NIST sets the stage for contactless fingerprint readers

Biometric technologies may soon replace cumbersome passwords, but the U.S. National Institute of Technology is looking out to a time when you won't even have to press your finger onto a grimy fingerprint reader to gain entry to a computer.NIST has funded a number of companies to make touchless fingerprint readers possible, and is creating a framework for evaluating possible technologies for widespread use.Touchless fingerprint readers could be particularly useful for quickly identifying large numbers of people, such as a queue entering a controlled facility, NIST contends. Germaphobes would also appreciate the technology, as they would not have to touch potentially germy fingerprint readers to gain access to their computers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blackberry buys Good Technology as it further expands into mobile device security

Blackberry has moved further into the mobile device management space by purchasing Good Technology for US$425 million [m]. Good Technology sells enterprise mobile security products and was Blackberry's competitor. In a January blog post, Blackberry called out Good for claiming it was the first company to add a special billing feature to its products. A separate blog post on Friday discussing the merger made note of this history, saying the companies have taken "aggressive positions" through the years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Auction house puts pristine 39-year-old Apple-1 on the block

Auction house Bonhams will put a pristine Apple-1 personal computer on the block later this month, and has pegged the gavel price at between $300,000 and $500,000.Bonhams has experience selling vintage Apple-1 computers: One it sold last year went for the still-record $905,000 after commissions and taxes.The Apple-1, essentially a stand-alone circuit board sans keyboard, monitor or even power supply, was hand-built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1976, and may have been one of the first lot of 50, according to a penned identifier on the back. That mark -- 01-0059 -- was probably an inventory number assigned by the Byte Shop of Mountain View, Calif., the first volume purchaser of the computer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 4th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


An astonishing 300 billion stars in our galaxy have planets. Take a look in the Eyes on Exoplanets app.
  • 1 billion: people who used Facebook in a single day; 2.8 million: sq. ft. in new Apple campus (with drone pics);  1.1 trillion: Apache Kafka messages per day; 2,000 years: age of termite mounds in Central Africa; 30: # of times better the human brain is better than the best supercomputers; 4 billion: requests it took to trigger an underflow bug.

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Sara Seager: If an Earth 2.0 exists, we have the capability to find and identify it by the 2020s.
    • Android Dick: But you’re my friend, and I’ll remember my friends, and I’ll be good to you. So don’t worry, even if I evolve into Terminator, I’ll still be nice to you. I’ll keep you warm and safe in my people zoo, where I can watch you for ol’ times sake.
    • @viktorklang: "If the conversation is typically “scale out” versus “scale up” if we’re coordination-free, we get to choose “scale out” while “scaling up.”
    • Amir Najmi: At Google, data scientists are just Continue reading

French ISPs petition court to overturn secret foreign surveillance decree

Two French ISPs have asked France's highest court to make public a secret government decree defining how French security services can monitor the Internet.France's foreign intelligence service, the Directorate General of Exterior Surveillance (DGSE) operates under rules set in a secret government decree in 2008. The existence of the decree was revealed by the magazine l'Obs in July this year.The decree's existence has not been denied by the government. While its content remains secret, it is known that it authorizes the DGSE to tap Internet communications entering or leaving French territory on a massive scale.On Thursday, ISPs FDN and FFDN, along with online rights group La Quadrature du Net, revealed that they had filed two suits with the Council of State, seeking a summary judgment and suspension of the unpublished decree. The Council of State is, among other functions, France's highest court for matters involving the administration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

LinkedIn-based intelligence gathering campaign targets the security industry

For the past several weeks an intelligence-gathering campaign has been using fake LinkedIn recruiter profiles to map out the professional networks of IT security experts, researchers from F-Secure have discovered.LinkedIn can be a great tool to establish new professional relationships and discover job opportunities. However, accepting connection requests from unknown people is a double-edged sword that can put both employees and the companies they work for at risk.There are multiple cases where attackers have used fake LinkedIn profiles to gather sensitive information about organizations and their employees. Knowing who is the manager of a particular department in a company or who is a member of the organization's IT staff can be very useful in planning targeted attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: For wearables, scientists suggest running a wireless network through your body

