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100 articles, 2016-02-25 12:01 1 Microsoft introduces Windows 10 for PCs build 14271 and Mobile build 14267.1004 to Fast ring (4) Microsoft released two new Insider builds to the Fast ring today. Windows 10 Mobile build 14267.1004 fixes an issue with Lumia 550 and Windows 10 for PCs build 14271 has other fixes. 2016-02-24 18:16:01+00:00 1KB www.neowin.net 2 Apple plans Siri for Mac as tentpole feature for this fall's OS X 10.12 launch (2) Apple has reportedly been testing Siri for Mac since at least 2012, but even though the digital assistant has already made its way from the iPhone to the Apple Watch and Apple TV, it’s been notably absent from OS X.… 2016-02-25 08:32:48 1KB www.techspot.com 3 MasterCard wants to replace passwords and PINs with selfies In the ongoing search for the successor to unsecure passwords and PINs, financial

(2) services giant MasterCard is taking a modern approach to authenticating transactions called MasterCard Identity Check. 2016-02-25 11:17:44 2KB www.techspot.com 4 Docker: Build Use-case-appropriate Containers - Developer.com Docker hits a sweet spot with the default container construction. It provides reasonable (2) defaults without hindering productivity of users. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 5KB www.developer.com 5 Alcatel OneTouch Fierce XL now supported by Windows 10 Insider Preview (2) After releasing Windows 10 for PCs build 14271 and Windows 10 Mobile build 14267.1004 today, Microsoft also announced that the Alcatel OneTouch Fierce XL can now enroll in the Insider Program. 2016-02-24 18:46:01 2KB www.neowin.net 6 Facebook rolls out reaction buttons to iOS, Android, and web Facebook today rolled out expanded Like button 'reactions', a set of emoji that allows the (2) user to choose from six different emotions. The new feature is rolling out on iOS, Android, and facebook.com. 2016-02-24 14:40:01+00:00 2KB www.neowin.net 7 Apple: FBI Wants Access To Many Different iPhones Despite the FBI's insistence that it's focused on the San Bernardino terrorism case, authorities want access to more than one iPhone. 2016-02-24 08:06:00 5KB (2) www.informationweek.com 8 Upcoming Features in GCC 6 | Linux.com The Red Hat developer blog looks at what's coming in version 6 of the GNU Compiler Collection. The x86/x86_64 is a segmented memory architecture, yet GCC has largely (2) ignored this aspect of the 2016-02-24 02:19:00 1KB www.linux.com 9 Down and Dirty: Understanding the Actor Model - (2) Developer.com Learn to use the Actor Model in your programming. It will make life simpler. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 5KB www.developer.com (2) 10 Why API Providers Should Offer SDKs APIs can enhance the versatility of your website, enabling others to leverage its functionality and/or the data it contains. The next step is to offer an SDK to make it easier to consume your APIs. Here's how to determine whether SDKs make sense for your company--and how to get started. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 7KB www.programmableweb.com

11 Why Apple is right to fight FBI backdoor Apple is right to fight the FBI's demand for a backdoor into Sayed Farook's iPhone, says (2) Rick Orloff, who calls it a "slippery slope." 2016-02-22 12:00:19-05:00 4KB www.cnbc.com 12 Outsourcing Data Science: What You Need To Know More companies are creating data science capabilities to enable competitive advantages. (2) Because data science talent is rare and the demand for such talent is high, organizations often work with outsourced partners to fill important skill gaps. Here are a few reasons to consider outsourcing. What can go right and wrong along the way? 2016-02-22 08:06:00 7KB www.informationweek.com 13 How collaboration tools helps NASA search for black holes Email chains and FTP drives just don't cut the mustard, says research scientist Brian Grefenstette,Business Software,Internet,Software,Services and Outsourcing ,NASA,NuStar,Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array,Huddle,California Institute of Technology,CalTech,Brian Grefenstette,collaboration,Cloud,Science,security,email 2016-03-17 00:00:00 4KB www.computing.co.uk 14 Enter the sandbox for email security Orlando Scott-Cowley, cyber security strategist at Mimecast, exhorts IT professionals to examine the layers of protection they have in place against weaponised email attachments,Security,Hacking,Business Software ,Mimecast,Cyber security,email,malware,CIO 2016-03-17 00:00:00 5KB www.computing.co.uk 15 paid Apple $1bn – plus a percentage – to remain default search app on iOS Apple drives a hard bargain – and a big, fat commission from Google,Mobile Software,Software ,Google,Apple,Android,Java,Dalvik,Oracle 2016-03-17 00:00:00 2KB www.computing.co.uk 16 Oracle users warned over virtualisation software licence risks “It's simply not clear what Oracle’s contractual position is in reference to virtualised hardware,” warns software company,Software,Cloud and Infrastructure ,Oracle,TmaxSoft,Virtualisation 2016-03-17 00:00:00 3KB www.computing.co.uk 17 Canonical targets IoT projects with 64-bit ARM developer platform The Linux firm creates a reference platform using its Ubuntu Core,Developer,Internet of Things,Open Source ,ARM,Canonical,Ubuntu Core 2016-03-17 00:00:00 3KB www.v3.co.uk 18 Visa aims its secure payments tech at cloud-based banking apps The payments firm is expanding the scope of its tokenisation service,Financial Solutions,Mobile Software ,Apple,Visa,smb-services,SMB Spotlight 2016-03-17 00:00:00 3KB www.computing.co.uk 19 Big changes ahead for the patent system in Europe EU rules aim to support more innovation in Europe by better protecting patent holders with the unitary patent and the Unified Patent Court 2016-02-25 11:56:48 1KB www.computerweekly.com 20 EU moves towards digital single market with online content portability Lawyers Chris Watson and Tom Scourfield explain how the EU is moving towards the creation of a digital single market with its proposal for online content portability 2016-02-25 11:55:56 2KB www.computerweekly.com 21 DirectX 12 Multi-GPU Technology Tested: GeForce and Radeon Paired Together The new Ashes of the Singularity benchmark 2.0 brings support for explicit multi-adapter (EMA), DirectX 12's multi-GPU technology, which enables support for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs in the same system. This means it's possible to pair a GeForce GTX 980 Ti with a Radeon R9 Fury X and that's exactly what we'll be focusing on today. DirectX 12 Multi-GPU Technology Tested: GeForce and Radeon Paired Together. 2016-02-25 08:34:54 3KB www.techspot.com 22 Jolla quietly debuts Aqua Fish smartphone at MWC Jolla, the Finnish mobile device maker that raised eyebrows earlier this year by snubbing some of its crowdfunding backers, made a surprise appearance at Mobile World Congress with a new smartphone in tow. 2016-02-25 08:34:34 1KB www.techspot.com 23 DJI now offers insurance policies for your drone Drone maker DJI revealed a couple of years back that it was developing a parachute designed to minimize damage to a drone in freefall. The DropSafe Speed Reduction System eventually made it to market although its $800+ price point and… 2016-02-25 08:34:37 2KB www.techspot.com 24 Sony sends out invites to PlayStation VR event at GDC 2016 With so much press surrounding the Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive VR, it's easy to forget that a third major player is looming on the horizon. I'm of course talking about Sony and its PlayStation VR (formerly Project Morpheus). … 2016-02-25 08:34:15 2KB www.techspot.com 25 Sharp agrees to $5.8b Foxconn sale Reports say Sharp's board have agreed for the company to be taken over by Taiwan's Foxconn, bringing an end to years of financial uncertainty and marking one of the largest deals in Japanese history. 2016-02-25 07:26:01 2KB www.neowin.net 26 First sign of OneDrive placeholders returning appears in Redstone build WalkingCat, a Twitter user who is gaining credibility as a leakster at a rapid pace, found the first clues that OneDrive placeholders may be returning in the Windows 10 Redstone update. 2016-02-25 07:09:24 2KB www.neowin.net 27 Telegram launches channels 2.0 a day after reaching 100M users After reaching 100m active monthly users, Telegram has introduced channels 2.0. This update greatly improves channels, bringing features like admin signing and silent . 2016-02-25 03:02:01+00:00 2KB www.neowin.net 28 Ghostery 6.0 for Firefox syncs settings with other devices Anti-tracking company Ghostery has updated its Firefox add-on to version 6.0 in what the developer is calling “the most significant upgrade to Ghostery since its inception”. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 1KB www.softwarecrew.com 29 How to: Set up a Kodi PVR on Windows How to use XMBC to record live TV 2016-02-25 00:00:00 1KB www.alphr.com 30 adds voice editing and formatting to make dictation easier Last September, Google added 'voice typing' to Docs. Starting today, you can edit using your voice to copy and paste, add bullets, select and replace text, and change styles. 2016-02-24 21:56:01+00:00 1KB www.neowin.net 31 GitLab 8.5 pours on the speed The latest version of the code-hosting platform adds a chronological to-do list, and the Enterprise edition features Geo for remote replica capabilities 2016-02-24 21:53:00 2KB www.infoworld.com

32 Microsoft finally buys cross-platform mobile development company Xamarin After years of rumors, Microsoft has finally acquired cross-platform mobile development company Xamarin. Xamarin allows developers to create native Android, iOS, and Windows apps with one code base. 2016-02-24 20:12:01 1KB www.neowin.net 33 Apple personal assistant Siri making her way to the desktop with OS X 10.12 "Fuji" According to reports Apple is finally planning on bringing Siri to their final platform, the desktop, with their next release of OS X 10.12 or "Fuji", a rumour which has been heard before. 2016-02-24 16:14:01+00:00 2KB www.neowin.net 34 Cloud software maker Salesforce posts 25.3 pct rise in revenue Feb 24- Salesforce.com Inc reported a 25.3 percent rise in quarterly revenue, helped by an increase in demand for its web-based sales and marketing software. Net loss narrowed to $25.5 million, or 4 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended Jan. 31, from $65.8 million, or 10 cents per share, a year earlier. The company's revenue rose to $1.81 billion from $1.44... 2016-02-24 16:11:00-05:00 1KB www.cnbc.com 35 Hands-on: Panasonic Toughpad FZ-F1 - a seriously rugged Windows 10 mobile device It's certainly not sexy, and you may not consider it especially exciting, but the new Panasonic Toughpad FZ-F1 is a truly rugged mobile device, running Windows 10 IoT Mobile Enterprise. 2016-02-24 16:00:01+00:00 5KB www.neowin.net 36 New platform improves efficiency of security operations Security teams often have to spend a lot of their time investigating incidents, which is time consuming and can distract from other tasks. Security teams often have to spend a lot of their time investigating incidents, which is time consuming and can distract from other tasks. To improve the efficiency of security operations centers (… 2016-02-24 14:55:52 3KB betanews.com 37 Save 25% off a ilumi LED Smartbulb via Deals Today, you can save a quarter off the price of a ilumi LED Smartbulb via Neowin Deals. New and improved design: Light up your world for the next 20 years right from your smartphone. 2016-02-24 14:18:01+00:00 2KB www.neowin.net 38 Salesforce.com faces scrutiny as Wall St frets over cloud software SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 24- Salesforce.com' s quarterly report will be under the microscope after the bell on Wednesday as Wall Street searches for new signs of trouble in spending on cloud software. With investors trying to figure out whether the poor reports from Tableau and a handful of others are company-specific or indicative of trouble across the sector,... 2016-02-24 13:11:00-05:00 2KB www.cnbc.com 39 AI 'frees us up to be humans again,' H2O.ai chief says Machines may be able to "automate away" much of what needs to happen in the business world, but only the parts they're better at anyway, says H2O.ai CEO SriSatish Ambati. 2016-02-24 12:27:00 3KB www.cio.com.au 40 BlackBerry eyes IoT, diversifies with new cybersecurity practice Struggling smartphone vendor BlackBerry is looking to diversify its business by launching a cybersecurity consulting service, focusing in part on the Internet of Things, and providing related tools to customers 2016-02-24 12:01:00 2KB www.infoworld.com

41 Hands-on: Alcatel Plus 10 - a Windows 10 tablet with a 4G LTE keyboard Alcatel's new Windows 10 tablet could be a popular choice at the right price for those seeking a low-cost device with 4G LTE support - albeit built into the detachable keyboard, not the tablet itself. 2016-02-24 11:24:01+00:00 5KB www.neowin.net 42 RHEL On Azure: What Took So Long? Red Hat Enterprise Linux joins the crowd of Linuxes now available on Microsoft's Azure. It's the last to do so. How soon will OpenShift follow? 2016-02-24 10:05:00 7KB www.informationweek.com 43 of War 4 will be a "graphical showcase" on Xbox One The Coalition's studio head Rod Fergusson talks a bit about the high technical bar being set for the upcoming Gears of War 4 game, claiming the game will achieve 60 FPS and superb visuals. 2016-02-24 09:34:01+00:00 2KB www.neowin.net 44 Facebook's new 'Reactions' buttons are here! Do you 'like' the emojis? Facebook is rolling out its "Reactions" feature for all 1.6 billion users, allowing them to use different responses to a post. 2016-02-24 09:28:35-05:00 2KB www.cnbc.com 45 What should the Linux Mint developers do to regain the trust of users? Also in today's open source roundup: The Linux Mint forum database had been compromised well before the site was hacked, and the f.lux beta is now available for Android 2016-02-24 09:09:00 2KB www.infoworld.com 46 Security Concerns Continue Amid Cloud Adoption While most top IT executives at companies of all sizes continue to express concern about the security of data in the cloud, that hasn't slowed their move to embrace this new infrastructure as a home for corporate data. A new survey and report reveal their top security nightmares and provides some recommendations about how to protect data in the cloud. 2016-02-24 09:06:00 5KB www.informationweek.com 47 Xbox Games with Gold for March 2016 announced Microsoft's Xbox Games with Gold offerings for February are nearing their end, which means we get to see what free titles Microsoft has for Xbox Live subscribers for the month of March. 2016-02-24 08:44:01+00:00 3KB www.neowin.net 48 Microsoft pursues JavaScript developers with Typescript 1.8 The latest version of Microsoft's typed JavaScript superset features module augmentation, faster compilation, and control flow analysis 2016-02-24 07:50:00 3KB www.infoworld.com 49 Ahead of Senate hearing, a look at the early warnings about H-1B In 1995, then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich feared the H-1B program could inflict real harm on US workers; here’s what he says now 2016-02-24 04:43:00-08:00 4KB www.infoworld.com 50 Here's what tech leaders have said about the Apple-FBI dispute so far Most industry leaders have lined up behind Apple, but there are notable exceptions 2016-02-24 04:01:00-08:00 5KB www.infoworld.com 51 Meet Pantheon Mail, a Fork of the Now Dead Geary | Linux.com The elementary OS team has forked the now dead Geary email client, and they have announced the launch of Pantheon Mail. Geary was an email application developed by a group named Yorba, but they 2016-02-24 01:53:00 1KB spd.rss.ac

52 Five years after the Arab Spring, how does the Middle East use social media? In 2011, the Arab Spring rocked many parts of the Middle East. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 6KB phys.org 53 London overtakes Amsterdam as most in-demand location for datacentre space Research from real estate advisory organisation CBRE shows demand for colocation space in London continues to grow, outstripping Amsterdam 2016-02-24 00:00:00 2KB www.computerweekly.com 54 IT could help avert Norwegian healthcare crisis With a per capita healthcare spend already the highest in the world, Norway is facing a healthcare crisis as its population is increasingly dominated by elderly people 2016-02-24 00:00:00 1KB www.computerweekly.com 55 Spotify to move datacentre workloads to Google’s cloud Spotify says building and buying datacentres to keep up with demand for its services is no longer viable, as it prepares to shift its infrastructure into the Google cloud 2016-02-24 00:00:00 2KB www.computerweekly.com 56 Hertz division chooses Cognizant to support IoT plans The equipment hire division of Hertz has contracted IT services firm Cognizant to support the implementation of its internet of things strategy 2016-02-24 00:00:00 2KB www.computerweekly.com 57 Ministry of Defence collaboration contract goes to G-Cloud SME Inovem Inovem follows up G-Cloud contract wins with Ministry of Justice and Department of Health by clinching new deal with the Ministry of Defence 2016-02-24 00:00:00 1KB www.computerweekly.com 58 GE lures allies for Predix industrial internet dominance Global manufacturer GE has established a partner programme for its Predix platform to drive the value of analytics across the industrial internet 2016-02-24 00:00:00 1KB www.computerweekly.com 59 Citi’s corporate clients do $1tn in mobile banking Citi bank's mobile service for corporate finance departments has notched up $1tn in transactions since its launch in 2011 2016-02-24 00:00:00 2KB www.computerweekly.com 60 Daily API RoundUp: Switch Payments, NASA, SafetyCulture, Druid, Unbabel, Market Prophit, Knurld We've added 19 APIs to the ProgrammableWeb directory in categories including Payments, Voice, Astronomy, Safety, and Translation. Featured today are several APIs for the Knurld voice recognition platform. Here's a rundown of the latest additions and how developers can benefit. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 7KB www.programmableweb.com 61 Facebook Releases Python Ads API SDK Docs Facebook has released the first set of docs for its Python Ads API SDK. The Docs were pulled directly from the SDK to maintain technical accuracy and consistency with code changes. The docs directly mirror classes within the SDK. Each doc contains Fields, Methods, and Code Samples. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 1KB www.programmableweb.com 62 Google speeds news to smartphones, challenging Facebook Google on Wednesday began delivering "blazingly fast" articles to smartphones and tablets in a stepped-up challenge to Facebook to be the leading mobile news hub. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 3KB phys.org

63 Google funds 128 news projects in Europe Google announced Wednesday it would provide 27 million euros ($29.7 million) to 128 news organisations in Europe as part of its "Digital News Initiative." 2016-02-24 00:00:00 2KB phys.org 64 Africa's first music download service launches in Senegal Africa's first home-grown platform for legal music downloads launched in Senegal on Wednesday with a mission to promote African artists, pay them properly, and fight internet piracy. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 2KB phys.org 65 Git 2.7.2 Open-Source Distributed Version Control System Adds New Features | Linux.com The development team of the best free, open-source and cross-platform distributed version control system, Git, which is being used by numerous developers worldwide, have announced the release of Git 2016-02-23 22:55:00 1KB spd.rss.ac 66 Java finally gets microservices tools Lightbend's Lagom framework helps Java developers create and manage microservices architectures 2016-02-23 21:53:00 2KB www.infoworld.com 67 ANALYSIS-Cyber security startups face funding drought SAN FRANCISCO/ BOSTON, Feb 23- The U.S. cyber security industry, once one of the hottest targets for venture capitalists, is now grappling with a funding slump that has forced some startups to sell themselves or cut spending. 'said Promod Haque, senior managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, which manages about $6 billion in capital. Other deals this year... 2016-02-23 16:16:00-05:00 5KB www.cnbc.com 68 Food printers and eye writing: tech show's quirkiest gadgets BARCELONA, Spain— While tens of thousands flock to the Mobile World Congress to check out the latest smartphones, the show also offers glimpses of some of the coolest off- beat— and downright strange— innovations. Here is a look at the quirkiest of the gadgets and apps on display this week in Barcelona. We have to play and enjoy education, "said Hector Perez, CEO of the... 2016-02-23 13:41:00-05:00 6KB www.cnbc.com 69 Bill Gates Weighs In On Apple Vs. FBI Encryption Battle Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates adds his opinion to the Apple vs. FBI debate. The government has demanded Apple grant access to the locked iPhone of a suspected terrorist. 2016-02-23 13:06:00 4KB www.informationweek.com 70 Docker Launches End-To-End Container Management The container engine supplier wants to help usher containers from development into production via IT operations. 2016-02-23 11:00:00 5KB www.informationweek.com 71 Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge: An Up-Close Look Competent and compelling, Samsung's latest smartphones, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, don't break new ground, but they're solid high-end offerings. The company also unveiled a VR camera and other device initiatives. 2016-02-23 07:06:00 3KB www.informationweek.com 72 Mobile App Development Gets Enterprise Friendly Boost The enterprise mobile app market is booming. JAMF, IBM, MobileIron, and VMware -- along with more than 60 partners -- aim to help mobile developers make their apps more enterprise friendly and maintainable. Here's what their community approach can mean for your business. 2016-02-23 06:06:00 4KB www.informationweek.com 73 Startup touts four-factor authentication for VIP-level access Trusona’s system involves an app, a dongle, the post office, and the subject of 'Catch Me If You Can' 2016-02-23 04:36:00-08:00 5KB www.infoworld.com

