Facebook’s privacy problems in Belgium highlight weaknesses in EU legislation

A Belgian privacy lawsuit targeting Facebook highlights the difficulties national regulators will face policing the activities of international Internet companies until new privacy laws are passed.The Belgian Commission for the Protection of Privacy is unhappy with the way Facebook handles the personal information of the nation’s citizens and in May asked it to change its policies in a number of “recommendations,” which have the force of law in the country.Facebook, though, maintains it doesn’t have to answer to the Belgian privacy watchdog as its international operations are run from Dublin, where the Irish Data Protection Commissioner oversees its compliance with the European Union Data Protection Directive as implemented under Irish law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Silver Peak launches MPLS killer

WAN evolution has been on the mind of IT leaders for decades. Historically though, network managers seemed comfortable to just “talk the talk” when it came to actually moving away from a traditional hub and spoke, MPLS based network. The problem statement seems to be fairly well understood. Traditional WANs are expensive to run, offer little in the way of flexibility, are hard to secure and network managers typically have little visibility into the types of applications and traffic patterns that traverse the network. So, why haven’t more organizations evolved from a legacy network to something more current, like an Internet based WAN? The answer lies in the expression “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Despite all the pain, the high cost and the static nature of traditional networks, they’re what we know. Whenever I talk to a network manager about the topic, interest is high, but so is the skepticism about whether an Internet based WAN could really support a businesses needs.   This is why so few of us want to be like Captain Kirk and “boldly go where no WAN manager has gone before”.To read this article in full or to Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: CEOs don’t care about mobile, IoT or wearables, says report

CEOs’ priorities are different from the rest of us when it comes to tech. For one thing, half of U.S. CEOs worry more about new industry entrants from the technology sector disrupting their businesses, than adopting devices as a strategy, according to a recent survey from analysts PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PWC.Strategic importance CEOs aren’t getting over-excited about devices. Investment is being made, but more CEOs thought cybersecurity was strategically more important to them that mobile, IoT and wearables, the survey found. Mobile gets barely half of CEOs’ attention. Only 55 percent of those polled reckoned mobile tech for engagement with customers is strategically “very important” to their enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: CEOs don’t care about mobile, IoT or wearables, says report

CEOs’ priorities are different from the rest of us when it comes to tech. For one thing, half of U.S. CEOs worry more about new industry entrants from the technology sector disrupting their businesses, than adopting devices as a strategy, according to a recent survey from analysts PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PWC.Strategic importance CEOs aren’t getting over-excited about devices. Investment is being made, but more CEOs thought cybersecurity was strategically more important to them that mobile, IoT and wearables, the survey found. Mobile gets barely half of CEOs’ attention. Only 55 percent of those polled reckoned mobile tech for engagement with customers is strategically “very important” to their enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Look Back at ONUG NYC 2015

ONUG Logo

I had a great time at the Open Networking Users Group meeting in NYC last month. Shortly afterward, I took a moment to think back on what I’d seen there, and that post was published on Gestalit.com. I won’t reproduce it here, so please take a moment to read my post at the source (gestaltit.com) and let me know what you think (here or there; either is fine). Topics covered include:

  • Containerized microservices
  • Software Defined WAN
  • Cross-functional teams
  • Adoption rates of new technologies

ONUG covered some cool stuff; I hope you enjoy the post.

 

Disclosure

My post at GestaltIT is a sponsored post as part of the ONUG Spring 2015 Tech Talk Series, part of the larger Tech Talks series.

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at A Look Back at ONUG NYC 2015 and give me a share/like. Thank you!

GSM switch off good news for phone users, not for connected devices

Carriers around the world are converging on 2017 as the year to turn off their GSM networks, with three operators in Singapore announcing Monday their plans to reuse their GSM spectrum for other services.The end of GSM will free up more bandwidth for faster 3G and 4G network technologies—but will also force users of older connected devices that depend on GSM networks to upgrade or replace them.On Monday Singaporean operators M1, Singtel and StarHub became the latest operators to set a timetable for turning off their GSM networks. They will do so on April 1, 2017, following in the footsteps of Telstra in Australia, which plans to do so by the end of 2016, and AT&T in the U.S, which will flip the switch on Jan. 1, 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rent the Runway’s CTO says a strong engineering department turns dreams into reality

Rent the Runway calls itself "a fashion company with a technology soul," with proprietary systems driving its growth from its 2009 formation as an online dress rental company through its expansion into brick-and-mortar shops in 2013 to the introduction of the lineup of online features it has today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Explain-a-holic (Communicate Clearly)

But just a couple of days ago, I was talking to someone about managing expectations in the IT world. How do you convince someone else to buy into a project? How do you get them to back your idea, rather than inventing their own? While the question itself is interesting, I’m going to leave my thoughts on it to another post.

