Новости за 02.05.2016

Track workouts, heart rate, distance, calories burned, floors climbed, active minutes, and steps with the popular Fitbit Charge HR. Sync data wirelessly and automatically back to your computer or smartphone, where it can be viewed and analyzed securely online. Fitbit Charge HR also tracks your sleep, and can wake you with a silent alarm. 

Dell’s planned US$67 billion acquisition of EMC will create a broad collection of businesses called Dell Technologies.

Hard on the heels of a similar purchase last week, Oracle has announced it will pay $532 million to buy Opower, a provider of cloud services to the utilities industry.

Google Apps is getting a new set of tutorials. The tech giant announced Monday that it has acquired Synergyse, a startup that offered businesses a guided tutorial for Google Apps.

The worst part of this mistake – other than the pain caused to innocent weasels – is that it should have been avoided, at least here. After all, as I was typing last Friday’s post about an electrocution-sparked electrical outage at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the question did occur to me: Is a weasel actually a rodent, as I am about to allege?

Microsoft last week outlined the timetable it will use to drop browser support for sites that secure traffic with SHA-1 certificates, part of an Internet-wide plan to rid the Internet of the weaker encryption.

This report from the CIO Executive Council (CEC), based on a webcast featuring Scott Angelo, CIO at K&L Gates, and Mike Plantinga, CIO at CIBC Mellon, explores CIO-level strategies for dealing with cybersecurity threats – before and after a data breach.

Back in 2007, I went to O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON). That particular year Canonical had a mini-summit, which happened in the two days before OSCON, called Ubuntu Live.

The Interop conference convening this week will be a far cry from the gathering of a small group of technology pioneers who sought interoperability among Internet devices 30 years ago.

Microsoft has tried in the past to make apps communicate, like with Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) in the 1990s. It worked, but in a limited fashion, allowing for linking data between Word and Excel. But if you wanted to share data from non-Microsoft apps, you were out of luck.

At the OpenStack Summit in Austin recently, one of the companies invited to keynote on the first day was a cloud, hosting and services vendor from France, OVH. Like most of the people in the room, the name OVH raised my eyebrows. I've been covering the cloud world since it existed, and I'd never come across the company. Maybe they were a new startup or something?

EMC is going back to basics -- but for a new generation of users -- on the first day of EMC World on Monday.

According to ESG research, enterprise organizations continue to invest in all types of threat intelligence (note: I am an ESG employee).  For example, 60% of organizations have had a threat intelligence program in place for more than 2 years, 69% consume 6 or more open source or commercial threat intelligence feeds as part of cybersecurity analytics efforts, and 72% of enterprises plan on increasing spending on their threat intelligence programs over the next 12 to 18 months.

Researchers from the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research took aim at Samsung’s SmartThings and came up with four proof-of-concept attacks that they believe should make SmartThings owners a bit paranoid by thinking about worst-case scenarios in which hackers remotely take control of your home.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) last month lost the No. 1 spot to Google's Chrome, marking a major milestone not only in IE's 21-year lifespan, but a dramatic changing of the desktop browser guard.

"Android" and "enterprise" are two words that traditionally haven't gone together. But with Google beefing up its Android for Work initiative -- and getting ready to launch more enterprise-friendly features with the upcoming Android "N" release -- the notion of companies considering Android for employees no longer seems far-fetched.

Paul Valente, a Chicago Public Schools systems engineer, jokes that his employer is "a $7 billion organization with a $6 billion budget." Not surprisingly, the underfunded department has a short-staffed IT team, so Valente is always looking for ways to cut costs and streamline operations -- and he feels he has struck gold with an application rationalization scheme.

Database fans, start your clocks: Microsoft announced Monday that its new version of SQL Server will be out of beta and ready for commercial release on June 1. 

Herve Coureil spent more than two decades building a career before landing the top technology spot at Schneider Electric, which specializes in energy management and automation. Nothing unusual there -- except for the fact that Coureil spent most of his 23 years at Schneider outside of IT, in business and financial roles. In fact, he served as chief financial officer in Schneider's Critical Power and Cooling Services unit before becoming CIO in 2009.

Looking for a new job but can't seem to land one? Maybe your poor networking skills are to blame? A new national survey reveals that while HR professionals say employee referrals are the best source for finding great candidates, only 7 percent of job seekers are using referrals as part of their job search.

Results from two recent studies suggest that cybersecurity needs an overhaul at most companies with root causes of the problem including poor communication, a lack of employee awareness, slowed productivity and a lack of budget.

Angler, Magnitude, and Nuclear are a few of the most commonly used exploit kits criminals are using to deliver a variety of payloads from botnets to ransomware. Exploit kits are really just a means for malicious actors to get in the door. Once their payloads are installed, the payload is unique to the criminal, and the payload delivered has a profound impact on business operations.

Microsoft’s message board/social network for business, Yammer, now allows administrators to invite people from outside of the Yammer network into groups for discussions and other messaging. The company made the announcement in the Yammer blog last week.

Social Linux butterflies

When most people think of “Linux nerds,” the first phrase that comes to mind typically isn’t “super-duper social.” But it should be. If you’ve ever been to a Linux convention, you’ve seen these social Linux butterflies firsthand. And that social nature extends to social media as well. 

On any given day, more than 9,000 groups in 180 countries will gather somewhere in their local community to attend a “meetup,” according to the company that coined the term and originated the concept, Meetup.com. While topics range widely – from Texas Hold’em to plant-based nutrition – there are more listings for technology-focused topics than any other area, except careers/business.