Новости за 16.11.2016

Today I watched an interesting Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing about “Understanding the Role of Connected Devices in Recent Cyber Attacks.” The attacks refer to when insecure IoT devices infected with Mirai malware hammered DNS provider Dyn in October.

When it comes to responding to cyber-attacks it seems many companies are severely lacking.

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.

General Electric five years ago launched a software platform intended to create applications that could take their cues from sensor-equipped turbines. The idea was that companies could improve productivity by reducing manual check-ups and save millions of dollars in operational costs by anticipating when their planes, trains and other heavy equipment would require maintenance.

What have GE, Citigroup, FedEx, Bank of America, Intuit, Gap, Kaiser Permanente, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase learned from using the public cloud?

While I was off fighting viruses, SUSE released an update to its SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, a popular business Linux operating environment. The focus of this service pack appears to be accelerating network performance, enhancing support for SAP applications and HANA, improving support for IBM Power architecture systems and other important improvements.

Lets start here: the Hubsan X4 quadcopter is just $37 after the current 29% discount on Amazon, where it averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 500 people (read reviews). So if you've been thinking about buying a quadcopter, you don't have a whole lot to lose on this one. The X4 is lightweight and durable, with an optional protection ring included that's designed to keep it safe through the inevitable crash. A 6-axis flight control system with adjustable gyro sensitivity make it very easy to fly... Читать дальше...

The U.S. government needs to pass regulations mandating internet of things security measures before device vulnerabilities start killing people, a security expert told lawmakers.

Microsoft packed SQL Server 2016 with new advanced features that are supposed to help it compete with a host of other database software. But some of the advanced capabilities in the relational database software were restricted to the most expensive Enterprise edition. That's about to change.

The shift to digital has introduced several new technologies into businesses. Internet of Things (IoT), mobility, cloud and the like allow companies to become highly agile and move with speed.

Distributed database software vendor DataStax announced today that it had completed the acquisition of DataScale, a specialist in cloud-based management services for data infrastructure, paving the way for a fully managed version of DataStax's offering in early 2017.

A former CSO of the World Bank Treasury calls the SWIFT system outdated and open to malware attacks. Those vulnerabilities could lead to manipulation of financial transactions.

Cisco Talent Show

Cisco has acquired 193 companies over its history, and in an effort to retain as much talent from its buyouts as possible, the company has created a Founders Forum consisting of 46 entrepreneurs who started and/or led businesses Cisco has purchased. These creative minds meet quarterly to share ideas. Here is a sampling of the members, who are listed alphabetically by acquired company name.

Matt Cutler, whose startup Cisco bought three years ago, found himself moving from an outfit with eight people to one with tens of thousands. He looked forward to accessing resources beyond his reach at Collaborate.com, but was wary of being able "to get stuff done" within the larger organization.

The tech industry brims with examples of bright entrepreneurs who have struck it big by selling their startups and then hightailing it out of those larger companies once contractually eligible so that they can pursue their next venture.

That SD-WANs will replace routing was not the most important message from last week’s Gartner webinar with Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Joe Skorupa.

There's no love lost between Google and Microsoft. The two companies have been fiercely competitive with one another in the public cloud, productivity and operating system markets, at times leaving users in the lurch.

After a long campaign against open source and Linux, Microsoft has for the past few been pushing its love of the popular operating system. On Wednesday, the company made that even more official by joining the Linux Foundation, an organization that shepherds development of the operating system's kernel and provides funding for open source projects.

As I wrote in March of this year, the Databricks service is an excellent product for data scientists. It has a full assortment of ingestion, feature selection, model building, and evaluation functions, plus great integration with data sources and excellent scalability. The Databricks service provides a superset of Spark as a cloud service. Databricks the company was founded by the original developer of Spark, Matei Zaharia, and others from U.C. Berkeley’s AMPLab. Meanwhile, Databricks continues... Читать дальше...

The massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack last month on Dyn, the New Hampshire-based Domain Name System (DNS) provider, was mostly an inconvenience.

Most businesses offer no shortage of benefits to employees, but what happens when your employees aren't aware most of those benefits exist? While free lunch and snacks in the break room are easy enough to spot, and appreciate, there are plenty of overlooked benefits hiding in your onboarding handbook.

For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet -- dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like -- in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing.

Back for 11th helpings?

Image by Mark Gibbs / psdblast.com

Welcome, once again, to the Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards. It’s been a few years since our last effort to point the digit of disdain at those individuals, companies or entities that don't, won't or can't come to grips with reality, maturity, ethical behavior and/or social responsibility because of their blindness, self-imposed ignorance, thinly veiled political agenda, rapaciousness and greed, or their blatant desire to return us to the Dark Ages. Читать дальше...

Android Everywhere

That little green Android elf is everywhere this Black Friday 2016 shopping season to help retailers slash the price of tablets, phones and more running Google’s mobile operating system based on the Linux kernel.

Audrey Hatten-Milholin has worked at the University of California, San Francisco for 17 years. But come February, her job in the IT department as a system architect will be taken over by a worker from India.