The bot backlash begins

Bots are hot, hot, hot.Until they’re not, not, not.Unless you’ve been cut off from all media in a vain attempt to avoid the 2016 presidential campaign, you’re probably aware that bots are bright, new shiny things in the tech world.The idea behind “bot-mania” is that a conversation is often the best, most natural way for a program or service to communicate with a human. Instead of websites or apps, you can type or talk to the bot and get the answers or services you’re looking for.Sounds great right? And it is. Or at least it’s a great idea. Most of the time, anyway.Great bot expectations? It turns out, as so often happens in the world of technology, the hype may be getting ahead of the reality, creating expectations that cannot currently, or perhaps ever, be fully met.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 million accounts compromised via Lifeboat hack, a Minecraft Pocket Edition community

You’d think you’d hear about a hack that affects over seven million people … unless the company chooses to “cover it up.” Thankfully that is changing thanks to security researcher Troy Hunt, via Have I Been Pwned. Have I Been Pwned? Scale-wise, it's a big breach. Lifeboat is listed in Have I Been Pwned’s top 10 breaches; it currently is ranked eighth with 7,089,395 compromised accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 million accounts compromised via Lifeboat hack, a Minecraft Pocket Edition community

You’d think you’d hear about a hack that affects over seven million people … unless the company chooses to “cover it up.” Thankfully that is changing thanks to security researcher Troy Hunt, via Have I Been Pwned. Have I Been Pwned? Scale-wise, it's a big breach. Lifeboat is listed in Have I Been Pwned’s top 10 breaches; it currently is ranked eighth with 7,089,395 compromised accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Cloud to the Rescue

3Blades offers data science collaboration services. In addition to offering task based project management features, 3Blades also allows users to spawn custom workspace, model and data source instances within the context of their projects. A variety of resource configurations are … Continued

Riverbed looks to redefine networking in a cloud-first world

The technology industry has gone through several waves of innovation since the birth of computing. The industry kicked off with mainframes, which eventually gave way to client/server, which eventually evolved into branch office computing. Today, we are in the midst of the transition to a cloud-first world.Each of these waves brought with it new networking tools and technologies. The devices that we used to build local LANs were not the same ones we used to build WANs.This trend of requiring new tools is also true for the transition to the cloud. Organizations are rapidly shifting to Wi-Fi to enable mobile devices to connect to cloud services and embracing software-defined WANs (SD-WAN) to give the network the necessary levels of agility required to meet the demands of a cloud-first world. Unfortunately, most of these technologies have been built independent of one another, making management of the end-to-end network in a cloud-centric business very difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed looks to redefine networking in a cloud-first world

The technology industry has gone through several waves of innovation since the birth of computing. The industry kicked off with mainframes, which eventually gave way to client/server, which eventually evolved into branch office computing. Today, we are in the midst of the transition to a cloud-first world.Each of these waves brought with it new networking tools and technologies. The devices that we used to build local LANs were not the same ones we used to build WANs.This trend of requiring new tools is also true for the transition to the cloud. Organizations are rapidly shifting to Wi-Fi to enable mobile devices to connect to cloud services and embracing software-defined WANs (SD-WAN) to give the network the necessary levels of agility required to meet the demands of a cloud-first world. Unfortunately, most of these technologies have been built independent of one another, making management of the end-to-end network in a cloud-centric business very difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Networked clothing getting closer

Clothes with embroidered electronics that can act as internet-connecting antennas or as health monitors are just around the corner.High-precision embroidered circuits have been woven into fabrics with 0.1mm accuracy in experiments. That kind of precision could allow in-clothing antennas to be matched perfectly to radio waves and for sensors to be incorporated into fabrics in such a way as to feel the same on skin as the base material, scientists from Ohio State University say.The revolutionary “functional textile” medium will be known as “e-textiles,” John Volakis, director of the ElectroScience Laboratory at Ohio State University, said in a news release. His team has developed the precise technique.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Empty DDoS threats earn extortion group over $100,000

Extorting money from companies under the threat of launching distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against their online properties has proven lucrative for cybercriminals. So much so that one group has managed to earn over $100,000 without any evidence that it's even capable of mounting attacks.Since early March, hundreds of businesses have received threatening emails from a group calling itself the Armada Collective, asking to be paid between 10 and 50 bitcoins -- US$4,600 to $23,000 -- as a "protection fee" or face DDoS attacks exceeding 1Tbps.While many of them did not comply, some did; the group's bitcoin wallet address shows incoming payments of over $100,000 in total. Yet none of the companies who declined to pay the protection fee were attacked, website protection firm CloudFlare found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Empty DDoS threats earn extortion group over $100,000

Extorting money from companies under the threat of launching distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against their online properties has proven lucrative for cybercriminals. So much so that one group has managed to earn over $100,000 without any evidence that it's even capable of mounting attacks.Since early March, hundreds of businesses have received threatening emails from a group calling itself the Armada Collective, asking to be paid between 10 and 50 bitcoins -- US$4,600 to $23,000 -- as a "protection fee" or face DDoS attacks exceeding 1Tbps.While many of them did not comply, some did; the group's bitcoin wallet address shows incoming payments of over $100,000 in total. Yet none of the companies who declined to pay the protection fee were attacked, website protection firm CloudFlare found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Empty DDoS threats earn extortion group over $100,000