74 Oracle snags cloud startup Ravello to aid in battle with AWS, Microsoft Azure Ravello's 'nested virtualization' software enables enterprises to use public clouds as an extension of their own data centers 2016-02-23 04:08:00-08:00 2KB www.infoworld.com 75 IBM says its new software links all your IT to the cloud The digital-transformation imperative looms large in the business world today, but it's not always clear how on-premises software and data should fit into the picture. IBM hopes to help. 2016-02-23 02:53:00 3KB www.cio.com.au 76 Case study: National Rail Enquiries tackles website uptime issues with AWS and SOASTA The National Rail Enquiries website took a battering in the wake of the 2013 St. Jude's Day storm, prompting the organisation to rethink its hosting and load-testing procedures 2016-02-23 00:00:00 1KB www.computerweekly.com 77 Samsung Pay processes $500m in first six months Samsung Pay is being used by about five million people in the US and South Korea and China will be the next step in its global launch 2016-02-23 00:00:00 2KB www.computerweekly.com 78 4 of the slickest versions of XMBC Want to get the best out of Kodi fast? Try one of these 5 Kodi builds. 2016-02-23 00:00:00 2KB www.alphr.com 79 Java 9 to address GTK GUI pains on Linux Bringing Java current with the latest edition of the toolkit will prevent app failures due to multiple GTK versions 2016-02-22 21:53:00 3KB www.infoworld.com 80 Zuckerberg Hits MWC To Talk Drones, AI, VR In his keynote address at Mobile World Congress, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision of how drones could be used to deliver Internet services to poor populations, and talked about the future of Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence. 2016-02-22 20:06:00 6KB www.informationweek.com 81 Adobe rolls out new enterprise app creation service Adobe has merged two of its app development services into one in an attempt to help businesses easily build professional-looking apps, without requiring a whole lot of coding know-how. 2016-02-22 15:54:00 3KB www.computerworld.com.au 82 Popular Linux distro hit by hacked version on official site over the weekend Mint downloaded on Saturday may leave a bad taste in your mouth 2016-02-22 12:47:00+00:00 3KB www.techradar.com 83 Verizon to buy XO Communications' fiber-optic business U.S. wireless phone provider Verizon Communications said it would buy XO Communications' fiber-optic network business. 2016-02-22 10:19:36-05:00 2KB www.cnbc.com 84 Mobile App Dev: 3 Trends That Will Shake Up Your Strategy Industry analyst Peter Crocker outlines three emerging technology trends that will have you rethinking your organization's mobile development strategy. 2016-02-22 10:06:00 5KB www.informationweek.com 85 8 Reasons Cloud Email Is A Smart Move Now If you've been dragging your feet on migrating your company's email to a cloud service, here's why it's time to reconsider. 2016-02-22 07:06:00 3KB www.informationweek.com

86 Hacker Explains How He Put 'Backdoor' in Hundreds of Linux Mint Downloads A lone hacker who duped hundreds of users into downloading a version of Linux with a backdoor installed has revealed how it was done. Lefebvre said in a blog post that only downloads from Saturday 2016-02-22 06:35:00 1KB www.linux.com 87 Basic software that held key to shooter's iPhone went unused WASHINGTON— The county government that owned the iPhone in a high-profile legal battle between Apple Inc. and the Justice Department paid for but never installed a feature that would have allowed the FBI to easily and immediately unlock the phone as part of the terrorism investigation into the shootings that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California. 2016-02-22 05:14:00-05:00 7KB www.cnbc.com 88 Beware of Hacked ISOs If You Downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th! Clement Lefebvre writes: I’m sorry I have to come with bad news. We were exposed to an intrusion today. It was brief and it shouldn’t impact many people, but if it impacts you, it’s very 2016-02-22 02:10:00 1KB www.linux.com 89 Facebook's Zuckerberg at crossroads in connecting the globe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to boast that his 3-year-old effort to bring the developing world online has reached millions of people in some of the world's poorest nations. 2016-02-22 00:00:00 7KB phys.org 90 Zuckerberg to press on with Internet access despite setback Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed Monday to press on with his 3-year-old effort to bring the developing world online, even after Indian regulators banned one of the pillars of the campaign. 2016-02-22 00:00:00 7KB phys.org 91 All eyes on Zuckerberg at Barcelona fair as security debate rages Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes to the stage Monday at the world's biggest mobile fair in Barcelona just as US tech giants clash with authorities in the latest debate pitting privacy against security. 2016-02-22 00:00:00 3KB phys.org 92 IBM Extends Support for Swift Programming Language The IBM Swift runtime preview and Swift Package Catalog will help bring Swift to the cloud to simplify app development. 2016-02-22 00:00:00 4KB www.eweek.com 93 Spark Spreads, Apache Arrow Accepted: Big Data Roundup Databricks announced a free community edition of Spark along with free training materials. Apache Arrow became a project within the Apache Software Foundation. And SAP announced support for Spark in its Predictive Analytics platform. We've got that and more in our big data roundup for the week of Feb. 21, 2016. 2016-02-21 10:06:00 5KB www.informationweek.com 94 Apple Fixes iPhone Error 53 With iOS Update Apple has pushed a software update to fix the Error 53 problem plaguing iPhone users who got third-party repairs. 2016-02-20 11:06:00 4KB www.informationweek.com 95 Windows 10 Lands At DoD, Outlook Web Launch: Microsoft Roundup Microsoft this week debuted Outlook.com, group video calls on Skype for iOS and Android, the Lumia 650, and several new features on Windows 10. 2016-02-20 10:05:00 4KB www.informationweek.com

96 US would let Apple keep software to help FBI hack iPhone WASHINGTON— The Obama administration has told a U.S. magistrate judge it would be willing to allow Apple Inc. to retain possession of and later destroy specialized software it has been ordered to design to help the FBI hack into an encrypted iPhone used by the gunman in December's mass shootings in California. "Apple may maintain custody of the software, destroy... 2016-02-20 03:12:00-05:00 6KB www.cnbc.com 97 Npm Inc. explores foundation for JavaScript installer Developers who may hesitate to participate in a single company's technology may participate more if it's independent, Npm's founder hopes 2016-02-19 21:53:00 3KB www.infoworld.com 98 Facebook updates Messenger app to handle several accounts SAN FRANCISCO— Facebook has redesigned its popular Messenger app so several people can use it on the same smartphone or tablet without relinquishing their privacy. The update announced Friday initially will only be available on devices running on Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system. Facebook didn't set a timetable for making similar... 2016-02-19 15:33:00-05:00 1KB www.cnbc.com 99 Outbreak threat: should we use antivirus software on our phones? If malware is everywhere, surely our phones are next... 2016-02-19 13:00:00+00:00 4KB www.techradar.com 100 How Tim Cook, in iPhone Battle, Became a Bulwark for Digital Privacy Tim Cook's standoff with officials marks his evolution to one of the most outspoken corporate execs, The New York Times Reports. 2016-02-19 09:44:38-05:00 10KB www.cnbc.com Articles

100 articles, 2016-02-25 12:01

1 Microsoft introduces Windows 10 for PCs build 14271 and Mobile build 14267.1004 to Fast ring (4) Today, Microsoft released two Insider builds to the Fast ring: Windows 10 for PCs build 14271 and Windows 10 Mobile build 14267.1004. Neither build has any new features; however, there are a number of important fixes. For example, Windows 10 Mobile build 14267.1004 is the same build as 14267 ; however, the bug that caused the Lumia 550 not to charge has been fixed. Here's what got fixed in Windows 10 for PCs build 14271: Known issues for Windows 10 for PCs build 14271: Here's what got fixed in Windows 10 Mobile build 14267.1004: Known issues in Windows 10 Mobile build 14267.1004: Source: Windows Blog 2016-02-24 18:16:01+00:00 Richard Woods

2 Apple plans Siri for Mac as tentpole feature for this fall's OS X 10.12 launch (2) Apple has reportedly been testing Siri for Mac since at least 2012, but even though the digital assistant has already made its way from the iPhone to the Apple Watch and Apple TV, it’s been notably absent from OS X. According to 9to5Mac'S Mark Gurman , that will change this year when the company launches OS X 10.2 in the Fall. Gurman says Siri for Mac almost ready to go and will be announced as a “tentpole” feature for the next major update to OS X, which is expected to be previewed in June at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The digital assistant will reportedly be summoned in a handful of ways: through a Siri icon in the top right corner of the Mac’s menu bar, using a keyboard shortcut, or with the “hey Siri” voice prompt when your computer is plugged into a power outlet. Of course if you're down with the idea of another device “always listening” to you in your home there will be an option to disable the feature. Beyond Siri 9to5Mac reports OS X will receive minor user-interface tweaks across core system application windows, along with performance-focused improvement. If the company stick to its usual release schedule we can expect OS X 10.12 to launch around September or October, around the same time the next major update to iOS is due. 2016-02-25 08:32:48 Jose Vilches

3 MasterCard wants to replace passwords and PINs with selfies (2) In the ongoing search for the successor to unsecure passwords and PINs, financial services giant MasterCard is taking a modern approach to authenticating transactions called MasterCard Identity Check. Last year, MasterCard completed a pilot program for a feature that allows users to authenticate online transactions using facial recognition. Dubbed by many as "Selfie Pay," the app maps the user's face and requires them to to eliminate fraud by using a still photograph. The company says its algorithms can also detect if someone is trying to fool it by using a video. Ajay Bhalla, MasterCard's president of enterprise security solutions, told The Verge that the facial recognition system won't be used to authenticate every transaction. Instead, it may be utilized if the context of a purchase seems abnormal such as, for example, if you're shipping an item to an unfamiliar address. It may seem silly to some but it could come in handy if your phone doesn't have a fingerprint scanner. Following the successful trials, MasterCard said it will be rolling out the technology to 14 countries over the summer including Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, the US, the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Norwary, Switzerland, Denmark and Finland. Within five years, Bhalla believes the technology will be ubiquitous. It's unclear if that prophecy will indeed come to fruition but it's encouraging to see large players like MasterCard moving past the traditional password and PIN approach. Image courtesy Flickr 2016-02-25 11:17:44 Shawn Knight

4 Docker: Build Use-case-appropriate Containers - Developer.com (2) By Jeff Nickoloff Containers are a crosscutting concern. There are more reasons and ways that people could use them than I could ever enumerate. So, it's important that when you use Docker to build containers to serve your own purposes, you take the time to do so in a way that's appropriate for the software you're running. The most secure tactic for doing so would be to start with the most isolated container you can build and justify reasons for weakening those restrictions. In reality, people tend to be a bit more reactive than proactive. For that reason, I think Docker hits a sweet spot with the default container construction. It provides reasonable defaults without hindering productivity of users. Docker containers are not the most isolated by default. Docker does not require that you enhance those defaults. It will let you do silly things in production if you want to. This makes Docker seem much more like a tool than a burden and something people generally want to use rather than something they feel like they have to use. For those who would rather not do silly things in production, Docker provides a simple interface to enhance container isolation. Applications are the whole reason we use computers. Most applications are programs that other people wrote and work with potentially malicious data. Consider your web browser. A web browser is a type of application that's installed on almost every computer. It interacts with web pages, images, scripts, embedded video, Flash™ documents, Java applications, and anything else out there. You certainly didn't create all that content, and most people were not contributors on web browser projects. How can you trust your web browser to handle all that content correctly? Some more cavalier readers might just ignore the problem. After all, what's the worst thing that could happen? Well, if an attacker gains control of your web browser (or other application), they will gain all of the capabilities of that application and the permissions of the user that it is running as. They could trash your computer, delete your , install other malware, or even launch attacks against other computers from yours. So, this isn't a good thing to ignore. The question remains, how do you protect yourself when this is a risk that you need to take? The best approach is to isolate the risk. First, make sure that the application is running as a user with limited permissions. This way, if there's a problem it won't be able to change the files on your computer. Second, limit the system capabilities of the browser. In doing so you make sure that your system configuration is safer. Third, set limits on how much of the CPU and memory the application can use. Limits will help reserve resources to keep the system responsive. Last, it's a good idea to specifically whitelist devices that it can access. This will keep snoops off your webcam, USB, and the like. High-level system services are a bit different from applications. They're not part of the operating system, but your computer makes sure they're started and kept running. These tools typically sit alongside applications outside the operating system, but they often require privileged access to the operating system to operate correctly. They provide important functionality to users and other software on a system. Examples include cron , syslogd , dbus , sshd , and docker. If you're unfamiliar with these tools (hopefully not all of them), it's all right. They do things like keep system logs, run scheduled commands, and provide a way to get a secure shell on the system from the network, and docker manages containers. Although running services as root is common, few of them actually need full privileged access. Use capabilities to tune their access for the specific features they need. Low-level services control things like devices or the system's network stack. They require privileged access to the components of the system they provide (for example, firewall software needs administrative access to the network stack). It's rare to see these run inside containers. Tasks like file system management, device management, and network management are core host concerns. Most software run in containers is expected to be portable. So machine-specific tasks like these are a poor fit for general container use cases. The best exceptions are short-running configuration containers. For example, in an environment where all deployments happen with Docker images and containers, you'd want to push network stack changes the same way you push software. In this case, you might push an image with the configuration to the host and make the changes with a privileged container. The risk in this case is reduced because you authored the configuration to be pushed, the container is not long running, and changes like these are simple to audit. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 www.developer.com

5 5 Alcatel OneTouch Fierce XL now supported by Windows 10 Insider Preview (2) Users of the Alcatel OneTouch Fierce XL have quite a bit of news today. Earlier, we reported that users of the device were receiving the cumulative update, build 10586.107. Since Microsoft has released Windows 10 for PCs build 14271 and Windows 10 Mobile build 14267.1004 to the Fast ring , users of the device can now enroll in the Insider Program. Last Monday, we reported that the Windows Device Recovery Tool was updated to include support for the Fierce XL. After that, it's not surprising to see the device being supported by the Windows 10 Insider Preview. Microsoft also subtly mentioned that the Lumia 650 is supported by Redstone builds. Originally, the firm had reported that build 14267 was only supported by Lumia 550, 950, 950 XL, and Xiaomi Mi4 , although some had reported being able to install it on their Lumia 650. Build 14267.1004 also fixes the issue that Lumia 550 users were having where their device wouldn't recognize a charger . If you're a user of the Alcatel OneTouch Fierce XL or Lumia 650, you're now officially supported by the Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview and can go ahead and download build 14267.1004. Lumia 550 users can also download the build without worrying about not being able to charge their device. Gabe Aul also noted that as devices are upgraded to Windows 10 Mobile, more devices will be added to the supported devices list for Redstone builds. He suggested that in the meantime, users can either "stay in the Fast ring and sit tight" or switch to the Release Preview ring and test cumulative updates. Source: Windows Blog 2016-02-24 18:46:01 Richard Woods

6 Facebook rolls out reaction buttons to iOS, Android, and web (2) Facebook is rolling out their Like button "reactions" after over a year of testing. Users will now be able to select from a variety of emoji after a long press on the Like button. Users will be able to choose from emoji for "like", "love", "haha", "wow", "sad", or "angry". The update is available for iOS, Android, and facebook.com right now. The new feature is still not available on Facebook for Windows Phone, Windows 10 , or Paper for iOS . Upon launching the Facebook app or visiting facebook.com, users won't see anything that's different other than some new reaction emoji on posts. The new feature requires the user to long press or hover over the Like button before the new emoji are shown, after which they can be selected. Initially tested in Spain and Ireland, the new buttons originally contained two more, which ended up being cut: "yay" and "confused". Testing showed that those that used either of the two buttons were unlikely to ever use it again. Facebook users have been asking for ways to express emotions other than "like" for some time, mainly requesting a "Dislike" button. After all, when someone posts on Facebook about a tragedy happening to them, a user might want to react in a different way than a Like button, which wouldn't be very fitting. The new "reaction" buttons aim to fix just that. Source: The Verge 2016-02-24 14:40:01+00:00 Richard Woods

7 Apple: FBI Wants Access To Many Different iPhones (2) In the name of protecting people from terrorism, the US government has gone to war against the private sector and its ability to build secure technology products. The Justice Department is seeking a court order to force Apple to create software that will enable FBI investigators to crack the password protecting encrypted data on an iPhone used by one of the shooters in last year's San Bernardino terrorist attack. The FBI insists it is making a narrow legal demand that's relevant only to a specific case. "We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly," said FBI director James Comey in a statement. "That's it. We don't want to break anyone's encryption or set a master key loose on the land. " However, according to an Apple legal filing last week, law enforcement authorities have sought court orders to compel Apple to unlock at least a dozen other iPhones in nine cases working their way through US courts. In a list of FAQs posted on Apple's website, the company claims that law enforcement agents have said they have hundreds of phones they'd like to unlock. Apple insists the FBI's demand is broad because it would establish a legal precedent that would allow similar demands to be made to any company or individual in the future. "If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone's device to capture their data," said CEO Tim Cook in a letter to Apple customers. In a New York Times op-ed column published on Monday, New York Police Department Commissioner William Bratton and NYPD Intelligence and Counterterrorism Deputy Commissioner James J. Miller acknowledge, "The ramifications of this fight extend beyond San Bernardino. " They assert that they're not asking for a back door. "Complying with constitutionally legal court orders is not 'creating a back door'; in a democracy, that is a front door. " But it remains unsettled whether or not the FBI's demand is lawful. In a democracy, this door, whether framed as a front door or back door, is barred when authorities impose an "unreasonable burden. " As George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr suggests in The Washington Post , the court system will have to decide whether the FBI's request represents an unreasonable burden. That won't be an easy decision. Kerr asks if that standard should reflect whether "the subject company has a business strategy that includes opposing government surveillance requests. " In short, is uncompromising security a legal product? The American public narrowly favors the government. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 51% of US adults surveyed say Apple should unlock the iPhone to help the FBI. About 38% disagreed and 11% said they didn't know. Present and former leaders of technology companies, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO , have voiced support for Apple . [Read Tim Cook vs. FBI: Why Apple Is Fighting the Good Fight.] Technical experts largely appear to agree with Apple's characterization of the situation and of the risks compliance poses to its business. In a blog post last week, Jonathan Zdziarski, a computer security researcher and iOS forensics expert, explains that the FBI isn't asking Apple to provide the data on the iPhone in question. It's asking the company to create a forensics tool, which requires exposure of Apple's technology to third-parties. Zdziarski goes on to suggest that the Justice Department's assertion that Apple will be able to keep its tool secret is disingenuous, because doing so would violate the norms of forensic science, where digital tools must be validated independently. "Not only is Apple being ordered to compromise their own devices; they're being ordered to give that golden key to the government, in a very roundabout sneaky way," explains Zdziarski. "What FBI has requested will inevitably force Apple's methods out into the open, where they can be ingested by government agencies looking to do the same thing. " Indeed, if the US government can demand Apple's assistance, governments of China and Russia can be expected to seek similar service, not just from Apple, but from Google, Microsoft, and every other company. Does your company offer the most rewarding place to work in IT? Do you know of an organization that stands out from the pack when it comes to how IT workers are treated? Make your voice heard. Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's People's Choice Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-24 08:06:00 Thomas Claburn

