4 IT leaders share the mobile apps they use every day

Smartphones have become more than anyone could have imagined. We use them as a communication device, to pull analytics reports, to connect with colleagues on social media, and even to help monitor core IT services. Yet, it can be hard to know which apps are the most valuable to keep around or rely on during a hectic schedule.To give you some ideas, CIO.com asked several CIOs which apps they use each day, the ones they rely on the most as part of their routine. Some of the apps they use are surprising (e.g., games to pass the time in a meeting) and some are more for personal use.Brad Schick, CTO and vice president of engineering at cloud service provider Skytap 1. SlackTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The pain of training your replacement

At New York Life, IT employees are training overseas workers to do their jobs. It's a difficult task that takes an emotional toll, and there are odd rules and processes to follow.The training starts with sessions over the Web with the offshore contractors. Eventually, the IT employees expect to train the contractors in-person.One IT employee, who is training replacement contractors, said she has been told by management not to ask the contract workers any questions. Even simple queries, like, "Did you have a chance to read this document?" or, "Are you familiar with this technology?" to the contract workers, from India-based Tata Consultancy Services, are not allowed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why curious people make better employees

Curiosity isn't reserved for childhood. It's a powerful characteristic that keeps you engaged and sharp at work. And, at the right company, being a curious person might land you a job over someone who may look more qualified on paper. At least, that's the case for Tony Vartanian, co-founder of Lucktastic, a division of the mobile game design company Jump Ramp. Vartanian has grown his company by hiring qualified, curious candidates over people who simply have an impressive background, but don't demonstrate the same thirst for knowledge.According to a study from Gallup International, some of the best entrepreneurs are curious and creative thinkers, which the study says indicates they can "creatively look beyond the present and imagine possible futures for their company." They aren't the type of people who sit around and wait to be told what to do -- instead they drive the change within their own organization through out-of-the-box thinking. And, according to Vartanian, that's a quality you want in every employee you decide to hire at your startup.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

15 tips and tricks to get the most from your LG G5

LG took a lot of risks with the new LG G5—it's got a metal chassis, unusual modular "friends," and no app drawer. There are some great features built in, but there are also a few shortcomings that you'll need to address in order to have the best experience possible. No phone is perfect, after all. So, we've got 15 tips and tricks to make your G5 the best phone it can be.Knock code Use a few taps to wake and unlock your G5. LG started offering the Knock Code security feature a few years ago, and it continues to be great on the LG G5. Knock Code lets you create a series of taps on the screen that can wake and unlock the phone in a single step. You can set up a Knock Code from the Lock screen menu under Select screen lock.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple rebuts DOJ’s appeal in N.Y. meth dealer’s iPhone case

Apple last week opposed the Department of Justice's renewed demand that it assist investigators in accessing a drug dealer's iPhone, arguing that the government has not proved the company's help is required."The government has utterly failed to satisfy its burden to demonstrate that Apple’s assistance in this case is necessary," lawyers for the Cupertino, Calif., company said in a brief filed with a federal court in New York on Friday. "The government has made no showing that it has exhausted alternative means for extracting data from the iPhone at issue here, either by making a serious attempt to obtain the passcode from the individual defendant who set it in the first place ... or by consulting other government agencies and third parties known to the government."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wireless Startup Takes New Approach To WiFi Analytics

EU investigating Google’s contracts with phone makers, operators

The European Commission is still investigating whether Google’s Android operating system and Amazon’s contracts with e-book publishers have broken antitrust rules, its Competition Commissioner said Monday in Amsterdam.Margrethe Vestager’s remarks come amid reports that the European Commission could formally press charges in the form of a "statement of objections "against Google as early as this week. Her speech suggests that formal charges into both Google’s Android operating system and Amazon could still take some time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Send in the Microsoft Surface clones

Copy catsSeveral new Windows 10 tablet computers have either been released, or announced to be released soon, that copy the industrial design of Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 and Pro 4. Like the Surface tablets, most of these clones have a kickstand that you flip out to prop them up on a flat surface; and they use a keyboard which can fold over onto the tablet’s display to protect it. While the Surface Pro 4 starts at $899 and can cost as much as $2,699, these clones are generally less expensive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 whaling emails that could get by an unsuspecting CEO

WhalingWhaling threats or CEO fraud continues to grow with 70 percent of firms seeing an increase in these email-based attacks designed to extort money. There has been an uptick of activity lately as fraudsters spend the first few months of the year taking advantage of tax season, targeting finance departments with emails that look like they are coming from a company’s senior executive. Case in point are Snapchat and Seagate as companies that inadvertently gave up employees’ personal information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Uberization Of The Data Center

