How data science is changing the energy industry

Recent declines in oil prices have hit the world economy hard. Alberta, Canada’s major oil region, has witness increased unemployment due to declining commodity prices. In January 2016, Saudi Arabia increased the price of gasoline for its citizens by 50 percent given the situation. With major fluctuations in prices and the high cost of energy projects, quality information has never mattered more.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 15 big data and analytics companies to watch The energy industry uses data science to cut costs, optimize investments and reduce risk. Reducing costs with data science is a popular application in the industry: much work has focused on improving maintenance and equipment monitoring. Optimizing investment decisions takes several forms including better internal resource allocation and assisting investors. Data science also contributes to improving public safety by providing better monitoring and oversight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Home IoT devices are wide open, security provider discovers

Reverse-engineering a password in a Wi-Fi-driven WeMo light switch by using the decryption code from the device is among the security debacles uncovered by IoT security hardware solution firm Bitdefender.To add insult to injury, Bitdefender told the device maker about the discovered vulnerability last fall, when it discovered the problem, and as of February, it still hadn’t been fixed, Bitdefender says in its study Risks in the Connected Home.And the WeMo wasn’t the only IoT device Bitdefender found lacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Home IoT devices are wide open, security provider discovers

Reverse-engineering a password in a Wi-Fi-driven WeMo light switch by using the decryption code from the device is among the security debacles uncovered by IoT security hardware solution firm Bitdefender.To add insult to injury, Bitdefender told the device maker about the discovered vulnerability last fall, when it discovered the problem, and as of February, it still hadn’t been fixed, Bitdefender says in its study Risks in the Connected Home.And the WeMo wasn’t the only IoT device Bitdefender found lacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI says hack tool only works on iPhone 5c

Only the iPhone 5c running iOS 9 can be unlocked by the tool the FBI bought to crack the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers.The tool does not work on the iPhone 5s or 6, so it only addresses a "narrow slice" of iPhones, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said late Wednesday at Kenyon College.The government is considering whether it should disclose to Apple the flaw that aided the hack: "We just haven't decided yet," he said at the Ohio college's Center for the Study of American Democracy.A court in California ordered Apple to help the FBI to hack by brute force the passcode of the iPhone 5c. The government was concerned that, if an auto-erase feature was activated on the phone, the data that the FBI was looking for would be automatically erased after 10 unsuccessful attempts, so it wanted a workaround from Apple.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FBI says hack tool only works on iPhone 5c

Only the iPhone 5c running iOS 9 can be unlocked by the tool the FBI bought to crack the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers.The tool does not work on the iPhone 5s or 6, so it only addresses a "narrow slice" of iPhones, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said late Wednesday at Kenyon College.The government is considering whether it should disclose to Apple the flaw that aided the hack: "We just haven't decided yet," he said at the Ohio college's Center for the Study of American Democracy.A court in California ordered Apple to help the FBI to hack by brute force the passcode of the iPhone 5c. The government was concerned that, if an auto-erase feature was activated on the phone, the data that the FBI was looking for would be automatically erased after 10 unsuccessful attempts, so it wanted a workaround from Apple.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SDN Adoption: Are We Ready To Dive In?

OpenStack Mitaka: Telco NFV, ‘Intent,’ & Neutron

Neutron has merely gotten a bad rap, OpenStack officials say.

Galaxy S7 and mid-range phones boost Samsung’s profit

Samsung Electronics’ flagship Galaxy S7 smartphones and sales of its mid-range devices in emerging markets have likely helped the company boost its operating profit in the first quarter.The South Korean company forecast Thursday that its operating profit for the quarter was likely to be 6.6 trillion won (US$5.7 billion), an over 10 percent increase from close to 6 trillion won in the same quarter last year.Revenue likely increased 4 percent in the quarter to 49 trillion won, according to the company’s guidance.Samsung has been in the past sandwiched between Apple’s iPhone at the high end and products from Chinese vendors at the mid-range and low end. But its flagship Galaxy S7 and the curved-screen version, the Galaxy S7 edge, launched commercially in March, appear to have made deep inroads into the high-end market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HSBC is not a real bank

From a customer’s perspective it’s hard to tell if HSBC UK is some sort of performance art as opposed to a real bank.

I will add more things to this blog post as they occur to me, since this is the first time I’m writing these down in one place some of the many many absurdities are bound to slip my mind.

How are they absurd? Let me count the ways.

You can only view about one month of transaction history in your account, and you see it in the logical reverse chronological order.

For anything older, you have to check your “statements”, which have overlapping data and are in chronological order. They have the data. They just refuse to show it to me in a useful form.

So if you want to inventory one month of expenses you now have to synchronize your recent transactions (reverse chronological) with one or two overlapping chronological ones. Oh, and multiply this by two to look at debit and credit card expenses.

If you thought the main banking website was bad (and it’s terrible. If you don’t think it’s absolutely awful then you’ve never seen e.g. SEB to compare), then you should Continue reading

HSBC is not a real bank

From a customer’s perspective it’s hard to tell if HSBC UK is some sort of performance art as opposed to a real bank.

I will add more things to this blog post as they occur to me, since this is the first time I’m writing these down in one place some of the many many absurdities are bound to slip my mind.

How are they absurd? Let me count the ways.

You can only view about one month of transaction history in your account, and you see it in the logical reverse chronological order.

For anything older, you have to check your “statements”, which have overlapping data and are in chronological order. They have the data. They just refuse to show it to me in a useful form.

So if you want to inventory one month of expenses you now have to synchronize your recent transactions (reverse chronological) with one or two overlapping chronological ones. Oh, and multiply this by two to look at debit and credit card expenses.