8 Upcoming Features in GCC 6 | Linux.com (2) The Red Hat developer blog looks at what's coming in version 6 of the GNU Compiler Collection. "The x86/x86_64 is a segmented memory architecture, yet GCC has largely ignored this aspect of the Intel architecture and relied on implicit segment registers. Low level code such as the Linux kernel & glibc often have to be aware of the segmented architecture and have traditionally resorted to asm statements to use explicit segment registers for memory accesses.... " Read more at LWN 2016-02-24 02:19:00 LWN

9 Down and Dirty: Understanding the Actor Model - Developer.com (2) The Actor Model is a programming paradigm in which the basic unit of execution is the actor. Unlike an object in the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm where work can be done on a standalone basis, Printer. Print() for example, in the Actor Model, an actor does work by using messages to express actions upon a system or other actors within the given system (see Figure 1). Figure 1: The Actor Model lends itself well to service-oriented architecture The Actor Model is particularly useful when programming in large, distributed, asynchronous systems that have unpredictable degrees of latency. In the old days, for many of us, computing was about one person using one computer to do work. Today, one person uses hundreds, if not thousands of computers working concurrently to get work done. A simple example is doing a price lookup for an airplane flight. You go to a Web site that handles flight bookings, enter some data, and then issue a command to the site to find prices on the flight. Does the site look up the prices one at a time? No. The price lookup is done concurrently. The site sends your purchase parameters to all the airlines at once and waits for the information to come back. Once the information is gathered, it's all sent back to you at once (please see Figure 2). Figure 2: Flight booking is the poster child of concurrent programming and the dynamics of the flight booking are a textbook use case example of the actor model. In the case of Figure 2, the user acts upon the Web site, the Web site acts upon the backend server, and the backend server acts upon each airline's ticketing system. Let's take a more detailed look. As mentioned above, in the Actor Model the basic unit of execution is an actor. In the Actor Model, everything is an actor. An actor expresses an action upon a system or another actor by way of a message. An actor can express actions upon many systems and actors concurrently using messages. Consider the following scenario shown in Figure 3: Dad wants Kid to clean Kid's Room while not interfering with his Poker game. Figure 3: In the Actor Model, an actor acts on one or many actors Figure 3 describes a scenario in which Dad, the central actor, is sending messages to another actor, Kid, and a system, Poker Game. Dad acts upon the actor, Kid, by sending a message "Clean room. " Also, Dad acts upon the system, Poker Game, by sending a message, "Make bet. " The important thing to understand is that Dad is an actor acting upon two domains asynchronously and work is accomplished by way of the messages. An actor sends a message to a system or other actor. Interaction between the originating actor and the subsequently messaged system or actor is facilitated by way of a return callback message. The essential feature of the Actor Model is that all interaction is asynchronous and autonomous. The affected actor does work and then notifies interested parties when work has been accomplished. The coupling is loose with message management being a critical dynamic of the model. Listing 1 shows an example message in JSON that one could imagine being sent in the flight booking scenario described in Figure 1. Notice please the declaration of a callback URL to which flight information is to be sent as the last property of the JSON message. Remember, processing actor messages is asynchronous and loosely coupled. The actor responds only to information of the message provided. Should one or more callbacks be required, that callback information must be provided within the content of the message. Also, please understand that although Listing 1 uses JSON, any format that is well known to the sending actor and receiving system or actor can be used. In Listing 1, you can just as easily use XML, , or any other message format you choose as long as that format is understood by all the actors in play. Listing 1: A message can have a callback address by which it notifies other interested actors of system status Again, the beauty of the Actor Model is that it's discrete and lends itself well to asynchronous, concurrent work. An actor acts upon something and that's it. Subsequent work and callback notifications are independent mechanisms. Thus, when implementing an Actor Model you are going to spend a lot of time managing messages and managing process calls within threads. It can be a lot of work. However, to save time and labor, there are many pre-existing frameworks you can use that implement the Actor Model, Akka / Akka. NET , Orleans , and Dotsero , to name a few. The Actor Model is well suited to the landscape of process-intensive, large-scale service- oriented architectures. Given the intrinsic variation in responsiveness of cloud-based services, the Actor Model accommodates both the power and hazard of working with Internet-based data processing. The asynchronous nature of the send-response messaging feature that is a vital part of the Actor Model allows you to do concurrent computing is a way that is flexible and extensible. And, if you use an existing Actor Model framework, you can get yourself operational is a fraction of the time that it would take to build your own. Once you adjust your thinking into the message-driven way of developing, you'll find the Actor Model to be invaluable when it comes to designing large-scale, service-oriented systems that run on the Internet. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 Robert Reselman

10 Why API Providers Should Offer SDKs (2) If your business is providing a website and/or mobile app--or even if a website or mobile app merely drives revenue for your core business--then the speed with which customers adopt that offering is critical to the success of your business. Perhaps you've even enhanced the versatility of your website by offering an API that allows others to leverage its functionality and/or the data it contains. And now you're wondering if you should take this a step further by offering an SDK to make consuming your API easier. ProgrammableWeb.com’s API directory includes more than 14,000 APIs, a number that is increasing significantly by the day. It’s not surprising, since APIs have changed the way that business is done and how information is shared on the Web. Indeed, APIs have contributed to the rapid growth of such Web giants as eBay, Google, Twitter and Facebook. Pretty much every major Internet company has APIs. Related: The Top 5 Apple SDKs of 2015 SDKs--in particular, mobile SDKs--are driving the next wave of Web integration: the means by which mobile applications, Web apps, and things (as in the " Internet of Things ") derive value from Web-based resources. An SDK, or software development kit, represents a collection of one or more APIs, programming tools and documentation that enables a programmer to develop applications for a specific software package, software framework, operating system or hardware platform. In order to create applications, developers will often download SDKs and start coding. Before you start to develop your SDK, you'll have to decide on the platform from which you want your API to be consumed. In other words, which devices, operating systems, languages, and applications are your target users running? If your goal is for your API to be consumed by mobile devices, then it makes some sense for you to focus on iOS and Android (in that order), leaving other mobile platforms like Windows for later. Or maybe you see your API being consumed as part of a back-office workflow (on the server-side). In this case, you might want to focus your attention on server platforms like Python, PHP, Node.js, and other similar languages. Most of the buzz today is around mobile SDKs, particularly for iOS and Android. There are also Java SDKs, JavaScript SDKs, Python SDKs, hardware-specific embedded SDKs,. NET SDKs, Ruby SDKs, PHP SDKs – there's probably at least one SDK for any language you can think of. It all depends on how (and where) you're trying to extend your platform. The overall goal of an SDK is to get developers up and running with your solution quickly and easily. For this reason, SDKs typically include programming tools, documentation and example code. It's important to have example code so developers can quickly learn what can be done and the best practices for doing it. Example code should contain comments and descriptions of functions and parameters so developers can learn quickly. Depending the complexity your API, a complete reference application may be a good idea. Thorough and accessible documentation is essential in order to instruct and support developers. Providing an SDK has quite a few benefits, including (but not limited to): ● Accelerating deployment: Everyone wants to move at Internet speed, so the faster you can demonstrate the value of your solution, the better. A well-implemented SDK gets developers up and coding more quickly by putting APIs at their fingertips, along with examples of coding best practices and documentation. ● Ensuring best practices: Beyond simply coding faster, best practices help developers write code that plays well with your service. Passing data, commands and status back and forth may not always be the most intuitive thing, and there are subtle differences among services. Moreover, a poorly coded app that works directly with your API could cause a critical issue that might impact your business, your clients’/partners’ businesses, or both. A good SDK can play a big role in preventing the use of bad or inefficient code--and in reducing its impact on systems. A good SDK can also help ensure the right business rules and practices are in place in all of the apps using your service. Making sure that your customers use your service the right way helps them realize its value while minimizing the risk to the API provider ● Increasing security: Security is a hugely important issue in general, and even more so as applications and services increase their interconnected nature. An SDK can be used to decrease fraudulent use of your service. For example, an SDK can be used to encrypt data or code both on devices and as it crosses networks. An SDK can also enforce security requirements--for example, for storing account information, passwords and transaction processing. And, depending on your industry, you could use your SDK to force compliance with regulations like PCI-DSS and HIPAA. ● Controlling your brand image: You've worked hard to build a good service, and that's reflected in your brand. Don't let others make design decisions for you. Your SDK can be used to control the way that developers integrate your service into their own UIs. ● Learning more about your customers (and their customers): Use your SDK to gather analytics about how users interact with your service within the app they're using. Usage statistics are critical in developing, maintaining and improving your service. A properly designed SDK will help you gather the analytics you need to continuously improve your service. If you look closely at the benefits I've listed above, you'll notice that they work together to accomplish one thing: increase revenue. Understanding how customers use your service so you can improve it will increase sales. Plus, think about what lengthens your sales cycle: Customers won't close a deal until they know your solution works for them. As your customers integrate your services into their apps faster, your sales cycle will get shorter. Get your customers to market faster, and you'll both reap the rewards. Shorter sales cycles usually mean increased sales and greater revenue. You'll have happy salespeople and a happy CFO. You might even be able to satisfy requirements for key deals by adding functionality to your SDK without making any changes to the rest of your codebase and infrastructure, which will make your techies happy. If an SDK could make your sales and development teams happy, then what are you waiting for? 2016-02-24 00:00:00 By Matt Sarrel , PW Staff

11 Why Apple is right to fight FBI backdoor (2) The U. S. Department of Justice's motion issued last week to compel Apple to create a bypass of its iPhone data self-destruct feature is understandable. The FBI wants to access data stored on an encrypted iPhone owned by Syed Farook, who, with his wife, killed 14 people in San Bernardino last December. Apple's CEO Tim Cook wrote a public letter to customers, calling the order a dangerous precedent. However, when we examine the implications of having Apple and other companies build "backdoors" into their products that enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data on endpoint devices, we soon find that building such backdoors actually creates more problems than it solves. It could lead to putting these backdoors into everyone's smart phone, PC or other computing device, creating a whole new attack vector for hackers to exploit. Hackers and hostile foreign countries will see this as an opportunity to use this vulnerability to their benefit. If these backdoors are built, it will be a question of when, not if, a hacker will create his own exploit and use it to get his hands on an enterprise's, person's or government agency's data. In addition, if we start down the slippery slope of including backdoors in our computing devices, then sophisticated terrorists and other criminals will pursue alternative security solutions. Rather than depend on an endpoint's built-in encryption and other security features, they will add off-the- shelf security tools to protect their data. The Department of Justice will end up finding itself playing a game of "whack-a-mole," working to compel every third-party encryption vendor within its jurisdiction to build backdoors into its products. Yet even if the government finds a way to win this game it will still lose. Sooner or later, companies located in countries beyond the U. S. Department of Justice's legal jurisdiction will develop and sell their own encryption tools – companies that the U. S. Department of Justice will be unable to compel to install backdoors. Meanwhile, the negative impact of creating these backdoors in hardware and software products is significant. Corporations and individuals will no longer trust that the data they save on their smart phones, PCs and other computing devices is safe – unless they add complex and expensive third-party encryption tools to these devices themselves. Also, computing device manufacturers would likely need to create whole new teams to manage the hundreds to thousands of unlock requests they are likely to get from not just the federal government, but state, local, and foreign governments as well. Moreover, creating backdoors to access encrypted data on endpoint devices is not a silver bullet that will win the war on terrorism. If law enforcement agencies have a suspect in their sights, there are many tools, processes and capabilities they can leverage to gather data that will further their investigations. Trying to decrypt data on an endpoint, while very valuable, isn't the only option. In the end, if we force companies to build backdoors that the government can use to access encrypted data we wind up making our security problem worse, not better. Terrorists and criminals will continue to use other tools to secure or encrypt their data. Corporations, governments, and individuals will need to add yet another piece of software to their technology stack to mitigate a known backdoor. If they don't, and they are compromised, government leaders and executives will ask the security team, "If you knew about the vulnerability, why didn't you protect us from it? " I believe we all want to prevent terrorism. But in doing so, we should not weaken the security posture of the internet, and only make ourselves less safe, not more. 2016-02-22 12:00:19-05:00 Rick Orloff, former Apple security chief

12 Outsourcing Data Science: What You Need To Know (2) A great number of companies are investing in data science, but the results they're getting are mixed. Building internal capabilities can be time- consuming and expensive, especially since the limited pool of data scientists is in high demand. Outsourcing can speed an organization's path to developing a data science capability, but there are better and worse ways to approach the problem. "The decision to outsource is always about what the core competency of your business is, and where you need the speed," said Tony Fross, VP and North American practice leader for digital advisory services at Capgemini Consulting. "If you don't have the resources or the ability to focus on it, sometimes outsourcing is a faster way to stand up a capability. " A recent survey by Forbes Insights and Ernst & Young (EY) revealed that most of the 564 executive respondents from large global enterprises still do not have an effective business strategy for competing in a digital, analytics-enabled world. "Roughly 70% said that data science and advanced analytics are in the early stages of development in their organization," said John Hite, director, analytic architect, and go to market leader for the Global Analytics Center of Excellence at EY. "They said they had critical talent shortfalls, inconsistent skills and expertise across the organization. " Unfortunately, data science projects and initiatives can fail simply because organizational leaders don't think hard enough about what the business is trying to accomplish. They also need to consider what resources, if any, are already in place, and how the project or initiative will affect people, processes, technology, and decision-making. Businesses are building their data science capabilities with the goal of driving positive business outcomes. However, success must be defined more specifically, and the results of the effort must be measurable. "A lot of times, the client feels like the faster they launch a project, the faster they'll achieve the outcome without defining first what needs to be achieved," said Ali Zaidi, research manager at IDC . Goal-setting, particularly at a departmental level, business unit level, or for a one-off project may actually work against a company's best interests, especially when the strategic goals of the organization have not been contemplated. "The first conversation [shouldn't] just focus on the fire that needs to be put out, but the key challenges faced at the top level of the organization," said Eric Druker, a principal in the strategic innovation group at Booz Allen Hamilton. "You also need to understand how analysis is currently done, in stove pipes, or whether data is being shared across the organization. You also need a coherent strategy for linking subject matter experts to data scientists. " Even if the business problem is well-defined, the data science team, whether wholly or partially outsourced, needs to work backward from the goal to understand how the planned change will impact end-users, business processes, and decision-making processes. For example, an EY client built a customer churn model that was capable of identifying which customers would defect in two weeks. Unfortunately, the marketing and sales teams needed 4- to 6-week lead times to take appropriate action, so the model had to be re-tuned. "Starting with the end-user and how the [business] process is going to change can sometimes be overlooked," said EY's Hite. "Even if you get that right, do the end-users have the skills required, and are they incented to take the action you want? " One company built a predictive model capable of identifying the customers who were likely to pay late. However, the customer service representatives tasked with sending payment reminders to those customers were compensated on customer satisfaction levels, not whether customers were paying their bills, Hite said. The growing demand for data science and data scientists is creating a market ripe for consultant organizations that now include the big consulting firms, systems integrators, traditional tech vendors, boutique firms, startups, and firms focused on specific vertical industries. One option is extending the relationship with a current service provider, assuming that provider actually has the level of expertise the organization requires. [The future of your advanced analytics program may depend on the success (or failure) of your first project. Make sure it's successful. Read How to Succeed With Advanced Analytics.] "[If] you have a trusted partner relationship, you have everything contract-wise you need. Speed is paramount," said Capgemini's Fross. "You also need to consider who will give you the best resources immediately. " Different parts of an organization may be outsourcing different data science projects or initiatives to different parties to achieve different goals. Sometimes the lack of orchestration among the various operating units can have an adverse effect on the enterprise. "Data science is a cultural change in the way we make decisions. Firms that come in to solve an ad hoc problem miss all these great opportunities to understand the context for decision-making and how decision-makers use data," said Booz Allen Hamilton's Druker. "[If you're working on an ad hoc basis,] it creates an impression that progress is being made. But because it's firefighting, it may inhibit the movement on a data science capability down the road. " Some organizations choose to work with outsourcing partners who specialize in a particular industry or who have consultants with specialized business domain knowledge. Others are looking for expertise that is best found outside one's own industry. "People in your own industry will be laggards in the same way you are," said Capgemini's Fross. "If you want to understand customer context, you want to consider someone from a retailer, because they know context better than anyone. If you're a pharma company and you're trying to get your act together around data and MDM (master data management), you probably want to look at something from financial services. " Regardless of which types of firms are on the short list, companies should put more effort into due diligence than they often do. "As I’m talking to the vendors, I'm asking them about recurring business," said Jennifer Bellisent, principal analyst at Forrester Research , in an interview. "How many of these projects are one- offs? And Page 2: The silver bullet? Does your company offer the most rewarding place to work in IT? Do you know of an organization that stands out from the pack when it comes to how IT workers are treated? Make your voice heard. Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's People's Choice Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-22 08:06:00 Lisa Morgan 1 of 2

13 How collaboration tools helps NASA search for black holes When it comes to human technological achievement, building a structure and having it successfully orbit the Earth is up there with space flight itself. While the International Space Station is the most high profile of our planet's man-made satellites, there are numerous others, all doing important work in helping scientists understand our universe. One of those is the NASA Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), a telescope orbiting 500km above the Earth, which concentrates on a specific section of the electro-magnetic spectrum - x-rays - enabling NASA to hunt for some of the less understood phenomena in the depths of space, including black holes, neutron stars and supernovas. Brian Grefenstette, research scientist at California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and NuSTAR, is on the mission's science team, and explained how the explorer space telescope operates. "We're primarily [using] an x-ray space telescope so we use next-generation focusing optics and x-ray detectors to look at emission from very hot gas around black holes, neutron stars and the interiors of supernovas when they explode," he told Computing . That, Grefenstette explained, is achieved by a mix of "pure" telescope optics and intensive data analysis to determine what's out there. "We have a telescope where every photon that comes through bounces off our optics, gets registered on our detectors then, on the ground, we have reconstruction software that makes images about intensity versus energy curves, which we can use to figure out things like the temperatures of the gas, what isotopes are decaying to make the x-rays we can see," he said. With NuSTAR in orbit above the Earth, the team behind the project is spread across the globe, with scientists and researchers in countries including the US, the UK, Japan and Italy. Therefore, in order for scientists across the world to work together in the hunt for black holes, NuSTAR employs Huddle enterprise cloud-collaboration software. "Certainly, when we moved to Huddle it was great to have everything you'd want - calendars, discussion threads and so on - all in one spot, which we didn't have before," said Grefenstette. He described how the software enables multiple specialised work groups to coherently work together in documenting findings. "We take observations from the data that comes down [from the telescope] then graduate students or post doctorates download that data, do the analysis and put together presentations on what we saw. In some cases it's very surprising when we didn't really know what we were going to observe before we did," he said. Given the sometimes unusual nature of the discoveries, they're all discussed on teleconferencing and any alterations or references to documents are made within Huddle. [Please turn to page 2] 2016-03-17 00:00:00 www.computing.co.uk

