is built on Lambda, API Gateway, and CloudFront. Social campaigns tend to be pretty spiky – when there’s a lot of press a stampede of users can bring infrastructure to a crawl if you’re not ready for it. The team at parall.ax chose Lambda because there are no long-lived servers, and they could offload all the work of scaling their app up and down with demand to Amazon.

James Hall from parall.ax is going to tell us how they built an internationalized app that can handle any level of demand from nothing in just six weeks.

The Interview

Riverbed acquires Ocedo, accelerates its SD-WAN timeline

Riverbed has been the market leader and de facto standard in WAN optimization for well over a decade. When Riverbed first launched its flagship product, Steelhead, the company took off like a rocket, proving to be a panacea to almost all private WAN woes. In fact, one network manager once described Riverbed to me as “network crack,” meaning once you get a taste of it, you need to continually get more.However, times have changed and more and more organizations are evolving to SD-WANs. This doesn’t obviate the need for WAN optimization, but it certainly shifts the emphasis to other technologies. The SD-WAN space has been filled with startups because the traditional vendors, like Riverbed, were slow to come to market with solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Tortoise and the Austin Hare

Dell_Logo

Dell announced today the release of their newest network operating system, OS10 (note the lack of an X). This is an OS that is slated to build on the success that Dell has had selling 3rd party solutions from vendors like Cumulus Networks and Big Switch. OS10’s base core will be built on an unmodified Debian distro that will have a “premium” feature set that includes layer 2 and layer 3 functionality. The aim to have a fully open-source base OS in the networking space is lofty indeed, but the bigger question to me is “what happens to Cumulus”?

Storm Clouds

As of right this moment, before the release of Dell OS10, the only way to buy Linux on a Dell switch is to purchase it with Cumulus. In the coming months, Dell will begin to phase in OS10 as an option in parallel with Cumulus. This is especially attractive to large environments that are running custom-built networking today. If your enterprise is running Quagga or sFlow or some other software that has been tweaked to meet your unique needs you don’t really need a ton of features wrapped in an OS with a CLI you will barely use.

So Continue reading

Serious flaw patched in Intel Driver Update Utility

A software utility that helps users download the latest drivers for their Intel hardware components contained a vulnerability that could have allowed man-in-the-middle attackers to execute malicious code on computers.The tool, known as the Intel Driver Update Utility, can be downloaded from Intel's support website. It provides an easy way to find the latest drivers for various Intel chipsets, graphics cards, wireless cards, desktop boards, Intel NUC mini PCs or the Intel Compute Stick.The vulnerability stems from the tool using unencrypted HTTP connections to check for driver updates. Such connections can be intercepted and modified by attackers located on the same local network as affected computers or in control of a router along their Internet connection paths.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Memory that learns could help tomorrow’s intelligent computers

As researchers try to build more complex computers that get closer to emulating the way the human brain works, one of the areas of focus is memory.Existing chips, hard disks and tape drives are great at storing large amounts of data, but a new breed of memory chip called a memristor could go a step further: helping the artificial intelligence systems of tomorrow actually understand the data and make more use of it.Memristors could help computers connect the dots to identify diseases or help self-driving cars recognize objects based on probabilities and associations. Memristors are best used in machine-learning models to make predictions based on patterns and trends culled from large stacks of information, said Alex Nugent, CEO of Knowm.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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