Alleged Syrian hacker is extradited to the US on extortion charges

A hacker with alleged connections to members of the  Syrian Electronic Army appeared in a Virginia court Tuesday to face charges of participating in an extortion scheme that threatened victims to delete or sell data from compromised computers.  Peter Romar, who was detained by German authorities on a provisional arrest warrant on behalf of the U.S., had been earlier charged by a criminal complaint unsealed on March 22. The Syrian national, also known as Pierre Romar, was residing in Waltershausen in Germany.He is alleged to have worked with Firas Dardar from Homs, Syria, on the extortion scheme.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce outage continues in some parts of the US

Salesforce.com was having an outage in some locations on Tuesday, prompting the company’s CEO to apologize to users on Twitter.The cloud applications company said on its website that the over 12 hours disruption was the result of a database failure on the NA14 instance, which introduced a file integrity issue in the NA14 database.The outage had not been apparently resolved by late evening.Salesforce customers are grouped together in instances, which typically consist of servers and other infrastructure that provide the company's service to a set of the company’s customers.The NA14 instance is in North America by most accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sabotage? Rash of fiber cuts dog Verizon

Verizon and local police departments along the east coast have been tracking a series of seemingly deliberate fiber cuts that have been robbing consumers of cable, phone and Internet services.+More on Network World: Ethernet: Are there worlds left to conquer?+The number and the precision of some the cuts leads police and others to believe they are related to the now weeks long strike between some 40,000 Verizon workers represented by the Communications Workers of America and management. The workers went on strike April 13 primarily impacting Verizon’s wireline business, in nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States plus Washington, D.C.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sabotage? Rash of fiber cuts dog Verizon

Verizon and local police departments along the east coast have been tracking a series of seemingly deliberate fiber cuts that have been robbing consumers of cable, phone and Internet services.+More on Network World: Ethernet: Are there worlds left to conquer?+The number and the precision of some the cuts leads police and others to believe they are related to the now weeks long strike between some 40,000 Verizon workers represented by the Communications Workers of America and management. The workers went on strike April 13 primarily impacting Verizon’s wireline business, in nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States plus Washington, D.C.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WhatsApp expands to the desktop

WhatsApp is taking its popular messaging service to the desktop with a new Mac and Windows app released Tuesday. It's a pretty straightforward app: the millions of WhatsApp users can now continue conversations from their phone on a computer, and vice versa. That's a boon for people who want to chat with friends on WhatsApp without having to use their phones. The move should help WhatsApp better compete with other messaging services like Line, WeChat and Telegram, which already have desktop applications available for at least one platform. In order to set the app up, users have to scan a QR code inside the application with the Android or iPhone versions of WhatsApp, which will then allow them to log into the application and use it.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Shared Memory Pushes Wheat Genomics To Boost Crop Yields

Wheat has been an important part of the human diet for the past 9,000 years or so, and depending on the geography can comprise up to 40 percent to 50 percent of the diet within certain regions today.

But there is a problem. Pathogens and changing climate are adversely affecting wheat yields just as Earth’s population is growing, and the Genome Analysis Center (TGAC) is front and center in sequencing and assembling the wheat genome, a multi-year effort that is going to be substantially accelerated by some hardware and updated software.

With the world’s population expected to hit 10 billion …

Shared Memory Pushes Wheat Genomics To Boost Crop Yields was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Slack is letting its users take their chat credentials to other apps

Slack is offering its users a new way to sign into other applications. The company announced Tuesday that it has launched a new "Sign in with Slack" feature that lets people use their login for the chat app to sign in to participating applications. Developers of applications like Quip can now enable their users to sign in with Slack credentials, which can make it easier for people to get started with applications -- and therefore more likely to try them out. The new feature makes it possible for independent developers and startups focused on workplace productivity to get an easier foothold with new users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slack is letting its users take their chat credentials to other apps

Slack is offering its users a new way to sign into other applications. The company announced Tuesday that it has launched a new "Sign in with Slack" feature that lets people use their login for the chat app to sign in to participating applications. Developers of applications like Quip can now enable their users to sign in with Slack credentials, which can make it easier for people to get started with applications -- and therefore more likely to try them out. The new feature makes it possible for independent developers and startups focused on workplace productivity to get an easier foothold with new users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Eric Schmidt plays good defense at the Oracle-Google trial

