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Total 49 articles, created at 2016-03-03 06:01 1 Mass Effect: Andromeda delayed to 2017, EA exec suggests BioWare Montreal's sci-fi RPG epic now set for release in fiscal Q4, according to publisher's CFO. 2016-03-03 04:54 2KB www.gamespot.com (2.00/3)
2 Microsoft opens applications for $3000 HoloLens development kit
(2.00/3) Hot on the heels of HTC and its Vive VR headset , Microsoft is opening up shop with a version of its HoloLens augmented-reality headset. Unlike Oculus' Rift and the Vive, however, Redmond isn't making HoloLens hardware available to just anybody. The company is taking applications for a Development Edition... 2016-03-03 03:23 3KB techreport.com 3 Samsung Galaxy TabPro S goes up for pre-order in the UK Windows 10 2-in-1 will start shipping on 16 March 2016-03-03 02:43 2KB www.theinquirer.net
4 Samsung wins appeal in patent dispute with Apple This is still going on? 2016-03-03 05:15 2KB www.theinquirer.net
5 iPhone 5SE price, release date, specs and rumours Apple's 4in smartphone tipped to go on sale on 18 March 2016-03-03 04:55 3KB www.theinquirer.net 6 DROWN: 11 million OpenSSL websites vulnerable to HTTPS attack Thought HTTPS meant secure? Think again! 2016-03-03 04:55 3KB www.theinquirer.net 7 Apple reportedly shifts iPhone 5SE and iPad Pro Mini unveiling to 21 March Just one day before FBI showdown 2016-03-03 04:55 2KB www.theinquirer.net 8 'X' is the most popular password exploited by hackers Be warned, Xzibit 2016-03-03 04:55 2KB www.theinquirer.net
9 iOS 9.3 will let IT admins enforce homescreen layouts and block NSFW apps Firm looks to grow its share of the business market 2016-03-03 04:55 2KB www.theinquirer.net 10 HTC Vive pre-orders go live and sell at a rate of 25 a second Headset costs £689 in the UK, plus £57.80 for shipping and tax 2016-03-03 04:55 3KB www.theinquirer.net 11 Finally! Startup designs round smartphone to fit women's delicate spherical hands Women are empowered to get a round in 2016-03-03 04:55 2KB www.theinquirer.net 12 Bomgar launches password vault to add to cloudless secure access system 10,000 customers, 10,000 Bomgars 2016-03-03 04:55 3KB www.theinquirer.net 13 Windows 10 is now the second most popular desktop operating system But it's not as straightforward as you think 2016-03-03 04:55 2KB www.theinquirer.net 14 Android Pay will hit the UK in March Hey, hey there’s a new way to pay 2016-03-03 04:55 2KB www.theinquirer.net
15 PS4 and Xbox One updates add boosted remote play and new social features Updates aimed at thos who want to play PS4 on Macs and old games on next-gen Xbox hardware 2016-03-03 04:55 3KB www.theinquirer.net 16 FBI director calls encryption a 'vicious guard dog' as iPhone unlocking row hits Congress James Comey wants firm to 'take the dog away and let us pick the lock' 2016-03-03 04:55 4KB www.theinquirer.net 17 Shocking problem forces Amazon to recall Fire tablet chargers Oh the irony 2016-03-03 04:55 2KB www.theinquirer.net 18 New Mac malware linked to infamous Hacking Team Code bears hallmarks of Italian 'security' company 2016-03-03 04:55 3KB www.theinquirer.net
19 Kanye cheesed off at Deadmau5 as Twitter baiting continues Social media might be all about bringing people together to share stories, but as any true celebrity follower knows, it's also the place to see Grade-A celebrity fueds unfold in real time. And once again, Kanye West has served up the goods. 2016-03-03 04:54 1KB www.cnet.com 20 Uncharted 4 delayed again The PS4 adventure has been delayed once again; A Thief's End is now set to launch in May. 2016-03-03 04:54 893Bytes www.gamespot.com 21 Hacker turns floppy disk drive into 128GB card reader Modding EXTREME! RAAAAH! 2016-03-03 01:54 2KB www.theinquirer.net
22 On building dueling narratives in Quantum Break Quantum Break narrative designer Greg Louden chats writing for a game and show at the same time, and how his experience in VFX fueled the tale. 2016-03-03 04:54 14KB www.gamespot.com 23 Your bus may be spying on you Technically Incorrect: In another round of the slugfest between security and privacy, Maryland lawmakers are objecting to buses that get in your business. A bill before the state senate would limit audio recording on public transit. 2016-03-03 04:54 3KB www.cnet.com 24 Pentagon taps former Google CEO for Silicon Valley inspiration The FBI might be at war with Apple, but the US military still loves Silicon Valley. 2016-03-03 04:54 2KB www.cnet.com 25 What if video games could read your emotions? It's already happening The new wave is called "emotion-aware gaming" and it has a number of interesting- sounding applications. 2016-03-03 04:54 2KB www.gamespot.com
26 New Steam security updates coming next week The new updates should improve security measures for accounts, market transactions, and restoration 2016-03-03 04:54 812Bytes www.gamespot.com 27 Apple gets backing in FBI iPhone case from privacy groups, tech titans The ACLU files the first in an expected series of briefs telling a federal court that it sides with Apple and believes an FBI request to hack a terrorist's iPhone threatens everyone's privacy and security. 2016-03-03 04:54 1KB www.cnet.com 28 After Super Tuesday, Google searches for one phrase hit an all-time high Following the biggest night of primary results in the presidential election so far, a record number of people went online looking for someplace a little more calm and cool. 2016-03-03 04:54 1KB www.cnet.com 29 US cyberbombs Islamic State on the 'virtual battlefield' The government, possibly for the first time ever, acknowledges ongoing cyberattacks against the terrorist group. 2016-03-03 04:54 1KB www.cnet.com 30 Concept cars forecast the future at the Geneva auto show (pictures) Concept cars from Citroen, Pininfarina, Subaru and other companies give us a look at what type of vehicles will hit the roads of the near future. 2016-03-03 04:54 742Bytes www.cnet.com 31 Kanye the software pirate? These apps could help his money troubles Hip-hop star Kanye West is mocked for revealing Pirate Bay downloads in his browser tabs. Can he not afford music editing software? A few new payment apps could be the answer Kanye needs. 2016-03-03 04:54 1KB www.cnet.com 32 Veeam Hires Former VMware vCloud, HPE Exec As New Channel Chief Kevin Rooney said he is looking forward to helping data protection software developer Veeam build a billion-dollar organization in the near future. 2016-03-03 04:52 2KB www.crn.com 33 Defense Secretary: Hackers Can Help Make Pentagon Networks More Secure U. S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter talked about the Pentagon's new 'bug bounty' program and why Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt can help forge close private-public sector connections at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. 2016-03-03 04:52 2KB www.crn.com 34 Palo Alto Networks CEO At RSA: Security Isn't About Technology, It's About Trust While keeping information and devices secure might seem like a massive technology problem, it's actually a problem of trust that threatens to set back all technological progress, Mark McLaughlin said in a keynote at the 2016 RSA Conference. 2016-03-03 04:52 3KB www.crn.com 35 Latest Comcast Modem Takes Aim At Google Fiber -- And Partners See A Big Opportunity Comcast's latest modem offers gigabit speeds without a fiber network, and partners eager to sell it say it competes directly with Google Fiber. 2016-03-03 01:48 3KB www.crn.com
36 Employee Reports: Layoffs Underway At IBM Big Blue started sending notices Wednesday, according to an employee Facebook page, but the severity of personnel cuts is not yet clear. 2016-03-03 04:52 2KB www.crn.com 37 I was one of the first people to play Minecraft in virtual reality TL;DR: Phil Spencer made me a promise, and he delivered 2016-03-03 01:06 9KB www.techradar.com 38 Cisco already uses CliQr's CloudCenter platform in a range of data center products, including ACI and UCS. Cisco already uses CliQr's CloudCenter platform in a range of data center products, including ACI and UCS. 2016-03-02 23:56 2KB www.eweek.com 39 UK government didn't back the Raspberry Pi with funding Coulda, but didn't 2016-03-03 00:06 2KB www.theinquirer.net
40 High Tech Industry Job Creation Engine Powers Into 2016 Here's a look back at what the technology industry's job market looked like in 2015 and why 2016 will be yet another banner year for high tech hiring. 2016-03-02 22:49 1KB www.eweek.com 41 Talent is the biggest challenge for Australia's future: Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-CEO and co-founder of Sydney success story Atlassian, believes the country will find itself in a 'bad spot' if it does not invest in future talent. 2016-03-03 00:32 6KB www.zdnet.com 42 VESA ratifies DisplayPort 1.4 standard The VESA standards body has finalized the specification for the DisplayPort 1.4 standard. The association calls this the first major update to DisplayPort since the publication of DisplayPort 1.3, which became a specification back in September 2014. The most important new feature in this version of the spec is Display... 2016-03-03 02:12 1KB techreport.com 43 Samsung begins shipping a 15TB data center SSD We often think of 1TB or 2TB SSDs as massive in PC enthusiast circles these days, but those drives pale in comparison to Samsung's latest. The company says it's now shipping the PM1633a SSD , a 15.36TB monster that talks to host systems over a 12Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)... 2016-03-03 02:12 1KB techreport.com 44 Head-To-Head: Surface Pro 4 vs. iPad Pro iPad Pro or Surface Pro 4? Apple or Microsoft? iOS or Windows 10? What's the right tablet for you? The war between Apple and Microsoft continues. 2016-03-02 23:51 1KB www.crn.com 45 Apple scores a win against the All Writs Act in New York case Apple has scored a point in one of its legal battles over iPhone security. It isn't in the San Bernardino case that has caught national attention in recent weeks, though. Rather, the company has been assisting the government in an investigation of the iPhone of Jun Feng, a man who... 2016-03-02 23:04 3KB techreport.com 46 DROWN attack breaks TLS wide open using SSLv2 An international group of researchers has discovered that web traffic encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS) can be decrypted if a server also supports the antiquated SSLv2 cryptographic protocol. The researchers estimate that a staggering 33% of HTTPS-enabled sites are vulnerable to this attack, which they call DROWN, for Decrypting... 2016-03-02 23:04 1KB techreport.com 47 10 Moneymaking Opportunities For Cisco Partners From Its New DNA Cisco is offering channel partners an array of professional services with the launch of its new service-centric Digital Network Architecture. Here are 10 ways to make money springing from DNA. 2016-03-02 23:35 1KB www.crn.com 48 Logicalis Buys 21-Person Microsoft Communications Powerhouse Logicalis purchased a 21-person Microsoft Gold partner specializing in unified communications and voice from its parent company to turbocharge its education and health-care practices. 2016-03-02 23:51 3KB www.crn.com 49 IBM Builds Out Security Response With Resilient Systems Acquisition IBM has joined the cyber-security acquisition frenzy with its own buy of Resilient Systems. Big Blue gains the company's incident response platform and its well-known CTO Bruce Schneier. 2016-03-03 00:05 4KB www.informationweek.com Articles
Total 49 articles, created at 2016-03-03 06:01
1 Mass Effect: Andromeda delayed to 2017, EA exec suggests (2.00/3) Speaking in an interview at a business summit, EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen said the highly-anticipated sequel will be available "Q4". In the context of his comments, he appears to be referring to the fiscal fourth quarter, and not the calendar fourth quarter. EA's financial fourth quarter stretches across January to March, which means Jorgensen's claim is that Mass Effect Andromeda will ship at some point in the first three months of 2017. Here's the interview passage, verbatim: Interviewer: Speaking of new IP, is there any updated colour you can offer on the FY17 release date, particularly with regards to your non-sport franchises. Jorgensen: Yeah we've got a great year ahead. For the first time I'm trying to dampen down Wall Street expectations, which is a good position to be in. We've got our Battlefield first-person shooter coming in the third quarter, and our third party title that Respawn built... it's called Titanfall... it's the second title they brought out under that brand. Both those are first-person shooter and will be targeted around both fast action-driven shooter market as well as the strategy driven market in the quarter. We have all our sports games, we have Mirror's Edge, a runner game coming out in the first quarter, and then we have Mass Effect, which is a sci-fi action game, in our fourth quarter. So big year ahead and we're pretty excited. GameSpot has contacted EA for clarification. Mass Effect: Andromeda developer BioWare Montreal has disclosed few details regarding the next Mass Effect game. Trailers have suggested the game takes place after the original trilogy, as the legacy of Shepard is referenced. It is also speculated the character could be named after Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. This would fit in with the naming of the original trilogy's protagonist, who was named Shepard after the first American man in space, Alan Shepard. techradar.com 2016-03-03 04:54 GameSpot Staff www.gamespot.com
2 Microsoft opens applications for $3000 HoloLens development kit (2.00/3) Hot on the heels of HTC and its Vive VR headset , Microsoft is opening up shop with a version of its HoloLens augmented-reality headset. Unlike Oculus' Rift and the Vive, however, Redmond isn't making HoloLens hardware available to just anybody. The company is taking applications for a Development Edition of the HoloLens hardware from developers in the USA or Canada. Prospective users also need to be Windows Insiders, and they'll need to be comfortable providing feedback on the AR headset to Microsoft. Applicants deemed worthy of a kit will then need to fork over $3000 for the hardware. Microsoft has also revealed the "holographic experiences" that HoloLens will ship with. Since this is a developer release, HoloLens will ship with HoloStudio , an app that developers can use to build 3D content at real-world scale using the HoloLens headset itself. The headset will also include a special version of Skype that will let HoloLens users collaborate using holographic experiences. Another tool that'll arrive this summer is Actiongram, an experience that's meant to allow "creative coders and content creators" to create "emotionally compelling and humorous videos" using holograms. We've already seen some of the potential that HoloLens holds for gaming, and Microsoft will offer three games with the Development Edition kit. RoboRaid (formerly Project X-Ray) pits players against a swarm of robotic invaders, and it uses a room's walls and furnishings as part of its levels. The company describes Fragments as "a high-tech crime thriller. " This game blends its futuristic crime-solving story with the user's surroundings. Finally, Young Conker is a platformer that doesn't share much of that franchise's history beyond the name and a squirrely main character. Unlike VR headsets that need to be tethered to a PC, HoloLens is a self-contained device. Microsoft revealed more detail about the underlying hardware today, and it's interesting to see what powers HoloLens' version of augmented reality. The headset's brain is what Microsoft calls a "holographic processing unit," or HPU, that runs 32-bit, "Intel architecture" code. This custom chip drives two "HD 16:9 light engines" that the company says can draw up to 2.3 million total light points with a holographic density of 2500 radiants (light points per radian). To make sense of those measures, the company says that the more light points and radiants there are in a holographic experience, the better it becomes. Microsoft says the first shipment of HoloLens Development Edition kits will go out March 30. theinquirer.net 2016-03-03 03:23 by Jeff techreport.com