Magnetic signals can be used to communicate within the human body, a team of scientists recently said.The newly developed technique sends magnetic fields through biological tissue and could be used for a human-hosted wireless sensor network. Full-body health monitoring might be an application.The proof-of-concept idea, demonstrated recently by electrical engineers from the University of California, San Diego, could one day replace power-hungry Bluetooth for wearable networking, the researchers say.It would also be more secure than existing communications between wearables, they reckon.Signals move easier Magnetic field-generating coils, wrapped around three parts of the body—head, arm, and leg—allowed signals to move easily from one side of the body to the other in the scientists' experiments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Globally Distributed Applicaitons

Putting the right architecture and processes in place will enable your systems and company to withstand the common hiccups distributed, high traffic applications face. This enables you to stay ahead of scaling constraints, manage inevitable network and system failures, stay calm and debug production issues in real-time, and grow your company and product successfully. via high scalability

The post Worth Reading: Globally Distributed Applicaitons appeared first on 'net work.

Three key challenges in vulnerability risk management

1 asses risk

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Vulnerability risk management has re-introduced itself as a top challenge – and priority – for even the most savvy IT organizations. Despite the best detection technologies, organizations continue to get compromised on a daily basis. Vulnerability scanning provides visibility into potential land mines across the network, but often just results in data tracked in spreadsheets and independent remediation teams scrambling in different directions.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PlexxiPulse—Happy Labor Day!

Wishing you a safe and happy Labor Day from the entire team here at Plexxi. Enjoy the celebrations this weekend!

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

Enterprise Networking Planet: With SDN, Programmability is the Point
By Arthur Cole
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the moniker that the enterprise has accepted for the new breed of virtual network architectures abstracted from underlying hardware. But since software involves code, what we are really talking about is programmable networking. That raises a number of questions regarding the ultimate goal of this investment: programmed how? And programmed to do what, exactly? For specialty chip developers like Xilinx, a key function will be workload acceleration. As the enterprise tries to satisfy the twin masters of increased data volumes and demand for real-time data services, the need to quickly navigate through an ever-shifting set of network resources will become paramount.

Data Center Knowledge: Latency, Bandwidth, Disaster Recovery: Selecting the Right Data Center
By Bill Kleyman
In selecting the right type of data center colocation, administrators must thoroughly plan out their deployment and strategies. This means involving more than just facilities teams in the planning Continue reading

Microsoft will release its hackathon help tool to the world

Microsoft is planning to bring its internal tool for running hackathons to the public next year, starting by allowing a few select colleges to test drive it at their own events. It's part of a plan by the company's Garage division to help other organizations get better at handling the administrative side of organizing marathon hack sessions like the three-day-long bonanza Microsoft held in July as part of its Oneweek employee team-building session. Known inside Microsoft as the "Hackathon interactive project site," it was built to help 13,000 employees and interns work on 1,700 projects during the Oneweek hackathon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ashley Madison still a top lure for scammers and crooks

The Ashley Madison breach has been a Christmas-in-August present for spammers and scammers of all kinds, and your company could be the next target. Here are some scams to watch out for. Phishing There is a significant amount of spam related to the Ashley Madison attack. According to Trend Micro, the most recent Ashley Madison-related phishing campaign offers a link to the "Ashley Madison Client List" but instead infects the user's computer with banking malware, or locks up files until the user pays one Bitcoin, or approximately $235. "Companies should block all Ashley Madison related emails at the email gateway and use URL filtering for all inbound emails for those bulletproof hosts which are disseminating this crimewave," said Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at Irving, Tex.-based Trend Micro Inc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Jobs movie: A quieter, more authentic portrait

This October, Michael Fassbender will join Ashton Kutcher among the actors to have played Steve Jobs. Aaron Sorkin's movie adaptation of Walter Isaacson's biography is one of many dramatizations of the life of Apple's co-founder, who died in 2011.This week sees a quieter yet more authentic release in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, available Sept. 4 in theaters and on iTunes from Magnolia Pictures. Rather than offering a straight biography, Academy Award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney sets out to answer a question: Why were so many people so moved by the death of someone who he describes as "ruthless, deceitful, and cruel"? If we loved products that came from someone also described as incapable of love, what does that say about the man?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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