DoS’ing your mind: Controlling information inflow

Everyone wants your attention. No, seriously, they do. We’ve gone from a world where there were lots of readers and not much content, to a world where there is lots of content, and not many readers. There’s the latest game over here, the latest way to “get 20,000 readers,” over there, the way to “retire by the time you’re 32” over yonder, and “how to cure every known disease with this simple group of weird fruit from someplace you’ve never heard of (but you’ll certainly go find, and revel in the pictures of perfectly healthy inhabitants now),” naggling someplace at the back of your mind.

The insidious, distracting suck of the Internet has become seemingly inescapable. Calling us from our pockets, lurking behind work documents, it’s merely a click away. Studies have shown that each day we spend, on average, five and a half hours on digital media, and glance at our phones 221 times. -via connecting

Living this way isn’t healthy. It reduces your attention span, which in turn destroys your ability to get anything done, as well as destroying your mind. So we need to stop. “Squirrel” is funny, but you crash planes. “Shiny thing” is funny, but Continue reading

Verizon Wireless settles FCC complaint about supercookie tracking

Verizon Wireless, in a settlement over its use of so-called supercookies to track mobile customers, will notify them about its targeted advertising practices and will obtain their permission before sharing personal identifiers with third parties.The company, in its settlement with the Federal Communications Commission, will also seek customer permission before internally sharing information gleaned by tracking its mobile customers using undeletable supercookies, the agency said Monday. The company will also pay a US$1.35 million fine for its use of the unique identifier headers, called UIDH or supercookies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OS X hit by first ever piece of ransomware

Over the last 15 years or so, Apple's Mac platform has traditionally been a much safer computing environment than Windows. Of course, this wasn't necessarily due to OS X having incredibly stronger security protections, but was rather a reflection of the fact that hackers were prone to targeting Windows given its stature as the most commonly used OS on the planet.But the times they are a chagin'. As the Mac has become more popular in recent years, hackers are increasingly setting their sights on OS X users who may now be operating with false sense of security as it pertains to malware.Illustrating this changing dynamic, OS X over the weekend was hit with its first piece of malware. This past Saturday, Transmissionbt.com issued a warning indicating that version 2.9 of Transmission - a popular and easy to use BitTorrent client - was infected with ransomware. As such, victims of the attack were greeted with messages stating that their hard drive had been encrypted and that the only way to decrypt it was to pay a fee of about $400.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OED tools: OneNote

The Problem Notes, code and configuration snippets, links, screenshots… where/how to save them and allow and easy/fast way to tag/search them when needed? The Solution In my opinion the best software for notes is Onenote today. One note has a better integration with Windows 10, it’s free, supports multiple platforms and the mobile App actually […]

Maintainers of new generic top level domains have a hard time keeping abuse in check

Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that have sprung up in recent years have become a magnet for cybercriminals, to the point where some of them host more malicious domains than legitimate ones.Spamhaus, an organization that monitors spam, botnet and malware activity on the Internet, has published a list of the world's top 10 "worst TLDs" on Saturday. What's interesting is that the list is not based on the overall number of abusive domains hosted under a TLD, but on the TLD's ratio of abusive domains compared to legitimate ones.Over the years, lists of spam-friendly top level domains have typically had .com, .net and .org at the top. However, a TLD's trustworthiness ultimately relies on the ability of the organization that manages it -- known as the registry -- to police its name space and to enforce rules for its resellers, the registrars.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: IPv4 Market Outlook

During Q4, the IPv4 trading market was the only source available to obtain IPv4 numbers in North America, and by the close of the year ARIN had recorded 194 transfers conveying over 34 million IPv4 numbers. Because a non-trivial portion of IPv4 transactions occur outside of the ARIN transfer approval process, even these high-growth numbers understate the total market activity in 2015. -via CircleID

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Setting the scene from RSAC 2016

Among the waves of noise, mutterings of threats, analysis, BYOD demands, the Great Fear of IoT, and the hyper-ptui of sales blather, I saw something at RSA. Call it a security crocus, that first brave flower of people paying attention. There are a smattering of hardened security professionals at RSA. They’ve seen it all, watched as secure data was opened like a can of old anchovies, and smelled just as bad. You can see it in their eyes, mostly: Skepticism mixed with scar tissue, thick skin, and I-told-you-so, with a short attention span and nary a smile. + MISS RSA? Catch up with all the news from the show +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fast & Furious with Mellanox

“Your data center is so cool!”  

