App opens up smartphone use for people with arm paralysis

South Korean researchers have developed an app that helps people with arm paralysis use smartphones.Dubbed Dowell, the app is designed to assist people who can’t use their hands well, and is targeted at users with muscular dystrophy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), stroke and other ailments that restrict movement.The app has a user interface that works with a variety of input methods for disabled people, which are known as computer assistive devices. It can receive information from a trackball mouse, head-tracking camera and mouth stick, which is a tool for manipulating a cursor with the mouth.The project is being presented at the 2015 Computer-Human Interaction Conference (CHI) in Seoul this week as part of an industry-university collaboration involving Samsung Electronics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP leaves Apple Beats behind with new X360 hybrids

Hewlett-Packard has closed the door on its partnership with Beats Audio, now owned by Apple, by introducing its first hybrid PCs to feature Bang and Olufsen audio technology.The Envy X360 and Pavilion X360 are intended to be primarily laptops, but can be used as tablets with screens that rotate 360 degrees. The hybrids can also deliver booming sound.HP has relied on Beats for years for its PCs and tablets, but that was before Apple acquired it. HP’s new X360 hybrids are the first of many PCs, tablets and accessories that will carry audio from B&O, said Mike Nash, a vice president with HP’s Personal Systems Group.The hybrids don’t have striking designs or the thinness of Lenovo’s Yoga PC, but they are less expensive and come with the latest Intel Pentium Core M and Core i processors. Another selling point is their ability to fit up to 1TB of hard-drive storage, which is a rarity in hybrids.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCIE RS – it’s the payload, not the header

There is some actual content here, but first – a few drips of sap. The title is a nerdy rendering of the adage ‘its the journey, not the destination’. The decision to take time from study and blog had to do with this very thing – reserving time for reflection along the way. While taking […]

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Quentin Demmon

Quentin Demmon
Network Engineer at Healthcare Specialty Benefits Management company

Quentin Demmon is a network engineer, hobbyist weightlifter (Olympic style), and wannabe philosopher. He is excited to be blogging about his CCIE journey in gory, melodramatic detail. Follow him on twitter, facebook, and instagram.
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The post CCIE RS – it’s the payload, not the header appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Quentin Demmon.

Google may launch wireless service as soon as Wednesday

Google could take the wraps off of its wireless service as soon as Wednesday, sparking new competition by charging customers only for the amount of data they use.The service will be offered in the U.S. through a partnership with Sprint and T-Mobile, who have agreed to carry traffic, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the plans. It will be available initially only to users of Google’s latest Nexus 6 phones, the report said.Currently, most mobile operators charge users for a fixed amount of data that lapses if they don’t use it up each month, so the Google service could put pressure on that type of plan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP partners with FireEye for cyberattack investigation and response

Hewlett-Packard is partnering with computer security company FireEye to give it a technological edge in detecting and investigating cyberattacks.FireEye’s threat detection and incident response capabilities will be incorporated into HP’s Enterprise Services. The companies are planning to offer an “industry standard reference architecture” centered around advanced threat protection and incident response, according to a news release Tuesday from the RSA security conference in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP partners with FireEye for cyberattack investigation and response

Hewlett-Packard is partnering with computer security company FireEye to give it a technological edge in detecting and investigating cyberattacks.FireEye’s threat detection and incident response capabilities will be incorporated into HP’s Enterprise Services. The companies are planning to offer an “industry standard reference architecture” centered around advanced threat protection and incident response, according to a news release Tuesday from the RSA security conference in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Contributing back to the security community

This Friday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, along with Marc Rogers, Principal Security Researcher at CloudFlare, I'm speaking about a version of The Grugq's PORTAL, an open source network security device designed to make life easier and safer for anyone traveling, especially internationally, with phones, tablets, laptops, and other network-connected devices.

Portal uses open-source software and services to take inexpensive, commodity travel routers and turn them into powerful security devices. Since this is pretty far from CloudFlare's core business, it warrants a brief digression into why we support projects like this.

Computer security was for a very long time only of interest to hobbyists, academics, and obscure government agencies. Cryptography was an interesting offshoot of number theory, a foundational but very abstract part of mathematics, and many of the early infrastructure components of the Internet didn't include security at all -- there was an assumption that anyone who could gain access would be responsible and well-intentioned, a consequence of the academic origins; after all, why would they want to break or steal things which were freely available.

Before the "cambrian explosion" of commercial computer security, there was still a lot of great security research -- it Continue reading

Nigerian gov’t hands over Nitel, Mtel assets to NATCOM

The Nigerian government has officially handed over the assets of Nigerian Telecommunications (Nitel) and its mobile arm, Mtel, to the NATCOM consortium, but there is general pessimism about the ultimate fate of the telecom company.NATCOM last week paid the $252 million acquisition price for Nitel and Mtel. Over the years, the government has tried multiple times to sell the former national carrier. Several groups including Omen International, Investor International London and the New Generation Consortium led by China Unicom all ended up failing to pay their bid prices for Nitel and Mtel.As in many African countries, the Nigerian government failed to recapitalize its national carrier.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google, Apple, Amazon spend record amounts on lobbying

