Facebook’s React Native could succeed where other cross-platform frameworks have failed

At the F8 developer conference earlier this week, Facebook reported an unprecedented 85 percent reuse of code attributable to React Native on its internally developed Android and iOS Ads Manager app.On top of that, the company announced that Microsoft will port React Native to run on Windows 10, Windows phones and Xbox One. And Samsung announced it would port React Native to its Tizen OS that runs on many devices, including wearables and smart TVs.That is significant considering cross-platform frameworks have such a bad reputation that developers often joke that Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damn lies and then there is cross-platform.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AV software: “I’m not quite dead yet”

If you are a cybersecurity professional, you’ve probably read the quote, “AV is dead” hundreds or even thousands of times. The thought here is that antivirus software is no longer effective at blocking modern exploits and malware, thus its useful lifespan is effectively over. Now, when any technology is declared “dead,” it is usually an industry analyst (like me) who makes this type of provocative statement. I remember the analyst declaration “mainframe is dead” from the early 1990s and the more recent refrain portending the death of the PC. In this case, however, many people attribute the “AV is dead” soundbite to a former Symantec VP quote in the Wall Street Journal, which seems to give it more credibility. After all, if Symantec, the market leader, thinks AV is dead, then it sure as heck must be.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU plan to collect, not share, air traveler data is ‘absurd’

Air passengers entering or leaving the European Union will have their movements kept on file by police authorities from 2018 under draft legislation approved by the European Parliament.Critics, however, say a lack of provisions to share the data severely limits the plan's usefulness.Airlines running flights into or out of the EU must hand over the data to national Passenger Information Units (PIUs) that will hold the data for law enforcers. Member states may choose to gather data from travel agencies and to retain information about passengers on flights within the EU too.However, there will be no centralized EU database of arriving and departing passengers, and no automatic sharing of data between the various national PIUs. With open land borders between countries in the Schengen Area, and no mandatory collection of information on intra-EU flights, it will be difficult for investigators to use the data to determine whether a person of interest is in the EU.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU plan to collect, not share, air traveler data is ‘absurd’

Air passengers entering or leaving the European Union will have their movements kept on file by police authorities from 2018 under draft legislation approved by the European Parliament.Critics, however, say a lack of provisions to share the data severely limits the plan's usefulness.Airlines running flights into or out of the EU must hand over the data to national Passenger Information Units (PIUs) that will hold the data for law enforcers. Member states may choose to gather data from travel agencies and to retain information about passengers on flights within the EU too.However, there will be no centralized EU database of arriving and departing passengers, and no automatic sharing of data between the various national PIUs. With open land borders between countries in the Schengen Area, and no mandatory collection of information on intra-EU flights, it will be difficult for investigators to use the data to determine whether a person of interest is in the EU.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Proposed encryption legislation: What you need to know

The first draft of long awaited federal encryption legislation that would govern to what lengths vendors and service providers have to go in order to comply with court decryption orders has finally been released.It takes a stab at defining how to give law enforcement the authority to access encrypted information and under what circumstances that is OK. It also tells vendors and service providers to what lengths they would have to go to help out.The proposal has not been filed formally as a bill in Congress, but its release will generate discussion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Proposed encryption legislation: What you need to know

The first draft of long awaited federal encryption legislation that would govern to what lengths vendors and service providers have to go in order to comply with court decryption orders has finally been released.It takes a stab at defining how to give law enforcement the authority to access encrypted information and under what circumstances that is OK. It also tells vendors and service providers to what lengths they would have to go to help out.The proposal has not been filed formally as a bill in Congress, but its release will generate discussion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mozilla explores radically different browser as Firefox leaks share

Mozilla is trying to come up with a next-generation browser, but according to company executives, seems uncertain whether to retain the current Firefox technology or switch to something else, perhaps the same that powers Google's Chrome. Last week, Mark Mayo, the head of Mozilla's cloud services engineering team, revealed that a new project, dubbed Tofino, is exploring options for a radical revision of Firefox. "We're working on browser prototypes that look and feel almost nothing like the current Firefox," Mayo wrote in a long piece on Medium. "The premise for these experiments couldn't be simpler: what we need a browser to do for us -- both on PCs and mobile devices -- has changed a lot since Firefox 1.0."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook open-sources developer tools for iOS

Facebook’s annual F8 conference in San Francisco is geared toward developers, but the company’s biggest announcements so far have been way more focused on new stuff for Facebook’s users to dig into, like a camera that shoots 360-degree video, Messenger chatbots, and a Save to Facebook button for reading articles later. But the company also shared some developer news, like tools that make iOS apps easier to build.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Amazon Web Services is eating the world

Is it possible to review Amazon Web Services in one article? Not a chance. What about a book? Perhaps a long one, preferably with several volumes. The reality is that Amazon’s cloud business is larger than ever and spawning new features, services, and options faster than any one person could begin to follow. The company is swallowing the Internet by delivering the simplest way to create complex, highly scalable, data-rich applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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 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?

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

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

1 … 3,042 3,043 3,044 3,045 3,046 … 3,841