Новости за 22.12.2015

What to give the publishing executive who has everything?

That's the question I asked myself this holiday season about John Gallant, Chief Content Officer of Network World parent organization IDG U.S. Media and a key mover and shaker behind our recent adoption of the Slack tool that we're using to foster better "collaboraction" between editors, reporters, technology and design staff, and others.

MORE: Slack sets aside $80M to help developers extend its platform

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Figuring out mysteries

Image by Flickr

Cyber technology couldn’t get by without algorithms to encrypt, analyze metadata and find traffic anomalies, but they are used more and more widely in other fields. Here are 10 algorithms that perform functions as varied as scanning for disease genes, catching classroom cheats and figuring out murder mysteries as well as Agatha Christie’s heroine Miss Marple.

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No matter how much of a Star Wars fan you might or might not be (I pretty much jumped off the fanmobile after Jar Jar Binks) the idea of the Jedi lightsaber was always uber-cool.

The First

Image by Reuters/Joe Skipper

They have talked about it for years and had a couple failures but SpaceX this week did what no one has done before – they launched a multi-stage rocket into space, delivered 11 satellites into low-Earth orbit and landed the first stage of the spacecraft back on the launching pad. The Falcon rocket becomes the first of what SpaceX hopes will become a family of reusable launcher systems. Take a look.

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We all like to talk about security, but sometimes words can't tell the whole the story. That's especially true in the case of cyber-threats, identify theft and fraud. It's a numbers game. And as you'll see, users weren't the winners in 2015.

"The U.S. economy as a whole is only reaching 18% of its digital potential," McKinsey said in a new report.

At my company, and those of most people I know, just about everyone works on a laptop these days. Here in the Bay Area tech community, desktop computers can sometimes seem like an endangered species.

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.

Google’s recent Eddystone announcement adds another heavyweight to the indoor location-based services market.  With beacon location support from the two largest mobile ecosystem providers, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons have become the de facto standard for indoor micro-location applications.  Let’s investigate some of the nuances of the Eddystone format compared to Apple’s iBeacon and highlight key items that organizations should consider while deploying a nascent solution.

Security researchers and crypto experts have spent the last few days trying to figure out the details of a recently announced backdoor in Juniper NetScreen firewalls that could allow attackers to decrypt VPN (Virtual Private Network) traffic. They believe that they found the answer: a combination of likely malicious third-party modifications and Juniper's own crypto failures.

A New Year's resolution to change Facebook posting habits is worth considering for most people. That trail of the ups and downs of the past year could hold an unpleasant surprise that could be socially or professionally limiting.

Acacia Communications, an optical networking company that boosts bandwidth for cloud and other service providers, Monday filed for an IPO -- a rarity during a year in which the number of tech companies going public is at its lowest since 2009, the year Acacia launched.

Comcast has made a breakthrough that could enable it to offer gigabit-speed broadband to its existing network without going through the exhaustive, and expensive, process of building out a new fiber network. 

As for why the U.S. has the most cameras connected to the Internet that have no unique passwords to protect them, could it be that all those cameras are not actually located in the U.S.? For example, there was a camper with icicles that appeared to be about a foot long hanging off of it as a deep snow covered the ground, but it was tagged as being located in Ocala, Florida. A quick search revealed the temperature to be 80 degrees, and that didn’t come close to matching the real-time image.

Oracle promises to give customers tools that easily uninstall insecure older versions of Java SE that may still lurk as vulnerabilities within Web browsers.

NetApp is acquiring startup SolidFire for US$870 million cash for a foothold in the fast-growing market for scale-out flash storage.

A "stay interview" is similar in intent to its cousin, the exit interview: to gather feedback from employees about their experiences in the workplace, both positive and negative, to determine areas for improvement. There's one key difference, however -- timing. Stay interviews are performed much earlier in an employees' tenure to measure engagement and satisfaction, in the hopes of reducing the chance that talent will leave for better opportunities.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says IT jobs will grow 12% over the next decade, except for programmers. That occupation will shrink as more work is shifted to lower wage countries, according to the government.

We can't all be winners

Image by Wikipedia

The worst fails always start with good intentions. Maybe you want to improve the status of artists on streaming music services, find a DVD player solution for Windows 10 users, or create a great TV service for cord cutters.

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At a web conference meeting with IT security professionals in early December, IT advisory services firm Wisegate polled the small group about how comfortable they were with sharing cyberthreat information with industry peers and with government agencies.

One of the major trends in IT over the past few years has been increased automation and a concurrent decrease in the need for human or manual intervention. Virtualization has made it possible to spin up a virtual server space for developers to do their work in isolation of the production systems, and hypervisors like VMware and Hyper-V make it possible to get one running in under 20 minutes. 

Sure there are those boilerplate questions such as do you work well with others or what are your strengths and weaknesses, but there are a few questions that interviewers ask that they hope will set you apart from the others.

It's a beautiful corporate campus in Knoxville, Tenn., sitting behind a sign for a company you might not have heard, although Scripps Networks Interactive is the home of a few cable TV channels you have heard of – Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel, DIY Network, Cooking Channel and Great American Country.

While it says it has no reason to think there are backdoors in any of its products, Cisco has started an additional code review looking for “malicious modifications” after Juniper’s announcement that its ScreenOS operating system has been vulnerable for years.

Impressive performance

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 tablet is not inexpensive – the configuration we tested ran $1,800, and that’s without the $130 keyboard. But the Surface Pro 4 is extraordinarily light and very, very fast for its ultra-slim dimensions and weight. The Pen is more useful than we’d imagined, and its vivid display and serious performance are impressive. Here are some tips and tricks to get the most out of your new Surface.