Microsoft to release lowest-priced Lumia smartphone yet

Building on the launch earlier this year of two low-cost Lumia phones, Microsoft has taken the price down even further for its latest smartphone.Also targeted at emerging markets, the Lumia 430 will be priced at US$70 before taxes, when bought without carrier subsidies, and represents Microsoft’s most affordable Lumia smartphone yet.In January, the U.S. tech giant unveiled the Lumia 435 and the Lumia 532 that are priced just a notch higher.Although limited in specs, the three phones strengthen Microsoft’s product offerings for a market segment in which low-cost Android handsets are dominant. Globally, Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS only had a 2.8 percent market share in last year’s fourth quarter, according to research firm IDC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

March Madness 2015: Cool apps, alternative brackets, and tools to win your pool

Sports!The 2015 NCAA tournament kicks off in earnest today, now that the play-in rounds are complete and the final 64 teams are set. There are more ways to keep up with the action now than ever before. Here are the video streaming options, mobile apps, and other tools to help you stay informed and up-to-date with the action.Obligatory streaming slideGone are the days of digging through message boards and clicking on suspicious URLs to try to find a live stream of NCAA tournament games while at work. The NCAA streams all of the action through its March Madness Live app, available on the web as well as on iOS and Android. And for those watching at work, March Madness Live has the "Boss Button," which, when clicked, opens a fake PowerPoint-style document complete with nonsense bar graphs that will make you look like you're actually being productive when your boss happens to walk by. Genius.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo exits China, closing R&D center

Yahoo is closing its only remaining office in China and laying off between 200 and 300 employees there, news reports said on Wednesday.The moves are part of CEO Marissa Mayer’s efforts to rein in costs at the aging Internet company. Yahoo’s office in Beijing, the company’s only physical presence in mainland China, has housed an R&D center employing engineers.“We will be consolidating certain functions into fewer offices, including to our headquarters in Sunnyvale, California,” a Yahoo representative told the Wall Street Journal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mandrill warns attack may have exposed some data about email

Mandrill warned customers on Wednesday that some email-related data may have been exposed after attackers tried to lasso some of its servers into a botnet.Data doesn’t appear to have been stolen, but some customers should take some security precautions, wrote Brandon Fouts, general manager of Mandrill, which is a platform for managing transactional email that is owned by The Rocket Science Group.“There’s not evidence that any customer data was queried or exported, but unfortunately we can’t completely rule out the possibility of access,” Fouts wrote in a blog post.Data that may have been exposed includes internal logs about emails sent, including sender and recipient addresses but not custom metadata or the content of messages, Fouts wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

T-Mobile CEO ‘fairly confident’ net neutrality won’t kill Music Freedom

T-Mobile’s CEO says he’s confident that upcoming net neutrality rules won’t mean an end to the carrier’s “Music Freedom” promotion that allows unrestricted music streaming from certain sites.The rules, which were recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission but are not yet law, prohibit Internet providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic and from offering paid traffic prioritization services. They’ve been opposed by Republican lawmakers and major telecommunications companies.John Legere said he’s still combing through the 400-page regulation, which the FCC passed after an unprecedented 4 million [m] public comments, but he doesn’t believe the service will be affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

T-Mobile CEO ‘fairly confident’ net neutrality won’t kill Music Freedom

T-Mobile’s CEO says he’s confident that upcoming net neutrality rules won’t mean an end to the carrier’s “Music Freedom” promotion that allows unrestricted music streaming from certain sites. The rules, which were recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission but are not yet law, prohibit Internet providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic and from offering paid traffic prioritization services. They’ve been opposed by Republican lawmakers and major telecommunications companies. John Legere said he’s still combing through the 400-page regulation, which the FCC passed after an unprecedented 4 million [m] public comments, but he doesn’t believe the service will be affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What ever it is, CISA isn’t cybersecurity

In the next couple months, Congress will likely pass CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. This is a bad police-state thing. It will do little to prevent attacks, but do a lot to increase mass surveillance.

They did not consult us security experts when drafting this bill. If they had, we would have told them the idea doesn’t really work. Companies like IBM and Dell SecureWorks already have massive “cybersecurity information sharing” systems where they hoover up large quantities of threat information from their customers. This rarely allows them to prevent attacks as the CISA bill promises.

In other words, we’ve tried the CISA experiment, and we know it doesn’t really work.


While CISA won’t prevent attacks, it will cause mass surveillance. Most of the information produced by countermeasures is in fact false-positives, triggering on innocent anomalies rather than malicious hackers. Your normal day-to-day activities on the Internet occasionally trigger these false-positives. When this information gets forwarded to law enforcement, it puts everyone in legal jeopardy. It may trigger an investigation, or it may just become evidence about you, for example, showing which porn sites you surf. It’s mass surveillance through random sampling.

That such mass surveillance is the goal Continue reading

Cumulus Networks, sFlow and data center automation

 Cumulus Networks and InMon Corp have ported the open source Host sFlow agent to the upcoming Cumulus Linux 2.1 release. The Host sFlow agent already supports Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, and AIX operating systems and KVM, Xen, XCP, XenServer, and Hyper-V hypervisors, delivering a standard set of performance metrics from switches, servers, hypervisors, virtual switches, and virtual machines – see Visibility and the software defined data center.

