Sorry, Boaty fans: The Internet can’t always get what it wants

No one laughed more than I did when the Internet stepped up and voted overwhelmingly to name a British research ship Boaty McBoatface. The suggested moniker still made me giggle days later.But now comes word that the officials tasked with actually naming the ship are not that big on Boaty. From a story in the Guardian: However, Jo Johnson, the science minister, signaled the government was preparing to activate its get-out clause. “The new royal research ship will be sailing into the world’s iciest waters to address global challenges that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including global warming, the melting of polar ice and rising sea levels,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t buy into hybrid cloud headache hype, GE’s cloud guru says

General Electric is on an aggressive pursuit of going embracing cloud services, the company's CTO – IT Chris Drumgoogle told me recently.GE has tens of thousands of apps; petabytes of storage and more than $100 billion in annual revenue. So it can’t rely on just a single vendor. Drumgoole says that GE’s highest value apps in the cloud straddle across at least two providers. Lower-priority apps can run in one cloud. Chris Drumgoole, CTO of IT, General Electric: Hybrid cloud hype is 'overblown'To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Viber follows WhatsApp in adding end-to-end encryption to its messaging service

Viber, a popular instant messaging and Voice-over-IP service provider with more than 700 million users, has implemented end-to-end encryption to protect its customers' communications against snooping.The move comes after Facebook-owned WhatsApp turned on full end-to-end encryption earlier this month, bringing secure and private instant messaging into the mainstream.The majority of IM apps have long encrypted the communications between users' devices and their own servers. However, in such a configuration, the service providers themselves can still read communications as they pass through their servers to get routed to the intended recipients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Viber follows WhatsApp in adding end-to-end encryption to its messaging service

Viber, a popular instant messaging and Voice-over-IP service provider with more than 700 million users, has implemented end-to-end encryption to protect its customers' communications against snooping.The move comes after Facebook-owned WhatsApp turned on full end-to-end encryption earlier this month, bringing secure and private instant messaging into the mainstream.The majority of IM apps have long encrypted the communications between users' devices and their own servers. However, in such a configuration, the service providers themselves can still read communications as they pass through their servers to get routed to the intended recipients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

39% off Sennheiser RS120 On-Ear Wireless RF Headphones – Deal Alert

Sennheiser, one of the world's leading manufacturers of headphones, microphones and wireless transmission systems, is currently offering their RS120 Wireless Heaphones at a 39% discount. With a regular price of $129, this unit can be purchased on Amazon now for just $78. The RS120 receives an average of 4 out of 5 stars from nearly 10,500 reviewers (read reviews).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple confirms WWDC June 13-17, opens registration for ticket lottery

After Siri provided a sneak peek at the dates for Apple’s 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference, the Cupertino-based company confirmed the event by launching its WWDC 2016 website. WWDC starts on Monday, June 13, and runs throughout the week until Friday, June 17. WWDC actually takes place at two venues. Monday, the day of the keynote, will be at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. The rest of the week will be at Moscone West, where WWDCs in recent past have been held. MORE: Siri says Apple WWDC is June 13-17To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Drilling Down Into Nvidia’s “Pascal” GPU

Nvidia made a lot of big bets to bring its “Pascal” GP100 GPU to market and its first implementation of the GPU is aimed at its Tesla P100 accelerator for radically improving the performance of massively parallel workloads like scientific simulations and machine learning algorithms. The Pascal GPU is a beast, in all of the good senses of that word, and warrants a deep dive that was not possible on announcement day back at the GPU Technology Conference.

We did an overview of the chip back on announcement day, as well as talking about Nvidia’s own DGX-1 hybrid server

Drilling Down Into Nvidia’s “Pascal” GPU was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

More on Reading and Writing Books

Russ White wrote a great response to my “Do You Really Want to Write that Book?” blog post and I couldn’t agree more with what he wrote. Unfortunately, he seems to be a bit over-idealistic when analyzing why the market for high-end content is so small.