What I realized, halfway through answering the question, was that I was sucking up a lot of time talking about things that probably didn’t matter. I was spending time talking about the problems of getting people to own the problem, or make them believe they’d invented the solution, and specific projects I’d been involved in where we could never convince a wide group of people to buy into our ideas and solutions.

At some point, I’m certain I sounded like this snippet from a recent email —

Like if I asked, “what is 1+1?” he might say, “one takes 1, and adds 1 to it, and you get the next integer, which is really quite interesting, because you can do this over and over again, and never get the same answer, which is a bit like…”

There are, Continue reading

Ansible Tower 2.2 … coming soon!

Ansible_Tower_2.2_PreviewIf you were at AnsibleFest NYC, you saw a sneak preview of Ansible Tower 2.2, coming this summer. For those of you that didn't, we thought we'd mention some of the things that are coming in the next release.

Ansible Tower remains the best way to run Ansible in your organization - marrying the simple, agentless, and powerful automation of Ansible with the control, security, and delegation you need to supercharge your IT teams ability to tackle complex automation tasks simply.

And we've worked to make Tower even better for you, bringing you new features like:

Streamlined Interface with Setup Mode

dashboard-1

We've listened to our customers and foregrounded the things you need on a day to day basis.,Meanwhile, Tower’s new setup screen gathers all the parts of Tower the administrator needs to configure such as organizations, users, groups, and permissions, in one place.

Galaxy Integration

Just add a Galaxy requirements file to your project directory, and Tower will automatically pull any playbook roles you need from Ansible Galaxy, GitHub, or any other centralized source.

Inventory Support for OpenStack

Ansible is committed to help make OpenStack simple for everyone to use, and we've now made it simple to Continue reading

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, June 15

As Spark faithful gather this week, IBM puts down its betThe hugely popular Hadoop framework for processing big data sets is getting some serious competition from alternative platform Spark, the Wall Street Journal reports, and thousands of the upstart’s acolytes are expected at the Spark Summit in San Francisco this week. IBM is getting behind the Apache open-source project with an investment worth hundreds of millions of dollars in software developers and technology, the New York Times says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, June 15

As Spark faithful gather this week, IBM puts down its betThe hugely popular Hadoop framework for processing big data sets is getting some serious competition from alternative platform Spark, the Wall Street Journal reports, and thousands of the upstart’s acolytes are expected at the Spark Summit in San Francisco this week. IBM is getting behind the Apache open-source project with an investment worth hundreds of millions of dollars in software developers and technology, the New York Times says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon now an open book on search warrants and subpoenas

Amazon.com has published its first transparency report describing how it has responded to requests from law enforcers for information about its customers.The company fielded 813 subpoenas, 25 search warrants, 13 court orders and fewer than 250 national security requests from U.S. authorities. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act prohibits Amazon from disclosing exactly how many National Security Letters and FISA court orders it has received: the number may have been zero.Despite its reluctance to release the information—companies such as Apple and Google are years ahead of it—Amazon says it is no lackey of the state security apparatus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 06.15.2015

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.AOP ConnectKey features: AOP Connect, a unique online portal that allows organizations unprecedented access to their intellectual property research results and offers secure interaction with global researchers. The platform offers the ability to leverage results of all of a client’s previous AOP Studies for new purposes. More informationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Best tools for single sign-on

Single mindednessSince we last looked at single sign-on products in 2012, the field has gotten more crowded and more capable. For this round of evaluations, we looked at seven SSO services: Centrify’s Identity Service, Microsoft’s Azure AD Premium, Okta’s Identity and Mobility Management, OneLogin, Ping Identity’s Ping One, Secure Auth’s IdP, and SmartSignin. Our Clear Choice test winner is Centrify, which slightly outperformed Okta and OneLogin. (Read the full review.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Smartphone beacons power crowdsourced weather forecasts

A Japanese climate information company that wants to track just about every cloud in the sky in its own data cloud is handing out atmospheric sensors for smartphones that could improve forecasting.Weathernews is distributing the sensors to users of its Weathernews Touch, a crowdsourced weather info app that has been downloaded more than 13 million times.The hexagonal, palm-sized WxBeacon sensors can detect changes in temperature, barometric pressure and humidity and automatically upload them to the Weathernews cloud.The aim is to improve weather forecasting with more granular, local information and to encourage more people to contribute to crowdsourced weather data, a Weathernews spokeswoman said. The company, which calls itself the world’s largest private weather data firm, believes the data gathered by the beacons could be particularly useful when typhoons strike Japan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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