3 Samsung Galaxy TabPro S goes up for pre-order in the UK THE WINDOWS 10-POWERED Samsung Galaxy TabPro S has gone up for pre-order in the UK with a release date of 16 March. The Galaxy TabPro S can be picked up from the Samsung website for £849 , which we'll assume is the 128GB model rather than the higher-spec 256GB offering. It also appears that only the black model is available to pre-order at present, as the white version has yet to show up on the store. Samsung expects stock to become available on 16 March, according to the pre-order page, despite having originally promised a February release . The Galaxy TabPro S was announced at this year's CES. The device is Samsung's first Windows 10-powered 2-in-1 and the first Windows hybrid to come with an AMOLED screen. This display measures 2in, and has a 2160x1440 resolution. Intel's fanless Core M processor provides the power, and comes with 4GB of RAM. There's a 5,200mAh battery which Samsung claims will offer 10.5 hours of life and can be charged to full in 2.5 hours. The Galaxy TabPro S is one of the thinnest Windows 10 devices, despite these high-end specs. The tablet measures 290x199x6.3mm and weighs 693g, while the bundled keyboard add-on measures 290x199x4.9mm. This Bluetooth keyboard also adds Surface Pro-style functionality to the device, attaching to the tablet's aluminium-clad rear to create a makeshift stand that can be used at two angles. Like Apple's 12in MacBook, the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S has just one USB Type-C connection, but will be offered with a separate multi-port adaptor complete with HDMI and USB A and C output. The Galaxy TabPro S has a dual 5MP camera set-up, NFC, Bluetooth 4.1 and a choice of Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro. Samsung has left the software largely untouched, but has added functionality that will let you unlock the device with a Samsung Galaxy smartphone by waving it over an NFC chip in the keyboard. µ
2016-03-03 02:43 www.theinquirer.net
4 Samsung wins appeal in patent dispute with Apple THE BLOOMING Apple versus Samsung patent case has taken another turn (or is it another weak spasm?) after Samsung won an appeal and the prospect of walking away with some cash. This could be good news as we might be coming to the end of the dispute and finally putting to bed a period of cash farming by the patent lawyer community. A ruling from the court at the end of last week came down favourably on Samsung and some of its arguments in defence of the use of its technology in devices like the Apple iPhone. We've read about this online, and have asked both parties for a response. We expect something positive from Samsung, and perhaps some fighting talk from Apple. Reuters got to this before us , reporting that the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington D. C. delivered the good news to Samsung and that Samsung welcomed it with open arms. "Today's decision is a win for consumer choice and puts competition back where it belongs - in the marketplace, not in the courtroom," said the firm, perhaps naively. This case has been in more courts than Tim Henman's balls, and we can no longer see a time when Samsung and Apple will not push and pull at each other via the medium of lawyers. Apple did not reply to the Reuters report, but you will be the first to know if we have any more success. For those of you asleep at the back, this latest decision follows a ruling in Apple's favour in 2014 in which Samsung was liable for a $120m fine and general disapproval from the courts. Reading around, it doesn't seem like there is much sympathy for Apple here and a general feeling that this was a risky move by Apple that did not pay off. µ 2016-03-03 05:15 www.theinquirer.net
5 iPhone 5SE price, release date, specs and rumours 2016 WILL MARK THE RETURN of the 4in iPhone in the form of the iPhone 5SE, if speculation is to be believed. The handset will reportedly look to those after a cheap, pint-sized iPhone, and will reportedly mimic the iPhone 5C with stripped-back features and a budget price. We've rounded up everything we know about the so-called iPhone 5SE below, and we'll update this article as soon as we hear more. Release date The iPhone 5SE (or iPhone 6C, depending on what rumours you believe), was tipped to be be unveiled at a launch event on 15 March , alongside the iPad Air 3 and new Apple Watch models. However, newer rumours point to an unveiling on 21 March , and claim Apple will also launch a smaller version of its iPad Pro tablet, not the iPad Air 3 as previously thought. There's no word on a release date yet, but there's talk that the handset will go on sale in April. Price If rumours out of 9to5Mac are to be believed, pricing for the iPhone 5SE will start at $450 for a 16GB model, the same as the iPhone 5S. Specifications A leaked video, if legitimate, reveals that the iPhone 5SE will have a similar design to the iPhone 6S , sporting an aluminium case and the same curved edges and antenna lines as Apple's latest flagship smartphone. A leak via Twitter tipster OnLeaks ( below ) backs this up, showing an apparent iPhone 5SE with an all-metal design. LOL #iPhone6c ... pic.twitter.com/0gxR4bq63n — Steve Hemmerstoffer (@stagueve) December 31, 2015 This suggests that, unlike the vibrantly coloured iPhone 5C before it, Apple's next 4in iPhone will be available in the same space grey, silver, gold and rose gold colours as the top-end smartphone. However, a previous report from TechWeb claimed that the iPhone 6C will feature a few bold colour options, similar to the iPhone 5C. According to 9to5Mac , which first revealed the smartphone's likely iPhone 5SE name , the handset will look more similar to the iPhone 5 than the newer iPhone 6S, although notes that it will feature a curved glass front similar to that seen on Apple's latest top-end smartphones. This report also points to an 8MP and 1.2MP dual camera set up, and notes that it the so-called iPhone 5SE will feature Bluetooth 4.2, VoLTE, and 802.11ac WiFi. Previous rumours have suggested that the iPhone 6C will not include a fingerprint sensor, but the leaked footage seems to suggest that the budget iPhone will have a Touch ID sensor, which means it's likely to support Apple Pay and come with a built-in NFC chip. It's unlikely to come with 3D Touch support, according to rumours. Forbes reported that the iPhone 6C may have a "2.5D" display with curved edges that improves the tactile sensitivity of finger swipes. Apple will apparently use an A8 processor, the same chip that appeared in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. If this is the case don't expect Live Photos, as this relies on Apple's newer A9 processor. However, don't get too down about it just yet, as a new report out of Bloomberg claims the iPhone 5SE will, in fact, pack the same A9 chip as the iPhone 6S , which will be paired with 1GB RAM. Online gossip suggests that the iPhone 6C will feature a 1,715mAh battery, improving on the 1,500mAh offering inside the iPhone 5C. There's also talk of 4G LTE support, and 16GB, 32GB and 64GB storage versions. µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
6 DROWN: 11 million OpenSSL websites vulnerable to HTTPS attack RESEARCHERS HAVE warned that as many as 11 million websites are at risk of a newly uncovered vulnerability affecting HTTPS and other services that rely on SSL and TLS encryption. The security protocols are widely used to encrypt web transactions and other highly sensitive traffic. HTTPS has also been increasingly deployed to protect people's browsing of ordinary websites in an era when more and more governments are engaging in large-scale web surveillance. "DROWN allows attackers to break the encryption and read or steal sensitive communications, including passwords, credit card numbers, trade secrets and financial data. Our measurements indicate that 33 percent of all HTTPS servers are vulnerable to the attack," claim the researchers behind the paper that explains how it works. The research indicates that a quarter of top-level domains deploying HTTPS and a third of all sites are vulnerable. The DROWN flaw centres on continuing legacy support for outdated cryptography by website operators. "Due to misconfigurations, many servers also still support SSLv2, a 1990s-era predecessor to TLS," said the researchers. "This support did not matter in practice, since no up-to-date clients actually use SSLv2. Therefore, even though SSLv2 is known to be badly insecure, until now merely supporting SSLv2 was not considered a security problem, because clients never used it. "[But] DROWN shows that merely supporting SSLv2 is a threat to modern servers and clients. It allows an attacker to decrypt modern TLS connections between up-to-date clients and servers by sending probes to a server that supports SSLv2 and uses the same private key. " A server is vulnerable to DROWN if: It allows SSLv2 connections, which is surprisingly common owing to a combination of misconfiguration and inappropriate default settings. About 17 per cent of HTTPS servers still allow SSLv2 connections, according to the researchers. The server's private key is used on any other server that allows SSLv2 connections, even for another protocol. Many companies reuse the same certificate and key on their web and email servers, for instance. In this case, if the email server supports SSLv2 and the web server does not, an attacker can take advantage of the email server to break TLS connections to the web server. Taking key reuse into account, some 16 percent of HTTPS servers are also vulnerable, putting a third of HTTPS servers at risk. "To protect against DROWN, server operators need to ensure that their private keys are not used anywhere with server software that allows SSLv2 connections. This includes web servers, SMTP servers, IMAP and POP servers, and any other software that supports SSL/TLS," advised the researchers. The authors of the research are based in universities across three continents and have produced a full technical paper explaining the flaw (PDF). µ To hear more about security challenges, the threats they pose and how to combat them, sign up for The INQUIRER sister site Computing 's Enterprise Security and Risk Management conference on 24 November.
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
7 Apple reportedly shifts iPhone 5SE and iPad Pro Mini unveiling to 21 March APPLE IS REPORTEDLY planning to unleash the iPhone 5SE and smaller iPad Pro tablet at an event on 21 March, not 15 March as previously thought. So says Buzzfeed , which has heard from sneaky inside sources that Apple has settled on 21 March to show off a handful of new products. This is the day before the company is due to go head to head with the FBI in court. The star of the show will be the iPhone 5SE , Apple's first 4in iPhone since the iPhone 5C. The handset will reportedly look similar to the iPhone 5S, but with a curved glass front similar to that seen on Apple's latest top-end smartphones. It will be offered in the same colour options of Silver, Space Grey, Gold and Rose Gold, according to reports. We can also expect the iPhone 5SE to feature the same A8 and M8 processors seen inside the iPhone 6, an NFC chip for Apple Pay, Bluetooth 4.2, VoLTE, 802.11ac WiFi, and 8MP and 1.2MP cameras complete with autofocus, support for larger panoramic images and the Live Photos feature that debuted on the iPhone 6S. A new iPad is also tipped to appear on 21 March. Previous rumours had pointed to Apple launching the iPad Air 3, but new reports claimed that the firm plans to reveal a smaller iPad Pro tablet. The mooted 9.7in device, which will potentially launch as the iPad Pro Mini, will offer near identical specs to the bigger 12.9in iPad Pro, according to the rumours, with an A9X processor and display technology that supports the Apple Pencil stylus. Apple is also said to be prepping a downsized version of the Smart Cover keyboard attachment. There's chatter that the 9.7in tablet will feature rear-facing LED flash for improved photos in low light, and additional speaker grilles to better match the audio quality of Apple's 12.9in tablet. Apple seems keen to work The INQUIRER team hard on 21 March, as this is apparently not all the firm has up its sleeve. The Apple Watch 2 is unlikely to be unveiled, but the firm reportedly plans to show off some new Apple Watch options. Expect multiple new colours for the rubber Sport Bands, additional colours for the line of Hermès bands, a black version of the Milanese Loop, and an additional band range made from a new material. 2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
8 'X' is the most popular password exploited by hackers IDIOTS WITH IDIOT PASSWORDS are still a big problem after a new report from Rapid7 revealed the examples that see hackers rubbing their hands with glee. Rapid7's year-long Project Heisenberg experiment examined the passwords that hackers try to exploit, instead of highlighting the most popular dumb passwords picked by dumb users. The firm created honeypots designed to mimic systems running remote desktop protocol (RDP) which is used to remotely log-in into a system and is often run by PoS devices, kiosks and other Windows kit. "Project Heisenberg is a collection of low-interaction honeypots deployed around the world," the security outfit explained. "The honeypots run on IP addresses which we have not published, and we expect that the only traffic directed to the honeypots would come from projects or services scanning a wide range of IP addresses. "When an unsolicited connection attempt is made to one of our honeypots, we store all the data sent to the honeypot in a central location for further analysis. " Rapid7 monitored more than 221,000 log-in attempts and then studied the credentials that attackers used. We assume that Xzibit has found himself the target of hackers, as the experiment revealed that 'x' is the password that hackers most commonly have a stab at. 'Zz' was the second most common, followed by 'St@rt123', '1' and, of course, 'P@ssw0rd'. Rounding off the top 10 were 'alex', '...... ' and 'administrator'. "We guess that these passwords are selected because whomever is conducting these scans believes there is a chance they will work," Rapid7 said. "Maybe the scanners have inside knowledge about actual usernames and passwords in use, or maybe they're just using passwords that have been made available from previous security breaches in which account credentials were leaked. " Rapid7 also cast its eye over the usernames that hackers are most likely to try, naming 'administrator', 'user1' and 'admin' among the top 10. µ To hear more about security challenges, the threats they pose and how to combat them, sign up for The INQUIRER sister site Computing 's Enterprise Security and Risk Management conference on 24 November.