If you thought the main banking website was bad (and it’s terrible. If you don’t think it’s absolutely awful then you’ve never seen e.g. SEB to compare), then you should Continue reading

Nvidia’s screaming Tesla P100 GPU will power one of the world’s fastest computers

It didn't take long for Nvidia's monstrous Tesla P100 GPU to make its mark in an ongoing race to build the world's fastest computers.Just a day after Nvidia's CEO said he was "friggin' excited" to introduce the Tesla P100, the company announced its fastest GPU ever would be in a supercomputer called Piz Daint. Roughly 4,500 of the GPUs will be installed in the supercomputer, which will be built at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center in Switzerland.Piz Daint will a deliver peak performance of 7.8 teraflops, which would make it the seventh-fastest computer in the world. The fastest in the world is the Tianhe-2 in China, which delivers a peak performance of 54.9 petaflops, according to the Top500 list released in November.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM’s Power chips hit the big time at Google

Google and Rackspace are designing a server based on IBM's upcoming Power9 processor, a sure sign that Intel is no longer the only game in town for cloud service providers.The companies announced plans for the system, which they call Zaius, at IBM's OpenPower Summit in Silicon Valley on Wednesday. It's one of several new Power servers on show at the event.They plan to submit the design to the Open Compute Project, meaning other companies will be able to use the design as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple believes it can patch the iOS security exploit used by the FBI

After a multi-week battle that saw Apple and the FBI duke it out both in court and in the court of public opinion, the FBI finally managed to access a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Ultimately, the FBI reportedly relied upon an exploit from an Israeli software forensics company called Cellebrite to bypass the iPhone's built-in security mechanisms.While one might reasonably assume that this spells the end for what proved to be a contentious issue, that couldn't be farther from the truth. For starters, the DOJ has indicated that it won't think twice about seeking help from device manufacturers in future cases.A DOJ statement on the matter reads:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple believes it can patch the iOS security exploit used by the FBI

After a multi-week battle that saw Apple and the FBI duke it out both in court and in the court of public opinion, the FBI finally managed to access a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Ultimately, the FBI reportedly relied upon an exploit from an Israeli software forensics company called Cellebrite to bypass the iPhone's built-in security mechanisms.While one might reasonably assume that this spells the end for what proved to be a contentious issue, that couldn't be farther from the truth. For starters, the DOJ has indicated that it won't think twice about seeking help from device manufacturers in future cases.A DOJ statement on the matter reads:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Want a meteorite? Christie’s set to auction unique space rocks

It’s not everyday you could have the opportunity to buy a piece of space – but Christie’s London auction house will on April 20 offer about 80 meteorite pieces and a bunch of space rock paraphernalia to go along with them.+More on Network World: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space+The meteorite collection is made up of a variety of sample space rocks from private and public collections with some items expected to fetch over a million dollars at the auction.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Want a meteorite? Christie’s set to auction unique space rocks

It’s not everyday you could have the opportunity to buy a piece of space – but Christie’s London auction house will on April 20 offer about 80 meteorite pieces and a bunch of space rock paraphernalia to go along with them.+More on Network World: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space+The meteorite collection is made up of a variety of sample space rocks from private and public collections with some items expected to fetch over a million dollars at the auction.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meg Whitman: Here’s everything you need to know about HP Enterprise

Meg Whitman doesn't shy away from a challenge. She led eBay from tiny startup to household name, ran for governor of California and, nearly five years ago, took the helm at Hewlett Packard and stabilized an organization stumbling badly from a variety of very public missteps. Having engineered the split of the Silicon Valley icon into consumer tech (HP, Inc.) and corporate-focused Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Whitman is now HPE's Chief Executive Officer. The IT market is undergoing fundamental and rapid change owing to cloud, mobile and other powerful drivers. The competitive landscape in which this $50 billion startup plays is also shifting dramatically, with a slew of emerging players and the prospect of the largest-ever tech merger of Dell and EMC. No sweat, right? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meg Whitman: Here’s everything you need to know about HP Enterprise

Meg Whitman doesn't shy away from a challenge. She led eBay from tiny startup to household name, ran for governor of California and, nearly five years ago, took the helm at Hewlett Packard and stabilized an organization stumbling badly from a variety of very public missteps. Having engineered the split of the Silicon Valley icon into consumer tech (HP, Inc.) and corporate-focused Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Whitman is now HPE's Chief Executive Officer. The IT market is undergoing fundamental and rapid change owing to cloud, mobile and other powerful drivers. The competitive landscape in which this $50 billion startup plays is also shifting dramatically, with a slew of emerging players and the prospect of the largest-ever tech merger of Dell and EMC. No sweat, right? To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Report: CIOs neglect BPM in favor of trendier software

Business process management (BPM) systems are essential to creating an efficient organization, but many CIOs today are more focused on trendier topics such as data analytics and CRM, according a report by Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

New Azure tool helps IT tame SaaS apps

More organizations are moving their data out of their data centers and into the cloud, which complicates IT’s efforts to keep track of applications in use. With the new Microsoft Cloud App Security within Microsoft Azure, IT and security teams can step up application discovery and apply controls in line with existing security, privacy, and compliance policies.Most enterprises rely on cloud applications, whether or not they are officially sanctioned. Shadow IT is pervasive, with employees signing up for SaaS applications on their own without first going through IT. According to Microsoft’s statistics, an employee uses 17 cloud applications on average, and an organization shares 13 percent of its files externally, of which a quarter are shared publicly. Business units do what they must to get the job done, but IT is left in the dark about what applications employees use and where corporate data is stored.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here