Manage those Macs: A guide for Windows admins

Bringing Macs into an existing IT environment can make any Windows admin feel a little wrong-footed. Everything is familiar, in terms of the tasks and settings, but with enough of a twist to seem a bit foreign at first. Our ongoing series of Mac management tips is here to help guide you in rolling out Macs securely and productively.In part one of this series, I looked at the essential requirements for integrating Macs into enterprise environments, including how to join them to enterprise systems. At scale, large Mac deployments often require a unique set of skills and tools to be successful. The same goes for applying management policies to Macs, which I cover in this article. Here, you will get an overview of Mac policies and insights into how to plan a strategy for deploying them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How IT teams navigate unlimited vacation policies

Take as much time off as you'd like, so long as you get your work done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How compliance can be an excuse to shun the cloud

Every company has its reason for embracing or not embracing the cloud. In the case of companies in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, regulatory compliance is a convenient excuse for luddites to shun the cloud and its potential benefits. And consultants who serve those markets say that while CIOs and other IT managers cite compliance as the reason for not embracing cloud services and applications, it's really an excuse by managers who just don't want to move to the cloud for whatever reason. "There's a perception that has existed that the cloud is less secure," said Tom Crawford, CIO strategic advisor and president of the consultancy AVOA. "Part of that stems from the basis, wrongfully so, that I cannot secure something unless it's inside my own data center. For the most part that no longer holds water. Internal systems are often less secure." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is blockchain and how does it work?

Blockchain technology backs up Bitcoin to this day, but there’s been a recent groundswell of interest from a variety of industries in making distributed ledger technology work.A blockchain is the structure of data that represents a financial ledger entry, or a record of a transaction. Each transaction is digitally signed to ensure its authenticity and that no one tampers with it, so the ledger itself and the existing transactions within it are assumed to be of high integrity.The real magic comes, however, from these digital ledger entries being distributed among a deployment or infrastructure. These additional nodes and layers in the infrastructure serve the purpose of providing a consensus about the state of a transaction at any given second; they all have copies of the existing authenticated ledger distributed amongst them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is blockchain and how does it work?

12 apps Windows power users must have

Windows power users, ftw!Are you a Windows power user?You know, the guy who everyone approaches when they’re having trouble with their computer. The guy who knows all the shortcuts, tricks and tips for just about any app or program on said computer. The guy who has an app for something most people didn’t even know you could do, let alone have an app for.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Barcelona faces the challenge to make its smart city truly smart

Just about every major city wants to be called a smart city, it seems.Take one example: Barcelona made a big splash to be considered a smart city three years ago. Since then, it has installed noise and air quality sensors along a major thoroughfare. There are also smart streetlights, smart parking and even smartphone apps for tourists to use to navigate the city's sights.At the city's Llevant Beach, there are 22 self-powered lighting units, including six that rely on solar and wind power. The wind-powered units can function when wind speed is relatively slow, storing up enough energy to operate as long as six days without pulling electricity from the grid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Boosting Deep Learning with the Intel Scalable System Framework

Training ‘complex multi-layer’ neural networks is referred to as deep-learning as these multi-layer neural architectures interpose many neural processing layers between the input data and the predicted output results – hence the use of the word deep in the deep-learning catchphrase.

While the training procedure is computationally expensive, evaluating the resulting trained neural network is not, which explains why trained networks can be extremely valuable as they have the ability to very quickly perform complex, real-world pattern recognition tasks on a variety of low-power devices including security cameras, mobile phones, wearable technology. These architectures can also be implemented on FPGAs …

Boosting Deep Learning with the Intel Scalable System Framework was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Optional Windows update aims to protect Microsoft wireless mice against hijacking

Alongside its batch of mandatory security patches released Tuesday, Microsoft also issued an optional update aimed at protecting Windows computers against an attack that could hijack wireless mice to execute malicious commands.The attack, dubbed MouseJack, affects wireless mice and keyboards from many manufacturers, including Microsoft. It was discovered and presented earlier this year by security researchers from IoT security firm Bastille Networks.MouseJack exploits several vulnerabilities in the communications protocols between the USB dongles plugged into computers and the wireless mice and keyboards that are paired with them. These flaws allow attackers to spoof a wireless mouse from up to 100 meters away and send rogue keystrokes instead of clicks to a computer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Optional Windows update aims to protect Microsoft wireless mice against hijacking

Deploying WiFi In The Real World

Setting up a WiFi network is much more complex than the simple exercise it's often portrayed as.