14 Enter the sandbox for email security Hackers, attackers and cybercriminals are no slouches when it comes to staying on the cutting edge of the tools of their trade. The black hats that seek to exploit our networks, applications and users are highly adept at finding new ways to break into our systems. The white hats that seek to defend us often lament that hackers only need to be good at the job once to be a success, whereas security pros need to be good every day. We often cite the "arms race" or the Red Queen Effect when talking about staying ahead of the creativity of the hackers. Standing still for any length of time will not serve you well in this game. I recently gave a presentation to a select group of CIOs at the Computing IT Leaders' Summit, in which I suggested that anyone who hasn't taken a fresh look at their email security infrastructure in the past 18 months is likely to be behind the curve here. Given that rate of advancement of threats to our email security, relying on your last upgrade "a couple of years ago" means you're highly likely to be out of date in terms of protection. The best example of this, and probably the biggest threat to email security right now, is the rise of the use of malicious VBA macros to create weaponised attachments in email. Hackers and cybercriminals are great experimenters and know exactly what types of protections are used to defeat their malware. They even download and run freely available software trials of all the on- premises email security applications to work out how to circumvent them. It is from this "reverse engineering" that they've determined how to avoid classic signature detection techniques that would look for malicious code or traces of malware embedded in attachments. And have graduated to using the embedded macros in Office documents to do the dirty work for them. The trap here is obvious; a weaponised attachment with a malicious macro contains no "viral payload" and as such becomes dangerous only when the malware is downloaded by macro as the end user runs the attachment. Luckily modern versions of Office applications disable macros by default, but this doesn't stop administrators re-enabling the functionality as a default, nor does it help the legions of Office users who are running software that pre-dates the feature. Using VBA macros within Office document attachments is a real demonstration of the ingenuity and dedication of cybercriminals. It shows us why we shouldn't rely on technology that hasn't been upgraded for a few years. So what do we do? If classic signature-based detection is ineffective, hackers are avoiding legacy secure email gateway and desktop anti-virus protection and employees are at risk from infecting themselves with seemingly innocent looking Office files, what is the solution? Network sandboxing isn't a new technology, it's one that's been used in desktop antivirus for many years; Norman AS brought the concept to the enterprise desktop a couple of decades ago and it's been around on the network ever since. Recently the sandbox has also been applied to the SMTP secure email gateway, albeit with a latency overhead. It's here that we can start to unpack the problem of hidden macro code in attachments. Without an email attachment sandbox, weaponised attachments can pass straight through a classic secure email gateway. After all, there's no malicious code in them to trigger a signature detection. A lone URL within the macro, obfuscated within that code and unique to that attachment doesn't in itself pose a risk. Until the macro is executed. This is where adding an SMTP gateway sandbox to your security stack helps to defend and protect against the macro threat. Executing, exploding, detonating and other dramatic phrases are how we describe what the sandbox does. In short, it's simply running the attachment in an environment that detects anomalies with its behaviour. For example, if a sandbox is executing an Excel spreadsheet that a user has been sent as an email attachment. And, when run the macro calls out to a remote web server to download a ZIP or executable file we can largely assume that's not normal behaviour. Now is the time to review the layers of protection you have in place against weaponised attachments. Adding a gateway sandbox is the latest advancement in security that you need to consider in order to remain protected against advanced threats. Orlando Scott-Cowley is cyber security strategist at Mimecast 2016-03-17 00:00:00 www.computing.co.uk

15 Google paid Apple $1bn – plus a percentage – to remain default search app on iOS Google paid Apple $1bn in 2014 in order to remain the default search engine in Apple's iOS mobile operating system - and also pays a percentage of all revenues that it generates via Apple devices. The revelations were made in court transcripts from the ongoing case between Google and Oracle over Google's use of the Java API in order to compile Java code to run on Dalvik, a virtual machine designed to run Java code on Android. There had been conjecture leading up to the deal that Apple planned to replace Google as the default search engine with in-house developed technology, which would also help Apple drive more revenues from its platform. However, that may also have been a bargaining chip that Apple used in order to squeeze more money out of Google, coincidentally also its biggest rival in mobile operating systems. The disclosures were uncovered by newswire Bloomberg, which claims that they were subsequently quickly removed. According to Oracle attorney Annette Hurst in a court hearing last week, a Google witness last week, questioned during pre-trial information, also claimed that " at one point in time the revenue share was 34 per cent " - although it wasn't clear from the transcripts whether it was Apple or Google who trousered that 34 per cent. Google, meanwhile, objected to the information going on the record. "That percentage just stated, that should be sealed," lawyer Robert Van Nest was quoted by Bloomberg. "We are talking hypotheticals here. That's not a publicly known number. " The disclosure comes after the court had heard software giant Oracle claim that Google had generated revenues of $31bn and profits of $22bn since the release of Android, Google's Linux- based operating system. Oracle is claiming that Google's use of the Java API in order to run its apps on Dalvik on Android infringes its own Java software patents. Google claims that APIs are not - and should not be - patentable. 2016-03-17 00:00:00 www.computing.co.uk

16 Oracle users warned over virtualisation software licence risks Oracle database users running their applications in a virtualised environment using third-party virtualisation software, such as VMware's, could be in "serious breach" of Oracle's software licensing rules - and potentially on the hook for millions in fines and extra software licences. That is the claim of Carl Davies, managing director at Tmaxsoft, which provides a "drop-in replacement for the Oracle database", and which therefore has a vested interest. "Nobody is suggesting that Oracle users - be they ISVs or end users themselves - are intentionally running in breach. It is simply not clear what Oracle's contractual position is in reference to virtualised hardware," said Davies. He continued: "Oracle permits some partitioning technology as a means of limiting the number of software licences required in virtualised environments but it can be unclear which methods are approved and it's easy to misinterpret and fall into non-compliance. "But ignorance is no defence once Oracle decides to audit an organisations' estate. The one sure result for non-Oracle Virtualisation Machine (OVM) users such as VMware will be significant cost and disruption, and once the audit is complete they will be given 30 days to become compliant again. " Complaints over software vendors' licence auditing programmes have increased as new software licence sales have fallen in recent years. It is not just Oracle that has been the target of user ire, but also Microsoft and SAP, among others. "To be clear, Oracle does publish an Oracle Partitioning Policy, which makes a distinction between hard and soft-partitioning," said Davies. "It prohibits the use of many of the most common virtualisation technologies as hard partitioning in order to limit the number of licences required, including Solaris 9 resource containers, AIX workload manager and VMware," he continued. "However this document has been far from widely publicised and, confusingly, explicitly states that none of these prohibitions can be included in any contract. Despite the fact that Oracle goes to great lengths to describe its partitioning policy, it goes on to suggest that this very policy will not form part of any agreement or contract. "This is obviously very perplexing and it isn't surprising that some customers are accusing Oracle of promoting misuse of its software to then report that same customer to be out of compliance. " Tmaxsoft has, in the past, accused Oracle of being heavy-handed in its software licence audits , and of coming down hard on users adopting virtualisation within their environments to make their hardware go further. 2016-03-17 00:00:00 www.computing.co.uk

17 Canonical targets IoT projects with 64-bit ARM developer platform Canonical has unveiled a development platform for projects targeting the Internet of Things (IoT) based on its Ubuntu Core software platform and a 64-bit ARM-based DragonBoard single- board computer. The new development kit is touted by the company as the first ARM-based 64-bit development board available for Ubuntu Core. Detailed on Canonical's Ubuntu Insights blog , it offers an affordable but flexible environment for building IoT projects that can scale from ARM-based servers to embedded solutions, the company claimed. Ubuntu Core is a minimum footprint operating system that Canonical initially developed as part of its initiative to develop an Ubuntu smartphone, but which is versatile enough to be used in the cloud as a host for operating containers or in embedded applications such as devices targeting the IoT. One of the key features of Ubuntu Core is its Snappy mechanism for delivering updates to both the operating system and application code. This is transactional, meaning that updates can be easily applied or rolled back if required. The hardware comprises the DragonBoard 410c from Arrow Electronics. This is a compact single-board computer the size of a credit card, like the popular Raspberry Pi devices. It is based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor that boasts four of ARM's Cortex-A53 64-bit CPU cores. Canonical said that the Dragonboard 410c forms its reference platform for Ubuntu Core on the ARM 64-bit architecture. This means that future updates of the operating system will be available first for the DragonBoard 410c, ensuring users a stable development environment. "Adopting the DragonBoard 410c as our ARM 64-bit reference platform is proof of our commitment to the open platform community surrounding the board. Via snappy Ubuntu Core and the DragonBoard 410c, developers will have an affordable, accessible and flexible way to create new IoT solutions," said Canonical's vice president for Commercial Devices Operations Jon Melamut. As well as its 64-bit CPU, the DragonBoard 410c has 1GB of memory and 8GB of eMMC flash storage, with 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth for wireless connectivity, plus I/O including Two USB ports, SPI and I2C interfaces and a number of general purpose I/O (GPIO) pins for connecting hardware. Canonical said that its Ubuntu Core image for the Snapdragon 410 will be available for download from the website of the Linaro Linux project's 96Boards programme. The DragonBoard 410c itself is available from Arrow Electronics at a price of £53. 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 peruse the agenda and to sign up 2016-03-17 00:00:00 www.v3.co.uk

18 Visa aims its secure payments tech at cloud-based banking apps Payments giant Visa is looking to venture deeper into the cloud and connected devices space by offering its tokenisation service to a wider range of banking services. It will offer its tokenisation services, which help secure digital and mobile payments, to banks that offer their customers apps that store payment credentials in the cloud. Sandra Alzetta, executive director of product enablement at Visa Europe, said the expansion of the Visa Europe Payment Tokenisation Service (VEPTS) is a response to the forecasted growth of more digital payment technologies . “By 2020, our projections are for one in five consumers to pay for items using their smartphone on a daily basis and for payments on mobile or tablet to account for more than 50 percent of Visa transactions,” she said. “Looking at contactless as an early indicator, where adoption has doubled and spend has trebled in the last year, we believe this projection could well be a conservative estimate. “By expanding our service to make tokenisation available to our client banks through a number of new technology partners, consumers will have access to all manner of fantastic new payment experiences accessible through their mobile phones, tablets and all manner of other ‘connected’ devices.” To capitalise upon this forecast, VEPTS will also be offered to secure payment features in wearable and connected devices, such as smartwatches. It can also be used to secure internet browser-based wallets and payment services specific to retailers through the Visa Checkout service, along with "card on file" payment options commonly used by major online retailers. Many people fear the security risks from hackers swiping credit card details when carrying out digital payments online or via mobile devices, but Visa’s tokenisation services enable payments without surrendering credit card details on the route between payee and bank. It works by substituting credit card details and account information with a series of numbers. These "tokens" are then submitted to a payment service and eventually translated by the customer’s bank to authorise the payment. The system means that no financially compromising numbers are transmitted by the payment app, device or online service, so even if hackers were able to swipe the token they would not be able to translate it into any usable information. This secure form of payment helps to support Apple Pay , which launched in the UK last year. Visa is keen to find new ways to facilitate secure payments having recently teamed up with security firm FireEye to launch a threat intelligence portal designed to combat financial crime . 2016-03-17 00:00:00 www.computing.co.uk

19 Big changes ahead for the patent system in Europe After many years of discussion and painfully slow negotiations, later in 2016 European Union (EU) member states could finally implement a radical overhaul of the patent system in Europe , introducing a new type of patent and a pan-European court to handle patent disputes. This package of reforms will affect all patent users. It represents the biggest change to the patent system since the European Patent Convention was introduced in the 1970s, which allowed innovators to obtain patent protection across Europe through a single, centralised procedure run by the Munich-based European Patent Office (EPO). Although the EPO mechanism has been immensely successful – with more than 250,000 patent applications each year – critics argue that the current system is too inadequate to support innovation in Europe’s single market in the 21 st century, and a poor match for the US patent system. They pointed out the high costs of obtaining and enforcing patents in Europe, and the fact the centralised EPO procedure stops when the patent is granted (with some exceptions). The right granted by the EPO – a “European Patent” – is, in effect, a bundle of national patent rights, individually administered by national patent offices, with disputes on each national component adjudicated by the relevant national court. The inherent duplication of renewal fees and (sometimes) national court proceedings can make patent protection unaffordable for many users. 2016-02-25 11:56:48 David Sant

20 EU moves towards digital single market with online content portability The European Commission released proposals in December for moving towards a “modern, more European copyright framework” as part of its digital single market initiative. A regulation to ensure the cross-border portability of online content services in the EU is the most significant of the proposals. Although cross- border online content portability will affect broadcasters, producers and distributors in the media industry across Europe, it is arguably a more favourable outcome than a blanket prohibition on service blocking by geography. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets means that around half of all internet users in Europe access audiovisual content online, and often on the move. As well as becoming a mainstream channel for traditional broadcasters such as Sky, online consumption has led to the emergence of new platforms offering media content, such as Netflix and NOW TV. Typically the rights to audiovisual content are sold on an exclusive territorial basis, which allows rights holders to maximise revenue in markets where demand is highest, and to tailor the content to the preferences of each individual market. For example, the rights to live Italian league football matches are likely to receive most interest from Italian consumers, and commentary and advertising is likely to be tailored towards them accordingly. The objective of the digital single market initiative is to eliminate obstacles to an internal single EU market for digital content and services. The initiative also involves reviewing the practice of “geo-blocking” of copyright works. Geo-blocking allows the providers of media content to restrict consumers in one member state from accessing content available in another member state precisely because the rights holder has licensed the content to the provider on an exclusive territorial basis. For example, consumers in Italy cannot take out a subscription with Sky UK to watch Sky Sports UK in Italy as Sky UK’s rights apply only to the UK. It also means that UK consumers with a Sky Sports UK subscription cannot watch Sky Sports UK while on holiday in Italy. 2016-02-25 11:55:56 Chris Watson and Tom Scourfield

21 DirectX 12 Multi-GPU Technology Tested: GeForce and Radeon Paired Together Ashes of the Singularity gave us an early peek at how AMD and Nvidia's current GPUs are shaping up for DirectX 12 when we checked out the upcoming real-time strategy title last November. Back then our focus was primarily on DX11 vs. DX12 performance and more to the point how Nvidia's Maxwell and AMD's GCN 1.2 architectures compared. We also looked at CPU performance which proved to be interesting to look at as well. Although the final game's release is still pending, we know Stardock has been hard at work as shown by the cool new features in its Ashes of the Singularity benchmark 2.0. The most notable of them is 'explicit multi-adapter' (EMA), DirectX 12's multi-GPU technology, which gives game developers precise control over the workloads of their engine and direct control over the resources offered by each GPU in a system. Rather than the AFR (alternate-frame rendering) method used by DX11, each frame of a game is split into a tile and this method is called SFR (split-frame rendering). SFR can break each frame of a game into multiple smaller tiles, and assign one tile to each GPU in the system. These tiles are rendered in parallel by the GPUs and combined into a completed scene for the user. Parallel use of GPUs reduces render latency to improve FPS and VR responsiveness. Perhaps the coolest and most unholy feature of EMA is its ability to support both AMD and Nvidia GPUs in the same system. This means it is possible to pair a GeForce GTX 980 Ti with a Radeon R9 Fury X for example. This mind blowing feature is what we will be focusing on today. Another advantage of this method is greater memory capacity. Previously multi-GPU configurations in DX9, DX10 and DX11 games were limited to a single GPU's worth of VRAM. For example, dual 4GB cards would only equal 4GB. This is because each GPU contains an identical copy of a game's data set to ensure synchronization and prevent scene corruption. DX12's explicit multi-adapter technology allows multiple GPUs to combine their memory into a single larger pool. This means two 4GB cards would essentially have an 8GB memory buffer and this could certainly improve the texture fidelity of future games. The Ashes of the Singularity benchmark 2.0 also makes advanced use of multi-queue and signaling mechanisms, aka asynchronous compute. This is the feature that AMD supports at a hardware level while Nvidia has had to patch it in at the driver level. As a result, GeForce cards were actually faster when rendering in the DX11 mode, while the opposite was true for the Radeon graphics cards. Now with even more emphasis on async compute it will be interesting to see how Nvidia's Maxwell GPUs handle this latest version of Ashes of the Singularity. Something worth noting is that the Multi GPU mode under DX12 required 16GB of RAM to work, installing less would cause the game to hang when loading and eventually crash to the desktop. The developer says this is because Multi GPU requires additional RAM due to the way D3D12 shadows texture memory. 2016-02-25 08:34:54 Steven Walton

22 Jolla quietly debuts Aqua Fish smartphone at MWC Jolla, the Finnish mobile device maker that raised eyebrows earlier this year by snubbing some of its crowdfunding backers, made a surprise appearance at Mobile World Congress with a new smartphone in tow. If you recall, Jolla announced last summer that it was splitting its business into two by licensing its software to other device makers. The move would allow the company to continue developing its own hardware while simultaneously building up the Sailfish OS install base. The Aqua Fish from Indian handset maker Intex Technologies is a product of the latter. The Aqua Fish features a 5-inch TFT display operating at 1,280 x 720 and is powered by a Qualcomm quad-core SoC clocked at 1.3GHz alongside 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage (expandable via microSD card slot). There's an 8-megapixel camera on the rear as well as a 2- megapixel shooter up front. Connectivity-wise, the Aqua Fish includes 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, 4G LTE and a micro-USB 2.0 port. It'll ship running Sailfish 2.0 and is powered by a smallish 2,500mAh battery. Jolla says the Aqua Fish handset will go on sale this April in India. It'll be offered in orange and black color schemes and is rumored to be priced between $120 and $150. No word yet on whether or not it'll make its way outside of India. 2016-02-25 08:34:34 Shawn Knight

23 DJI now offers insurance policies for your drone Drone maker DJI revealed a couple of years back that it was developing a parachute designed to minimize damage to a drone in freefall. The DropSafe Speed Reduction System eventually made it to market although its $800+ price point and compatibility with a limited number of drones means it isn't an option for everyone. Now there's an option for everyone else to protect their investment. It's called the DJI Care Protection Plan and as the name suggests, it's an insurance policy for your drone. Designed to provide pilots of all skill level peace of mind, the plans are offered in six- and 12- month increments. Pricing starts at $99 for a six-month plan that covers a Phantom 3 Standard and tops out at $699 for a year of coverage on an Inspire 1 V2.0 drone with coverage amount caps of $499 to $3,099, respectively. DJI care offers coverage for Phantom 3 Standard, Phantom 3 4K, Phantom 3 Advanced, Phantom 3 Professional and Inspire 1, version 2.0 with X3 gimbal camera. Plans can be purchased at the same time the drone is bought or added separately and can be transferred to a new owner should you sell your drone. DJI says plans cover damage to the aircraft, gimbal or camera under normal use and pilot error such as drops and crashes. If you're accident-prone or otherwise clumsy, it may not be a bad idea to look into DJI's offering . 2016-02-25 08:34:37 Shawn Knight

