IDG Contributor Network: Federal agencies struggling with digital transformation, study says

Federal bosses admit they're falling behind the tech advances being made in the private sector, says a survey. Consequently, they acknowledge that their stakeholder expectations aren't being met.The leaders appear to know there's a problem, yet they're having problems making the transformations and going digital, according to researchers from the National Academy of Public Administration and ICF International, the two organizations that jointly released the report earlier this month.Problems Money, security and privacy concerns, and lumbering acquisition procedures are among the issues the "federal leaders" who responded to the survey say are preventing them from making progress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A: Mobile app security should not be an afterthought

As enterprises struggle to keep up with their internal demand for mobile apps, more are turning to more speedy development workflows, such as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) , which essentially calls for mobile development teams to focus on the highest return on effort when compared to risk when choosing apps to develop, and features to build within them. That is: focus on apps and capabilities that users are actually going to use and skip those apps and features they won’t.Sounds simple, but what does that mean when it comes to security? We know application security is one of the most important aspects of data security, but if software teams are moving more quickly than ever to push apps out, security and quality assurance needs to be along for the process. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Spectacular black hole space images

Strong gravityImage by NASABlack holes had the spotlight as the centerpiece of the gravitational waves discovery announced recently. The waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes – that were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. NASA defines black holes as places in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space and that can happen when a star is dying for example.   While black holes are basically invisible, they make for some spectacular imagery, some an artist’s interpretation, in the space matter and stars around them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 12th, 2016


Maybe this year's Mavericks can ride some gravitational waves?  

 

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  • 3.96 Million: viewers streaming the Super Bowl; 1000 kilometers: roads made of solar panels in France; 500mg: amount of chlorophyll absorbing photons in a tree;

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • cmyr: soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. 
    • aback: we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free.
    • @dotemacs: - We’re moving to Java + Spring. - Why? - Cos of threads… and scaling… - OK … what exactly…? - I’m just going by what I was told.
    • @asolove: Chaos Monkey People: every week, one randomly-selected person must take the whole week off regardless of their current work. Org must adapt.
    • @waynejwerner: we almost started using them, but couldn't find examples of not Google / Netflix using containers Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—Is the Network a Storage Problem?

In talking to our customers, CEO Rich Napolitano realized that the rapidly changing dynamics of storage have an impact on network traffic. After reading articles like this one from Enrico Signoretti at the Register on how the network may become the next bottleneck for storage, he decided to investigate further. In a blog post this week, Rich identifies how storage is changing, its impact on the network and how Plexxi solutions can enable scaled-out storage. Give it a read!

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week.

SiliconANGLE: Is there a new networking solutions provider du jour for cloud architects?
By R. Danes
How does a young company compete against a behemoth competitor with an 80 percent enterprise marketshare? “We look for the agents of change,” said Plexxi, Inc.’s CEO Rich Napolitano, referring to the company’s strategy for attracting customers looking for novel IT Solutions.

Xconomy: What’s New in Boston VC Land: Assemble, Hyperplane, Pillar
By Gregory T. Huang
GV (not to be confused with GC) is Google Ventures’ new name. The firm, also bicoastal, has been moving away from seed-stage investing, according to a Wall Street Journal story. GV Continue reading

White-hat hackers key to securing connected cars

WASHINGTON -- It's a scary prospect, barreling down the highway when a hacker seizes control of your brakes and power-steering system.The specter of hacking a vehicle, potentially a matter of life and death, demands auto makers to elevate security as a priority as they develop ever-more sophisticated in-car technology, a member of the Federal Trade Commission is warning.[ Related: Senators call for investigation of potential safety security threats from connected cars ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T to run field trials of 5G wireless in Austin this year

AT&T announced today it will begin field trials of faster 5G wireless technology this summer in Austin, Texas.The 3GPP industry standard for 5G, also known as Fifth Generation wireless, is not expected to be completed until 2020, with the earliest phase completed in 2018.Wireless speeds with 5G could be 10 to 100 times faster than with 4G LTE, which generally averages in the 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps range for users downloading data.Both AT&T and Verizon have ambitious 5G rollout plans, prompted by the recent explosion of wireless video and Internet of Things connectivity. AT&T estimates that its wireless network grew 150,000% from 2007 to 2015, largely because of video traffic; more than 60% of its wireless traffic in 2015 was video.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FTC reminder: ‘Spread the word about government imposters’

Yes, you and I are waaaaay too savvy to fall for the old “I’m calling from the government and you had better pay up” trick.Unfortunately, others are not, especially among the elderly.So the Federal Trade Commission is once again asking for help getting the word out: We’re hearing from our colleagues that those pesky government imposters are at it again, using the FTC’s name to try to con people into paying them for something. Whether it’s to clean up your credit report, give you a prize, resolve a complaint against you, or pay off a debt you owe, they’re all lies. The message may be a call or an email, but it isn’t from the Federal Trade Commission, or any other federal agency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Making IPv6 Work

Wouldn’t it be nice if turning on IPv6 really was ‘press one button and the rest is magic’ easy? For some things, it is. If you’re talking about client-side, enabling an IPv4-only home service on DSL or fibre really can be this simple, because all the heavy lifting is being done inside your ISP: you’re not enabling IPv6 in the network, you’re turning on the last mile. It was knocking at your door and you just had to let it in. -via circleid

The post Worth Reading: Making IPv6 Work appeared first on 'net work.

Nasdaq to use blockchain to record shareholder votes

Add shareholder voting to the list of applications for blockchain technologies.Later this year, Nasdaq plans to record stockholders' electronic votes on its own blockchain system for companies listed on one of its exchanges. By digitizing the entire process, it expects to speed and simplify the proxy voting process.Blockchains -- the best known of which is the public ledger of bitcoin transactions -- are distributed records of events, each block in the record containing a computational "hash" of itself and of the previous block, so that all are connected like links in a chain.A hash, or digest, is a short digital representation of a larger chunk of data. Hash functions are designed so that calculating (or verifying) the hash of a chunk of data takes little computing power, while creating data with a particular hash is computationally expensive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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