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
9 iOS 9.3 will let IT admins enforce homescreen layouts and block NSFW apps APPLE IS SETTING ITS SIGHTS on enterprise users with the upcoming iOS 9.3 release that will allow IT admins to enforce homescreen layouts and blacklist NSFW apps. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith spotted the business-focused features in Apple's recently updated Configuration Profile Reference document that details plans to introduce a tool to enable IT managers to enforce a homescreen layout on employees' iPhones. This means that a company can ensure that apps it wants workers to use can't be moved to a folder or a different page. Apple explained: "The Home Screen Layout Payload is designated by specifying com.apple.homescreenlayout as the PayloadType value. It can contain only one payload, which must be supervised. It is supported on the User Channel. This payload defines a layout of apps, folders and web clips for the Home screen. " iOS 9.3 enables MDM to enforce homescreen layouts, black/whitelist apps, and enforce notification settings https://t.co/fjOqfFYzY9 — Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) March 1, 2016 The iOS 9.3 update will also allow organisations to hide apps, or blacklist or whitelist specific ones, and determine what can be downloaded to an iPhone or iPad in the first place. This means that companies could prevent staff installing the likes of Crossy Road or Candy Crush onto a work device. There's also an option for administrators to disable Apple's bundled iTunes Radio service. Troughton-Smith noted that "presumably this means you can permanently hide system apps on iOS 9.3 with the right profile". Administrators will also be able to enforce notification settings, which may help them in circumstances where it's critical that some app notifications come through. The features show Apple looking to further boost its position in the enterprise smartphone and tablet markets. The last we heard, the iPhone will still the most popular smartphone for business folk , accounting for 66 percent of device activations in Q3 2015. iOS 9 doesn't just bring new enterprise-focused features, as it includes Night Shift mode, secure Notes, an improved Health app, updates to CarPlay and new Education features. The update is expected to arrive alongside the launch of the iPhone 5SE and 9.7in iPad Air, which is tipped to take place on 21 March . µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
10 HTC Vive pre-orders go live and sell at a rate of 25 a second VIRTUAL REALITY (VR) is here, or it will be when the 15,000 HTC Vive headsets, sold in 10 minutes, are shipped to their owners keen on escaping our bland world. Units sold at a rate of 25 a second in the first 10 minutes after pre-orders of the VR headset created by HTC and Valve went live at 3pm yesterday. The headset costs a heady £689 in the UK, plus £57.80 for shipping and tax, so it looks like both companies have pocketed a nice wad of cash. The number of pre-orders will have generated nearly $12m for Valve and HTC going by the US price of $799. That’s not bad going given that the Vive doesn't have a huge range of games and uses. But there are always plenty of people who are flush with money in lieu of sense. Buyers will not be short changed, however, as the Vive package comprises the headset, two wand-like controllers, external sensors to map movements and locations as you skip around a virtual world, and three VR games: Google’s Tilt Brush , Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives and Fantastic Contraption . We’ve had a go with the first two games and reckon they're a good introduction to moving around in VR, but they don’t offer a superlative experience and early VR adopters might have to wait a little until some bigger games are made for the Vive. That being said, it's build around the SteamVR system, which on the software side is an extension of Valve's Steam PC games platform, so we can expect some big hitting VR games in the not too distant future. Before you rush to pre-order a Vive, it's worth noting that you’ll probably need to fork out the same again on a gaming-grade PC or laptop to power the Vive unless you have one already. That puts the cost of the Vive up there with a pretty powerful PC gaming set up, which arguably has more to offer in terms of games than VR in its current form. You’ll also need a bit of free space to get the most out of the Vive, ideally 15ft square. This is good for those with country estates, not so good for people in cramped London house shares. The Vive can be used in smaller spaces, requiring a minnimum of 5ft by 6.5ft, but this may result in confused doctors trying to make sense of the first run of VR accidents. The Vive is therefore a bit of a tricky proposition. It’s more expensive than rival VR headset the Oculus Rift , but each time we’ve tried the Vive during its development phase we’ve been blown away. And if you think about it, the Vive is a much cheaper and healthier way of entering fantasy worlds than sustaining a hallucinogenic drug habit. µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
11 Finally! Startup designs round smartphone to fit women's delicate spherical hands AN OUT-OF-TOUCH startup has launched a spherical smartphone aimed at women because, let's face it ladies, holding rectangles is a bit of challenge. Get ready to bin your iPhone or Galaxy smartphone, as Washington-based company dToor (which stands for Designing the Opposite of Rectangle, of course) has answered the dreams of, we assume, the entire female population with the launch the Cyrcle Phone, a round flip- phone that will finally put an end to the problem of us women having to hold rectangles in our delicate spherical hands. That's right, no more cutting your paper-thin skin on the edges of your awkwardly shaped handset, as the Cyrcle encompasses everything women love with its vibrantly coloured clamshell design that resembles a compact mirror or a Polly Pocket. "Our generation has been brainwashed into thinking that the rectangular shape is attractive simply because it is easy to manufacture. Nature itself is filled with very few rectangles. Why aren't we striving to make a more natural and sensual form? " You said it, dToor. Let's not forget how difficult it is for us women to carry a smartphone when our hands are otherwise occupied with putting on lipstick or carrying a mountain of shopping, as we don't have the luxury of pockets like our male counterparts. "First, truly feminine clothing does not normally have pockets, and if it does the pockets are frequently too small or not shaped to accept a large rectangular object," the Cyrcle website says. "Second, women need to be connected as women love to talk, text and communicate through any means available on smartphones with their family, friends and lovers. " We jest about it, of course, but the Cyrcle Phone is 100 percent a real thing, and the worst part is that it's designed by women, former Microsoft employees Christina Cyr and Linda Inagawa, who plan to crowdfund the 2G phone on Kickstarter this summer for $100 per device. Fingers crossed it's available in pink, eh ladies? µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
12 Bomgar launches password vault to add to cloudless secure access system SECURE ACCESS provider Bomgar has announced a new password vault service to add to its existing on- premise access systems. Unlike most systems, Bomgar acts as a broker between connections based on the customer premises, meaning that a tunnel is exactly that: no cloud or third-party involvement. The INQUIRER spoke to Stuart Facey, VP EMEA, and William Culbert, Director of Solutions Engineering at Bomgar, about the service. "There's nothing wrong with a VPN tunnel in principle, but there's a high degree of lack of control. Bomgar replaces that with its own secure tunnel with a broker in the middle making sure there are no point-to-point connections between the server and the computer," said Culbert. The difference between a traditional VPN solution and Bomgar is in the level of security offered by an on-premise solution and the granular control. "When you set the connection up it is qualified as to when that tunnel opens, whether you're allowed to use that window, what time you're allowed to use that window, what you can do in that window, what network you can access in that window," he explained. "It allows the injection of passwords which you can't do with a VPN in the same way so you don't see passwords as part of the process. " You can also see exactly what's happened when. "In addition, whatever you've done is audited in a textual context and a video film context, so you can replay the complete incident from opening the tunnel to closing the tunnel," said Facey. Culbert added: "As part of an audit trail, what you want is to be able to prove who, what and when, and those are the three things you can give to an organisation. " Bomgar is an on-premise solution, so customers remain secure even if their own network is compromised. "All of our customers have their unique version of the software. What that means in an era of social engineering is that spearfishing attacks are a lot more difficult," said Culbert. "If you're using a using a third-party remote access service you could be breaking your internal security policy by inviting someone into your internal security structure. By connecting someone through your own system, you're proving that it's an approved source of remote connectivity. " Other advantages can be found for sensitive industries where discretion, auditing, filing and security governance are paramount, as Culbert explained. "Organisations depending on their sector and location have to comply with different security governance models and these could involve not offshoring certain data. From a cloud perspective, you don't know where the data is going," he said. It's not rocket science, according to Facey: "Think about it: you wouldn't put your safe full of valuables in the garage. You'd keep it in the house. " The new password vault service works by providing a form of token access to avoid passwords being transferred at all, meaning that security is assured. It can be used alongside multi-factor authentication for added safety, and will be available "soon". µ To hear more about security challenges, the threats they pose and how to combat them, sign up for The INQUIRER sister site Computing's Enterprise Security and Risk Management conference , taking place on 24 November.
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
13 Windows 10 is now the second most popular desktop operating system MICROSOFT'S WINDOWS 10 adware receptacle continues its climb this month as we delve into the operating system market share analysis from Net Applications' Netmarketshare service. The big news is that we have a new second place OS and there's no prize for guessing what it is. Windows 7 suffered only a tiny drop in popularity to 52.37 percent (-0.13), which is likely to be a worry for Microsoft whose increasingly aggressive attempts to foist Windows 10 onto the public aren't working as quickly as it would like. Windows 10 is now technically in second place with 12.82 percent (+0.97) and is the only Windows operating system to gain ground. Even if you add Windows 8 at 2.43 percent (-0.25) and Windows 8.1 at 9.83 percent (-0.57) that's still only 12.03 percent. So it's happened. Windows 10 has hit second place, unarguably this time. But do remember that Windows 10 is the one true operating system now, and that this figure includes every tablet, ultraportable, IoT device etc that runs Windows 10. This skews it against other figures in the list. Windows XP is now in fourth place, without really losing much ground. It stands at 11.24 percent (-0.18) proving that the faithful really are faithful. Microsoft has started moving the goalposts for hardware support in another attempt to bolster Windows 10 uptake, but the diehard Windows XP fans seem set to stay on as long as possible. Away from Windows, there is a nominal rise in Linux use to 1.78 percent (+0.07) and Mac OS X claims 3.72 percent (+0.28) for 10.11 El Capitan and a slight drop for 10.10 at 2.2 percent (- 0.13). Add in stragglers on previous versions and Mac OS totals 7.76 percent, but this is just for desktop and laptop machines. Tablets and phones use iOS. Netmarketshare will have to reconsider the way these figures are compiled at some point as the form factors continue to merge into one another. But for now, we shall keep reporting them as they are given to us. Just don't believe all the hype around Windows 10. µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
14 Android Pay will hit the UK in March GOOGLE’S ANDROID PAY is set to hit the UK late, bringing a the contactless and mobile payments service to Britain ready to do battle with Apple Pay. Some loose-lipped sources from the industry sources revealed the rumoured launch date, according to a report in The Telegraph , but Google has yet to confirm any details. Apple already has the lead on Android Pay in the UK, Having launched in Blighty way back in July. But Android Pay found some success in with its US launch back in September , so is poised to rollout the service in the UK. Mimicking Apple Pay , Android Pay works by enabling people who hate rifling through their wallets to pay for purchases using a smartphone loaded with Visa or MasterCard details at an NFC-enabled contactless terminal. But things are about to get crowded in the mobile payments arena. Samsung is due to launch the Samsung Pay contactless payments service in the UK , although the company hasn’t divulged an official launch date. Already live in Korean and the US, Samsung Pay offers contactless payment through NFC and Magnetic Secure Transmission, a technology gained through the acquisition of LoopPay. Unlike Apple Pay and Android Pay, this means that Samsung Pay will work with older payment terminals without NFC functionality, potentially giving it much more reach with UK retailers. But Apple has enjoyed a pretty successful rollout of Apple Pay probably due to offering the market a limited selection of smartphones all running the same or very similar versions of iOS. While Google has a bigger challenge owing to the complicated and fragmented mass of handsets running Android with multiple and customised versions of the operating system. With ever more retailers accepting contactless and mobile payments , we’re likely to see increasing numbers of people waving their smartphones over terminals to pay for their fancy coffees and artisan breads. Oh joy.µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
15 PS4 and Xbox One updates add boosted remote play and new social features GAMERS REJOICE. Sony and Microsoft have pushed out updates for their respective PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles that deliver several new features. The 3.50 update for the PS4 , currently in beta, adds Friend Online notifications that alert games when friends log-in to the PlayStation Network (PSN). Those feeling less than chatty can appear offline to their friends yet remain logged-in to PSN. There’s also the ability to schedule events with friends so that social gaming sessions can be easily joined, and a share feature added to the Dailymotion video app allows PS4 players to broadcast their gaming exploits on the online video service. But the standout feature is enhanced Remote Play on the PS4. This is not yet available in the beta, but has been expanded to allow PS4 gaming to be streamed from the console to a PC or Mac. The service was previously limited to the PSP Vita console and the PlayStation TV. Some gamers may question why they would want to abandon their sofa and big TV PS4 setup, but the new feature could be a nice boon for those who fancy a bit of PS4 exclusive gaming in between. Microsoft’s Xbox One console, meanwhile, has had a pretty meaty update that adds features based on gamer feedback. These include the ability to track game progress, customise DVR recording length, output Party Chat to headphones and speakers at the same time, and enable video playback directly in the console’s Activity Feed area. The update includes the ability to purchase Xbox 360 backward compatible games on the Xbox One ( below ), which should appeal to gamers wanting to play last-generation games on a cutting-edge console. Microsoft has also boosted the chat feature to allow 16 people to enter a group chat, because whoever heard of too many cooks spoiling the broth? The Party Chat feature is also enabled in Twitch broadcasts so that players can be joined by the gaming world’s equivalent of backseat drivers by streaming videos of game-play to the Twitch platform. Other features squeezed into the update include the ability to compare Xbox Avatars, the improved displaying of people with bad Xbox Live reputations , and the addition of the Gamerscore Leaderboard into the Xbox app so that gamers can feel empowered or emasculated when comparing gaming stats against those of their friends. All these features are available for members of the Xbox One Preview programme. Those not registered will need to wait until the update rolls out over the next few weeks. They do say patience is a virtue. µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