24 Sony sends out invites to PlayStation VR event at GDC 2016 With so much press surrounding the Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive VR, it's easy to forget that a third major player is looming on the horizon. I'm of course talking about Sony and its PlayStation VR (formerly Project Morpheus). According to IGN , we will be hearing more about Sony's virtual reality plans in the near future as the company has sent out media invitations for an event that'll take place March 15 in San Francisco (during the annual Game Developers Conference). The press event will begin with a PlayStation VR presentation followed by hands-on demonstrations, the invite reads. With Oculus VR already accepting pre-orders and HTC to do so next week priced at $599 and $799 , respectively, all eyes will be on Sony to see how much they'll ask for the PlayStation VR and when it'll arrive (assuming of course that Sony is prepared to release those details). Leaks have suggested it could be priced under $500. At CES last month, Sony executive Kaz Hirai told the BBC that developers are collectively working on 100 or more titles for the virtual reality headset. Given the platform, one could safely assume that most of those titles are games. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are also expected to have their fair share of gaming titles in addition to other applications. Sony's PlayStation VR event begins at 2pm PST on March 15 and although it hasn't been confirmed, I suspect it'll be livestreamed over the Internet. 2016-02-25 08:34:15 Shawn Knight

25 Sharp agrees to $5.8b Foxconn sale Sharp appears set to be taken over after the company's board accepted an offer by Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn. Unnamed sources familiar with the matter told Reuters the board agreed unanimously to the deal. Foxconn's 650 billion yen ($5.8 billion) takeover of Sharp will be the largest acquisition of a Japanese tech firm by a foreign company. Foxconn's current position as Apple's biggest supplier is likely to receive a healthy boost by the deal. Apple currently source many of their iPhone and iPad displays from Sharp, who may look to reduce their reliance on displays supplied by competitor Samsung. State-backed investment firm, Innovation Network Corp of Japan (INCJ), had also submitted a offer to try and keep the Sharp afloat. However that deal was less appealing to Sharp's board because it appeared less certain in resolving the company's struggling performance. Sharp's financial troubles have been ongoing for some time, receiving two bank bailouts since 2012. Despite those efforts the warning signs have persisted, with the company even asking employees to buy Sharp-branded products late last year. Throughout Sharp's struggles, Foxconn has repeatedly tried to purchase the company including a failed deal also in 2012. The board's unanimous acceptance of Foxconn's current offer appears to be an improvement over last month's reported buyout offer of $5.1 billion . Representatives for Sharp and Foxconn declined to comment on reports of the agreement. Source: Reuters | Sharp image via Sorbis / Shutterstock.com 2016-02-25 07:26:01 Matt Blowes

26 First sign of OneDrive placeholders returning appears in Redstone build Rumors have been swirling around for a few months now that OneDrive placeholders would make a return in the Redstone update for Windows 10. Twitter user WalkingCat has uncovered the first signs of that actually happening. As with all early signs like this, we always advise readers to take them with a grain of salt. While it's clear that it has something to do with cloud storage and with something called "Placeholder", that is quite literally all we know for sure. Keep in mind that early builds of Windows 10 Mobile had an Android subsystem built into them ; however, the RTM build did not. It's still very early days for Redstone, so it's important to not jump to conclusions. If you're unfamiliar with OneDrive placeholders, this is the technology that was implemented with Windows 8.1. Users could go into File Explorer and see their entire OneDrive. Some files were stored online-only and some were available offline. When attempting to use an online only file, the system would download the file for use. Users could also right-click a file or folder and choose to make it available offline or online-only. Microsoft removed this capability in Windows 10, making OneDrive work more like it does on Windows 7 and OS X. Users would need to choose which folders to sync and then only be able to see those files and folders in File Explorer. Microsoft had said that they made the decision because users were confused as to why they couldn't access their online-only files while they were offline. They did promise to build an "alternative" to the deprecated placeholders before the end of 2015; however, they never did. 2016-02-25 07:09:24 Richard Woods

27 Telegram launches channels 2.0 a day after reaching 100M users A few days ago, the Telegram team took to their blog to celebrate having more than 100,000,000 monthly active users. Now, they've updated 'channels' to version 2.0, bringing a slew of new features including: links to posts, silent messages, admin signatures, message editing in channels and supergroups, and a quick share button for bots. Briefly, an explanation of channels for new or non- users of Telegram: channels can be created to broadcast messages out to an unlimited number of subscribers. They can be made publicly available so that anyone can subscribe to receive new updates. Even if you join a channel after it has been created, you can still scroll back through all of the messages ever posted. Channels 2.0 greatly improves channels. For instance, links to posts allows you to select an individual message that had been broadcasted to a channel and share it with friends outside of Telegram or post it on other social networks. When the outside user clicks the link, they'll get taken to the channel and the message will be highlighted. Silent messages allow channel admins to post a new message without notifying users. This feature is useful for late nights and non-urgent updates. To send a silent message, the user must tap the bell icon to toggle silent messages. Admin signatures will let followers know who sent out the message without linking to the poster's profile. Typos can be fixed in channels and supergroups by tapping (double tap on iOS) on the message and then pressing 'Edit'. Finally, quick share buttons for bots allow users to share links, pictures, and videos that they get from bots. Telegram has a bad time as of late after the service was endorsed by ISIS for its followers to use. It's encryption scheme, MTProto, was also criticised by well known cryptographers such as Moxie Marlinspike because it was made in-house by the Telegram team and was not tried and tested. When it comes to encryption it is important to get code publicly scrutinised to remove any bugs. 2016-02-25 03:02:01+00:00 Paul Hill

28 Ghostery 6.0 for Firefox syncs settings with other devices LastPass 4.0 released, debuts new look and Emergency Access feature 28 Jan 2016 Password manager provider LastPass has unveiled LastPass 4.0, a major new release of its ... Is your IT security as good as your big customers expect? 22 Jan 2016 Cisco's 2016 Annual Security Report suggests SMEs are falling behind in terms of IT security - ... Stretch your NAS with Seagate's new 8TB drive 15 Jan 2016 If the total capacity of your NAS is beginning to feel like a constraint, Seagate may have the ... Survey says... SMEs like instant asset write-off 14 Dec 2015 MYOB's ongoing Business Monitor survey reports strong support for the instant asset write-off. Business hacks: How to protect your website against hackers 4 Dec 2015 How concerned should you be of a hack, and how do you handle the fallout once one happens? 2016-02-25 00:00:00 Mike Williams

29 How to: Set up a Kodi PVR on Windows Kodi might is a great way to stream content from your hard drive or the internet, but it can also be configured to display terrestrial digital and analogue channels, too. And because Kodi can be installed on your Windows laptop or Windows PC, it'll also act as a PVR - letting you watch and record anything you like. Interested? Here's how to do it. Setting up Kodi as a PVR can be broken down into two distinct parts. The first step is to enable your PC or laptop to receive digital/analogue, so you'll need to buy a suitable TV Tuner or TV Card. 2016-02-25 00:00:00 Comment Now

30 30 Google Docs adds voice editing and formatting to make dictation easier Google introduced 'voice typing' to Docs last year , allowing users to write without physically typing in Chrome. Voice dictation without voice editing, however, has always been an awkward and disjointed affair, forcing users to lurch between talking, typing to edit and then speaking once again. Repeat. Google has now taken the next step, making the writing process more seamless by adding voice- directed editing and formatting to its popular online word processor. The most commonly-used commands have been implemented so far, including copy and paste, selecting text by speaking the phrase or word, and choosing a formatting style before you start dictating. While initiating voice typing is as easy as choosing it from the Tools menu, the required syntax to edit and format is not as obvious. Google’s support and information page is a helpful resource, detailing how to phrase voice commands. The page will continue to be updated as new features are added. As with the previous introduction of voice typing last September , the new voice-enabled features are currently only available on Chrome for the desktop on Windows, Mac and . Source: Google Docs blog via VentureBeat 2016-02-24 21:56:01+00:00 John Devon

31 GitLab 8.5 pours on the speed GitLab this week upgraded its code-hosting platform, emphasizing performance and adding to-do list and remote replica capabilities. GitLab 8.5 is lot faster, said Job van der Voort, GitLab vice president of product at the company, in a posting about the upgrade. "Average mean performance is up at least 1.4 times, up to 1.6 times for 99th percentile response times. For slower pages, the response time has been improved way beyond this. " The new version features Todos, a chronological list of to-dos. "Whenever you're assigned to an issue or merge request or have someone mention you, a new to-do is created automatically," said van der Voort. GitLab 8.5 Enterprise, meanwhile, features an alpha version of Geo, providing for a remote replica of a Geo instance. Geo makes it quicker to work with large repositories over large distances, and this instance can be used for cloning and fetching projects as well as for reading data. The GitLab Pages feature for hosting a static website under a separate domain name now backs TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates and custom domains, and users can upload their own certificates. "The new functionality of GitLab Pages was made possible with the help of a new HTTP server written in Go," van der Voort said. "We call it the GitLab Pages daemon, and it supports dynamic certificates through SNI and exposes pages using HTTP2 by default. " GitLab is vying against juggernaut code-sharing site GitHub in the Git repository market. The latest upgrade follows the release of Gitlab 8.4 , the 50th release of the platform, by about a month. More about Transport 2016-02-24 21:53:00 Paul Krill

32 Microsoft finally buys cross-platform mobile development company Xamarin After years of speculation and rumors , it's finally official. Microsoft has acquired cross-platform mobile development company Xamarin for an undisclosed amount. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, writes: Xamarin currently has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries. Over 100 of them are Fortune 500 companies, including Alaska Airlines, Coca Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell, and JetBlue. While Microsoft's cross-platform efforts have increased and therefore their partnership with Xamarin strengthened, integration was built into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility Suite. Xamarin allows developers to share a C# code base between native Android, iOS, and Windows apps. Microsoft promises to share more at Build and at Xamarin Evolve in April. Source: ScottGu's Blog via VentureBeat 2016-02-24 20:12:01 Richard Woods

33 Apple personal assistant Siri making her way to the desktop with OS X 10.12 "Fuji" Apple is expected to announce the next yearly iteration of their desktop operating system OS X, version 10.12, at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Codenamed "Fuji" the next version of the Unix-based OS is planned to include a few minor interface tweaks to core system windows, but not nearly as significant as those made in past versions. The big change will be the addition of their controversial Siri to the desktop environment, bringing the digital assistant to all aspects of the Apple consumer's computing environment. The implementation of Siri is said to differ than the one found on the iOS devices or on Apple Watch , with an icon for Siri set on the Menu Bar across the top similar to the Spotlight magnifying glass. Clicking this should activate a dark, transparent and familiar Siri interface across the top right hand corner of the screen and turning on voice control. There should be an interactive set of colourful waves to provide feedback to the user that Siri hears their commands, although the final interface is still in testing and may yet change. Siri will also have a pane in System Preferences which should allow users to set a keyboard shortcut to activate the service. Mac OS 10.12 users will have the option to enable Siri at first startup, much like iOS and when the computer is plugged in on A/C power will respond to "Hey Siri" voice prompts without the need to activate first. Siri on the desktop has reportedly been in development since 2012 , and has been a much requested feature for Apple users who rely on the service on their iPhone's, iPad's, Apple Watchs and Apple TVs . Source 9to5Mac | Image Siri via Hadrian / Shutterstock.com 2016-02-24 16:14:01+00:00 Christopher Dupres

34 Cloud software maker Salesforce posts 25.3 pct rise in revenue Feb 24 (Reuters) - Salesforce.com Inc reported a 25.3 percent rise in quarterly revenue, helped by an increase in demand for its web-based sales and marketing software. Net loss narrowed to $25.5 million, or 4 cents per share, in the fourth quarter ended Jan. 31, from $65.8 million, or 10 cents per share, a year earlier. The company's revenue rose to $1.81 billion from $1.44 billion. (Reporting by Kshitiz Goliya in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel) 2016-02-24 16:11:00-05:00 CNBC

35 Hands-on: Panasonic Toughpad FZ-F1 - a seriously rugged Windows 10 mobile device Since Windows 10 launched last year, we've seen the OS make its way to an astonishing array of devices - phones, tablets, all-in-ones, 2-in-1s, smart TVs, micro-PCs, PC sticks, Internet of Things devices, the Xbox One, and all sorts of other form factors, including the good ol' fashioned desktop tower PC. The operating system, in its various versions, will continue to make its way to many more types of devices in the months and years ahead, including specialist devices that aren't designed for the mass consumer market, but which are still essential for businesses around the world. Panasonic is one manufacturer of such devices, with a keen focus on delivering an extraordinary level of ruggedness and robustness as part of the package. Indeed, the company has built a reputation as strong as its devices in this field, and its 'Tough-'branded devices are widely considered among the best in the business. This week at Mobile World Congress, Panasonic unveiled its new Toughpad FZ-F1, a replacement for the previous generation FZ-E1, which was an exceptionally rugged device in its own right. Waterproof and effortlessly able to withstand a drop from ten feet onto concrete, the E1 was built like a tank - appropriate, considering that it even saw deployment in military circles. It ran Windows Embedded 8.1 - but the new kid on the block has been brought bang up to date with Windows 10. The new FZ-F1 doesn't run the Windows 10 Mobile that you'll see on consumer devices though - although it certainly looks like it does. Instead, it runs Windows 10 IoT Mobile Enterprise (although Panasonic said that the version that will be released with the device later this year probably won't include Xbox Games built in...!). Panasonic responded to feedback from its customers, many of which - it says - were delighted by how rugged the E1 was, but suggested that perhaps it was a bit... too rugged. Many of them were apparently willing to trade some of that robustness for a slimmer, lighter device that could still deal with most of what its users could throw at it - literally, to some extent. The result is the much less chunky, and considerably lighter, FZ-F1. Check out some of the key specs of the device: ...and while Panasonic acknowledges that the F1 is a bit less hardcore than its predecessor, there's still plenty of ruggedness built in: Panasonic told me that while the older device was used in some truly extraordinary situations - such as military skydives from thousands of feet in the air - the new model is intended for much less extreme scenarios; more along the lines of processing inventory in warehouses, or dealing with package deliveries. While undeniably more mundane, creating devices for these use cases is no less essential - and it's especially important to ensure that devices such as this one are designed around the needs of the workers that will spend so much of their days using them to perform very specific tasks. As a result, Panasonic created a more 'hand-friendly' design for the F1; the thinner, lighter bodywork helps with this, as does the slightly more sculpted design compared with the previous version. The company also listened to the workers that use these devices who pointed out that the angle of the integrated barcode scanner made it awkward to use; on the new model, the scanner is now at an angle, which not only makes it much easier to quickly scan barcodes (thereby helping workers to be more productive), but also adds a 'hump' to the rear of the handset. On a consumer device, this would obviously be undesirable, but on a device developed around function rather than form, the hump boosts usability for the worker, who can hold the device a bit more easily. Indeed, it's surprisingly comfortable to hold, despite its immense weight. On theme of functionality, you may also note a couple of elements on the spec sheet which you might consider to be less than stellar. For example, despite being a brand new device, it uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 SoC - variant MS8974AB, the same version used on handsets like the Sony Xperia Z2 and ZTE Nubia W5. Why not the latest Snapdragon 820? Well, to put it simply, it's because that would be tremendous overkill. When it comes to highly focused business devices such as this one, you cram in the specs you need, and for the tasks that the FZ-F1 will perform, the two-year-old Snapdragon 800 should prove to be more than enough to do the job. The same goes for the display - it doesn't need to be huge, and it doesn't need to be Quad HD; a 4.7-inch display with HD (720p) resolution should, the company believes, be enough to clearly and crisply display the kind of information that workers will have to deal with routinely. It's not intended for playing games, watching movies or reading e-books, after all. Indeed, Panasonic has apparently done its best to carefully consider exactly how the device will be used, and designed it around those functions that it will be required to perform on a day-to- day basis. It may not be exciting or sexy, but devices like this one help to move products and people around the world every day - and that makes them very important indeed. 2016-02-24 16:00:01+00:00 Andy Weir

36 New platform improves efficiency of security operations Security teams often have to spend a lot of their time investigating incidents, which is time consuming and can distract from other tasks. To improve the efficiency of security operations centers (SOCs), Israel-based SECDO is launching a new platform aimed at managed security service providers (MSSPs). It provides advanced alert validation, investigation and remediation capabilities. The platform dramatically improves the efficiency of the SOC by automatically validating alerts from security event and information management (SIEM) systems, using unique thread-level endpoint activity data to identify false positives and prioritize true positives. Using SECDO, MSSPs will be able to handle the thousands of alerts that they receive each day, while meeting ever-more competitive SLAs for their customers. "SECDO is a valuable platform for MSSPs who want to offer their customers advanced services while improving the efficiency and response times of their own SOC," says Shai Morag, CEO and Co-Founder of SECDO. "With SECDO's endpoint analytics, MSSP SOC teams can now understand the full context of every alert, visually investigate, and reduce the time and resources needed to identify and eradicate a breach". The platform’s interactive data visualization technology enables SOC analysts to understand the 'who, what, where, when, and how' of every incident by showing the entire attack chain timeline back to the root cause. This enables first and second tier analysts to easily investigate and respond to threats without having to escalate to the next level. When an in-depth investigation is required, SECDO provides multi-dimensional, interactive search capabilities that can reduce hundreds of manual queries into a single visual search. It uses SECDO's disruptive thread-level endpoint intelligence and causality analysis technologies to give service providers visibility into their customer’s environment. This allows MSSPs to offer the advanced threat protection, incident investigation and forensics services that are necessary to stay ahead in the security marketplace. The platform has been in use for three months, with customers reporting positive results, you can find out more and request a demo on the SECDO website . Photo credit: Alex Mit / Shutterstock 2016-02-24 14:55:52 By Ian Barker Published 18 hours ago

37 Save 25% off a ilumi LED Smartbulb via Deals Today on offer via our Lifestyle section of Neowin Deals, you can save 25% off a ilumi LED Smartbulb. New and improved design: Light up your world for the next 20 years right from your smartphone. The A19 ilumi Smartbulb is a color-tunable LED light you can control and program wirelessly. Using the free app, you can adjust the color and brightness of your lighting or explore amazing built-in programs to experience lighting like never before. Plus,. ilumi lasts up to 20 years and is 5x more energy efficient than a regular bulb. So how does it work? Check out the short video promo below. The ilumi LED Smartbulb normally retails for $60, but you can pick it up for just $44.99 for a limited time. In addition, if you refer this deal via social media (below the 'Add to cart' button) which results in a purchase, you'll get $10 credit added to your Neowin Deals store account. Get this deal (Continental US only) or find out more about it. That's OK, If this offer doesn't interest you, why not check out other giveaways on the Neowin Deals web site? There's also a bunch of freebies you can check out here . How can I disable these posts? Click here . Disclosure : This is a StackCommerce deal in partnership with Neowin; an account at StackCommerce is required to participate in any giveaways or deals. For a full description of StackCommerce's privacy guidelines, go here. 2016-02-24 14:18:01+00:00 Steven Parker

38 Salesforce.com faces scrutiny as Wall St frets over cloud software SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Salesforce.com's quarterly report will be under the microscope after the bell on Wednesday as Wall Street searches for new signs of trouble in spending on cloud software. The world's largest maker of online sales software is seen as a barometer for the cloud- computing sector, where valuations took a major hit earlier this month after a dismal sales outlook from Tableau Software. With investors trying to figure out whether the poor reports from Tableau and a handful of others are company-specific or indicative of trouble across the sector, Salesforce's report will be watched more closely than normal, said Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler. Its shares were down 1.54 percent at $61.96 ahead of the report and have slumped 22 percent in 2016. Options bets implied traders expect Salesforce's stock to move 8.7 percent in either direction by the end of the week. San Francisco-based Salesforce has benefited as more businesses choose cheaper and easier software services delivered online, with no software directly installed on PCs. Reflecting the hyper-adoption of cloud computing technology in recent years, the company is seen posting a 23.9-percent increase in revenue for the fourth quarter to $1.79 billion, according to Thomson Reuters data. It is expected to post earnings of 19 cents per share for the quarter, which ended in January. Salesforce is expected to forecast fiscal 2017 revenue around $8.081 billion. Salesforce.com's stock trades at multiples implying Wall Street expects years of massive growth. The shares are at 63 times expected earnings, compared to 17 for Microsoft and 13 for Oracle. Of the analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters, 43 recommend buying Salesforce's shares while just one recommends selling and two have "hold" ratings. (Reporting by Noel Randewich, additional reporting by David Gaffen in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski) 2016-02-24 13:11:00-05:00 Noel Randewich