Extorting money from companies under the threat of launching distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against their online properties has proven lucrative for cybercriminals. So much so that one group has managed to earn over $100,000 without any evidence that it's even capable of mounting attacks.Since early March, hundreds of businesses have received threatening emails from a group calling itself the Armada Collective, asking to be paid between 10 and 50 bitcoins -- US$4,600 to $23,000 -- as a "protection fee" or face DDoS attacks exceeding 1Tbps.While many of them did not comply, some did; the group's bitcoin wallet address shows incoming payments of over $100,000 in total. Yet none of the companies who declined to pay the protection fee were attacked, website protection firm CloudFlare found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SWIFT banking network warns customers of cyberfraud cases

SWIFT, the international banking transactions network, has warned customers of "a number" of recent incidents in which criminals sent fraudulent messages through its system.The warning from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) suggests that a February attack on the Bangladesh Bank, in which thieves got away with US $81 million, was not an isolated incident.SWIFT is aware of malware that "aims to reduce financial institutions’ abilities" to find evidence of fraudulent transactions on their local systems, the organization said Tuesday. The malware has "no impact on SWIFT’s network or core messaging services," it added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SWIFT banking network warns customers of cyberfraud cases

SWIFT, the international banking transactions network, has warned customers of "a number" of recent incidents in which criminals sent fraudulent messages through its system.The warning from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) suggests that a February attack on the Bangladesh Bank, in which thieves got away with US $81 million, was not an isolated incident.SWIFT is aware of malware that "aims to reduce financial institutions’ abilities" to find evidence of fraudulent transactions on their local systems, the organization said Tuesday. The malware has "no impact on SWIFT’s network or core messaging services," it added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Companies must stop designing proprietary locked-down services

On May 15, 2016, the company that runs Revolv (a smart-home hub) will be intentionally bricking (for all intents and purposes) every single Revolv hub device ever sold—by killing the server the device depends upon and not providing any ability to self-host that service.The company that’s shutting off this service and bricking these (not cheap) devices? Google. Essentially. Revolve was acquired by Nest. Nest was acquired by Google. Google then changed to Alphabet and made Nest one of the companies owned by Alphabet. So, in a nutshell, Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Emphasis on Data Wrangling Brings Materials Science Up to Speed

In 2011, the United States launched a multi-agency effort to discover, develop, and produce advanced materials under the Materials Genome Initiative as part of an overall push to get out from under the 20-year process typically involved with researching a new material and bringing it to market.

At roughly the same time, the government was investing in other technology-driven initiatives to bolster competitiveness, with particular emphasis on manufacturing. While key areas in research were developing incredibly rapidly, it appeared that manufacturing, materials, and other more concrete physical problems were waiting on better solutions while genomics, nanotechnology, and other areas were …

Emphasis on Data Wrangling Brings Materials Science Up to Speed was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Linux and the Quest for Underlays

TuxUnderlay

I’m at the OpenStack Summit this week and there’s a lot of talk around about building stacks and offering everything needed to get your organization ready for a shift toward service provider models and such. It’s a far cry from the battles over software networking and hardware dominance that I’m so used to seeing in my space. But one thing came to mind that made me think a little harder about architecture and how foundations are important.

Brick By Brick

The foundation for the modern cloud doesn’t live in fancy orchestration software or data modeling. It’s not because a retailer built a self-service system or a search engine giant decided to build a cloud lab. The real reason we have a growing market for cloud providers today is because of Linux. Linux is the underpinning of so much technology today that it’s become nothing short of ubiquitous. Servers are built on it. Mobile operating systems use it. But no one knows that’s what they are using. It’s all just something running under the surface to enable applications to be processed on top.

Linux is the vodka of operating systems. It can run in a stripped down manner on a variety Continue reading

Save $105 on iRobot Roomba 880 Vacuum Cleaning Robot – Deal Alert

If you've been thinking about outsourcing some of the housework to robots, then this deal might be for you. The highly rated Roomba 880 is currently discounted by $105 on Amazon. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 1,300 people, with 70% rating it a perfect 5 stars (read reviews). With a regular price of $699.99, it can be purchased now for $594.99. Not exactly cheap, but this unit comes fully loaded to get the job done right:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell adopts Aerohive WLAN management for its wired switches

Ethernet switches and wireless LANs are just two ways to get on the same network in most enterprises, so it makes sense to manage them together if you can.Wi-Fi grew up as a separate realm from wired networks, with different monitoring and management tools, but these worlds have started to collide in the past few years. Among other things, wireless specialist Aruba added Ethernet switches to its architecture and Meraki took administration of both network components into the cloud. Rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems snapped up both of those companies.Now Dell has gotten into the game, not by acquisition but through a partnership with WLAN vendor Aerohive Networks. On Tuesday, the two companies are introducing a unified management tool called HiveManager NG.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell adopts Aerohive WLAN management for its wired switches

Ethernet switches and wireless LANs are just two ways to get on the same network in most enterprises, so it makes sense to manage them together if you can.Wi-Fi grew up as a separate realm from wired networks, with different monitoring and management tools, but these worlds have started to collide in the past few years. Among other things, wireless specialist Aruba added Ethernet switches to its architecture and Meraki took administration of both network components into the cloud. Rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems snapped up both of those companies.Now Dell has gotten into the game, not by acquisition but through a partnership with WLAN vendor Aerohive Networks. On Tuesday, the two companies are introducing a unified management tool called HiveManager NG.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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