16 FBI director calls encryption a 'vicious guard dog' as iPhone unlocking row hits Congress APPLE AND THE FBI have gone head-to-head in Congress over whether the firm should be forced to unlock the iPhone of a terrorist in the San Bernardino case. FBI director James Comey wa s first to take the stand during the five-hour hearing. He said that the debate was the "hardest issue" he's confronted in government. "The logic of encryption will bring us, in the not too distant future, [to a situation] where all conversations and papers and effects are entirely private. There’s a lot of good about this, a lot of benefits," he said. "[But] there are many costs to this. Law enforcement is dependent on being able to obtain warrants to look at information. That’s the way law enforcement provides public security. " However, Comey added that the rising use of encryption makes it almost impossible to access information and communications. "What we get is unreadable. We cannot decrypt that which is covered by strong encryption," he said. As such, the request to force Apple to create a way into the iPhone is necessary to ensure that the data can be accessed, according to Comey. "We are not asking to expand the government’s surveillance authority, but rather we are asking to ensure that we can continue to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to the legal authority that Congress has provided to us," he said. Comey also claimed that the FBI asking for a ‘backdoor’ is wide of the mark, saying that it is more about removing a ‘guard dog’ on the door that already exists in iPhones. “There’s already a door on that iPhone. We’re asking Apple to take the vicious dog away and let us pick the lock,” he explained. Comey did admit that the case could set a precedent that would give the FBI powers to unlock other phones in the future, but claimed that this is not the FBI's aim and that the action the FBI is asking for would not work on newer iPhones. "Any decision by a court is potentially useful to other courts, [although] I happen to think there are technical limits to how successful this San Bernardino technique could be given how phones have changed," he said. In response, Apple lawyer Bruce Sewell reiterated the firm's stance that the FBI's demands are too broad and pose too many risks to citizens' safety and privacy. "The FBI has asked a court to order us to give them something we don’t have, to create an operating system that does not exist because it would be too dangerous," he said. "They are asking for a backdoor into the iPhone, specifically to build a software tool that can break the encryption system which protects personal information on every iPhone. "The FBI is asking Apple to weaken the security of our products. Hackers and cyber criminals could use this to wreak havoc on our privacy and personal safety. "It would set a dangerous precedent for government intrusion on the privacy and safety of its citizens. " Sewell also noted that, even if Apple was forced to build the backdoor, criminals could always find other ways to keep their information hidden in encrypted apps, citing the example of the Telegram messaging app. “If Apple is forced to write a new OS to degrade the safety and security in phones belonging to hundreds of millions of innocent people it will weaken our safety and security, but it will not affect terrorists in the least,” he said. The outcome of the case remains uncertain, but Apple was boosted on Tuesday by a ruling in a New York court that the company should not be forced to unlock an iPhone owned by a drug dealer, echoing the San Bernardino case. µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
17 Shocking problem forces Amazon to recall Fire tablet chargers EVERYTHING SELLER AMAZON has been forced to recall chargers for Fire devices sold after September 2015 as there is a chance they could zap tablet-tappers with a jolt of electricity. Amazon sent an email to customers informing them of the risk posed by chargers for the Fire tablets , which include the best-selling model and, worryingly, one designed for kids. "We have determined that, in rare cases, when the power adapter included with the UK Fire 7in and UK Fire Kids Edition 7in tablet is pulled from the wall socket, the adapter assembly may detach and create a risk of electrical shock,” Amazon said. The chargers in question bear the FABK7B model number. We reckon the first four letters stand for Fry All Bad Kids, but we’ve had a lot of coffee today. Amazon stressed that the shocking problem occurs only on rare occasions, but the firm is pulling the plug on the problem and offering to replace the adapter or offer £12 in credit to order another one. After all, the last thing Amazon wants is a shocked and angry parent banging on the corporate doors about an electrocuted child. Fire users can charge the tablets using a USB cable attached to a laptop or PC in the meantime, which bypasses the shock risk. People with a spare generic USB charger can also use that instead and not get a bolt through their fingers when playing Angry Birds or Crossy Road. Amazon isn’t alone in having chargers that go bad and channel their inner Thor. Apple had to recall some iPad and MacBook chargers in January after discovering that they posed a shock risk, and Microsoft urged its Surface Pro users to ditch their chargers earlier this month after receiving 56 reports of cables catching fire. µ
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
18 New Mac malware linked to infamous Hacking Team MALWARE FOUND IN THE WILD and uploaded to VirusTotal at the beginning of February bears all the hallmarks of Hacking Team, the Italian security software outfit that supplied covert computer cracking and surveillance tools to governments worldwide. The malware wasn't detectable by any of the major antivirus scanners at the time, and even at the beginning of this week could be detected by only 10 out of 56 antivirus software packages and services. SentinelOne security researcher Pedro Vilaça published a technical analysis of the malware earlier this week under the headline: The Italian morons are back! What are they up to this time? . Key elements of the malware indicate that Hacking Team was back in business within three months of a breach in July last year in which all the company's emails, and much of its technology and techniques, were leaked by a hacker or ex-employee who has not been publicly identified. "Looking at the dropper code and comparing it with older samples, we can't spot many differences," said Vilaça in his analysis of the malware. "The structure is more or less the same and the tricks still the same, so you can refer to my slides and older blog posts if you are interested in those details. The only difference is that this time the dropper only packs a single persistence binary and a configuration file. Older samples packed more stuff. " The malware can be accurately dated as the code shows that it was last updated in October/November and the embedded encryption key is dated 16 October. The Shodan search engine, which collects data on open network ports, indicates that the malware's host was first seen on 15 October 2015, and that the last information was gathered on 4 February, according to John Matherly, the programmer behind Shodan. Vilaça added in an update: "I just found some unique code in this dropper. This code checks for newer OS X versions and does not exist in the [July 2015] leaked source code. "Either someone is maintaining and updating HackingTeam code (why the hell would someone do that?) or this is indeed a legit sample compiled by Hacking Team themselves. "Reuse and repurposing of malware source code happens (Zeus, for example), but my gut feeling and indicators seem to not point in that direction. " Vilaça strongly believes that Hacking Team is behind this new Mac OS malware because of the way it is coded. "When you have reversed all their samples let's say you start to know them quite well," he said. His belief is also based on comments from former Hacking Team employees who have said that the malware is consistent with the company's "normal practices". "Hacking Team is still alive and kicking but they are still the same crap morons," he concluded. µ To hear more about security challenges, the threats they pose and how to combat them, sign up for The INQUIRER sister site Computing's Enterprise Security and Risk Management conference , taking place on 24 November.
2016-03-03 04:55 www.theinquirer.net
19 Kanye cheesed off at Deadmau5 as Twitter baiting continues Oh Twitter -- you may distract us from our work and lead to countless hours wasted on hashtag games, but you do really hold your own when it comes to celebrity spats. And Twitter has served up the gold once again. And be warned Deadmau5, Kanye says he's "very detailed oriented...so don't try to just throw a bow on the original head" because he will know the difference. Fair point Kanye -- this isn't some sort of Ms. Pac-Man situation here. As for Mr Mau5's uncanny resemblance to Disney's iconic character, the DJ was quick to respond to claims he needed to find his own identity because Mickey Mouse was already taken.
2016-03-03 04:54 Claire Reilly www.cnet.com
20 Uncharted 4 delayed again The new release date is May 10, 2016. Layden added in the post, "We know this news might be disappointing, and we are sorry to have to make you wait a little longer to play Naughty Dog's latest. The good news is that the game is phenomenal -- we are fully confident that it will be worth the wait and the team at Naughty Dog is eager as ever for you to experience Nathan Drake's final adventure. "
2016-03-03 04:54 GameSpot Staff www.gamespot.com
21 Hacker turns floppy disk drive into 128GB card reader AN ENTERPRISING HACKER has revived a 1990s floppy disk drive and turned it into an all-singing, all- dancing 128GB flash drive. Stand back: this one comes under 'fun but pointless'. Original 3.5in floppies had magnetic digital disks capable of providing just 1.44MB, but the revived drive is in fact a doctored SD card reader and drive. A YouTube modder known as Dr Moddnstine managed the feat as part of a full update of a mid-90s IBM Aptiva. By a twist of fate, the ribbon cable from the disk drive happened to line up with the notches on an SD card, so with a bit of cajoling he was able to solder together the floppy drive and a cheap USB SD card reader. The disks are once again a perfect fit in terms of thickness (that's what she said) and line up with the connections, but are essentially an SD card inside a floppy housing. The result? Lights that light, drives that are recognised and no more questions like 'Mummy, what's an A drive?' OK, so it's pointless, but for hipster points alone it's worth a mention. And if you want to get nerdy about it, here's some stats. The 128GB diskette is the equivalent of 188,574 regular disks in terms of capacity. If you laid all those disks on top of each other, they'd reach a height of 622.29 metres. That's equivalent to 142 double decker buses. The one flaw we've noticed, though, is that the resulting drive could still have an old-fashioned IDE connection to the motherboard. If that turns out to be the case, the performance of the drive isn't going to be all that. Other mods in the project included an Asus Maximus VIII mainboard, a Core i7 processor with Corsair water cooler, 16GB of RAM and a Radeon R9 390 graphics card. µ
2016-03-03 01:54 www.theinquirer.net
22 On building dueling narratives in Quantum Break This still holds true for Quantum Break, nearly three years later. Although, there is still much shrouded in mystery: just how much do the properties influence each other? Peppered through Quantum Break are moments in which players are asked to make major decisions--these are called junction points. Decisions made at these junctions will permanently affect the course of the game's narrative, as well as determine what you see in the following show episode. GameSpot sat down with Greg Louden, narrative designer on Quantum Break, to talk more about the story's influences and just how deep the time- travel hole goes. GameSpot: How long have you been working on Quantum Break? Louden: For almost four years. I've been there from pre-production until now. It's been--I like to say--it's been a lifestyle in a way. It feels like I graduated in Quantum Break, it's like a degree. It's been really cool. The team has worked so hard so I'm really proud and happy to be here to show the game. Did you come up with the original story concept? Where did that concept come from and when did you come in? The original concept came from Alan Wake back in the day. I joined for Quantum Break. In Alan Wake there was this side TV show that they had called "Quantum Suicide," which basically played around with string theory and quantum theory. From there Sam and the team were thinking of a new game to do and they latched onto this time travel story. From there the game evolved to include superheroes, and then it evolved to include this Hollywood cast, like Shawn Ashmore. It evolved to include the live action show. When I got on the project, basically we knew it was a time travel story, we knew some of the super powers, but we didn't really know where to go and I was really happy to be designing the opening of the game. I got to design that. Kind of take the story of Jack Joyce turning from being an ordinary guy into a superhero. It was really exciting. Are you working on the show and the game or do you focus on the game? I've been largely focused on the game, but I've also worked quite closely with the writing team [for the TV show] to make sure they're showing the game overlap. What is that like, working on the two? It's been, as you can imagine, amazing. It's really exciting to get to work on a live action show as well as a game, but it's been incredibly challenging. A time travel story is always complicated. We have time travel webs and we have all these different shots to get and the mountains of screen plays I had to read through--you have no idea. It's been so exciting and empowering. What if we took this character from the show? We scan him in, like surface capture technology, and then he's a crossover character. We have crossover characters, crossover locations, you get to play in the same locations. Our optional storytelling: there's emails written by the characters from the show. The show and the game were originally like this [motions with hands apart], they were separate. But now they just crossover and they blend in and out. I don't think it's ever been done before, it's really exciting. At what point in development did that happen? When it was like--these are no longer separate properties, we're going to put them together? How does it happen? [It happened] relatively early on. I think at first it was like, let's just do a show and a game and then instantly Sam and the writing team, and even myself were all like, what if you could play with the show and the show would interact with the game? From there it was this momentous task of collaborating with Lifeboat Productions, the TV show guys we worked with, and blending to go through. There are two separate, but not separate properties. Is the show informed by the game or do you come up with concepts for the game with the show also in mind? Basically the way that it works is that you play the game and then once you play the game you play a junction moment. You play Jack Joyce as the hero, and then you play Paul Serene, who's the villain. There's Shawn Ashmore and Aiden Gillen. The villain, he runs a company called Monarch Solutions. You make a choice as the lead of Monarch and essentially your choice informs Monarch Solutions and the show is about Monarch, the villains. Basically the game and the show blend in and out. Your villain evolves based on your decisions and the villain is really uncovered in the live action show. It's a really hard game to talk about... That's the general thing. The show informs the game and the game informs the show. We really weave in and out. I can't wait for players to play through it all. For you, the narrative designer, what has been the most challenging thing about working on a game with this sort of storytelling depth? I think at first it was the time travel, trying to get my head around the time travel and trying to think of every instant: having moments that cross over [from the game], [the] concept of time travel and then from there it was the live action show. Once we had the live action show connected, the final thing was the junctions, the player choices. We had to set down the time travel map, show this is how the time travel works, set down the philosophy of the live action show, get that running, and then set down how you change the show and how you change the game. It's been, as a narrative designer, I think, it's a dream project. You get to design a story for a live action show, you get to design the story for a game. It's a time travel story, which everyone says is the hardest, so I feel like it's been a brilliant option. We have such a great team at Remedy. It's been challenging but really rewarding and exciting. You mentioned people say that time travel stories are hard. Why do people say it's hard? I think it's hard because there are so many plot holes and ways for the audience to pick it apart. I think our writing team at Remedy is so insistent on wanting to make sure we actually make it perfect, but that's been challenging. The time machine we designed and the science of it all... We wanted to do it right, we wanted this really grounded science-fiction experience. We didn't want it just to be random, we wanted to think of every instance, as we said we wanted to surprise and challenge the audience. We want you to play for a level and think, "This is cool," and then play through the same level and you're like, "Holy moly! I've been here before and I've seen these things, and this is why it happened and that's why that happened. " Why do you think time travel is so popular? If it's so difficult to do, why do you think people love it? I think that's part of people--that they always want to go back in time and they want to fix things or they want see what's going to happen in the future. I think that's the big thing. For me personally, with time travel it's always a "What would it be like if I could go back and I could change what I did here or what would it be like if I could go in the future and see what things would have been like if, after all this time has passed...? " I think that's why. It's been great for us because there have been so many great influences. There's been Interstellar --obviously has some great time travel--and Looper. A big reference for Quantum Break was Primer. