Новости за 11.03.2016

The Department of Justice (DOJ) yesterday criticized Apple with the sharpest words yet over the firm's refusal to help authorities unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, calling its legal arguments "corrosive" to American democracy.

It might seem ironic for the leader of the company that blazed the trail for shadow IT to acknowledge that the CIO's role has ratcheted up several notches in importance. Yet in a sign of how, in the words of Marc Andreessen, “software is eating the world” and perhaps irrevocably altering the business landscape, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says that the CEO is working closely with the CIO to architect digital transformations. Eventually, some of those CIOs will become CEOs, he said.

Microsoft is adding a new weapon to its aggressive Windows 10 push—or at least it appears that it is.

A panel discussion at Aruba’s Atmosphere conference on Wednesday talked up the need for better analytics and options for managing floods of personal devices on educational networks.

Microsoft is trying to lure users away from Evernote with a new tool that lets people migrate their notes from the startup’s note-taking service.  

Car giant General Motors plans to acquire autonomous vehicle technology vendor Cruise Automation in an effort to accelerate its efforts to develop self-driving capabilities.

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The conversion from free to paid registration and a spike in Open Compute Project Summit keynote attendance signaled that open hardware innovation is trending up. Summit attendees are companies like Facebook that buy land, build big data center buildings and fill them with commodity computing and networking hardware. Their mission is to build hyperscale, hyperefficient infrastructure that is flexible in handling workloads and agile in delivering new services in minutes.

You didn't think the science types at NASA would let March 14 (a.k.a. Pi Day 2016) pass by without notice, did you?

A patch for a critical Java flaw released by Oracle in 2013 is ineffective and can be easily bypassed, security researchers warn. This makes the vulnerability exploitable again, paving the way for attacks against PCs and servers running the latest versions of Java.

All countries regulate RF spectrum, but the form of regulation differs. In the case of LTE-in-unlicensed-spectrum, the US regulator invites the industry to police itself, while Europeans are more rules-oriented. These forces are shaping the path and future adoption of LTE-U (LTE in Unlicensed spectrum) and LAA (Licensed Assisted Access).  This column draws no conclusions as to which is the better approach, but it is indisputable that the future of these technologies will be determined in Europe.

UPDATE: March 10, 2016, 3:46 p.m. Pacific—In a conference call Thursday afternoon, Apple’s SVP and chief legal counsel Bruce Sewell said, “The tone of the brief reads like an indictment,” and in 30 years he’s never seen a brief trying so hard “to smear” someone. “It should be deeply offensive to everyone who reads it.”

Enterprises are no longer sitting on their hands, wondering if they should risk migrating applications and data to the cloud. They're doing it -- but security remains a serious concern.

An inexpensive but capable home computer

Famed calculator maker Texas Instruments’ first stab at the home computer market arrived in 1979 with the flawed TI-99/4, which included a poor keyboard, no support for lowercase characters, and the requirement that it use a custom TV monitor. Two years later, TI fixed those issues with the TI-99/4A (note the “A”)—seen here—which retailed for $525 (about $1,368 today when adjusted for inflation). That was pretty cheap at a time when the Apple II cost over twice that much. Читать дальше...

The new USB-C connection

There's a new USB in town -- the Type-C port. Smaller than the familiar USB Type-A, the USB-C plug uses the latest USB 3.1 specification, which means it's not only faster but reversible, eliminating the frustration of trying to insert a USB plug upside-down. Able to carry up to 100 watts of power (six times the USB 3.0 limit), a USB-C port can deliver up to 10Gbps -- double that of current USB 3.0 devices.

Show of hands: Who thinks the best site on the Web is maintained by the federal government?

In Florida Thursday night, Republican presidential candidates took on the H-1B visa program in a way they have never done before. They said the program is being abused, needs reform and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, in particular, seemed to recommend ending it.

Marking a milestone in a major job-training initiative, the Obama administration says that IT skills will be at the heart of the continued economic recovery and the expansion not just of the technology sector, but all areas of the economy.

The writing is on the wall for large-scale, traditional power generation, according to an official energy-industry organization in a major developed nation.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has submitted Thursday a plan for ending U.S. oversight of key technical Internet functions in favor of a global multi-stakeholder governance model.

A software component for encrypting instant messaging clients has a flaw that could let attackers take over users' machines, but there's now a patch for the vulnerability.

Apple has formally invited everyone (well, if you're using a Safari or Microsoft Edge browser) to livestream its event on March 21 at which the company is expected to introduce a new 4-inch iPhone and 9.7-inch iPad Pro. Mac and Apple Watch news could also be forthcoming, if speculation is to be believed.

It's official folks: Apple's long-anticipated March media event finally has a date and a time. Earlier today, Apple began sending out invitations to the event, now set to take place on Monday, March 21 at the company's Town Hall auditorium in Cupertino. The festivities will begin at 9 a.m. Pacific Time and will likely be captained by Tim Cook.

Online retail giant Amazon.com is back online after suffering a crash across its website and mobile app Thursday afternoon.

If 2015 was the year analytics tools became ubiquitous in enterprise software, 2016 is shaping up to do much the same for machine learning.