Underwhelmed by UL’s announcement

Today, Underwriters Laboratory announced the UL CyberSecurity Assurance Program. I won’t call it an oxymoron, but I’m deeply worried about it. While I have faith in UL, I’m not sure if they realize the breadth and depth of what they’re getting into.UL is the reason there are only small holes in appliances and CE gear. Why? So an average toddler can’t stick something inside and become electrocuted. UL helps product vendors have liability insurance within sane ranges. They promulgate standards that vendors are responsible to adhere to for insurance sake. Test labs do the rest, ensuring that First Article Samples (and then, perhaps subsequent production samples) of products adhere to a bevy of standards—all designed to make products safer but at least insurable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Underwhelmed by UL’s announcement

Today, Underwriters Laboratory announced the UL CyberSecurity Assurance Program. I won’t call it an oxymoron, but I’m deeply worried about it. While I have faith in UL, I’m not sure if they realize the breadth and depth of what they’re getting into.UL is the reason there are only small holes in appliances and CE gear. Why? So an average toddler can’t stick something inside and become electrocuted. UL helps product vendors have liability insurance within sane ranges. They promulgate standards that vendors are responsible to adhere to for insurance sake. Test labs do the rest, ensuring that First Article Samples (and then, perhaps subsequent production samples) of products adhere to a bevy of standards—all designed to make products safer but at least insurable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GE’s move to Boston could revive local tech business ambitions

Jeff Immelt candidly told Boston’s business and political elite yesterday about what GE hoped to get from the company’s move to Boston. He said GE moved to Boston for two reasons: to win the Internet of Things and rethink how companies work in this winner-take-all technology innovation economy.He also said he liked Boston because of the chip the tech community has on its shoulder; an obvious reference to the Silicon Valley’s domination of nearly every segment of technology. The Boston technology ecosystem, arguably the richest and most diverse R&D center in the world seems to have lost the DNA for growing big tech companies like the personal Internet, social or the sharing economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GE’s move to Boston could revive local tech business ambitions

Jeff Immelt candidly told Boston’s business and political elite yesterday about what GE hoped to get from the company’s move to Boston. He said GE moved to Boston for two reasons: to win the Internet of Things and rethink how companies work in this winner-take-all technology innovation economy.He also said he liked Boston because of the chip the tech community has on its shoulder; an obvious reference to the Silicon Valley’s domination of nearly every segment of technology. The Boston technology ecosystem, arguably the richest and most diverse R&D center in the world seems to have lost the DNA for growing big tech companies like the personal Internet, social or the sharing economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia’s DGX-1 supercomputer packs the horsepower of 250 servers

Your electric bills could soar if you kept Nvidia's monster DGX-1 computer running continuously for one month. The DGX-1 supercomputer can deliver the computing power of 250 two-socket servers in a desktop box, claimed Nvidia, which introduced the system Tuesday at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. The computer can deliver about 170 teraflops of performance, and multiple boxes on a rack could deliver 2 petaflops of performance. The fastest computer in the world delivers a peak performance of about 10 petaflops. Nvidia says DGX-1 is about 56 times faster than a server with two Intel Xeon-E5 2697 v3 chips, which can deliver about 3 teraflops of performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Banks are failing to capitalize on Big Data, says financial IT expert

Banks are neglecting to analyze the highly useful data being generated by new kinds of consumer-facing products, like apps, says an expert in the financial IT sector.Many financial institutions are overlooking key intelligence and indicators that they could be taking advantage of to re-invent themselves and ultimately compete with future disruption, thinks Deanne Yamato-Tucker, who heads Xavient Information Systems’ banking and financial services practice. Banking disruption could include peer-to-peer, blockchain and services like Bitcoin, for example.“Banks need to address the threat from new entrants such as PayPal, Google, Amazon, Apple, and P2P FX,” Yamato-Tucker told me in an e-mail. But they’re not managing their data properly to do so, she thinks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reaction: The 650 Gb/s software router

I’m forever seeing announcements like this in the software defined networking world—

The Linux-based CloudRouter Project, which is working on code for an open source virtual router, released version 3.0 this week. It adds Linux Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) kernel enhancements and claims throughput in excess of 650 Gb/s on commodity hardware.