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's really intense time travel movie. There's just so many great time travel references. It's been really cool to develop and be inspired by all these great stories. Can you think of any other media or books or anything that's influenced...? For me personally, Inception was always a big thing. It's not a time travel story, but it's a trip, and it has all these smaller things and the whole idea of the dreams--and as you've probably seen with Quantum Break, we have these really extreme environments where time breaks. We have these things called stutters. When the stutter hits with a ship crashing into a bridge or in combat where things are flowing over, it just creates these real surreal, almost dreamlike landscapes, so that was inspiring. I think last but not least is Terminator 2. Really? Most people think it's a robot movie, but it's also a time travel movie. That's been a really cool reference of characters and story telling. It's pretty cool references when you've got Inception and T2 and you get to do a game. It's pretty rad. Would you describe Quantum Break as "a trip? " I think so. I think it's a great story. It's definitely a hero story. So you get to see Jack Joyce and you get to see this great cast of characters evolve. The best thing of value is you have this whole different medium as part of the whole experience. You get this great live action show that you can walk [through] and change. You get all these different stories. We have optional storytelling, we have live action show bits, we have radio stations. One of the coolest things, actually, that I'm really happy with, is we have radio hosts in the game and the first decision you make in the game will change the radio host and the music that plays on the radio... The amount of complexity into the junction stuff, we have characters that change and they provide different insight into the stories. You have some really nitty gritty smaller decisions, here. We do. Basically we have so much optional story. We have just under a novel of text that you can read. Emails, newspapers... You'll see it when you play. You can investigate so much more than any other Remedy game. We've really stepped up to create this world that you can get involved in and shape; it's really exciting. What is the one thing you're hoping that players notice? I hope the players get immersed in the world. If anything, if they notice things, particularly, I think the time travel stuff for me is really important, and also if they understand the story. I think that's the bigger thing. I really want them to notice. I want them to know what our message is. I want them to know what we're trying to say. I think Remedy games have always had a bit of a message. That's the most important thing, all the rest of it is just detail. There's so many great things... I want them to notice how hard we worked, I want them to notice a whole bunch of things. It's hard to say, but if they can grasp the story and they can basically want to play it again because they realize that the story has changed based on their decisions, then that would be really great for them to notice. You keep mentioning screenplays. Did you write the script with more of a screenplay feel to it? Yeah, definitely. The way that Remedy has always worked is that we have obviously...everything starts from the story, everything at Remedy. Even our tools that we use are story based. We have a workshop with the writers. The level designers and the writing team, they sit there and we collaborate. We have a story chart and we figure out how to tell the story. As a level designer, similar to a director, your first thing you do at work is you have the screenplay on your right or on your left, if you're left-handed. You basically look through and you're adapting the screenplay into a game experience. The screenplay has everything. We have the detail of the characters, the looks, everything. They're really inspired. Like a great director, I think Remedy is such a great studio that when the writers take it to a whole other level. They're always so inspired as well. I think the thing with working at Remedy is you always want to inspire the person after you. The writers write a good story, and you're inspired, then you want to top it, so you do a good level. Then the level designers do a good level and you want to do good lighting. The animators want to rock it so they do great animation, and it's just this one-up-manship that creates the whole Remedy experience that fans love. What did you do before you were at Remedy? I've actually got an interesting background. Before Remedy I worked in film. I worked in effects and animation. I started off and worked on Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole in Sydney, which is a Zack Snyder animated movie. From there I worked on Sucker Punch for a tiny bit. I bounced over to work with George Miller, the guy that directed Mad Max: Fury Road , and on Happy Feet 2. From Happy Feet 2 I bounced over to London and worked on Prometheus for Ridley Scott. From Ridley Scott I bounced on to World War Z. In that job I simulated zombies, which was pretty cool. From there I jumped onto Gravity and I worked in an effects studio in Gravity. I joined Remedy as more of a visual effects designer. I was so into the story that they let me grow into a narrative designer. I've got a very interesting background. I've kind of swung from full quality art direction into more of story role and I'm loving it. It's a great company. You'll see the visual effects in the game are superb. The guys we worked with are... I worked with one of them on Hollywood VFX films. Our rendering tech and our sound designers were just top, really top. So everything we're really getting in the highest level. I don't really see the difference between film and games, to be honest. There's more opportunities for storytelling for me right now in games, so I'm really excited. So you were pulled into narrative by the specific story of Quantum Break? Yeah, and also just me being really inspired and constantly giving notes and reviews, just being into the story. They were like, "Greg, you're actually pretty good at this. Could you read this screenplay? " Then all the level designers: "Hey could you help me with this? " I kind of made my own role. I'm the first narrative designer at Remedy. I work really closely with Sam Lake and the writing team and the level designers. I champion the story. It sounds like Remedy is a really nurturing studio. It is. I think you can see it in the work. It comes across well because it's made in a really great place.
2016-03-03 04:54 GameSpot Staff www.gamespot.com
23 Your bus may be spying on you Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. This privacy versus security thing is becoming both heated and convoluted. It's easy to get the impression that security is anything the authorities say it is. In Maryland, for example, not everyone may know that many of the Maryland Transit Administration's buses can record passengers' conversations. "What [the MTA] is doing is a mass surveillance," Maryland Sen. Robert Zirkin, a Democrat, told the Post. Currently, there's no stipulation that the devices should be switched on by the driver only when there's a safety concern. This, among other things, is what the new bill is trying to bring into law, an effort that's been going on (and failing) since 2012, when the recording began. The recording devices were inserted into MTA buses without legislative approval. At the time, officials said they'd received legal advice that the recordings didn't violate the state's wiretapping law. This, to some, was quite some tap dance. Those who support the recording say it's intended to help investigate crimes, accidents and customer-service issues. Some also point to homeland security. Clearly, supporters say, when there's an incident, like a passenger or driver misbehaving, it's good to have audio. Moreover, not everyone is keen to go on record as a witness when something does occur. Witnesses can also have conflicting views of what happened. Having audio (on top of video, which vehicles also have) gives investigators added, objective evidence. However, Zirkin told the Post: "I can make an argument to tape everybody, everywhere -- everywhere they walk, everywhere they talk -- and you can make the excuse for homeland security. But that is not a valid reason to encroach this fundamentally on people's privacy rights. " The MTA told me it couldn't comment on the specifics of the amendments being proposed, as it hadn't been given their precise language. But it offered statistics that incidents of assault and theft on MTA buses fell from 356 in 2012 to 108 last year. "This legislation prohibits a proven, effective public safety tool and puts students and all MTA riders at greater risk," an MTA spokeswoman told me. Not everyone agrees. "Given how many conversations take place...and the incredibly minute percentage that are of legitimate interest to government," University of Maryland law professor Mark Graber told WYPR, "it would seem to me that government has to give a more specific reason about why you want to tape people. " Of course, one problem for Maryland is money. A retrofit wouldn't be cheap. The difference here is that it's the express intention of the devices to record private conversations. Who can possibly feel secure about that?
2016-03-03 04:54 Chris Matyszczyk www.cnet.com
24 Pentagon taps former Google CEO for Silicon Valley inspiration Tensions between Silicon Valley and the US government may seem to be at an all-time high, particularly with the headline-grabbing privacy battle between the FBI and Apple. But there's one agency that still has love for Silicon Valley: the Pentagon. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said that Alphabet Executive Chairman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt will lead a newly created board meant to bring Silicon Valley-style innovation to the $600-billion-a-year military bureaucracy. The 12-member group, called the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, will consult with the military on issues that are "deeply familiar to Silicon Valley companies," including data analysis and the use of mobile apps and Internet services, according to a Pentagon press release. The Defense Department didn't make Carter available for comment. Alphabet didn't make Schmidt available. Schmidt's work with the Pentagon is the latest example of the US military's efforts to cozy up with Silicon Valley at a time when the tech industry has been fighting back against government regulation and demands. The revelation from Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency was using technology to spy on its own citizens, and a recent court order demanding that Apple help the FBI hack into a terrorist's iPhone have increased tensions between the government and some of the world's most valuable tech companies. The innovation board was announced during the RSA conference, where Carter spoke on Wednesday. The Pentagon was light on the exact subjects Schmidt's board would tackle, but it did make clear that the board won't be discussing military operations or strategy. Carter and Schmidt share responsibility to pick the group's members, who, according to the Pentagon, will "represent a cross-section of America's most innovative industries. "
2016-03-03 04:54 Max Taves www.cnet.com
25 What if video games could read your emotions? It's already happening "Games are designed to take us on an emotional journey, but do not sense and adapt to a player's emotions," a line on Affectiva's website says. "Our emotion-sensing and analytics technology is transforming the gaming industry, giving developers the tools to create more immersive games and providing gamers the unique ability to drive gameplay with their emotions. " Affectiva calls this new wave "emotion-aware gaming. " Using the company's software and a webcam, the program can "measure and analyze a player's facial expressions of emotion in real time, enabling emotion-aware games and robust game analytics, in an accessible and scalable manner. " The technology has application potential not only for game design, but also for audience mood measurement. For example, Affectiva says platforms like Twitch could use it to monitor--in real time--the emotional state and engagement of its viewers. "Also, the emotional state of the players can be exposed to the audience as well as other players, highlighting when a player is most excited, frustrated or jubilant," it said. The Globe reports that Affectiva's software is already being used by advertising and market research companies to examine shoppers' reactions to advertisements. Other potential markets where the program could apply include automotive, legal, and robotics. Affectiva will showcase its software at the Game Developers Conference later this month in San Francisco. Attendees can try demos of "emotion-aware" games at its booth, including Nevermind. 2016-03-03 04:54 GameSpot Staff www.gamespot.com
26 New Steam security updates coming next week Steam Security Updates Coming March 9 "We believe these steps are necessary to ensure that accounts are made more secure, that users are empowered to identify and solve problems, and that the economic systems enjoyed by millions of customers are not compromised by people with malicious intent," Valve said.
2016-03-03 04:54 GameSpot Staff www.gamespot.com
27 Apple gets backing in FBI iPhone case from privacy groups, tech titans Public opinion may be divided on whether Apple should modify its mobile software to help the FBI gain access to a terrorist's iPhone, but several leading tech companies and privacy groups are definitely siding with Apple CEO Tim Cook. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the first in what's expected to be a series of amicus briefs in federal court supporting Apple's decision to challenge a February 16 court order that demands the company write a new version of its iOS software to bypass the phone's security. Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Facebook, and privacy groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have said they're also going to submit amicus briefs on Apple's behalf by the March 3 deadline. Apple says creating a new, custom version of iOS software is unprecedented and unconstitutional. Cook, in a public letter and other statements, says what the FBI is asking for is a "back door" or "master key" to every iPhone. Once it's created, he adds, it would compromise the privacy and security of the billion iPhones and iPads powered by iOS, Apple's mobile operating system. The FBI says it just wants to find out all it can about the terrorists involved in the December massacre in San Bernardino, California, which claimed the lives of 14 people.
2016-03-03 04:54 Connie Guglielmo www.cnet.com
28 After Super Tuesday, Google searches for one phrase hit an all-time high Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were the big winners in the Super Tuesday primary races on the road to the White House, but the results seem to have left some people feeling like the entire United States is a lost cause, if Google's search data is any indication. According to the Google Trends team, searches for the phrase "Move to Canada" reached their highest point in the search engine's history, well eclipsing the previous peak in November of 2004 following the reelection of President George W. Bush. In a chart posted to Twitter on Wednesday, Google itself speculates that it is the success of Trump more than Clinton that is inspiring people to consider their migration options in the wake of a highly unorthodox election cycle. Trump won seven state contests on Super Tuesday, as did Clinton. Others might look at the data and conclude that Google's base of users is overwhelmingly made up of Democratic supporters.