That’s the common reaction to web-IT data center networks architected for data-intensive workloads and unprecedented agility. Clos designs optimized for east-west traffic flows and standard layer 3 protocols with ECMP have replaced brittle 3-tier Cisco-style layer 2 networks.  DevOps with a true Linux network operating system (AKA “NetDevOps”) enables secure, reliable configuration management and automated lifecycle management while converging on a common set of tools and processes across compute, storage, and networking. What’s really cool is the high speed interconnects in fat tree network designs.

10G and 40G leaf/spine networks were the standards last year. This year, 25G connected hosts and 100G spines are emerging as the desired interconnect, aligned with the latest Xeon-based servers with Broadwell cores. With the 25/50/100G inflection, many new merchant silicon entrants have hit the market, and Cisco announced proprietary ASICs for the Nexus 9200/9300 with availability at the end of the year. But, why wait?  25/50/100G Spectrum-based switches from Mellanox with Cumulus Linux are available now.    

The joint Mellanox Spectrum and Cumulus Linux solution enables an open platform, unlocked performance, and unleashed innovation. Cumulus Linux is based on an open framework enabling customers of all Continue reading

Welcome to the club OS X users: First Mac-targeting ransomware detected in the wild

Welcome to the club, OS X users, since you are now vulnerable to ransomware infections and popular cybercriminal extortion schemes. The Transmission BitTorrent client has the dubious honor of being chosen as the first target to deliver Mac ransomware.On Saturday, OS X Transmission users who had downloaded version 2.90 took to the forum to report “OSX.KeRanger.A” malware. On Sunday, Palo Alto Network researchers Claud Xiao and Jin Chen revealed that on March 4 they had detected the “first fully functional ransomware seen on the OS X platform.” Attackers had infected two Transmission version 2.90 installers with KeRanger.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The 6 hottest new jobs in IT

When CompTIA conducted an intensive examination of the IT employment market last year, it uncovered demand for jobs whose titles would have been meaningless only a year or two ago: augmented reality designer, Internet of things architect, container developers.That’s no surprise, given that the IT job market is in constant flux, with new technologies emerging so quickly that hiring managers struggle to define those positions -- let alone give them a title. IBM, for example, has a director of blockchains, and Ford Motor is among many companies looking for GPU cluster engineers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon provides a behind the scenes look at data breaches

Interesting detailsImage by ThinkstockThe Verizon RISK Team performs cyber investigations for hundreds of commercial enterprises and government agencies annually across the globe. In 2015, they investigated more than 500 cybersecurity incidents. They shared some of the details in a recent report of how they solved the cyber crimes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple exec takes to op-ed page, argues against turning back the clock to ‘less-secure time’

Apple's head of software engineering took to The Washington Post's op-ed page Sunday to reprise many of the arguments the company -- and supporters -- have made to contest a federal court order that would compel it to help the FBI break into a passcode-locked iPhone."The encryption technology built into today's iPhone represents the best data security available to consumers," asserted Craig Federighi, vice president of software engineering at Apple, in a piece published by the newspaper yesterday. But "the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 3.7.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.cVu 3240NGKey features: cPacket cVu 3240NG is the most powerful distributed Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) solution on the market, delivering proactive real-time analysis, 40G line-rate performance analytics and complete packet inspection across L2-L7. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Does your company need an innovation lab?

Innovation takes time – and money, and people and resources. That’s why it’s common for a company to focus on core business activities and not build an innovation lab – a specific building or department dedicated to working on prototypes and fleshing out ideas. Part of the issue is that it can be difficult to justify and quantify the budget involved. Is it a skunkworks project that will consume resources but not deliver any value? Is it a purely a showcase for engineering prowess, or will the concepts produce real products? For many IT leaders, it’s hard to overcome the stigma of an innovation lab as a financial drain. “Innovation labs are regularly knocked because they often don't have clearly defined links to specific business strategies or goals,” says Charles King, an analyst with PUND-IT. “But that's also the basis of their appeal. In essence, innovation labs create a ‘safe’ space where an organization can explore unconventional, even radical ideas in hopes of inspiring changes or new opportunities that could enhance its business.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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