Storage Challenges In The Virtualized Data Center

Understand the limits of storage hardware when managing virtual workloads.

My VMX installation guide

My VMX installation guide - VMX-installguide.pdf I'm currently writing the 2nd Edition of the MX Series book. In this new edition, I wrote a chapter dedicated to VMX. The 2nd edition of the book will be released in few months: stay tuned :) ! I spent...

My VMX installation guide

Defining “Gray Hat”

WIRED has written an article defining “White Hat”, “Black Hat”, and “Grey Hat”. It’s incomplete and partisan.

Black Hats are the bad guys: cybercriminals (like Russian cybercrime gangs), cyberspies (like the Chinese state-sponsored hackers that broke into OPM), or cyberterrorists (ISIS hackers who want to crash the power grid). They may or may not include cybervandals (like some Anonymous activity) that simply defaces websites. Black Hats are those who want to cause damage or profit at the expense of others.

White Hats do the same thing as Black Hats, but are the good guys. The break into networks (as pentesters), but only with permission, when a company/organization hires them to break into their own network. They research the security art, such vulnerabilities, exploits, and viruses. When they find vulnerabilities, they typically work to fix/patch them. (That you frequently have to apply security updates to your computers/devices is primarily due to White Hats). They develop products and tools for use by good guys (even though they sometimes can be used by the bad guys). The movie “Sneakers” refers to a team of White Hat hackers.

Grey Hat is anything that doesn’t fit nicely within these Continue reading

Smaller Operators Have Been Slow to Embrace SDN

Why worry about SDN when 4G is still being deployed?

5G wireless slowly, carefully taking shape

5G wireless is coming, but it has a lot of challenges to overcome, and we’re not going to be enjoying its blazing speeds until 2020 at least. But, at cable industry group CableLabs’ InformED Wireless event on Wednesday in New York, several experts helped provide new hints about the shape of the technology to come.One of the biggest hurdles, it seems, is physics – 5G is going to be a millimeter-wave technology, operating at a much higher frequency than existing Wi-Fi. That’s great if the goal is to move a lot of information quickly – 5G speeds could top 6Gbps in the field – but it raises the issue of range.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5G wireless slowly, carefully taking shape

Will OpenStack Stay Disreputable?

“Keeping It Dirty”

I’ve lived in Durham, North Carolina since 1999 — I love it here, and I’ve finally found home. It’s been recognized as Tastiest Town, a Different Kind of Silicon Valley and one of the Best Places to Live. But it wasn’t always like that. Durham rose up from the ashes of failed tobacco and textile industries to a modern hub of medicine, research, and high-tech firms. Despite Durham’s rise over the past 10 years, non-Durhamites around the Research Triangle remember the Durham of old and are skeptical of it’s newfound success and reputation as a progressive yet gritty town.

The parallels between the rise of Durham’s revitalization and OpenStack’s popularity are uncanny. You still hear the following comments today:

“Why do you live in Durham, are you crazy?”
“How can you trust OpenStack community developers and run it in production?”

Enterprises continue to be skeptical of OpenStack’s production worthiness, but many companies are betting their businesses on this project. DreamHost, a Cumulus Linux customer, has been running a state-of-the-art OpenStack deployment for over two years. They automate their entire data center with Chef, leveraging Infrastructure as Code principles. Many others use standard DevOps Continue reading

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