Security, encryption experts: Congress is the answer to Apple v. FBI

The world’s top security and encryption experts who spent time last week at RSA Conference 2016 trying to figure out how to keep devices and communications secure yet also enable criminal investigations came up with nothing except to punt the issue to the U.S. Congress.And Congress will take up the issue this week with Attorney General Loretta Lynch scheduled to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The panel is looking into the Justice Department in general, but the topic is expected to come up.+More on Network World: Hot security products at RSA 2016+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Boeing’s self-cleaning aircraft bathroom lets you use loo without touching anything (mostly)

Boeing is looking to clean up one of the smallest and dirtiest component of travel—the commercial airplane toilet.With barely enough space to um, sit, and with high capacity usage, the commercial airline toilet perhaps is an engineering marvel but little else. Boeing however is looking to that notion with a self-cleaning aircraft bathroom– known as the Fresh Lavatory -- that the company says uses ultraviolet (UV) light to kill 99.99% of germs in the loo – and even puts down the toilet seat lid.+More on Network World: NASA: “Wild” technology will transform aviation+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Boeing’s self-cleaning aircraft bathroom lets you use loo without touching anything (mostly)

Boeing is looking to clean up one of the smallest and dirtiest component of travel—the commercial airplane toilet.With barely enough space to um, sit, and with high capacity usage, the commercial airline toilet perhaps is an engineering marvel but little else. Boeing however is looking to that notion with a self-cleaning aircraft bathroom– known as the Fresh Lavatory -- that the company says uses ultraviolet (UV) light to kill 99.99% of germs in the loo – and even puts down the toilet seat lid.+More on Network World: NASA: “Wild” technology will transform aviation+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Juniper Security CTO promises open framework for software defined network security

The new Juniper Networks liaison between the company’s engineering team and its customers says it will take time, but Juniper’s software defined security networking (SDSN) will eventually support third-party devices to help build security into the network fabric itself.It’s part of a shift from network security to a secure network that is flexible thanks to software defined networking, says Kevin Walker, Juniper’s Security CTO.The SDSN framework is designed to leverage the capabilities of the entire network to detect and assess threats, and enforce security policies across switches, routers and firewalls. Recently Juniper CEO Rami Rahim referred to this framework as “the rolling thunder of security enhancements.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DoS’ing your mind: Controlling information inflow

Everyone wants your attention. No, seriously, they do. We’ve gone from a world where there were lots of readers and not much content, to a world where there is lots of content, and not many readers. There’s the latest game over here, the latest way to “get 20,000 readers,” over there, the way to “retire by the time you’re 32” over yonder, and “how to cure every known disease with this simple group of weird fruit from someplace you’ve never heard of (but you’ll certainly go find, and revel in the pictures of perfectly healthy inhabitants now),” naggling someplace at the back of your mind.

The insidious, distracting suck of the Internet has become seemingly inescapable. Calling us from our pockets, lurking behind work documents, it’s merely a click away. Studies have shown that each day we spend, on average, five and a half hours on digital media, and glance at our phones 221 times. -via connecting

Living this way isn’t healthy. It reduces your attention span, which in turn destroys your ability to get anything done, as well as destroying your mind. So we need to stop. “Squirrel” is funny, but you crash planes. “Shiny thing” is funny, but Continue reading

Verizon Wireless settles FCC complaint about supercookie tracking

Verizon Wireless, in a settlement over its use of so-called supercookies to track mobile customers, will notify them about its targeted advertising practices and will obtain their permission before sharing personal identifiers with third parties.The company, in its settlement with the Federal Communications Commission, will also seek customer permission before internally sharing information gleaned by tracking its mobile customers using undeletable supercookies, the agency said Monday. The company will also pay a US$1.35 million fine for its use of the unique identifier headers, called UIDH or supercookies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OS X hit by first ever piece of ransomware

Over the last 15 years or so, Apple's Mac platform has traditionally been a much safer computing environment than Windows. Of course, this wasn't necessarily due to OS X having incredibly stronger security protections, but was rather a reflection of the fact that hackers were prone to targeting Windows given its stature as the most commonly used OS on the planet.But the times they are a chagin'. As the Mac has become more popular in recent years, hackers are increasingly setting their sights on OS X users who may now be operating with false sense of security as it pertains to malware.Illustrating this changing dynamic, OS X over the weekend was hit with its first piece of malware. This past Saturday, Transmissionbt.com issued a warning indicating that version 2.9 of Transmission - a popular and easy to use BitTorrent client - was infected with ransomware. As such, victims of the attack were greeted with messages stating that their hard drive had been encrypted and that the only way to decrypt it was to pay a fee of about $400.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OED tools: OneNote

The Problem Notes, code and configuration snippets, links, screenshots… where/how to save them and allow and easy/fast way to tag/search them when needed? The Solution In my opinion the best software for notes is Onenote today. One note has a better integration with Windows 10, it’s free, supports multiple platforms and the mobile App actually […]