39 AI 'frees us up to be humans again,' H2O.ai chief says Data will be a key factor that sets businesses apart competitively in the coming years, and success will depend increasingly on artificial intelligence and machine learning. So believes SriSatish Ambati, cofounder and CEO of machine-learning startup H2O.ai . "By 2022, I expect every company to include in their shareholder announcements how much money they made from their data," Ambati said in an interview. And that's where he hopes his company will play a big role. Founded in 2011, H2O.ai develops an open- source machine-learning platform called H2O that's used by insurance, healthcare and financial services companies to do things like predict churn, pricing and fraud. The company aims to help developers and data scientists leverage powerful machine-learning algorithms or, as it puts it, "democratize artificial intelligence for business. " The company says more than 5,000 organizations use its software, along with some 10 percent of the world’s data scientists. Capital One, Transamerica and Progressive are among its customers. Machine intelligence and predictive capabilities make the software adaptable, Ambati says, so that companies can continue to learn from their data even as conditions change. There's a problem for some companies, however: fear. Lost jobs are among the biggest causes for concern around AI, and the worry can inhibit some companies from adopting machine- learning technologies. Ambati sees it differently. Machines may be able to "automate away" much of what needs to be done in the workplace, but only those parts that machines are better at anyway, he said. There will always be a need for the "ah-ha moments" that depend on human intuition and emotion. "Over the past 100 years, we've been training humans to be as punctual and predictable as machines," Ambati explained. With AI, machines can do the "machine stuff" while humans spend their time on the areas where they excel. "What we really want from humans today are emotions, feelings and love, and those can't be automated," he said. "Time is the only nonrenewable resource," Ambati added. "Machine learning will mean we can finally use our time to build strong relationships and spend more time with customers and loved ones. We're so used to being machines at work -- this frees us up to be humans again. " More about Capital One Transamerica 2016-02-24 12:27:00 Katherine Noyes

40 BlackBerry eyes IoT, diversifies with new cybersecurity practice Struggling smartphone vendor BlackBerry is looking to diversify its business by launching a cyber security consulting service, focusing in part on the Internet of Things, and providing related tools to customers. The Ontario smartphone vendor, an early standard bearer for multifunction mobile phones, announced Wednesday it has acquired U. K. cyber security consulting firm Encription. The company did not disclose the terms of the deal, which was completed last week. BlackBerry's move into cyber security consulting isn't a huge leap, as the company has long positioned itself as a security-minded smartphone vendor. Late last year, the company launched the Priv , a security- and privacy-focused smartphone running a modified version of Android. The company has significant cyber security expertise in house, and the new cyber security consulting practice will build on those assets, a spokeswoman said. The company noted the global cyber security consulting industry generates US$16.5 billion in business a year, with huge growth predicted. BlackBerry posted a net loss of $89 million for its third quarter, which ended Nov. 28. Still, for the previous nine months ending on that date, it posted a net profit of $30 million, compared to a net loss of $332 million over the same period in 2014. BlackBerry's cyber security services will focus on helping customers with security strategies and providing technical assistance, the company said. The company will specialize in automotive and Internet of Things security and in detection, testing and analysis. The growing move into cyber security is a "smart move for Blackberry, especially as security is in the headlines" with a recent fight over smartphone encryption between Apple and the FBI, said Jeff Kagan, a mobile analyst. Still, it's unclear if cyber security consulting will be a long-term winning strategy for the company, he said by email. "BlackBerry is having a tough time finding growth areas," Kagan added. "Before we get too excited, we’ll just have to see whether this moves the needle at BlackBerry. " 2016-02-24 12:01:00 Grant Gross

41 Hands-on: Alcatel Plus 10 - a Windows 10 tablet with a 4G LTE keyboard A ton of devices have been announced this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona - from the intriguing LG G5 and evolutionary Galaxy S7 and S7 edge , to the mighty HP Elite x3 , and the Matebook, Huawei's new premium Windows 10 tablet. The number of companies launching Windows 10 devices has continued to grow in recent months, and Alcatel is one of the latest to join that list, having unveiled its new Plus 10 tablet at MWC. The tablet complements the Alcatel OneTouch Fierce XL with Windows 10 Mobile , which the company first showed off at CES earlier this year, and which went on sale in the US through T- Mobile this month. Given that it already offers a handset running Windows 10 Mobile, as well as a small Windows 10 Mobile tablet, the Pixi 3 , it makes sense that Alcatel would complete its line-up by offering a large tablet with Microsoft's new OS too - although its latest device runs the full 'desktop' version of Windows 10, rather than the Mobile edition. Even so, Alcatel is focusing keenly on mobility with the Plus 10 - this isn't a device intended to be used solely at home or in the office. Alcatel is one of only a small number of companies to offer 4G LTE connectivity in a Windows 10 tablet... although strictly speaking, that cellular support isn't in the tablet itself. Rather than integrate the cellular radios directly into the device, Alcatel has instead built that hardware into the keyboard section, into which the tablet magnetically docks. The company apparently believes that users are unlikely to carry around the tablet on its own anyway, and that it therefore makes more sense to offer 4G connectivity only when the keyboard is available. The reasoning behind this decision becomes clearer when you consider that the keyboard comes with its own 2580mAh battery, in addition to the 5830mAh battery available in the tablet itself; given the additional battery drain caused by connecting to cellular networks, Alcatel has evidently put some thought into this, but there will no doubt be some users disappointed that it didn't build the LTE support into the tablet itself, while still allowing the keyboard to offer additional battery capacity. Even between the tablet and keyboard, Alcatel says that you can expect around 8 hours of battery life, which the company promotes as "one working day" of usage. The keyboard is a pretty solid piece of kit, although the plastic used in its construction doesn't exactly feel high-grade. It doesn't feel especially 'cheap', but you won't be under the illusion that it's a top-of-the-line piece of hardware. The keys are nicely spaced, making it pretty easy to type, although the short downward key travel won't be to everyone's tastes. Sadly, there was no opportunity at MWC to test out the 4G connectivity, so this will have to wait until a 'real-world' test is possible away from the glitz and glamor of the show stand. The Plus 10 tablet itself is nice enough too. Again, you won't be fooled into thinking that you're holding a high-end device, but the design is inoffensive and the build quality seems decent. If you pick it up, you'll probably be immediately aware that you're holding an affordable device, but it doesn't feel cheap or flimsy. It's quite nice to hold, with a body that's just 8.3mm-thick and which weighs 465g. With the keyboard attached, the whole thing weighs a total of 850g, making this a nice, light package that you'll be able to chuck in your bag and carry around without it weighing you down too much. I refer to the Plus 10 as 'affordable', but Alcatel hasn't yet announced pricing for the device. Even so, given that Alcatel's other devices are priced towards the more affordable end of the pricing spectrum - and since the Plus 10's specs aren't exactly flagship-class - this seems like a safe bet. This impression is further reinforced by the display - a 10-inch IPS LCD with fairly low 1280x800px resolution. The panel is decent enough to look at, but it's nothing special. Contrasts are okay, brightness is okay, viewing angles are okay - "okay" really is the operative word here; it all gets the job done, but it's unremarkable. You don't have to look too closely at the display to spot individual pixels; you won't be fooled into thinking that you're staring at a premium Full HD screen. I suspect that pricing will be the key factor for many potential buyers when it comes to the Plus 10. In terms of its specs, it's much like any number of lower-end tablets, with an Intel Atom (Cherry Trail) processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage. The killer feature here is, of course, the 4G LTE support, and it's nice that Alcatel has also included a chunky extra battery in the keyboard to offset the power drain of that cellular connectivity. Given how few Windows 10 devices offer 4G support, Alcatel has a good opportunity to attract buyers who desire this feature, but who aren't prepared to pay for a premium device like Microsoft's Surface 3. Indeed, at the right price, the Alcatel Plus 10 could well be the ideal choice for some. This article was edited after publication, to add a reference to the Alcatel OneTouch Pixi 3 tablet. 2016-02-24 11:24:01+00:00 Andy Weir

42 RHEL On Azure: What Took So Long? After an extended period of negotiation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has become available on Microsoft's Azure cloud, where they "love Linux" but had previously been unable to offer RHEL. On Feb. 17, the operating system often used for Linux production systems quietly joined the ranks of Linuxes, including Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Debian, and Novell SUSE Enterprise, already accepted on Azure. It was the last to do so. For the Azure infrastructure-as-a-service to become competitive with Amazon Web Services, it had to backpedal and wipe away Microsoft's former antipathy to open source Linux, since Linux was running so many Web and data center workloads. Satya Nadella began that process as soon as he could after being named Microsoft's new CEO. In an October 2014 press conference, Nadella, accompanied by Microsoft executive vice president of Azure Scott Guthrie, assured listeners that not only would Linux play an increasingly important role on Azure, but also that "Microsoft loves Linux. Twenty percent of Azure is already Linux," he said at the time. That figure is likely to be much higher now. Corey Sanders, director of program management for Azure, wrote in a blog Feb. 17 that, "more than 60% of our images [in the Azure Marketplace] are Linux-based. " The Marketplace is where third parties sell their pre-configured systems as software-as-a- service on Azure. "Both Microsoft and I love Linux, and just days after Valentine's Day, I am ecstatic to showcase this love with several new announcements to provide you with even more open choice and flexibility for your cloud deployments on Azure," Sanders wrote. For the first time he was able to add, "and these announcements include Red Hat Enterprise Linux images. " If Microsoft has loved Linux for so long, why has it taken the better part of 17 months to get Red Hat's Linux included on the list? InformationWeek raised that question as far back as that press conference on Oct. 20, 2014, when we asked Nadella, "Why not Red Hat? " We didn't get any detail in the answer, only a repetition of the phrase. Nor is there any explanation in Sanders' Feb. 17 blog. But a recent interview with Ashesh Badani, general manager of cloud and OpenShift at Red Hat, provided the answer, at least in part. The offering of RHEL follows the announcement last November that Microsoft and Red Hat would work together to get RHEL onto Azure. Before the engineering teams were able to do so, legal teams from each side had to meet and iron out guarantees that Microsoft and Red Hat wouldn't come to blows over the legitimacy of the code in Linux. In 2007, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and general counsel Brad Smith claimed the Linux kernel violated 42 Microsoft patents, and that the operating system as a whole violated 235 more. At that time, Microsoft signed a special agreement with Novell SUSE, where it subsidized use of SUSE with customer coupons after reaching an agreement on Microsoft patents. Other small Linux vendors signed agreements as well. Red Hat was wary of all the legal issues raised by the SCO Group, which filed suit against large Linux users AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler for violating its Unix patents. The attack on customers won SCO widespread enmity in the Linux community, and Red Hat didn't wish to get into technical discussions with Microsoft if there was any prospect those old claims could come back to life. To get RHEL on Azure meant engineering teams would be sharing confidential information. If there was any possibility the legal issues might be revived, Red Hat wanted no part of an agreement, Badani said. "We need to be able to provide interoperative, cooperative, cross-platform support," if a customer using Azure has a problem while running RHEL on it, Badani said. To provide that, Red Had and Microsoft needed to achieve a trusted business relationship. At the same time, it had become in Red Hat's interest to reach a rapprochement with Microsoft, not only to get RHEL into Azure, but also to get the. NET languages into its OpenShift development platform. "We have every other language except. NET," Badani noted. OpenShift is a broad set of open source tools and languages that is in a battle for mindshare with Cloud Foundry as a platform-as-a-service offering. Badani wants as complete an offering as possible. Putting RHEL on Azure is a big step forward but is only the "precursor," Badani said. Red Hat and Microsoft are "doing testing right now" of OpenShift on Azure, but it's uncertain how soon the platform might become available, he said. "Once we get it stood up, it shouldn't take us that long. Some customers are already playing with it on their own," he said. [Want to learn more about container services in OpenShift? Read Red Hat Preps Containerized Cloud Workloads in OpenShift .] With containers blurring the lines between infrastructure-as-a-service and PaaS, it's important to Red Hat, with its early ties to Docker containerization, to get into the hands of developers interested in using Docker. It can do that through purely open source options, but there are a lot developers using Microsoft languages on Azure that it wouldn't mind being engaged with. There's also the background issue of cloud portability. Most customers have both Windows and Linux in their data centers and thus can ship workloads off in different directions, if they choose. OpenShift first ran on Amazon, so customers are already familiar with that option. Red Hat has been adding expertise in containerizing workloads through OpenShift and can offer a process similar to Google's own, automated Let Me Containerize That For You process to OpenShift users on Amazon. In addition, Red Hat announced in January that its Dedicated OpenShift, a version that a customer runs on a cloud server, was available on and Compute Engine. The rapid changes brought about by the cloud and containers are forcing old adversaries to rethink what they're doing. They have to find new ways to cooperate to remain part of the emerging landscape. The Microsoft/Red Hat launch of RHEL on Azure is a sign of how far that process has already been carried out -- and how it will continue to be in the near future. Are you an IT Hero? Do you know someone who is? Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's IT Hero Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-24 10:05:00 Charles Babcock

43 Gears of War 4 will be a "graphical showcase" on Xbox One There's no shortage of news for Gears of War fanatics. Last year, Microsoft's 'The Coalition' dev studio released Gears of War: Ultimate Edition , a 1080p/60FPS Gears of War re-master that featured a special edition Xbox One bundle as well as a back-catalog of Gears of War games that were released in the months following the game's launch. While the re-mastered Gears of War has claimed a lot of the spotlight for the franchise in recent months, it's the upcoming Gears of War 4 game that has us all clamoring for details, and it looks like we have some new info to share. In an interview with Official Xbox Magazine US, The Coalition studio head Rod Fergusson, who's been a part of the franchise since the beginning, shed some light on a couple details regarding Gears of War 4. Fergusson says that The Coalition really wants to keep the essence of the Gears franchise alive in this upcoming game, but players should expect some tweaks to the formula that are intended to keep the game feeling fresh. As for the technical side of things, Fergusson and his crew have high expectations for GoW 4: This "graphical showcase" includes the expectation of maintaining a 60 FPS benchmark and perhaps displaying content @ 1080p, something the hot-selling Halo 5: Guardians managed to achieve for the most part just a few months back. The visual showcase is no-doubt a sticking point for The Coalition when it comes to the Gears franchise - the studio is readying a release of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 with major system requirements that output the game in 4K resolutions. While getting both 1080p and 60FPS on the Xbox One can prove to be challenging, there's no doubt that The Coalition have a good shot at making it happen. With DirectX 12 now being available on the Xbox One after the Windows 10 rollout on Xbox One, The Coalition should have the opportunity to make Gears of War 4 the best-looking game on Xbox One to-date. via Nerd Leaks 2016-02-24 09:34:01+00:00 Chris Schroeder

44 Facebook's new 'Reactions' buttons are here! Do you 'like' the emojis? Sometimes the "like" button just doesn't cut it when expressing how you feel about a Facebook post. That's why Facebook is rolling out its new "Reactions" feature for all 1.6 billion of its worldwide users. TODAY viewers learned exclusively Wednesday that the like button is getting some company, allowing Facebook users to register different types of responses to a post. What it means for you: How the Reactions buttons work: Why Facebook made the change: "Reactions gives you new ways to express love, awe, humor and sadness,'' Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post when the testing began on Oct. 8. "It's not a dislike button, but it does give you the power to easily express sorrow and empathy — in addition to delight and warmth. " Zuckerberg also spoke in a town hall event on Sept. 15 about how the "Reactions" help users express emotions for situations where hitting "Like" doesn't feel appropriate. "Not every moment is a good moment and if you are sharing something that is sad, whether it's something in current events, like the refugees crisis that touches you or if a family member passed away, then it may not feel comfortable to like that post,'' he said. "But your friends and people want to be able to express that they understand and that they relate to you, so I do think it's important to give people more options than just like as a quick way to emote and share what they're feeling on a post. " 2016-02-24 09:28:35-05:00 Scott Stump

45 What should the Linux Mint developers do to regain the trust of users? The recent hacking of the Linux Mint site has drawn an enormous amount of media attention and has shattered the faith of some users. What should the developers of Linux Mint do to regain the trust of the folks who use their distribution? This topic came up in a thread on the Linux Mint subreddit and redditors there weren't shy about sharing their opinions. Chucks launched the thread by asking his question: The thing is no matter how you look at it or how much you blame the Mint team for what happened, the results were pretty serious and there was a ton of bad press. How should Mint approach the situation to minimize damage? Do they need to do anything or is "can happen to anybody" enough? I hope they figure it out and can continue their success story. More at Reddit Other Linux Mint users chimed in with their thoughts: And not to downplay the issue, but hacks like this are going to happen. Even large corporations and companies like Sony have been breached multiple times. If someone wants in bad enough, they'll eventually find a way in. In terms of attacks, this one wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Bad but not catastrophic. I think the ISOs need to be digitally signed, not just hashed. This is what I expect to be among their list of measures. " The Mint team needs to recognize this fact and act accordingly. Put the people and structure in place necessary for being a serious distribution. When people, especially noobs, are depending on Mint for their computing needs they are trusting the Mint team to know what they're doing. That trust has been rocked at least a little bit by the website hack. " I do like the conversation about distributing distros that this has generated. The idea of pgp signed images sounds good to me, hopefully Mint will adopt that. " More at Reddit 2016-02-24 09:09:00 Jim Lynch