2016-03-03 04:54 Eric Mack www.cnet.com
29 US cyberbombs Islamic State on the 'virtual battlefield' The US military is cyberbombing the Islamic State. The cyberattacks are designed "to cause [Islamic State] to lose confidence in their networks, to overload their network so that they can't function," said Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. "We're also using cybertools to disrupt [Islamic State's] ability to operate and communicate over the virtual battlefield. " Specifics about the cyberattacks against the Islamic State weren't giving during the briefing. "We don't want the enemy to know when, where and how we're conducting cyberoperations," said Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We don't want them to have information that will allow them to adapt over time. We want them to be surprised when we conduct cyberoperations. "
2016-03-03 04:54 Carrie Mihalcik www.cnet.com
30 Concept cars forecast the future at the Geneva auto show (pictures) $16,000 used SUVs Whether you like your SUVs cute or capable, or some blend of the two, we've got a wide variety of choices in Roadshow's first collection of Editors' Used Picks.
2016-03-03 04:54 Wayne Cunningham www.cnet.com
31 Kanye the software pirate? These apps could help his money troubles Kanye West needs our help. He may not be able to afford basic music editing software. After an embarrassing screenshot reveals the artist uses the Pirate Bay, we take a look at some mobile payment apps that could help prevent Kanye from becoming a starving artist: Stories in this tech-news roundup: CNET Update delivers the tech news you need in under 3 minutes. Watch Bridget Carey every afternoon for a breakdown of the big stories, hot devices, new apps and what's ahead. Subscribe to the podcast via the links below. Subscribe:
2016-03-03 04:54 Bridget Carey www.cnet.com
32 Veeam Hires Former VMware vCloud, HPE Exec As New Channel Chief Veeam's Kevin Rooney Veeam Software has hired as its new channel chief Kevin Rooney, a former VMware and HPE veteran who is looking forward to helping his new employer become a billion-dollar company. Veeam, which develops data protection technology for cloud and virtualized environments, late last month appointed Rooney as its vice president of North America Channel sales where he will be responsible for driving channel sales strategy and growing the company's Veeam ProPartner program. It was an opportunity Rooney couldn't resist, Rooney told CRN. [Related: Veeam Stays The Channel Course In Push To Keep Data Centers Available ] "I've watched Veeam from the outside-in for years, and saw the loyalty it inspired in its partners," he said. "And I see the opportunity to take Veeam to a billion-dollar company. This is a company that can only grow. " Rooney said he quietly started working at Veeam in late January after more than two-and-a-half years with VMware, where he most recently managed the cloud partner organization for VMware's vCloud Air public cloud service. That included the time that EMC and VMware were trying to combine vCloud Air with EMC's Virtustream cloud technology, a project that was eventually scrapped. Rooney said the end of the vCloud Air and Virtustream project did not impact his decision to leave VMware. Rooney stayed with the vCloud Air project longer than another fellow executive. Riccardo Di Blasio , former vice president of sales and marketing for vCloud Air, left VMware in September and the following month joined Santa Clara, Calif.-based storage startup Cohesity. Prior to joining VMware, Rooney spent about six years at Hewlett-Packard in the enterprise business now known as HP Enterprise, or HPE. He left HP as director of national partner sales in 2013 to join VMware. Rooney said his experience with VMware is an asset at Veeam, despite a 2014 dispute between the two after VMware declined to allow Veeam to exhibit in that year's VMware Partner Exchange conference. "Today, Veeam and VMware couldn't be in a tighter relationship," he said. "I'm not sure what happened then. But the alliance couldn't be better today. We've got mind share inside VMware. "
2016-03-03 04:52 Joseph F. www.crn.com
33 Defense Secretary: Hackers Can Help Make Pentagon Networks More Secure Under the Department of Defense's new "Hack the Pentagon" pilot program, unveiled Wednesday, so-called white hat hackers will have the chance to show their skills by breaking into some of the most heavily fortified networks on Earth. U. S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said he believes that inviting hackers to find vulnerabilities in the Pentagon's networks can help make them more resistant to attacks. "It's a way of crowdsourcing expertise and having access to good people rather than bad people," Carter said during a presentation at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. [Related: Apple-FBI Debate Center Stage At 2016 RSA Conference ] "You'd much rather find the vulnerabilities in your network in that way than by the other way," which includes theft of sensitive data and network breaches, said Carter. While many vendors run "bug bounty" programs that invite researchers to submit vulnerabilities in products in exchange for cash payments, this is the first time a federal government agency has launched such an initiative. The program is open only to U. S. citizens and participants must submit to a background check beforehand. The DoD, in a news release, described Hack the Pentagon as a "controlled, limited duration program" in which participants will be tasked with finding vulnerabilities in non-mission- critical systems. Hackers that find vulnerabilities will receive monetary rewards as well as the recognition that comes with breaking into a heavily protected DoD system, said Carter. Carter has been spearheading efforts to get the DoD working more closely with the private sector, an approach he said is necessary given the rapid emergence of new security threats. "It's a serious matter for us to remain open. Government tends to be closed, Defense especially, and often there are important reasons for this," Carter said. "But by and large, the more connected we are with the innovative community, the better we can do our mission. " The program is being led by the Defense Digital Service (DDS), a group that Carter launched last November that lets private sector technology experts work with the government without actually joining it officially.
2016-03-03 04:52 Kevin McLaughlin www.crn.com
34 Palo Alto Networks CEO At RSA: Security Isn't About Technology, It's About Trust While security might seem like a massive technology issue, keeping data and devices secure is really a problem of trust, according to Palo Alto Networks CEO Mark McLaughlin -- one that threatens to stall progress in all areas of technology. "We have to maintain trust in the digital infrastructure and we have to restore trust that has been lost," McLaughlin said in a Wednesday keynote at the 2016 RSA Conference in San Francisco. "There has been a lot of trust lost in the last number of years. " One recent example of this loss of trust in digital infrastructure is the Apple-FBI case, McLaughlin said. He did not take a stand one way or the other on the issue, although other security leaders did in their own RSA keynotes the day before. [Related: Apple-FBI Debate Center Stage At 2016 RSA Conference ] McLaughlin said new challenges created by the "fourth industrial revolution" include the blending of physical and cybersecurity challenges (seen in critical infrastructure attacks and furthered by the expansion of the Internet of Things), massive data aggregation and availability -- and the danger posed when that data is breached -- and a limitless amount of compute power. These issues pose massive technical challenges, McLaughlin said, but the real impact of a cyber event is that a company's reputation can be destroyed, bringing the business to its knees. For the security industry, McLaughlin said, that means companies must focus on rebuilding the trust in technology, or risk losing the progress gained by the technology revolution. "Security transcends technology. … These tectonic shifts that we do see in technology are creating the very productivity and infrastructure we need for the digital age, but at the same time, are also creating the opportunity itself to make the digital age go backwards," McLaughlin said. To solve the trust challenge, McLaughlin said, the security industry needs to "flip [the problem] on its head" by dramatically increasing the costs for a hacker of a successful attack. That will give the security industry more leverage in the equation, he said. McLaughlin proposed three ways that the security industry can do that: First, he called for an increased focus on prevention technologies, especially next-generation technologies, platforms and automation. Second, he said the industry needs to band together around threat sharing to turn unknown threats into known, automatically share intelligence and ingest that knowledge automatically into the network. He cited the Cyber Threat Alliance, which Palo Alto Networks belongs to alongside Symantec, Fortinet and McAfee, as an example. Finally, McLaughlin said, the security industry needs to promote cyber education, for both current business employees and the next generation. "We have to get to a new paradigm," McLaughlin said. "If we can bring those three things to the battle, then we will start to gain some leverage over a highly automated adversary. "
2016-03-03 04:52 Sarah Kuranda www.crn.com
35 Latest Comcast Modem Takes Aim At Google Fiber -- And Partners See A Big Opportunity Telecommunications behemoth Comcast stands to change the rules of high- speed Internet with the unveiling of a new modem that it says allows users to hit fiber-like speeds with no costly infrastructure. Comcast partners looking forward to getting their hands on the new modems say that the offering competes directly with Google's high-speed Internet service, Google Fiber. "Comcast is really serious about building up to higher speeds to compete with anyone offering gigabit speeds," said Luis Alvarez, president and CEO of Salinas, Calif.-based IT services provider and Comcast partner Alvarez Technology Group Inc. [Related: Comcast's Strong Q4 2015 Earnings Fortified By Big Gains In Business Services Division ] The latest modem could be a great option for small business customers, and Comcast will need the channel's help selling the offering, Alvarez said. Google Fiber touts connection speeds of 1 Gbps, about 80 times faster than the average U. S. Internet speed. Comcast's latest Docsis 3.1 modem is also capable of supporting 1 Gbps download speeds and maxes out at a 10 Gbps, according to the carrier. But unlike Google Fiber, which requires fiber infrastructure, Comcast's modem can achieve these speeds using its existing cable network, Comcast said. "If that really turns out to be the case, where you can take existing infrastructure and slap a new modem on it to go from 200 megabits to a gigabit, that's going to be huge," Alvarez said. "They are going to need the channel to promote this because the reality is that most businesses don't know, don't understand the variances in speed. " Comcast hasn't announced pricing for the Docsis 3.1 modem yet, and hasn't said when the product will be made available to the channel. But partners are already champing at the bit. "We'll definitely be pushing this when it's available to us to resell, because our customers need the bandwidth," said Jeffrey Lee, vice president and chief technology officer for Carceron, an Atlanta-based IT managed services provider that partners with both Comcast and Google. Carceron sells Comcast through its relationship with MicroCorp, an Atlanta-based master agent. Carceron usually sets restrictions on its customers' firewalls to limit specific traffic -- like Facebook and YouTube -- because of bandwidth limitations. But with an offering like the new modem, Carceron will be able to relax those limitations because significantly more bandwidth will be available, Lee said. Providing high-capacity, fairly priced connectivity solutions will help partners support their customers using the Internet in new and innovative ways, like for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, said Darryl Senese, vice president of carrier services for Atrion Networking, a Warwick, R. I.-based IT solution provider and Comcast partner.
2016-03-03 01:48 Gina Narcisi www.crn.com
36 Employee Reports: Layoffs Underway At IBM Just weeks after IBM denied that the biggest wave of layoffs in its history was just over the horizon, reports from employees surfaced Wednesday suggesting Big Blue had begun cutting a large portion of its workforce, although the scale and scope of the reduction wasn't clear. On a Facebook page that serves as a forum for IBM workers called Watching IBM, employees reported that the ax was falling across multiple locations and divisions of the company. Stoking employee consternation was a recent change in IBM's severance policy that reduced severance payments from six months to one, according to the posts. CRN could not reach an IBM corporate representative by phone or email for comment on the layoff reports by publication time. [Related: IBM Calls Massive Layoff Report 'Ridiculous' And 'Baseless' ] One employee posted on the page: "I am a GTS Strategic Outsourcing casualty of the mass firing today. My manager told me it was big and widespread, and I'd be hearing from a lot of people that will also be notified today. " That employee was given 90 days until an official end date, and received a one-month severance package, according to the post. Many of the cuts look to have come from Big Blue's consulting and services arms -- Global Business Services and Global Technology Services. IBM representatives told CRN near the end of January that the company expected to cut several thousand jobs -- a far lower number than feared by many -- but they didn't specify a time frame. Forbes published a story Jan. 22 reporting that IBM was on the eve of massive restructuring that would cut an astonishing 26 percent of the workforce, a "bloodbath" disproportionately impacting IBM's U. S. mainframe and storage workers. IBM replied in a statement at the time that it doesn't comment on rumors, "even ridiculous or baseless ones. " IBM went on to state that the company had announced a $600 million charge for workforce rebalancing -- an amount equating to several thousand employees. That would be a fraction of the more than 100,000 people that would lose jobs if the Forbes report was accurate. IBM also countered at the time that in the past year, it hired 45,000 people to transition its workforce to one emphasizing different sets of skills more closely matching its strategic objectives.