The Cumulus Linux platform makes it possible to run the same open source agent on switches, servers, and hypervisors – providing unified end-to-end visibility across the data center. The open networking model that Cumulus is pioneering offers exciting opportunities. Cumulus Linux allows popular open source server orchestration tools to also manage the network, and the combination of real-time, data center wide analytics with orchestration make it possible to create self-optimizing data centers.

Install and configure Host sFlow agent

The following command installs the Host sFlow agent on a Cumulus Linux switch:

sudo apt-get install hsflowd

Note: Network managers may find this command odd since it is usually not possible to install third party software on switch hardware. However, what is even more radical is that Cumulus Linux allows users to download source Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How your car will help control your home

AT&T is one company that is planning on consumers being able to control elements of their home from the dashboard of connected cars.AT&T says that it is planning to link its connected car and smart home products via a voice recognition-enabled dashboard control. Home security will be the principal driver of the new tech in that case. But others are also in a race to bring functioning products to market and obtain consumer acceptance.Two existing AT&T products – AT&T Digital Life, a home management system, and AT&T Drive, its connected car platform – will be merged together to create its platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ideovitra seeks to slay PC power vampires with SensyBee smart switch

There’s a vampire-slayer stalking the halls at Cebit.With SensyBee, a curvy little box that plugs into the back of a PC between the power supply and the wall outlet, turning the PC off when it is unused, Ideovitra hopes to eliminate PCs’ vampire power consumption.A typical desktop PC consumes around 200 watts when running—but still as much as 50W when in Windows 8’s “sleep” mode. Even when “turned off,” it can consume up to 20W, as the power supply and some other components remain powered up to perform functions such as wake-on-LAN, said Ideovitra’s sales manager David Chedotal.In the 6,500 hours a year that the average office PC lies unused, that vampire power consumption can add between 130 and 325 kilowatt-hours to the energy bill. At German electricity prices, that’s anywhere from €30 (US$32) to €90 wasted each year, according to Ideovitra.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple Watch and its wireless tech

Apple hasn't called its upcoming Apple Watch "magical" as it did with the iPad in 2010, but its wireless components have some spellbinding features.Whether the embedded NFC (near field communication), Bluetooth and Wi-Fi elements contribute to the success of the Apple Watch sales is still an open question. Fashion and an array of apps could definitely trump the device's wireless tech.Why might the wireless tech not matter?So far, there aren't many NFC-ready point-of-sale terminals installed in the U.S. Likewise, there are relatively few hotel rooms that can be unlocked with a Bluetooth connection to the Apple Watch.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 most powerful Internet of Things companies Wi-Fi access points and hotspots seem to be everywhere, but there is disagreement over how important Wi-Fi will be on the Apple Watch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds fine Verizon $3.4 million over 911 service outage issues

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has fined Verizon US$3.4 million over its failure to notify police and fire departments during a 911 service outage last year.Under the commission’s rules, Verizon and other carriers were required to notify emergency call centers of a six-hour outage that occurred in April. The outage involved multiple carriers and affected over 11 million people in seven states.Verizon’s portion affected 750,000 California residents who were unable to call 911 to reach an emergency operator at 13 call centers in northern California. The outage was the result of a coding error at a large 911 routing center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Feds fine Verizon $3.4 million over 911 service outage issues

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has fined Verizon US$3.4 million over its failure to notify police and fire departments during a 911 service outage last year.Under the commission’s rules, Verizon and other carriers were required to notify emergency call centers of a six-hour outage that occurred in April. The outage involved multiple carriers and affected over 11 million people in seven states.Verizon’s portion affected 750,000 California residents who were unable to call 911 to reach an emergency operator at 13 call centers in northern California. The outage was the result of a coding error at a large 911 routing center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pixometer app offers a smarter way to read dumb meters

So you want to track your water, electricity or gas consumption, but you still don’t have a smart meter on your supply? Pixolus has a mobile app that makes it easier to keep track of meter readings, even with dumb meters. Just tell the Pixometer app which meter you’re going to read, point the phone’s camera at it, and let the optical character recognition software do the work. Once the app gets a lock on the numbers, it speaks the reading out loud and stores it, and the date, in that meter’s file. You can even enter the price per kilowatt-hour, for electricity, or per cubic meter, for water, and the app will show you the expenditure since the last meter reading, and what that works out to per month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pixometer app offers a smarter way to read dumb meters

So you want to track your water, electricity or gas consumption, but you still don’t have a smart meter on your supply? Pixolus has a mobile app that makes it easier to keep track of meter readings, even with dumb meters. Just tell the Pixometer app which meter you’re going to read, point the phone’s camera at it, and let the optical character recognition software do the work. Once the app gets a lock on the numbers, it speaks the reading out loud and stores it, and the date, in that meter’s file. You can even enter the price per kilowatt-hour, for electricity, or per cubic meter, for water, and the app will show you the expenditure since the last meter reading, and what that works out to per month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Proposed data breach notification bill criticized as too weak

Proposed legislation that would require U.S. businesses to notify affected customers after data breaches is too weak because it would preempt stronger breach notification laws in several states and it wouldn’t cover several classes of data, including geolocation and health information, critics told lawmakers.The proposed Data Security and Breach Notification Act covers only data linked to identity theft or financial fraud, including Social Security numbers, but would not require businesses and nonprofit groups to notify users if other information is stolen, said critics, including Democratic members of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee’s trade subcommittee.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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