You know I usually have a cynical explanation handy, so here it is: too many people calling themselves engineers for no particular reason simply don’t care. It’s way easier to Google-and-paste your way around than to invest time in understanding the fundamentals.

Read more ...

IDG Contributor Network: Dome9 triple protects AWS infrastructure, but is it necessary?

A couple of years ago I wrote a story critiquing what I saw as some very emotive reporting. Essentially a technology vendor went bust as a direct result of their data being compromised while sited on Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers. The article in question essentially suggested that because of that particular incident, we should all be aware that the cloud isn't a safe place to store our data. As I said in my piece:“I’ve visited data centers that host cloud infrastructure. They have by far the highest level of physical and virtual security available. They are exemplars of due process. Compare this with the vast majority of organization’s IT resources. I’ve seen enough servers in cleaning cupboards or under desks to know what the norm is for organizations. To glibly suggest that penetrating a cloud platform is easier than a corporate data center is plain wrong.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT pros happy but open to new career opportunities

Today's workplace landscape is in a state of flux. Workers are still adjusting to a new normal in which job tenure is shorter and the hunt for a new position never stops. The annual Job Seeker Nation study from recruiting and hiring services company Jobvite shows that while 74 percent of the survey respondents say they're satisfied with their current job, that same percentage say they're also open to new opportunities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Containers in Windows Server 2016: What you need to know

In a story I wrote for Computerworld in January, which was a review of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4, I mentioned Windows Server's new support for Hyper-V containers that had been added to its support for Docker-style containers (present within the beta product since the previous beta milestone release).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Containers in Windows Server 2016: What you need to know

In a story I wrote for Computerworld in January, which was a review of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4, I mentioned Windows Server's new support for Hyper-V containers that had been added to its support for Docker-style containers (present within the beta product since the previous beta milestone release).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Google to test innovative 3.5GHz wireless in Kansas City

Google won approval last week to begin testing innovative 3.5 GHz wireless capabilities by using antennas on light poles and other structures in eight areas of Kansas City, Mo.It will be the first large-scale test of its kind in the nation, following a framework created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a year ago for the new Citizens Broadband Radio Service, which uses 3.5GHz spectrum and allows for dynamic spectrum sharing.+ ALSO: Kansas City presses on with emerging 'smart city' corridor (with video) +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google to test innovative 3.5GHz wireless in Kansas City

Google won approval last week to begin testing innovative 3.5 GHz wireless capabilities by using antennas on light poles and other structures in eight areas of Kansas City, Mo.It will be the first large-scale test of its kind in the nation, following a framework created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a year ago for the new Citizens Broadband Radio Service, which uses 3.5GHz spectrum and allows for dynamic spectrum sharing.+ ALSO: Kansas City presses on with emerging 'smart city' corridor (with video) +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Companies high on virtualization despite fears of security breaches

Companies are feeling more comfortable with the cloud, virtualization and even software defined data centers than ever before, despite their fears about security breaches, according to a study due out this month by technology companies HyTrust and Intel. While no one thinks security problems will go away, companies are willing to tolerate the risk in the name of agility, flexibility and lower costs.Some 62 percent of executives, network administrators and engineers surveyed expect more adoption of SDDC in 2016, which can quantifiably drive up virtualization and server optimization, while 65 percent predict that these implementations will be faster.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CEO targeted by fraud twice a month

Every couple of weeks or so, Tom Kemp's company gets hit by ever-more-sophisticated attempts to trick them out of large sums of money.It started two years ago, before business email compromise -- also known as CEO fraud -- became as widely-known as it is today.The email came in addressed directly to the company's controller, asking for a wire transfer of more than $350,000. The email seemed to come from the CFO and was part of a longer chain of emails between the CFO and the CEO discussing the transfer."If you looked at the email thread, it looked legitimate," said Kemp, CEO at security firm Centrify. "And there was a real bank account and a real company name associated with it."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here