2016-03-03 04:52 Joseph Tsidulko www.crn.com
37 I was one of the first people to play Minecraft in virtual reality Full disclosure: I'm probably the absolute worst person you could pick to be one of the first people in the world to try Minecraft in virtual reality. For one, I've played a grand total of two hours of Minecraft in my entire life. Second, virtual reality - despite covering it for years - still makes me feel both nauseated and ludicrously anxious at the same time. But, in a strange, cruel twist of fate, there I was sitting in a chair at Microsoft's Spring Showcase with an Xbox One controller in one hand and an Oculus Rift in the other, about to enter into Minecraft's world of blocks, pigs, chicken and Creepers in first-person. Earlier that morning, Phil Spencer got up on stage to announce that the WIndows 10 version of Minecraft would support Oculus Rift out of the box. Players who already own the game on Microsoft's latest desktop operating system won't need to buy anything else or do anything special, he said. He uttered the words "killer app" a few times while I jotted acronyms down like UWP ("Universal Windows Platform") and UWA ("Universal Windows Apps"). To make the day more memorable, Spencer said, Palmer Luckey himself would be hanging around the demo stations in case we had any questions. (Shameless plug: check out my full interview with the Oculus founder .) "Huh," I thought. "That's weird that Palmer Luckey is here to show off Minecraft. " What comes next is a lot of waiting around, standing in line and watching jealously as one by one my peers sat down at a demo station and a massive grin came across their face. When it was my turn, a developer walked me through step-by-step what I was going to see. He said the objective would be to get to the top of a tower guarded by zombies and skeletons. I'd need to figure out a few puzzles along the way, take a few minecart rides and shoot a cannonball into a rival tower. "If you feel sick at anytime," he said, "press the share button at any time to go into couch view. " "Oh, and if you feel sick, there's a bowl of ginger candy in front of you. " Great. At least they were prepared for me to be nauseous. Donning the goggles, I was met with the very familiar start screen that millions of players see every day when they fire up the game: three simple buttons, a logo and a sky-blue background. Seeing the screen from so close was disorienting. The field of view was too large and the clickable buttons, surrounded by an all-consuming sky, already made my stomach churn. But I pressed onward. Starting the game, I was thrown into a pitch-black cave. I was told that down to my right would be a treasure chest and inside I would find a pick-axe and a handful of torches. I took my first few steps in the world so many know and love but have never seen in this way. I knew none of it was real. It didn't look real. But it felt real, and that was enough to play tricks on my mind. Moving required the use of the left stick on the Xbox One controller, while turning was done with the right stick, both of which are a pretty standard convention. But actually interacting with an object like, say, the treasure chest, required me to look at it before pressing one of the face buttons - A,B,X,Y - on the controller. After extracting the pickaxe and closing the box, I ventured into the cave. I lit my torches and placed them on the wall. The fire looked like it always had in the game, undulating pixels that started yellow at the base of the flame before turning orange and red at the top, except now I was nearly touching it instead of staring at it on my monitor. I kept walking. The disembodied guide coming through my headphones gave me instructions to go up to the wall at the far end of the cave but not to, under any circumstances, use the pickaxe to go through the wall just yet. He said that the path ahead would be dangerous and that I'd need a weapon or two to face what lay ahead. I assented and found a nearby box with a bow, some arrows and a sword. Fully equipped, I tunneled through the wall. Looking around the Minecraft world in VR felt liberating. "I can build anything I want," I thought. "For the first time, I can build a small home and actually see it the way my avatar does. " That feeling of freedom is what Spencer was talking about earlier that morning, this being Oculus' killer app. Dive underwater, and you'd instinctively hold your breath. Ride a minecart, and you'll feel like you're moving. Build a castle and, for once, you'll actually feel like a king. But I couldn't think about him right now. Fighting the zombie and a skeleton, equipped with its own set of bow and arrows, was my first test. I sized them up, inhaled a deep breath and took out the sword I found back in the cave. After some awkward shambling (on my part, naturally) I managed to cut down the pixelated enemies. Once the fighting stopped, the voice from the outside world chimed in. "OK, now go towards that wooden pedestal and push the button. " I was hesitant, but eventually did as I was told. Pushing the button - a flat, gray rectangle - caused four feathered avatars to shoot into the field where I was standing. "It's a chicken shooter," he said. I laughed, proceeded to push the button roughly four or five more times and moved on. Moving along the trail, I ran into a set of tracks and a minecart, the first of two the developers placed on the path to the tower. "Now would be a good time to go into couch mode," he said. Having a pretty well-established fear of rollercoasters I couldn't help but agree. Pressing the controller's share button brought me out into a virtual living room decked out in appropriate Minecraft furnishings. The floor was made of gray brick. The red brick walls were lined with the same torches I used a few minutes ago to light the darkened cave. The focal point of the room, though, was a TV about five feet away from me on a white-grey pedestal. On the TV was the level I was playing, right where I left off, minecart and all. Interacting with the environment was the exact same as before - I still used the sticks to move and look around, and the headset to focus on an object - but the added distance lessened the intensity of the experience. I looked at the minecart and took it to another tower directly across from the one I fought the zombies on. There I found another button. Instead of chickens, however, this one shot cannon balls. The cannon balls flew into a mass of obsidian blocks in the valley below, which broke and gave way to a statue of Herobrine. A strange homage, I thought, but maybe Minecraft aficionados will get the reference. The second minecart brought me back to the first tower, one floor above where I stood a few moments ago and directly facing a pool of lava. Fun fact: lava, in the real world or in virtual reality, is deadly. To cool the lava down I'd need a large source of water. After a minute of searching with what I think was a puzzled look on my face (it's hard to tell what faces you're making while wearing an Oculus Rift), I finally saw a red switch on the opposite end of the room. If I used one of my arrows, I thought, I could probably hit it. It wasn't that simple. In order to squarely hit the button, I needed to aim a little above where I naturally wanted to look to compensate for the pull of gravity on the arrow. Go too high, though, and I miss the mark. After a few tries, I hit the carmine control device and flooded the room with water. Score. Crossing the cooled lava and exiting the other side of the room I saw unbroken sky. I had reached the top of the tower. All's well that ends well. Sort of. "You have one last obstacle: getting down. " At the end of the platform I was standing on was a hole located in the middle of the floor. That was my exit. As I approached the cut-away stone I switched back into fullscreen mode. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it the right way. I fell for a few seconds. Long enough to feel nervous but not long enough to do anything about it besides stop breathing. I hit the water and sunk to the bottom. Out of instinct, I held my breath. "Breath normally," the voice outside of the Rift said with an unseen-but-definitely-existent smile. "Press A to swim back to the surface. " After reaching the surface I saw one last tunnel that led to the third and final treasure chest. "I'm going to stop you here," he said. "There's one last thing for you to see. " He pulled me back into the sky-blue menu screen where I started. "Look at the button that says 'Multiplayer' and press A. When you see the list of servers, pick one and press A again. " "What you're looking at is a massive multiplayer server. There are hundreds of players here, but you're the only one seeing the game in virtual reality. " For a minute, I felt bad. Here were people who love the game, the people that play every day and watch Twitch streams when they're too tired to play themselves. All of them would love to play this on Oculus Rift, but here I am. "But wait," I thought, "Soon they'll be able to. " Article continues below
2016-03-03 01:06 By Nick www.techradar.com
38 Cisco already uses CliQr's CloudCenter platform in a range of data center products, including ACI and UCS. Cisco Systems is buying CliQr Technologies, a company whose orchestration platform is designed to help customers better manage the lifecycle of applications in the cloud. Cisco officials announced the company's intent to buy CliQr for $260 million March 1, the first day of its Partner Summit 2016 event. CliQr's CloudCenter platform provides customers with a single product to manage the application lifecycles across hybrid clouds, including bare metal, virtualized and container environments. The company's technology already is being used by Cisco in various switching and cloud offerings, including Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing System (UCS), Cisco officials said. "Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds," Rob Salvagno, vice president of corporate development at Cisco, said in a statement. "With CliQr, Cisco will be able to help our customers realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment. " CliQr's platform offers customers the ability to create a single application profile that can be easily and securely deployed across the data center, public or private cloud. It also, automatically applies the company's access control and security policies to an application and makes sure the policies move with the application. In addition, the technology will measure price and performance of the applications in the cloud, and gives customers a single management interface. According to Cisco officials, the plan is to continue to integrate CliQr with the company's data center products. CliQr employees will join Cisco's Insieme Business Unit, and will report to Prem Jain, senior vice president and general manager of the division. CliQr was launched in 2010, and had raised about $38 million, including $20 million in April 2015.
2016-03-02 23:56 Jeffrey Burt www.eweek.com
39 UK government didn't back the Raspberry Pi with funding THE MAN who made the UK's biggest selling computer has revealed that the government declined to provide any funding for the project. Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, said during the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 that, despite having now shipped over eight million units, funding was sought and swiftly denied when the project started in 2010. Upton said in an interview with Stuff that it was deemed that there was no market for this kind of caper. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. So is schadenfreude. "We applied for some government funding through a development agency in 2010. We weren't actually applying for money but for a loan guarantee," said Upton. "The proposal went out to an expert reviewer whom the development agency employed, and the reply came back: ‘No. Reject'. They said there was no market for a product like that. "Basically they were saying these products don't exist, and the fact that they don't exist is proof that there's no market for them. " How wrong they were. Upton revealed that the funding outfit in question was the East of England Development Agency, which closed in 2012 with presumably a lot of shame on its shoulders. "It has left me very sceptical about any government attempt to do industrial support because it is always going to have gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers are always going to have a bias towards things that already exist. We sold 4.5 million Pi 1s in three years, and three million Pi 2s in one year," he said. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is now in a position to offer £5 computers that have proved wildly popular. The UK government is currently struggling with a technology skills shortage and a lack of learning among the young. What were we saying about hindsight? µ The INQUIRER 's sister site Computing will be holding an Internet of Things Business Summit in London on May 12. Attendance is free to qualifying end users and places are already going fast. Visit the event page to see the agenda and to sign up. µ
2016-03-03 00:06 www.theinquirer.net
40 High Tech Industry Job Creation Engine Powers Into 2016 The U. S. technology industry continues to be a powerful job creation engine, according to the latest data from the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). The organization, which issued its U. S. technology employment report on March 1, said that the U. S. technology industry added hundreds of thousands of new jobs in 2015 and now employs nearly 7 million people. Meanwhile, the industry continues to be a major driver for the American economy, and high tech employees across multiple disciplines are seeing their compensation packages soar. The technology job market might be the strongest it's ever been, thanks in no small part to the growing importance of the cloud and mobile technology. There is also the realization among companies worldwide that skilled cyber-security professionals are extremely valuable and hard to find. This slide show covers what the technology industry's job market looked like in 2015 and why that provides strong evidence that 2016 will be yet another banner year for high tech hiring. Read on to learn more.
2016-03-02 22:49 Don Reisinger www.eweek.com
41 Talent is the biggest challenge for Australia's future: Atlassian CEO When it comes to Australia's future, Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-CEO and co-founder of startup darling Atlassian, believes the biggest challenge the nation is facing is its lack of talent. "I do think it's an important time for Australian tech. I think Australia has a place in the tech industry going forward -- well, it should have a place in the tech industry going forward," he said. "If we're not investing in technology we're completely stuffed as a nation. " As the world becomes more driven by technology, Cannon-Brookes belives that Australia is going to end up just consuming what everybody else around the world produces. "We are 1 percent of the world's GDP today, which makes us 20th in the OECD in terms of size of economy; if we're not producing 1 percent of the world's technology in 10, 20, 30 years time, there's no way we can maintain that position," he said. "That puts us in a bad spot. " "Malcolm's trying hard, they're trying at a government level -- and we think that's great," he said. "I think fundamentally it's about talent -- that's our biggest challenge in this country. Talent, training, and STEM education in high schools is critically important. " Cannon-Brookes said that Australia is behind many other developed nations when it comes to preparing children for the jobs they will need, and that if the nation does not employ some form of computational thinking in schools, he does not expect Australia to have the workforce in 20 to 30 years' time that it needs to have. "In the UK, kindergarten through 12 do computer science education; various states in the US are starting to mandate computer science as one of the things you graduate with in year 12 as a mandatory subject like Maths and English," he said. Under the federal government's AU$1.1 billion National Innovation and Science Agenda , the prime minister announced his intention to create an Entrepreneur Visa, which would allow those from overseas to live and work amongst Australia's tech industry. Last month, the government begun the consultation process for the visa, releasing a discussion paper to tackle concerns including: Individual nomination procedure, third party backing, length of stay, visa extension length, and whether the individual should be given permanent residency if their innovations prove to be a success. "It is critical for Australia's prosperity and growth that we not only tap into the best entrepreneurial minds in Australia, but we also make it easier for talent from overseas to contribute to this country's innovative future," Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science Christopher Pyne said at the time. "We are also keen to retain those educated and talented people who have come to Australia and developed their knowledge base during their time in this country. " Cannon-Brookes believes bringing in overseas talent while the country waits for its own students to be trained up is crucial. "We've got to be importing a lot of technical talent," he said. "We've got a lot of very talented engineers here. We always say at Atlassian that we don't have any experienced engineers. "Most of our guys have come in for the first time. We're doing it for the first time and we realise that; most of the people we are hiring locally are very, very smart, great engineers, but they're all doing it for the first time. "We're here as a business learning everything ... it's painful to just constantly be running through walls, so we've got to bring in as much overseas talent as we can -- and you know what, our lifestyle's pretty good here so they generally stay, they pay taxes for a long time, they have kids. " With Atlassian's 14-year anniversary just around the corner, Cannon-Brookes said his company feels as though it is still at the beginning of its journey. "We always say we're trying to target the 'Fortune 500,000' -- that's our target market so it's that big in terms of the customers we're going after. How we think about the world vastly differentiates us from traditional enterprise software companies," he said. "We have competitors that target the global 2,000 or something like that and we believe that the market is big and wide, and they think it's narrow. "It shows how we think about things differently; you can see that in our business model. " Atlassian was listed on the NASDAQ in December, following the largest ever float in the US from an Australian company. Prior to its listing, Atlassian was valued at AU$5.6 billion, but the heavily oversubscribed IPO saw the tech firm reach a AU$6.01 billion valuation. Within the first 24 hours of going public, Atlassian's stock soared 32 percent, debuting at $27.67 and peaking at $28.50 before closing at $27.78. The company's closing share price put its market value at nearly AU$8 billion. "We had a pretty big year last year and it was pretty exciting," Cannon-Brookes said Wednesday. "It was a bizarre couple of weeks, very exciting, exhilarating, but it was a much more patriotic climate than I think either Scott or myself thought it would be -- there were a few tears shed -- and seeing how excited people were here [in Australia] took us a bit by surprise. " In its first quarterly earnings report since IPO, the company posted second quarter non-IFRS operating income of $20.3 million with revenue of $109.7 million, an increase of 45 percent year-on-year. Atlassian told shareholders at the time that after expenses, the company raised net proceeds to the tune of $431.4 million from its IPO. Prior to going public, the company had never raised external financing in its 13 years of operation. In November, Atlassian said in its filing with the US Securities Exchange Commission that it intends to use the proceeds from the IPO for working capital, operating expenses, and capital expenditures, as well as to acquire other businesses, products, services, and technologies.