46 Security Concerns Continue Amid Cloud Adoption The Internet of Things (IoT) generates a lot of data, which organizations can store in the cloud. But how are they keeping it all safe? Many companies are realizing they face this challenge and are ramping up efforts to improve data security as they embrace new platforms, including IoT and cloud-based applications, according to a recent survey conducted by 451 Research. The survey, sponsored by data and cloud security vendor Vormetric , polled 1,114 senior IT executives, representing companies ranging from $50 million to more than $2 billion in annual sales. [What's the Apple vs. FBI fight over the encrypted and secured iPhone all about? Read Tim Cook vs. FBI: Why Apple Is Fighting the Good Fight.] More than 80% of respondents said they plan to store data in "new technology environments," defined as cloud, big data, or IoT. Of those, the vast majority (85%) said they were "concerned" or "very concerned" about security in the cloud. Over half of all respondents voiced similar concerns about the security of big data, while more than a third (36%) said that protecting IoT data was a major concern. Still, report author and 451 Research senior analyst Garrett Bekker , said in a prepared statement that security is an afterthought "when it comes to adopting new technologies, often taking a back seat amidst the rush to stake a claim in a promising new market. " Top data concerns for respondents were security breaches or attacks at the service provider (70%), increased vulnerabilities from shared infrastructure (66%), lack of control over the location of the data (66%), and lack of a data privacy policy or a privacy service level agreement (65%). The 451 Research survey showed that clients see encryption as one solution to guarantee cloud security. By a three-to-two margin, clients preferred to manage their own encryption keys, the survey said. "Encryption got a bad rap in the past 40 years," said Sol Cates , chief security officer at Vormetric, in an interview with InformationWeek. It was perceived as slow and complicated. "How do you apply it without breaking anything? " he asked. Early adopters of encryption were paranoid, or sensitive and paranoid, or aware of regulatory compliance, Cates noted. All these factors may have impeded the wide implementation of encryption as a security solution. But attitudes have shifted again, as companies now seek encryption solutions. As more data is collected by organizations, the C-suite is experiencing more concern over its security. Customers also expect their data to be kept safe, Cates explained. That collection of data is growing exponentially, as gigabytes pile into terabytes, finally adding up to petabytes. Do you protect it all? "Don't try to encrypt or protect everything," Cates said. Companies have to identify the 10% to 20% of data that is absolutely crucial. "If we lose this, we're done," is how Cates described this category. The burden rests on the chief security officer, who must understand the business in order to understand the value of the data and what is most important to protect, Cates explained. That person must be able to communicate that understanding in the same language used by the various departments in that business, he added. The CSO must do more than share statistics; the CSO must share understanding. Encryption isn't the only technology undergoing a major shift. Security was once a factor that made companies reluctant to move their data to the cloud , sometimes opting for hybrid solutions where the "crown jewels" would remain on-premises. "Something is shifting there," Cates said, as companies now pursue cloud-based solutions. "A lot of organizations started on the cloud," he said, while established companies are becoming comfortable once they've gained more control over their data environment. Cloud providers want no liability for storing client data, which pushes the responsibility for security back to the client, he added. 451 Research predicts encryption and security policy management will be part of all future cloud deployment, with encryption deployed either natively or via a third-party solution. Clients will find their best options for cloud security after sorting through internal policies, industry best practices, and compliance mandates. For big data, 451 Research recommends finding broad-based encryption and access controls that can cover traditional as well as big data repositories. When it comes to the Internet of Things, the report suggests that clients focus on device authentication and access controls, as well as encrypting data as it flows from the device to the database. Are you an IT Hero? Do you know someone who is? Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's IT Hero Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-24 09:06:00 William Terdoslavich

47 Xbox Games with Gold for March 2016 announced The end of February is in sight, which means Xbox Live subscribers only have a few days left to nab the free Xbox 360 and Xbox One games via this month's Games with Gold program. As usual, Microsoft have given us a preview of what's to come in the following month, so without further adieu, here are your Games with Gold titles for March 2016. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (Xbox One) : From the minds at Frogwares comes a new mystery solving adventure where you'll play as the famous detective Sherlock Holmes himself. Take on a first-person perspective as you seek to solve six major crimes that vary in their classification (murder, theft, etc.). Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishment features free story progression, meaning you'll be free to complete the tasks as you see fit. Sherlock Holmes will be available from March 16th to April 15th. Lords of the Fallen (Xbox One): This single-player RPG pits you in a world once ruled by an evil god who was overthrown by mankind in a great slavery rebellion. Millennia later, the spiteful Demonic Rhogar Legion return to conquer humanity all over again. Only you, a societal cast- away, stand as any hope of thwarting off these gods. CI Games delivers a beautiful medieval setting for your to explore and do battle in. L ords of the Fallen will be available for download from March 16 until March 31. Supreme Commander 2 (Xbox 360, Xbox One): Build a mighty military to rule your enemies in this real-time strategy game from the popular Square Enix development studio. You'll play through three factions available in-game to keep from dragging an entire civilization into civil war. Supreme Commander 2 can be enjoyed by yourself or with friends, as the game supports up to four player multiplayer online. The game will be available for download from March 1 until March 15. Borderlands (Xbox 360, Xbox One): Known for its unique cartoon-ish artistic presentation in a Mad Max-like setting, Borderlands has you take on the role of a mercenary on the planet of Pandora, where you'll be racing to find advanced alien technology from what is known as "The Vault". Borderlands features both offline and online cooperative play from an FPS/RPG approach, with the online portion supporting up to four players. Borderlands will be available for download from March 16 until March 31. For all Xbox One owners wanting to grab both Borderlands and Supreme Commander 2 , simply visit this link and click "Download from Xbox Store". The game should show up in your "My Games & Apps" section and be ready for download shortly after. Source: Xbox Wire 2016-02-24 08:44:01+00:00 Chris Schroeder

48 Microsoft pursues JavaScript developers with Typescript 1.8 Microsoft has made TypeScript 1.8 available and is hoping to entice developers to migrate their JavaScript projects. In version 1.8, .js JavaScript files now can output to .tsc, accessing the TypeScript compiler and allowing developers to convert JavaScript to TypeScript. "The TypeScript compiler checks the input.js files for syntax errors, and emits valid output based on the --target and --module flags," release notes state. "The output can be combined with other.ts (TypeScript) files as well. " The upgrade also features a module augmentation capability that lets developers design more modular libraries. "This allows library authors to distribute their libraries in a piecemeal fashion," Bowden Kelly, program manager for Visual Studio and. Net at Microsoft, said in a blog post. "Previously, TypeScript made the assumption that modules wouldn't change. With module augmentation, users have the ability to extend existing modules such that consumers can specify if they want to import the whole module or just a subset. " Strings in a type position become string literal types in version 1.8. "Only exact string matches are assignable to string literal types, and like any other type, they can be used in union types as well. So if we rewrite the AnimationOptions interface with string literal types, the API users now get type protection," Kelly said. Version 1.8 features control flow analysis to help catch common programming errors. And statements not guaranteed to execute at runtime are now flagged as unreachable code errors, and unused labels are flagged as well. Stateless function components from the React JavaScript UI library now are supported in TypeScript. Support for JSX, an embeddable XML-like syntax, has been expanded with a capability for custom JSX factories. Version 1.8 also leverages the ChakraCore JavaScript compiler , improving compilation times. With TypeScript, Microsoft is providing a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to JavaScript, similar to Google's Dart or CoffeeScript. Version 1.8 reached beta status in late January and is available for Visual Studio 2015 and 2013, as a NuGet package, and also via npm and source code . More about Google Microsoft 2016-02-24 07:50:00 Paul Krill

49 Ahead of Senate hearing, a look at the early warnings about H-1B In 1995, then U. S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich warned Congress about the H-1B program. Stories of IT workers training foreign replacements were already emerging, even though the visa program was just about five years old. The H-1B program has an "unknowably large potential," Reich told a Senate committee some 20 years ago , to inflict "real competitive harm on skilled U. S workers. " Reich's efforts changed nothing. Three years after he testified, in 1998, Congress raised the H- 1B cap. The Senate Immigration Subcommittee is holding a hearing Thursday to consider the impact of the H-1B visa program on high-skilled workers. A Disney IT worker who lost his job last year, Leo Perrero, will tell his story to the committee. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in 2008. Reich won't be testifying, but if he were to do so, this is what he would tell lawmakers: "I'd say the program has become just another way for Big Tech to keep wages down," Reich said in an email response to a question from Computerworld. "It was originally conceived as a means of getting into the U. S. specific skills in very short supply, which Americans didn't have or for which they couldn't be readily trained," said Reich. "That's not what it has morphed into. " Even in 1995, problems with the H-1B program were coming into focus. In his Senate testimony then, Reich discussed AIG, an insurance company that laid off about 250 IT workers after bringing in a visa-using contractor. Among the U. S. workers who lost a job was Linda Kilcrease, a programmer who trained her foreign replacement. Afterward, she became active on the issue. "I felt somebody has to put a face to this," said Kilcrease, who spoke at a news conference in Washington and appeared on CNN and the CBS Evening News . Despite all the attention on the AIG layoffs and others, it is "hard to believe we continue to be damaged by the same visa laws," said Kilcrease, who returned to IT work after her layoff and is now retired. But Kilcrease believes offshore outsourcing is affecting politics. "It's not just a few people who have lost their jobs, it's now a lot of people," she said. The anger is particularly seen in the candidacies of Donald Trump, the billionaire developer who is leading the race for the GOP presidential nomination, and from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is seeking the Democratic nomination. Both want the H-1B visa program reformed. "Who could be more different, who could be more opposite," said Kilcrease of Trump and Sanders. But together they probably "represent all the unhappiness with our economy. " The AIG layoffs in 1994 were among the early H-1B-related incidents, and it "came as quite a shock," said John Miano, a former programmer, longtime activist and now attorney. "Most people believe that you had to show you [could] not find an American before you hired a foreign worker. " Miano recently co-authored a just-published book about the H-1B visa program with columnist Michelle Malkin, Sold Out. "How was it possible then for companies to fire Americans and replace them with foreign workers? " he said. Patricia Fluno, who testified before Senate and House committees in 2003, was replaced by a foreign worker at Siemens and said the public attention IT workers bring to the issue can make a difference. "Make as much noise as possible," said Fluno, because when companies are looking at one IT department to move offshore, "they are looking at all IT departments. " 2016-02-24 04:43:00-08:00 Patrick Thibodeau

50 Here's what tech leaders have said about the Apple-FBI dispute so far In the week since Apple said it would do battle with the FBI over the agency's request for access to a smartphone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists, tech industry leaders have been weighing in with their views. Most have come down in support of Apple, though others, including Bill Gates and Simon Segars, CEO of UK chip company ARM, have leaned more towards the FBI's position. Here's a roundup of what tech leaders have said so far, starting with some of the most recent views expressed. On Monday, the Microsoft cofounder took issue with Apple's characterization that the government wants a "back door" to the iPhone. "Nobody's taking about a back door, so that's not the right question," Gates said. "This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They're not asking for some general thing; they're asking for a particular case. " The next day, Gates said headlines stating that he "backs the FBI" don't reflect his position. "I was disappointed because that doesn't state my view on this," he told Bloomberg. "I do believe that with the right safeguards, there are cases where the government, on our behalf, like stopping terrorism, which could get worse in the future, that is valuable. But striking that balance -- clearly the government has taken information historically and used it in ways we didn't expect, going all the way back to say the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. I'm hoping now we can have the discussion. I do believe there are sets of safeguards where the government shouldn't have to be completely blind. " Simon Segars at CES in 2015 Segars, whose company designs the microprocessors in most smartphones, was asked his views at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "It's a complex situation; there are rights and wrongs," Segars said. "We believe users should own their data and control who has access to it, but obviously there are some extreme circumstances where that should change. " "We're sympathetic with Apple," the Facebook CEO said at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. "We believe encryption is a good thing that people will want. " In a statement earlier, Facebook said the FBI's demands would create "a chilling precedent and obstruct companies' efforts to secure their products. " Koum was among the first tech leaders to speak out, taking to his Facebook page the day after Apple said it would oppose the FBI's request. "I have always admired Tim Cook for his stance on privacy and Apple's efforts to protect user data and couldn't agree more with everything said in their Customer Letter today," Koum wrote. "We must not allow this dangerous precedent to be set. Today our freedom and our liberty is at stake. " Sundar Pichai at Google I/O in 2015 Pichai soon followed with a series of tweets. "Important post by @tim_cook. Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users' privacy," Pichai tweeted on Feb. 17. He continued: "We know that law enforcement and intelligence agencies face significant challenges in protecting the public against crime and terrorism. We build secure products to keep your information safe and we give law enforcement access to data based on valid legal orders. But that's wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices & data. Could be a troubling precedent. Looking forward to a thoughtful and open discussion on this important issue. " Dorsey chimed in with a tweet on Feb. 18. "We stand with @timcook and Apple (and thank him for his leadership)! " Aaron Levie at the Box Dev conference "Apple's response to the government is something we completely, wholeheartedly agree with," the cloud storage CEO told TechCrunch. "The world is going to get more complex, so you can't create weaknesses in software that then will become vulnerabilities in the future. " "Over the last year, we've seen government agencies and law enforcement officials across the globe discussing policies that will harm user security through weakening encryption," Surman wrote on Medium last week. "This includes the so called Snoopers Charter in the UK and calls by agencies like the FBI for tech companies to create backdoors into encrypted communications. ... While it's hard to discuss internet policy in the context of horrific and tragic events, there is no question [the] FBI's request [is] an overreach. If granted, it both undermines everyday security for Internet users and would set a precedent for further weakening of encryption. While the tech industry largely supports Apple's position, the American public does not according to a study by the Pew Research Center. And there are plenty of voices outside of tech who back the FBI, including the White House , Donald Trump , and William Bratton, the New York City police commissioner, who cowrote an op-ed in the New York Times Tuesday. "Mr. Cook says Apple's ultimate goal is to provide customers 'safety' from 'attack," the op-ed reads. "But Mr. Cook does not seem to be talking about the kind of attack that took 14 lives in San Bernardino. Presumably, he means attacks from hackers or what he may view as government intrusion -- even when that intrusion is legal. " 2016-02-24 04:01:00-08:00 James Niccolai

51 Meet Pantheon Mail, a Fork of the Now Dead Geary | Linux.com The elementary OS team has forked the now dead Geary email client, and they have announced the launch of Pantheon Mail. Geary was an email application developed by a group named Yorba, but they disbanded almost a year ago. Their email client was really good and on the right track to becoming something special, but now it's dead. The beauty of open source means that anyone can pick up the pieces and either revive it or fork it. Geary was already made available in elementary OS, so it wasn't really a stretch for the team that builds the famous operating system to pick up where Yorba left off. Read more at Softpedia Linux News 2016-02-24 01:53:00 Softpedia

52 52 Five years after the Arab Spring, how does the Middle East use social media? Regime change in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya saw the departure of long-established – seemingly untouchable – political leaders and inspired ripples of protest and disquiet in many neighboring Arab nations. The tumultuous ramifications are still playing out in many countries across the region. During the immediate aftermath of these events the role played by social media in facilitating change was hotly debated. Perspectives ranged from Malcolm Gladwell's " Small change – why the revolution will not be tweeted ," through to John Pollock's " Streetbook – how Egyptian and Tunisian youth hacked the Arab Spring " and Clay Shirky's essay on " Technology, the public sphere, and political change. " Although social media's contribution to sociopolitical change in the region may have been overstated, it did help amplify discontent and provided global media outlets with valuable on-the- ground insights. At a time of information scarcity, social media offered perspectives that might otherwise have been hard to come by. Perhaps the most high-profile proponent of this new way of working was NPR's Andy Carvin , who successfully used Twitter to identify, share and verify stories. The impact of his work led the Columbia Journalism Review to ask: " Is this the world's best Twitter account? " Carvin's approach , like many others reporting on this chaotic period, was not without its faults , but this collaborative model pioneered new ways of using social media in a breaking news environment. Five years on, there remains considerable interest in how social media and mobile technology is shaping attitudes and behaviors in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), particularly among the region's substantial youth population . It's against this backdrop that I produce an annual round-up of developments from across the region, analyzing research findings and industry announcements to identify the key trends from the past 12 months. Here are 15 things we learned in 2015: Facebook's portfolio dominates Visually led social networks are very popular 6. Instagram, the popular photo sharing platform – which, like WhatsApp, is owned by Facebook – has 25 million users in MENA and 400 million worldwide, 77.6 million of whom are in the U. S. 7. Saudi Arabia has 10.7 million monthly active users on Instagram, while there are 2.2 million monthly users in UAE and 3.2 million in Egypt. 8. Snapchat saw usage grow from just 3 percent to 12 percent among members of a Middle East research panel measured by the global research company Ipsos (2014 data published in 2015). 9. Videos and photographs taken by pilgrims visiting Mecca were featured on Snapchat's "Live Stories" feed during Ramadan, giving non-Muslims a rare insight into the holy city. The move came after around 300,000 people tweeted using the hashtag #Mecca_live to get Snapchat to feature Mecca on their app. MENA is a global leader for online video 10. MENA is the fastest growing consumer of videos on Facebook. Consumption per head of Facebook embedded videos is twice the global average. 11. Turkey is the second most active country for Periscope streams; and three Turkish cities – Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir – are among the top 10 cities with the most Periscope users worldwide. Periscope, the live video streaming app, was launched by Twitter during March 2015. 12. Growth in watch time on YouTube is up over 80 percent year on year in the region, Google data show. After the U. S., MENA enjoys the world's second-highest online video viewership . Twitter isn't as big as you might think 13. The short messaging network was a poster child for the Arab Spring, but usage and impact vary widely. Saudi Arabia and UAE dominate MENA's Twitter market: 53 percent and 51 percent of social media users in those countries have an account; whereas 23 percent of online adults in America – 74 percent of whom are social media users – are on Twitter, according to the Pew Research Center (however, that's still around 65 million Americans). 14. Usage of Twitter is lowest across MENA in Libya (12 percent) and Syria (14 percent), TNS discovered. But, daily usage is highest in Jordan, Libya, Palestine and Syria, and lowest in Saudi Arabia, the same survey found, meaning that despite lower Twitter penetration, users are more active in these countries. 15. Twitter is popular with younger audiences in both the Middle East and the U. S., although in MENA, 45 percent of Twitter users are age 18-24 compared to 22.6 percent of total users in the U. S. Nonetheless, this age group is still the largest user group for Twitter in the United States. Globally, Twitter has 320 million monthly active users. What it all means Post-Arab Spring, the Middle East continues to be active on social media. All of the major networks are seeing growth in user numbers, and usage trends often mirror those found in other regions. This includes the often overlooked strength of Facebook, the rapid rise of visually orientated networks and the smaller than might be expected (given the volume of media coverage it gets) number of Twitter users. Understanding what social networks the region uses is important for brands, news organizations, NGOs and others wishing to tap into this growing regional market, and who want to know where best to direct their efforts. Meanwhile, the continued growth of social media usage, smartphone take-up, and the rise of visual and video-focused networks means that if the events of 2011 were to be repeated today, we could expect to see even more material originating from social platforms. For many of the political regimes in the region, this creates a level of nervousness. Turkey, for instance, has repeatedly shut down social networks at various points; and we've seen several recent cases in the Gulf region of social media users landing in jail as a result of posts on social networks and messaging apps. If a Facebook relationship status could describe the ongoing dynamic between the Middle East and social media, it would simply be: it's complicated. Explore further: Facebook says 56 million 'like' it in Arab world 2016-02-24 00:00:00 phys.org

53 53 London overtakes Amsterdam as most in-demand location for datacentre space London has overtaken Amsterdam as the leader of the colocation market, with adoption of datacentre capacity higher there than in any other European city over the past year. That’s according to figures released by real estate advisory firm CBRE , which revealed that 25.9 MW of colocation capacity was purchased in London during 2015, while – in Amsterdam – 17.9MW changed hands. “London continued its recent fine form to end 2015 with 25.9MW of take-up in the year. This figure was substantially above its 2014 figure of 18.4MW and boosted by three consecutive quarters as Europe’s most in-demand market,” the CBRE noted. “Amsterdam was always going to find it tough to reach the levels of 2015, but a strong Q4 performance added gloss to what could have been a particularly poor year otherwise.” Much of the demand for colocation space in London was driven by the retail sector, which purchased more than 10MW of the total capacity sold in the city last year, the CBRE’s research showed. “We expect London to continue to thrive during the early parts of 2016 as planned new facilities and continued take-up from the IT infrastructure universe continue to keep the market buoyant,” the report stated. Andrew Jay, head of datacentre solutions for Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea) at CBRE, said a lot of the increased demand for datacentre capacity was due to the activities of US firms. “Today, most substantial new requirements are led by IT infrastructure firms coming out of the US West Coast. In essence, these companies – which are few in number – are single-handedly shaping the European markets,” said Jay. “As we move through 2016, the expectation is we’ll see a surge of activity in Q1 and Q2, again driven by infrastructure companies, given the market is now primed for large-scale deals. “Finally, concerns remain regarding data protection and privacy exacerbated by the European Court of Justice’s recent ‘invalid’ ruling with respect to Safe Harbour. We think this will have a positive impact on demand in the smaller European markets.” 2016-02-24 00:00:00 Caroline Donnelly