How a giant like GE found home in the cloud

For Jim Fowler, CIO of General Electric, there’s a simple reason he is marching the company toward the cloud: “I’m not going to sell another aircraft engine because I run a global compute factory very well; I’m not going to sell another locomotive because I figured out how to engineer the user experience really well for my developers; I’m not going to sell an oil and gas pump because I’ve figured out how to do self-service,” he said at last year's Amazon Web Service’s re:Invent conference. “That’s AWS’s differentiator. That's what they do well.”  GE, the 123-year-old staple of the global industrial sector, is going all in on the cloud. The company plans to migrate 9,000 applications to public IaaS over the next three years. It is reducing its data centers from more than 30 to the single digits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reinventing the WAN

While some organizations continue to make use of WAN services such as Frame Relay and ATM, the use of those services is quickly diminishing. As a result, we are rapidly approaching a time when IT organizations will have only two WAN services to choose from: MPLS and the Internet. Given that trend, a key question facing network organizations is how to best design a branch office WAN using just those two services.Location of functionality Abogado states that security in the branch will evolve from a model that relies on the perimeter approach to a multi-layered model that requires embedding security into all branch technologies. The philosophy behind this change is that administrators will have to make the “trust" zone an “untrust” zone, since attacks can come from any vector, including inside the branch. He believes that a single layer of encryption is probably insufficient, and that IT organizations should consider encryption at both the application and network layers. Increased branch deployment of network and data segmentation are also key technologies that will support the multi-layer security model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Reinventing the WAN

While some organizations continue to make use of WAN services such as Frame Relay and ATM, the use of those services is quickly diminishing. As a result, we are rapidly approaching a time when IT organizations will have only two WAN services to choose from: MPLS and the Internet. Given that trend, a key question facing network organizations is how to best design a branch office WAN using just those two services.Location of functionality Abogado states that security in the branch will evolve from a model that relies on the perimeter approach to a multi-layered model that requires embedding security into all branch technologies. The philosophy behind this change is that administrators will have to make the “trust" zone an “untrust” zone, since attacks can come from any vector, including inside the branch. He believes that a single layer of encryption is probably insufficient, and that IT organizations should consider encryption at both the application and network layers. Increased branch deployment of network and data segmentation are also key technologies that will support the multi-layer security model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

New products of the week 4.18.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Altify MaxKey features: Altify Max is the first "augmented intelligence" platform that combines human and machine intelligence. Altify Max includes more than 30 years of sales knowledge built-in and combines the deep muscle memory of a million sales engagements, knowledge of the world’s best sales methodologies and insights from each individual business to create instant, real-time recommendations about how to progress each opportunity. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 4.18.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Altify MaxKey features: Altify Max is the first "augmented intelligence" platform that combines human and machine intelligence. Altify Max includes more than 30 years of sales knowledge built-in and combines the deep muscle memory of a million sales engagements, knowledge of the world’s best sales methodologies and insights from each individual business to create instant, real-time recommendations about how to progress each opportunity. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 4.18.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Altify MaxKey features: Altify Max is the first "augmented intelligence" platform that combines human and machine intelligence. Altify Max includes more than 30 years of sales knowledge built-in and combines the deep muscle memory of a million sales engagements, knowledge of the world’s best sales methodologies and insights from each individual business to create instant, real-time recommendations about how to progress each opportunity. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HBO’s Silicon Valley returns this weekend

The last episode of Silicon Valley’s previous season began with the protagonist giving an uplifting talk about why the gang got into this mess in the first place – “to build cool s**t” – as an injured man endured a 127-hours-esque ordeal on a live video stream using software that they had designed.“The quality is great!” enthuses one.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Catastrophic cyber attack on U.S. grid possible, but not likely + Secretive Intel quietly woos makers in ChinaTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IETF Hackathon: Getting TLS 1.3 working in the browser

Over the last few years, the IETF community has been focused on improving and expanding the use of the technical foundations for Internet security. Part of that work has been updating and deploying protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS), with the first draft of the latest version of TLS, TLS 1.3, published a bit more than two years ago on 17 April 2014. Since then, work on TLS 1.3 has continued with expert review and initial implementations aimed at providing a solid base for broad deployment of improved security on the global Internet.

CC BY 2.0 image by Marie-Claire Camp

In February of this year, the Internet Society hosted the TRON (TLS 1.3 Ready Or Not) workshop. The main goal of TRON was to gather feedback from developers and academics about the security of TLS 1.3. The conclusion of the workshop was that TLS 1.3 was, unfortunately, not ready yet.

One of the reasons it was deemed not yet ready was that there needed to be more real-world testing of independently written implementations. There were some implementations of the core protocol, but nobody had put together a full browser-to-server test. And some Continue reading

Zero Bandwidth Traffic Engineering

Oliver Steudler from Juniper sent me a link to an interesting Juniper blog post describing zero-bandwidth traffic engineering.

Read the blog post first and then come back for some opinionated rambling ;)

Is the problem real? Yes.

Building a Multi-node OpenStack Lab in UNetLab

In the previous post I’ve demonstrated how to get a working instance of a single-node OpenStack inside UNetLab. In this post we’ll continue building on that by adding two new compute nodes and redesigning our network to resemble something you might actually see in a real life.