Новости за 20.12.2016

The Mac Pro and Mac mini have languished for years. The iMac faces increased competition from rivals like Microsoft’s Surface Studio. The MacBook is thinner and lighter than ever, but not more powerful. Critics say it’s clear that Apple has put the Mac on the back burner. In a memo to employees, CEO Tim Cook said nothing could be further from the truth: “We have great desktops in our roadmap,” he wrote, according to TechCrunch. “Nobody should worry about that.”

(Insider Story)

In August, 2016 months of speculations ended when Rackspace announced that an investment management group would purchase the 18-year-old company. Rumors have been swirling that the company may be acquired, but instead Rackspace took the route that Dell, Riverbed and BMC have and went private.

Security experts from Google have developed a test suite that allows developers to find weaknesses in their cryptographic libraries and implementations.

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.

As I’ve written many times, the cybersecurity skills shortage is the biggest cybersecurity issue we face today. Not only are there too few bodies to fill the cybersecurity jobs, but a recent series of research reports from ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) indicates that many currently employed cybersecurity professionals are overworked, not managing their careers proactively, and not receiving the proper amount of training to stay ahead of increasingly dangerous threats. Читать дальше...

Most of my travel is booked well in advance. I’m kind of obsessive about my calendar and with a busy life to manage, I like to know what I’m up to weeks in advance. I’m also very loyal to one particular airline (here’s looking at you Air New Zealand) and am happy to pay a little more for a ticket on a top-shelf carrier that has good terms an conditions.

BlackBerry reported another quarter of losses and declining revenue on Tuesday, but CEO John Chen forecast that the company will break even next quarter, its first since quitting the smartphone business.

If you want a PC with Ubuntu Linux, you can turn to Intel's Joule single-board computer instead of buying an expensive machine.

Procrastination has once again turned into desperation. "Maybe I could whittle a pan flute from those broken chair legs in the basement", you're thinking. Snap out of it! Stay calm and remind yourself that with just a few minutes on Amazon right now you can still snag great gifts for anyone left on your list, and have them at your doorstep with plenty of time to gift wrap. Amazon's "last minute deals" page right here features great deals in almost any department, guaranteed by Amazon to arrive by Christmas. Читать дальше...

Edge computing today may be most simplistically defined as putting an extra layer of computing in the network between your smartphone and a centralized data center in the cloud for some optimizing purpose.

If two state representatives get their way and their newly proposed law moves forward, then people in South Carolina will be blocked from accessing online porn after purchasing a new device.

On Feb. 5, employees at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, started having network access problems that prevented electronic communications. Over the next few days, they learned that the hospital was the victim of a ransomware attack that encrypted files on multiple computers.

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.

Security experts are investigating whether a power outage that affected parts of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, and the surrounding region this weekend was the result of a cyberattack. If confirmed, it would be the second blackout caused by hackers in Ukraine.

One of the hardest enterprise applications to manage is Unified Communications (UC). Voice and video used to be fairly straightforward. Dedicated infrastructure, cables and endpoints ensured the quality was high and the system was simple to manage but was highly inefficient and costly.

A $1 billion Russia-based criminal gang has been bilking online advertisers by impersonating high-profile Web sites like ESPN, Vogue, CBS Sports, Fox News and the Huffington Post and selling phony ad slots, but that’s about to end.

Hardware and AI lead the way

Image by Martyn Williams

With last year’s corporate restructuring out of the way, 2016 was a year of rebuilding for Google and its parent company Alphabet.

This year, Google got much more serious about hardware, while placing big bets on artificial intelligence as the heart of its software. Products that fit this mission got revamped, while those that didn’t got axed or ignored. Read on for a review of what went right and wrong at Google in 2016.

To... Читать дальше...

Hortonworks has built its business on big data and Hadoop, but the Hortonworks Data Platform provides analytics and features support for a range of technologies beyond Hadoop, including MapReduce, Pig, Hive, and Spark. Hortonworks DataFlow, meanwhile, offers streaming analytics and uses technologies like Apache Nifi and Kafka.

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on goods manufactured in Mexico and offshore may accelerate the movement to cloud computing, analysts said.

Working with cryptographic libraries is hard, and a single implementation mistake can result in serious security problems. To help developers check their code for implementation errors and find weaknesses in cryptographic software libraries, Google has released a test suite as part of Project Wycheproof.

(Insider Story)

Microsoft announced a series of partnerships with location-based services in the hopes of creating what it calls a "world graph," covering all kinds of locations and objects and how they work together. 

The internet of things (IoT) is all about connecting devices to the internet so that they can talk to each other and to us, to make life more convenient. That might mean turning on the lights when we get up, or allowing us to use our phones to see who’s at the front door, even when we're at the office. The potential applications are endless.

Last week’s tech news cycle was dominated by coverage of the high-profile meeting between the incoming Trump administration and a star-studded roster of tech leaders. Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet’s (Google)’s Larry Page, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Oracle’s Sasha Catz,, IBM’s Ginny Rommety and others were summoned to Trump Tower for a heavily hyped sitdown that provided some amazing optics. (Who can forget the meme of Bezos, Page... Читать дальше...