Google, Apple and Amazon.com spent record amounts in the first quarter attempting to influence U.S. politicians and policy.Google, which was already the biggest tech lobbyist in Washington, D.C., spent $5.47 million in the first three months of the year, according to a report filed with the Senate Office of Public Records.That made it the fifth biggest federal lobbyist across all industries during the quarter, according to an analysis by Maplight.Google has been steadily increasing the amount it spends to influence the course of policy and law on a range of issues. Since mid-2011, it has spent on average at least a million dollars each month in areas both central to its business, such as online advertising and security, and tangential to it, such as international tax reform and drone technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google, Apple, Amazon spend record amounts on lobbying

Google, Apple and Amazon.com spent record amounts in the first quarter attempting to influence U.S. politicians and policy.Google, which was already the biggest tech lobbyist in Washington, D.C., spent $5.47 million in the first three months of the year, according to a report filed with the Senate Office of Public Records.That made it the fifth biggest federal lobbyist across all industries during the quarter, according to an analysis by Maplight.Google has been steadily increasing the amount it spends to influence the course of policy and law on a range of issues. Since mid-2011, it has spent on average at least a million dollars each month in areas both central to its business, such as online advertising and security, and tangential to it, such as international tax reform and drone technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo, still reliant on PCs, posts earnings that disappoint

Mobile is a crucial element in CEO Marissa Mayer’s turnaround plan for Yahoo, but the company is still heavily dependant on PCs for its money.That was evident Tuesday when Yahoo reported its financial results for the last quarter. Revenue from ads displayed on PCs brought in $873 million—more than three-quarters of the total. Mobile revenue climbed 61 percent from last year, but still reached only $234 million.This could be one reason Yahoo continues to struggle. Overall sales at the company rose by 8 percent to $1.23 billion. But excluding payments made to partners, sales were down 4 percent to $1.04 billion, missing the analyst estimate of $1.06 billion, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft moves to address customers’ concerns about cloud control and transparency

Microsoft is working on new features for its Office 365 cloud service designed to give customers more control over their data and more visibility into how it’s being accessed.The company will expand Office 365’s logging capabilities to include user, administrator and policy related actions for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. This will give cloud companies better insight into how their employees interact with content hosted on those services and whether those actions pose security or regulatory compliance concerns.The logs will be available through a new Office 365 Management Activity API (application programming interface) that can be tapped by monitoring, analysis and data visualization products. The API has been available to a select number of Microsoft partners already—security vendor Rapid7 announced today that its UserInsight intruder analytics product integrates with the new feature—and will be made available more broadly this summer as part of a private preview program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lack of broadband in some areas still limiting telemedicine

A lack of broadband service is limiting the deployment of telemedicine services in some places of the U.S., and not just remote rural areas, some experts say.Panasonic of North America, while providing Internet-based heart monitoring services for elderly residents of the New York City area, found several places were there were no wired broadband, Wi-Fi or strong mobile signals available, Todd Rytting, CTO for the company, told a U.S. Senate committee Tuesday.The SmartCare monitoring service significantly reduced the numbers of heart patients who had to return to the hospital, but “the biggest problem we faced was the lack of broadband to some of our citizens,” Rytting said. Some potential users of the service couldn’t get a broadband connection in “downtown New York City,” he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enough with the IT journeys already!!!

If there was an over/under line in Vegas on how many times the word "journey" will be mentioned next week in keynote addresses and other sessions at the big Interop network industry conference, I'd go with the over -- pretty much no matter what number the oddsmakers set the line at.If the badly behaved at next week's conference decided to make a drinking game of knocking back a shot every time an industry executive referred to a customer journey or a vendor's journey or a technology's journey, the trade show would be littered with passed out attendees (I beg you, don't try this.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Running Photon on Fusion via Vagrant

Most of you have probably picked up on the news of VMware’s new container-optimized Linux distribution, code-named “Photon”. (More details here.) In this post, I’m going to provide a very quick walkthrough on running Photon on VMware Fusion via Vagrant. This walkthrough will leverage a Vagrant box for Photon that has already been created.

To make things easier, I’ve added a photon directory to my GitHub “learning-tools” repository. Feel free to pull those files down to make it easier to follow along.

I assume that you’ve already installed Vagrant, VMware Fusion, and the Vagrant plugin for VMware. If you haven’t, you’ll want to complete those tasks—and verify that everything is working as expected—before proceeding.

  1. Install an additional Vagrant plugin that enables Vagrant to better detect and interact with Photon using this command:

     vagrant plugin install vagrant-guests-photon

    If you don’t install this plugin, you’ll likely get a non-fatal error about Vagrant being unable to perform the networking configuration. (Review the GitHub repository for this plugin if you want/need more details. Also, note that a PR against Vagrant to eliminate the need for this plugin was opened and merged; this fix should show up in a future release of Vagrant.)

  2. Continue reading

In case you aren’t suitably impressed by the scale of Amazon Web Services

Although the video has been up for awhile, if you haven’t had the chance to watch Amazon Web Service’s VP & Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton spell out AWS facts at the re:Invent conference last November, do yourself a favor and pull up a chair. Fascinating stuff that gives you some insight into the rapidly evolving world of cloud computing.The video is embedded below (or you can watch it on YouTube here, but here are some facts to whet your appetite: AWS has more than 1 million users AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) usage is growing 132% year over year AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is growing 99% year over year Every day AWS adds as much new server capacity as Amazon used to support its $7 billion business back in 2004 Networking only represents 8% of monthly AWS operating costs, Hamilton says, but the “cost of networking is escalating relative to the cost of all the other equipment.” That is very “anti-Moore,” he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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