Eric Schmidt was called to the witness stand Tuesday in Oracle’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Google, and he gave little ground during some tense exchanges with Oracle’s attorney.The chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was the first witness called in the trial, in which Oracle accuses Google of infringing its Java copyrights in Android.Schmidt was initially questioned by Google's own attorney, and he testified that Google did not believe it needed a license to use 37 Java application programming interfaces for which Oracle owns the copyright.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

T-Mobile, Qualcomm get FCC approval to test LTE-U

A controversial new wireless technology is closer to widespread use, after Qualcomm and T-Mobile got an official green light from the FCC to test LTE-U in four U.S. locations late last week.Qualcomm has had limited testing underway with Verizon since January, but the new authorization from the FCC means that the T-Mobile implementations will be of greater scope. T-Mobile will trial LTE-U (see explainer on LTE-U here) infrastructure in Richardson, Texas; Bellevue, Wash.; Simi Valley, Calif.; and the city of Las Vegas. Verizon’s testing is taking place in Raleigh and Oklahoma City.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA’s planet hunter spots record 1,284 new planets, 9 in a habitable zone

NASA’s planet hunting space telescope Kepler added a record 1,284 confirmed planets to its already impressive discoveries of extraterrestrial worlds. This batch of planets is the largest single account of new planets since Kepler launched in 2009 and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets realized by the space telescope so far to more than 2,300. NASA: Kepler's most excellent space discoveries "Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA. "This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NASA’s planet hunter spots record 1,284 new planets, 9 in a habitable zone

NASA’s planet hunting space telescope Kepler added a record 1,284 confirmed planets to its already impressive discoveries of extraterrestrial worlds. This batch of planets is the largest single account of new planets since Kepler launched in 2009 and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets realized by the space telescope so far to more than 2,300. NASA: Kepler's most excellent space discoveries "Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA. "This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3 interesting wireless networking research projects

Here's a brief look at three academic research projects that explore existing and future uses of wireless networking technology:Smaller RFID tags North Carolina State University researchers have come up with ways to create passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that are not only 25% smaller but also cheaper than typical tags. The no-longer-secret-sauce: The tags don't need to convert AC radio signals from a reader into DC in order to respond to the transmitter.These AC-only RFID tags are the work of Paul Franzon, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State, and Ph.D. students Wenxu Zhao and Kirti Bhanushali.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chicago bank finds public cloud ready for prime time

In the early 1930s Congress chartered a dozen federal loan banks across the country to help smaller banks provide liquidity for home loans. Today, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago holds $70.7 billion in assets. And Eric Gieger, vice president of IT operations for the bank runs this financial institution from the cloud.Just a few years ago it would have been rare to see financial institutions operating in the public IaaS cloud, but recently there have been more examples. Last year at Amazon’s re:Invent conference Capital One’s CIO Rob Alexander described how the bank is using Amazon’s cloud to host some of the company’s newest applications. Capital One and the FHLB of Chicago show that even the most risk-averse organizations are beginning to embrace public cloud computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rackspace’s big pivot pays off

After a tumultuous time period of executive transition, questions about whether the company would be taken private or sold, and debate about the future of its public cloud plans, managed hosting and cloud provider Rackspace made a big pivot last year.The company has always prided itself on “Fanatical Support,” meaning that it will help customers use its infrastructure services. Last year it did what would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago though: It began offering that fanatical support for other cloud providers too.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: IDC's pick for the best cloud consultant is... | Geeky ways to celebrate Friday the 13th +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ixia’s CloudLens brings visibility to hybrid cloud environments

The digital business era has brought about many changes to IT. One of the biggest evolutions is the acceptance and usage of the cloud.Cloud computing’s path is similar to the one virtualization traveled about a decade ago. Early on, virtualization was used in labs and for non-mission-critical workloads. But as the technology matured and organizations became comfortable with it, usage exploded.The same thing is happening with cloud, and over the next few years, the industry will see more and more applications and services moved to the cloud. Hybrid Cloud: The time for adoption is upon us For most organizations, however, migrating to the cloud is no simple thing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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