But you need to note one specific thing about this announcement. How did they achieve these forwarding rates? By using DPDK to offload the actual, well, forwarding to a custom ASIC on a NIC. The reality is that we’ve always done the control plane in software, and we’ve always done the forwarding in hardware. There have been precious few router platforms over the years where the forwarding plane is actually an “embedded system.”

Certainly we’re seeing a world where open source operating systems are learning to interact with commodity ASICs so it’s possible to separate the software from the hardware, and the operating system from the control plane, and this is all too the good. But if this is software defined networking, then we’ve been doing this since sometime in the 1990’s, perhaps even earlier…

Perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to considering the network operating Continue reading

Three-year-old IBM patch for critical Java flaw is broken

Security researchers have found that a patch released by IBM three years ago for a critical vulnerability in its own Java implementation is ineffective and can be easily bypassed to exploit the flaw again.The broken patch was discovered by researchers from Polish firm Security Explorations who found the vulnerability and reported it to IBM in May 2013. IBM issued a fix in a July 2013 update for its Java development kit.IBM maintains its own implementation of the Java virtual machine and runtime. This version of Java is included in some of the company's enterprise software products, as well as in the IBM Software Developer Kit, which is available for platforms like AIX, Linux, z/OS and IBM i.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds lack managed response to large-scale cyber attack

The Department of Defense is unclear about who would take charge and work with civilian authorities during a large-scale cyber attack on the US.There are a number of plans and directions for how the government would respond to a cyber attack on the nation’s electric grid or other large entity but tons of clarification and specific directions need to be ironed out to respond effectively, according to a Government Accountability Office report out this week.+More on Network World: IRS: Top 10 2015 identity theft busts+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UL takes on cybersecurity testing and certification

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) today announced a new Cybersecurity Assurance Program (CAP) that uses a new set of standards to test network-connected products for software vulnerabilities.The new UL certification will be for both vendors of Internet of Things (IoT) products and for buyers of products who want to mitigate risks.The testing standards were developed as part of a voluntary program involving industry officials as well as academics and the U.S. government.INSIDER: 5 ways to prepare for Internet of Things security threats President Obama's broad Cybersecurity National Action Plan, released in February, details a long-term strategy to improve cybersecurity awareness and protections. Obama's plan specifically notes that UL worked with the Department of Homeland Security to develop CAP to test and certify networked devices "whether they be refrigerators or medical infusion pumps, so that when you buy a new product, you can be sure it has been certified to meet security standards."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT tech goes from planning stage to execution

Internet of Things technologies can be complex and fragmented, but increasing numbers of pilot projects are emerging within smart cities, farms and at a wide range of businesses and industries."We are seeing adoption of IoT begin," said Mark Bartolomeo, vice president of IoT at Verizon, in an interview. "There are now use cases for IoT and less of an industry focus on the technology. The biggest macro trend lately is how IT can use the data [from IoT] more effectively to run a better business for customers."The carrier launched its ThingSpace development platform last October for companies to create and manage IoT applications more efficiently. In February, Verizon announced it had more than 4,000 developers using ThingSpace, and would open the software to third-party network and tech providers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The past and future of the videoconference room, Part 3: The User Interface

In the first of this series of blogs, I discussed the history and future of videoconferencing cameras, in the second I discussed the hierarchy of rooms/spaces/environments for visual collaboration. This – part three – is about how to use the darned things.From the earliest days of technology in enterprise conference rooms the user interface (UI) has been a contentious, problematic and difficult part of users’ satisfaction with that technology. All UIs have to achieve a balance between simplicity and power. The more that they can do, the harder they are to operate. So because videoconferencing has traditionally been hard, the UI has needed to do a lot to meet the needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s the deal with the massive Panama Papers data leak?

A data breach at Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca is being touted as the largest ever, at least in terms of the sheer volume of information leaked. The leaked information allegedly details the ways dozens of high-ranking politicians, their relatives or close associates in more than 40 countries, including the U.K., France, Russia, China, and India, have used offshore companies to hide income and avoid paying taxes. Starting on Sunday, more than 100 news organizations filed reports based on the leaked information. The numbers: The leaks reportedly cover 11.5 million confidential documents dating from the 1970s through late 2015. The 2.6 terabytes of leaked data include 4.8 million emails, 3 million database format files, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.1 million images, and 320,000 text documents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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