2016-03-03 00:32 Asha Barbaschow www.zdnet.com
42 VESA ratifies DisplayPort 1.4 standard The VESA standards body has finalized the specification for the DisplayPort 1.4 standard. The association calls this the first major update to DisplayPort since the publication of DisplayPort 1.3, which became a specification back in September 2014. The most important new feature in this version of the spec is Display Stream Compression 1.2. VESA says DSC 1.2 can allow for up to 3:1 compression of the video stream with end results that its members claim are "visually lossless. " The video stream compression has an immediate benefit. DisplayPort 1.3's Alt Mode already allowed for simultaneous transmission of video and data over USB Type-C and Thunderbolt interfaces. DisplayPort 1.4 goes a few steps further, enabling SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) data in tandem with high-definition video. Furthermore, the new standard supports 8K HDR video (7680 x 4320) at 60 Hz and 4K HDR video at 120 Hz. There are also a few other improvements, too. In VESA's own words: Who cares about crummy 4K anymore? 8K is where it's going to be.
2016-03-03 02:12 by Bruno techreport.com
43 Samsung begins shipping a 15TB data center SSD We often think of 1TB or 2TB SSDs as massive in PC enthusiast circles these days, but those drives pale in comparison to Samsung's latest. The company says it's now shipping the PM1633a SSD , a 15.36TB monster that talks to host systems over a 12Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. That eye- popping capacity comes courtesy of 32 512GB flash packages built with Samsung's 48-layer 3D V-NAND. The PM1633a is specified to deliver some impressive performance numbers to go with all that room. Samsung says the drive can hit sequential read and write speeds of up to 1200 MB/s, plus random reads of up to 200k IOPS and random writes of up to 32k IOPS. The drive's SAS controller is backed with 16GB of RAM. Befitting a business-class SSD, Samsung says the PM1633a can endure a full drive write per day over its lifetime. The company also builds in "a highly dependable metadata protection mechanism" and includes a data protection and restoration utility that apparently helps system administrators recover the drive from momentary power interruptions. Along with the 15.36TB range-topper, the PM1633a series will be available in smaller capacities from 480GB to 7.6TB later this year. Pricing for the drives wasn't announced.
2016-03-03 02:12 by Jeff techreport.com
44 Head-To-Head: Surface Pro 4 vs. iPad Pro Pro vs. Pro With the Surface Pro 4, Microsoft brings to market a tablet that strikes the right balance between work and play with the business-friendly Windows OS and first-class keyboard. And with the iPad Pro, Apple takes a giant step at making its iconic iPad not just a PC accessory, but a genuine productivity monster with its huge screen and dynamite keyboard. Which is a better fit for you? What CRN found was the battle between the Surface Pro 4 and the iPad Pro don't just fall along OS party lines – iOS vs Windows. There are real feature differences that could sway Apple loyalist to the Surface Pro 4 and vice versa. Here is how the two tablets stack up against each other.
2016-03-02 23:51 Tom Spring www.crn.com
45 45 Apple scores a win against the All Writs Act in New York case Apple has scored a point in one of its legal battles over iPhone security. It isn't in the San Bernardino case that has caught national attention in recent weeks, though. Rather, the company has been assisting the government in an investigation of the iPhone of Jun Feng, a man who has plead guilty to drug dealing. The investigators in Feng's case had argued that the All Writs Act (AWA) of 1789 allows them to compel Apple to bypass the passcode security on the defendant's iPhone. On Monday, magistrate judge James Orenstein ruled on Monday in the US District Court of the Eastern District of New York that the AWA does not give the government the power that it seeks. Orenstein looks to a federal law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act , or CALEA, for guidance in this case. The judge notes the All Writs Act is understood to have a "gap-filling" function, and Apple argued that CALEA left no gap to fill in the Feng case. Specifically, CALEA exempts some kinds of businesses from the obligations it creates for telecommunications companies to help law enforcement, including "information services" providers. Orenstein says Apple is clearly an information services company, and he argues that because neither CALEA nor other statues require Apple to provide the government with the assistance it seeks, the omission of that legal requirement implies that Congress has forbidden the government to compel such assistance under the law. Therefore, Orenstein says invoking the All Writs Act is not "agreeable to the usages and principles of law" as the AWA requires. While Orenstein's ruling has no direct bearing on the San Bernardino case, the judge does note that the Feng case is just one of 12 such cases where the government has invoked the AWA to enlist Apple's help, and the San Bernardino case is among those 12. Orenstein writes that the in the government's most recent use of the AWA, "it goes so far as to contend that a court - without any legislative authority other than the AWA - can require Apple to create a brand new product that impairs the utility of the products it is in the business of selling. " Since Feng's phone, in contrast to the San Bernardino shooter's, is still running iOS 7, Apple can easily bypass its security already. If, as Orenstein argues, the AWA doesn't allow the government to compel Apple to use technology it already has, then how can law enforcement justify compelling Apple to write new software to unlock the San Bernardino shooter's device using the same law? Orenstein makes very clear that he'd prefer the issue to be decided in the legislature, not the courts. In a passage that's rather critical of the United States' security agencies he writes, "It is also clear that the government has made the considered decision that it is better off securing such crypto-legislative authority from the courts (in proceedings that had always been, at the time it filed the instant Application, shielded from public scrutiny) rather than taking the chance that open legislative debate might produce a result less to its liking. " If both sides commit to a legal battle, the debate could continue for some time, and it may need to be decided in a higher court. This judge's ruling very well may change the way that the government justifies its requests, however. If the All Writs Act doesn't provide the authority the federal government is asking for, it may have to start looking elsewhere for a rationale.
2016-03-02 23:04 by Eric techreport.com
46 DROWN attack breaks TLS wide open using SSLv2 An international group of researchers has discovered that web traffic encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS) can be decrypted if a server also supports the antiquated SSLv2 cryptographic protocol. The researchers estimate that a staggering 33% of HTTPS-enabled sites are vulnerable to this attack, which they call DROWN, for Decrypting RSA using Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption. While the SSLv2 protocol has long been known to be weak , the attack is significant because traffic encrypted with the stronger TLS protocol is potentially vulnerable. Communication from a client—like a web browser or mail transfer agent —that insists on TLS encryption may still be subject to the DROWN attack if the server it's talking to supports SSLv2. Using the main DROWN attack variant, the researchers say they were able to decrypt a 2048-bit RSA TLS cyphertext in less than 8 hours using just $440 worth of Amazon EC2 resources. The attack has its own website that includes a technical paper with more details on how it works. Vulnerable services should move to disable SSLv2 support, and the site provides instructions for how to do so for popular software packages like OpenSSL and various web servers. To see if a domain or IP address is vulnerable to DROWN, you can enter it here.
2016-03-02 23:04 by Morgan techreport.com
47 10 Moneymaking Opportunities For Cisco Partners From Its New DNA Cisco's New Services-Centric DNA Cisco is opening the door to an array of new professional services that its channel community can offer customers with the launch of its service-centric Digital Network Architecture (DNA). DNA is based on automation, virtualization, analytics, managed services and open APIs -- all delivered within the Cisco One Software suite. The San Jose, Calif.-based networking leader is encouraging its 70,000 channel partners to become digital leaders to drive business outcomes for their customers as networking shifts toward software. "There's an immense amount of professional services opportunity by consulting and working with their customers to architect the right digital network environment," said Nirav Sheth, senior director for Cisco's Americas Partner Organization, in an interview with CRN. "DNA provides a much stronger platform and a continued platform for partners to sell into the lines of businesses, while they continue to win selling into IT. " Sheth breaks down for CRN 10 moneymaking opportunities springing from DNA, including additional rebates, software bundles, a new Capital Easy Pay structure, a free data platform and a host of new recurring-revenue services.
2016-03-02 23:35 Mark Haranas www.crn.com
48 Logicalis Buys 21-Person Microsoft Communications Powerhouse New York-based Logicalis has purchased a 21-person Microsoft Gold partner specializing in unified communications and voice from its parent company in an effort to turbocharge its education and health-care practices. Logicalis, No. 27 on the CRN 2015 Solution Provider 500, said its acquisition of The Woodlands, Texas-based Via Group will provide greater flexibility in supporting unified communication solutions across on-premise, hosted and hybrid environments. Combining Via's collaboration expertise with Logicalis' managed services capabilities will enable the company to deliver hosted, subscription-based solutions to clients looking to completely outsource responsibility for installing and managing business communications infrastructure, according to the companies. [Related: Logicalis Turns To Australia, Buys Cloud, Data Center Services Provider ] "We felt it was in the best interest of both of the organizations to formally bring Logicalis and Via Group together," Vince DeLuca, CEO of Logicalis U. S., told CRN. Terms of the deal, which was revealed Wednesday, were not disclosed. Via Group generated $7.17 million of revenue in 2015, according to an annual report by its parent company. Like Logicalis, Via Group is owned by publicly traded IT conglomerate Datatec Ltd. of Johannesburg. Datatec also owns Tarrytown, N. Y.-based specialty distributor WestconGroup. Moving from sibling companies to being part of the same company will enable Via Group and Logicalis to have a more unified strategy, broader perspective in the employee base and consistently offer strong prices to customers by avoiding margin stacking, DeLuca said. Logicalis and Via worked together on some deals as sibling companies where the skills and services of both companies were needed. The deal was primarily a switch in what entity had the operational and legal rights over Via Group, DeLuca said, rather than a traditional acquisition in which an asset is sold to an outside entity for its full value. Both Logicalis and Via work primarily with commercial and enterprise customers, DeLuca said. Existing Via customers will be able to leverage Logicalis' international presence and expertise in areas such as mobility, wireless, video, virtual call centers and virtual private networks to deliver more comprehensive and wide-reaching solutions to customers, according to the companies. The deal will also bolster Logicalis' ability to support client solutions from the data center to the mobile workforce. Acquiring Via Group will enable Logicalis to gain more of a foothold in verticals such as energy, local government and legal, according to the companies. In addition to being a Microsoft Unified Communications Gold partner, Via also works closely with vendors such as Avaya, Polycom, Dell, Nortel, Cisco, Siemens and Fujitsu.
2016-03-02 23:51 Michael Novinson www.crn.com
49 IBM Builds Out Security Response With Resilient Systems Acquisition IBM's Monday acquisition of Resilient Systems , a transaction reportedly valued at $100 million , marks yet another deal in what many in the industry view as a consolidation in IT security. From IBM's deal announced this week, to FireEye's buys of Invotas International Corp. and iSIGHT Partners, to Cisco's acquisition of Lancope in October, bigger security companies are adding new security capabilities by buying smaller companies. [Where does Microsoft stand when it comes to encryption and privacy? Read Microsoft's Top Lawyer Voices Support For Encryption At RSA .] IBM's deal to buy Resilient absolutely fits that pattern. IBM has identified security as one of four "strategic imperatives" for the company going forward -- specialties that the company expects will provide a strong growth rate and make up for declining revenues in other core areas of the company. While some areas of security are maturing and experiencing commoditization, including end- point protection platforms and consumer technology, others are growing, according to industry analyst firm Gartner . One area of strength is SIEM (security information and event management), and IBM has ranked at the top right of the Leaders quadrant in Gartner's most recent Magic Quadrant report for SIEM released in July 2015. In the report, Gartner said that the SIEM cyber-security market continues to be strong, driven by threat management, and that in 2014 this market experienced a growth rate of 14%. IBM's SIEM technology is called QRadar Security Intelligence Platform, and Resilient's incident response platform offers complementary capabilities. Resilient's platform automates and orchestrates the processes needed when dealing with the aftermath of a security incident -- from a breach to a lost device, IBM said in its announcement of the acquisition. The deal also brings one of the foremost security thought leaders into the IBM tent. Bruce Schneier, a security and privacy specialist, author, and cryptographer, is also the CTO of Resilient. He will join IBM as part of the deal, along with Resilient's other 100 employees. Schneier confirmed the IBM deal in a post on his blog this week: IBM is an ideal partner for Resilient and one that I have been quietly hoping would acquire it for over a year now. IBM has a unique combination of security products and services, and an existing organization that will help Resilient immeasurably. It's a good match. Schneier noted that last year Resilient integrated with IBM's SIEM system, and now says that he believes that's what attracted IBM to Resilient: Resilient has the platform that makes QRadar actionable. Conversely, QRadar makes Resilient's platform more powerful. The products are each good separately, but really good together. IBM security vice president Caleb Barlow told InformationWeek via email that the addition of Resilient Systems makes IBM's security offering even more comprehensive. "We have built out the broadest security intelligence portfolio in the enterprise security market, with much of our investment in the protection and detection markets," he wrote. "The planned addition of Resilient Systems, combined with our new IBM X-Force Incident Response team and services, marks a new chapter in our strategy with a major focus on incident response. " Barlow describes the Resilient Systems platform together with IBM's other security intelligence and incident forensics capabilities as enabling "an end-to-end, orchestrated process for addressing security incidents. " Customers can expect integrations of Resilient's capabilities across the entire IBM Security portfolio, he said. Rising stars wanted. Are you an IT professional under age 30 who's making a major contribution to the field? Do you know someone who fits that description? Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's Pearl Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here.
2016-03-03 00:05 Jessica Davis www.informationweek.com
Total 49 articles. Created at 2016-03-03 06:01