54 IT could help avert Norwegian healthcare crisis As a result of a generous welfare system together with major demographic changes and a marked increase in cases of cancer, diabetes, ulcers, skeletal injuries and mental disorders, Norway already spends more on public healthcare person than any other country, and is looking to the technology sector both to improve healthcare services and to contain costs. “A nursing home costs about NOK800,000 (£66,000) person per year,” said Kathrine Mhyre, CEO of Oslo Medtech . “ Recently the Norwegian health minister forecast that by 2030 almost one in four of Norway’s municipalities will have a population of which more than 50% are pensioners in need of care. Reorganising healthcare must be a priority and adopting technology is key to success.” Oslo Medtech is a health technology cluster, dedicated to the development of medtech and e- health products and services for the Norwegian and global healthcare markets. As one of Norway’s largest technology clusters, Oslo Medtech has more than 190 members including such major names as DNB, Siemens, Microsoft and Sintef. Its initiatives range from an startup incubator in Oslo to a focus on gamification within healthcare. “ Health technology was the most profitable industry in 2015,” said Mhyre. “As the demand for health services will continue to increase and put pressure on economies around the world, it’s an obvious area for the Norwegian government to focus on.” 2016-02-24 00:00:00 Karl Flinders

55 Spotify to move datacentre workloads to Google’s cloud Spotify is to shift its IT infrastructure to and wind down its reliance on private datacentres to keep up with the growing demand for its music streaming services. The music service is reportedly used by around by 75 million active users in 58 countries. Spotify lets users stream and listen to songs through mobile devices, desktop PCs and gaming consoles. In a blog post outlining the move , Nicholas Harteau, vice president of engineering and infrastructure at Spotify, said the company had previously bought or leased datacentre space to provide users with local access to the 30 million songs in its catalogue. However, as the Spotify user base has grown, meeting the growing demand for its services through datacentres has proven difficult, prompting the company to rethink its stance on cloud. “Operating our own datacentres may be a pain, but the core cloud services were not at a level of quality, performance and cost that would make cloud a significantly better option for Spotify in the long run,” said Harteau. “Recently that balance has shifted. The storage, compute and network services available from cloud providers are as high quality, high performance and low cost as what the traditional approach provides. This makes the move to the cloud a no-brainer for us.” The company has decided to shift its infrastructure onto Google Cloud Platform, with Harteau talking up the range of services Spotify will have access to from a data processing and analytics perspective. For instance, having access to Google’s BigQuery and Cloud Dataproc tools will let Spotify run complex data queries in minutes, rather than hours, to support its product development activities. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 Caroline Donnelly

56 Hertz division chooses Cognizant to support IoT plans HERC, the equipment rental division of Hertz, has outsourced its digital transformation to IT services firm Cognizant in a deal that will see internet of things (IoT) technology implemented. Cognizant will update the division’s core business applications to integrate digital capabilities, including mobile interfaces for field technicians to improve efficiency and productivity, as well as digital services for customers enabled by telematics. The equipment rental division is a unit of Hertz Global Holdings, and operates in more than 20 countries. It supplies equipment such as tools for rent, including aerial lifts, earthmoving equipment, forklifts and power generators. The company’s main customers are in sectors such as the transportation, industrial and manufacturing, construction, oil and gas, and mining. Once implemented, the IoT strategy will enable Hertz to automate things such as equipment location tracking, usage monitoring and maintenance scheduling. “Cognizant has long been a valued partner to HERC, so it is natural that we turn to them as we innovate with new technologies, and look to enhance our operational efficiencies,” said Rich Marani, CIO at HERC. The internet of things is affecting corporate business models as deployment costs and other barriers to entry continue to drop, according to analysts at Gartner. The analyst company said that by 2020 over 50% of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the IoT. But companies need support implementing IoT strategies. According to Gartner, three-quarters of IoT projects will overrun through 2018, possibly by as much as the full length of the original project schedule, and more ambitious and complex projects are liable to run longer. As a result some IoT deployments will develop significant weaknesses in performance, security and integration into existing processes. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 Karl Flinders

57 Ministry of Defence collaboration contract goes to G-Cloud SME Inovem The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has made good on its pledge to increase its use of commercially available, commodity cloud services through the roll-out of Inovem’s off-premise collaboration platform Defence Share, procured via G-Cloud. The MoD’s Information Systems and Services (ISS) division is rolling out the cloud-based collaboration technology, which has already been widely adopted within other parts of government. Based on UK SME Inovem’s flagship online workspace product Kahootz , Defence Share will let MoD staff store and share “official-sensitive” classified data with other government departments, third-party commercial organisations and allied nations via private and public internet networks. Speaking to Computer Weekly, Inovem managing director Peter Jackson said the deployment marks a change in procurement strategy for the MoD, which has previously favoured the use of costly and bespoke products for its collaboration needs. This time around, before embarking on a series of free product trials, the MoD drew up a shortlist of suppliers that list their products on the government’s Digital Marketplace platform. “They whittled down the list and eventually chose us, but we did not actually meet with the team at the MoD until after the contract had been awarded,” said Jackson. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 Caroline Donnelly

58 GE lures allies for Predix industrial internet dominance Global manufacturer GE has used Mobile Wold Congress to flesh out Predix, its industrial internet analytics platform, with the launch of a partner programme bringing on board major system integrators and consultancy firms. The programme represents the first step in GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s strategy to turn GE Digital, the company’s software arm, into a top 10 software business by 2020. Hitting this goal depends on establishing Predix as a major analytics platform for industrial applications. As Computer Weekly has previously reported, GE Digital developed Predix internally and it is now being used across the company’s business operations. The partner programme, called the GE Digital Alliance Program, aims to build a digital industrial ecosystem across global systems integrators (SIs), independent software suppliers, telecoms service providers and technology providers. The programme offers participants access to sales, marketing and technical resources from across GE Digital, as well as digital tools, training and enablement, online content and assets, Predix certification, developer sandboxes and joint deal registration. There are also specific benefits based on contribution level, according to GE Digital. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 Cliff Saran

59 Citi’s corporate clients do $1tn in mobile banking Business customers of Citi bank have done more than $1tn in transactions using mobile since the bank launched its mobile banking service for corporates five years ago. The Citi service for financial departments has allowed them to use mobiles to process payments, authorise trades, monitor global cash positions and payment status, and receive real-time notifications. In 2013 the bank launched a tablet version of the service. With $1tn of corporate client transactions completed using CitiDirect BE Mobile and BE Tablet , part of Citi’s online banking service, individuals are clearly no longer alone in taking advantage of mobile banking. Naveed Sultan, global head of Citi’s treasury and trade solutions (TTS) business, said: “As mobile technology and business demands rapidly evolve, TTS has met changing client needs with agility, and we continue to drive innovation and deliver services to enable our clients’ success worldwide.” The software was developed in Citi’s Innovation Lab in Dublin. “We are proud of the tremendous growth in mobile usage by our institutional clients and crossing this milestone in transaction value,” said Mike Whitaker, global head of institutional clients, group operations and technology, at Citi. “As new technologies emerge, we look forward to continuing to deliver value-add innovation for our clients.” With demand from people to use the same technology at work as they do at home, corporate banking is likely to become an increasingly mobile activity, as it has in the retail banking sector. According to a recent study, mobile services are helping retail banks retain customers and glean more revenue from them. Banking software company Fiserv carried out a year-long study of 17 finance companies to work out the return on their mobile investments. The research covered 67,000 mobile banking users and found that customers who made use of mobile banking are more likely to take up more of the products offered by their bank – an average of 2.3 compared with 1.3 for people who only use the branch. The study also revealed that mobile banking users generate more revenue for banks than customers who don’t use mobile banking. Banks made 72% more revenue from mobile users than from branch-only customers, according to the report. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 Karl Flinders

60 60 Daily API RoundUp: Switch Payments, NASA, SafetyCulture, Druid, Unbabel, Market Prophit, Knurld Every day, the ProgrammableWeb team is busy, updating its three primary directories for APIs , clients (language-specific libraries or SDKs for consuming or providing APIs), and source code samples. If you have new APIs, clients, or source code examples to add to ProgrammableWeb’s directories, we offer forms ( APIs , Clients , Source Code ) for submitting them to our API research team. If there’s a listing in one of our directories that you’d like to claim as the owner, please contact us at [email protected] . We've added 19 APIs to the ProgrammableWeb directory in categories including Images, Payments, Safety, and Translation. Featured today are several APIs for the Knurld voice recognition platform. Here's a rundown of the latest additions. APIs Switch Payments is an integrated payment platform. The Switch Payments API allows users to accept payments from 200 different Alternative Payment Methods (APM) from anywhere in the world. Users can create, authorize or refund payments, plus much more. This API is listed under the Payments category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Payments APIs. LibPixel is "Image Processing-as-a-Service" which allows for adjusting, resizing, and editing images online. The LibPixel Image REST API allows developers to access and integrate the service with third party apps, post images, edit images, and resize images. The API is listed under the Images category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Images APIs. SafetyCulture is a workplace safety inspection service. The SafteyCulture API gives users access to their SafteyCulture data including audits, images, and media. API access requires a premium plan obtained through SafetyCulture. We've listed this API under the Safety category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Safety APIs. Customize workplace safety applications with SafetyCulture API / image: SafetyCulture.io Druid is an open-sourced data repository for customizable analytics and data solutions. The Druid REST API allows developers to query data by various specifications, retrieve data sets, and integrate data sets. We've listed the Druid API in the Data category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Data APIs. LIKE WHAT YOU SEE? GET THESE UPDATES AND OTHER API NEWS DELIVERED DAILY TO YOUR INBOX. REGISTER FOR THE PROGRAMMABLEWEB TODAY NEWSLETTER. Unbabel is an online translation service that translates content into other languages. The Unbabel REST API allows developers to manage languages, retrieve topics and reports, post word counts and reports, and more. This API is under the Translation category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Translation APIs. Integrate Unbabel translation services directly into code via their Translation API / image: Unbabel Chimp Rewriter is a content creation service that produces SEO online content through natural language processing. The Chimp Rewriter REST API allows developers to integrate, retrieve, search and post data and content. The Chimp Rewriter API is listed under the Writing category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Writing APIs. Market Prophit compiles sentiment data from financial pundits, bloggers, tweets, etc. and creates ranking and scores for financial trading guidance. The Market Prophit API gives developers access to Marke Prophit's database. This API is listed under the Stocks category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Stocks APIs. MarketProphit Developer Center screenshot / image: MarketProphit ProofPoint's IQRisk Query API is useful for security management. The IQRisk API gives users access to ProofPoint's database of reputable domains and IPs as well as information on over 100 million malware samples. We've listed this API in the Security category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Security APIs. SpringRoll is an online education module and media manager. The SpringRoll REST API provides methods for creating and managing modules, uploading media, and retrieving players, modules, and media. The SpringRoll API is listed under the Education category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Education APIs. NASA 's Asterank API gives users access to the NASA/JPL Small Body Database and other relevant astronomical data. Data includes orbital elements, discovery, mass, and orbit diagrams on over 600K asteroids, meteorites, and comets. The Asterank API is listed under the Astronomy category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Astronomy APIs. Click here for an interactive 3D view of Asterank NASA/JPL Small Body Database Also from NASA , the Earth API gives users access to Earth observation data. The API is powered by the Engine and consists of a database of images from Landsat 8. Landsat 8 is NASA satellite that takes images of the entire Earth every 16 days. Query the image database with the API. This API is listed under the Mapping category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Mapping APIs. Related: How Hackers Crack Supposedly Secure and Private APIs Knurld.io offers a set of APIs for developers to incorporate voice authentication into their applications. The technology is able to recognize and identify a speaker's voice and provide authentication for application and device use based on voice biometrics. The APIs are as follows: Knurld Application Model API allows developers to create custom enrollment and verification schemes to fit their needs. Knurld Enrollment API allows developers to associate a consumer with an application model. After enrollment is completed, the consumer will be able to verify their identity by speaking the phrase used during enrollment. Knurld Analysis API analyzes an audio wavefile to automatically find speech endpoints for the purpose of enrollment or verification. Knurld Session API allows an end user (consumer) to be logged into the voice verification system for enrollment and verification of voice prints. Knurld OAuth API allows developers to get OAuth2 Access Token using client id and client secret. Knurld Status API is used for retrieving service status. Knurld Call API provides developers an optional tool that can be used record audio for enrollments and verifications. By providing a valid phone number, users can transform any telephone into a temporary microphone and send recorded audio directly to the system. This recorded audio can be downloaded through the API or sent directly to an enrollment or verification. Knurld Consumer APIs let developers manage the consumer resource. Knurld APIS are listed under the Voice category. See ProgrammableWeb 's complete list of Voice APIs. Intellisis's Bryan Chaney demonstrates A PIN pad adapted for speech biometrics using Knurld.io technology / image: YouTube/Knurld.io 2016-02-24 00:00:00 By Joy Culbertson , PW Staff

61 Facebook Releases Python Ads API SDK Docs Facebook has released the first version of its docs for the Python Ads API SDK. To maintain technical accuracy, Facebook generated the docs directly from the SDK. Accordingly, developers are able to easily follow code changes that may affect an application integrated with the API. Related: Facebook Intros Recommendations API for Advertisers The documentation follows the classes within the Python SDK. For instance, the Campaign class within the SDK corresponds to the Campaign doc within the documentation. Each doc contains Fields (Fields available within a queried class), Methods (list of all Methods associated with a class), and Codes Samples (sample code that shows developers how to use the method). To get started, visit the SDK docs. The latest Python SDK version can always be found on GitHub. While the PHP Ads API SDK remains on the roadmap, Facebook has not announced a specific release date. Facebook always encourages feedback from its developer community. For those who wish to participate, visit the Facebook Marketing Dev Community. 2016-02-24 00:00:00 By Eric Carter , PW Staff

62 Google speeds news to smartphones, challenging Facebook The (AMP) project that was announced late last year is now live, Google said. Challenging Facebook with its Instant Articles and the Apple News application, Google is using its massive computing power to enable mobile device users to load articles quickly, without the delay on many websites. AMP was said to load mobile Web pages an average of four times faster than the current norm, and use 10 times less data. "We want the mobile Web to live up to its potential—to make it great for everyone, so they can quickly and easily get to the high-quality journalism you are producing," Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said in a speech in Paris announcing the launch. "This is a priority project for Google and for me. " AMP lets websites build light-weight versions of pages that can load "instantaneously" on mobile devices , according to Pichai. He cited research indicating that people typically abandoned mobile Web pages if they take more than a few seconds to appear. "Now when you search for a story or topic on Google from a mobile device, webpages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the top stories section of the search results page," Google said in a blog post. "Any story you choose to read will load blazingly fast—and it's easy to scroll through the article without it taking forever to load or jumping all around as you read. " The technology launched with hundreds of partners, including Les Echos, TF1, Ouest France, and Vingt Minutes in France, Pichai said. Other partners previously signed up include the New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Guardian and Wall Street Journal. The move by Google to speed up mobile Internet gratification came as Silicon Valley rival Facebook works to expand its "Instant Articles" program launched last year. Facebook in December said that it had signed up 350 global media partners for its service tailored for Apple and Android devices. The service allows users to quickly view news articles which are hosted on the fast network of the world's biggest social network. Facebook says the articles are loaded for viewing 10 times faster than on standard connections. Apple also has moved to become a hub for news with its Apple News application launched last year. The projects have attracted many news organizations eager to get more readers through the news hubs as well as advertising revenues. Pichai said that "cares deeply about journalism—yes, because of the crucial role it plays in democratic society, ensuring the spread of knowledge and the free flow of information. " Shield against hackers Pichai also introduced "Project Shield," a project designed to protect publishers from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that essentially overwhelm websites with simultaneous requests for pages. The technology "lets Google intercept bad traffic before it reaches your server, providing a 'shield' against would-be attackers," according to the Internet giant. "I am happy to announce today that we will be offering Project Shield to all the world's independent news organizations. For free," Pichai said. "We hope that in the future even the smallest news organizations will be able to report the news without the fear of being taken down by digital attacks. " Explore further: Washington Post all-in for Facebook Instant Articles 2016-02-24 00:00:00 phys.org

63 Google funds 128 news projects in Europe Agence France-Presse is one of the organisations selected, for its platform of interactive graphics developed for users of AFP web and mobile media formats around the world. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai announced the latest funding in a speech in Paris. Google, which has been reorganised as a unit of the holding company Alphabet, had previously announced it was setting aside 150 million euros to help European news outfits in new projects that help them adapt to the digital landscape. "We are committed to ongoing discussion between the tech and news sectors," Pichai said in his remarks at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po. "To promote innovation in digital journalism. And play our part in building a more sustainable news ecosystem. " The funds offered by Google aim to "stimulate innovation in digital journalism " and will be spread out over the coming three years, he said. "The aim is to spark new thinking, which could come from anywhere, to give news organisations of all sizes the space to try new things and get projects off the drawing board and into production," Pichai said. "But let me be clear: participating in the Digital News Initiative is not about buying into Google's worldview. It is about discussion, debate, and getting things done together. It's open to everyone involved in news in Europe. " Pichai said the funds would go to a range of organisations "from small startups to large, established news players" and include projects "ranging from automated content personalisation and robot journalism, to hoax busting apps and tools to verify social media in real-time reporting. " The AFP project includes "high-quality, news -orientated graphics (which) deal with all the latest current events, economic issues, politics and sport," an AFP statement said. The graphics will be produced in all six of AFP's working languages, hosted by AFP, and integrated across digital platforms in a responsive manner. The project involves creating interactive graphic units, establishing an infrastructure for production and translation, and a beta platform to demonstrate and deliver the product to clients Explore further: Google donation to fund digital journalism innovation 2016-02-24 00:00:00 phys.org

64 Africa's first music download service launches in Senegal Internationally famous musicians such as Youssou Ndour and Baaba Maal are among almost 200 who have signed agreements with "MusikBi", along with younger rappers, jazz artists and Christian and Muslim vocalists. The platform draws its name from the word for music in Wolof, the language widely spoken in Senegal and neighbouring Gambia, said project developer Moustapha Diop at the launch in Dakar. Songs cost between 300 and 500 FCFA (50-85 US cents) and users can download them using mobile phone credit in a region where few have bank cards . "It is the first platform of its kind enabling music downloads by text or PayPal," said a statement released by Diop's company, Solid. Solid noted that many African music artists "cannot live comfortably by the proceeds of their work", adding the platform offered a chance for "promotion and to allow them to make a living from their art. " Concerts were one of the few ways local artists had to really make money, the firm noted. Piracy and changing consumer habits have seen record sales drop across the continent, with illegal downloads tempting African consumers looking online for music while copyright enforcement remains relatively weak. A source within the Solid group told AFP that after mobile operators took their share, artists kept 60 percent of their income from the service, while MusikBi took the remaining 40 percent. MusikBi does not offer a streaming service as local internet speeds are prohibitive for the format, especially in a mobile-driven market. Explore further: Pete Townshend brands iTunes a 'digital vampire' 2016-02-24 00:00:00 phys.org

65 Git 2.7.2 Open-Source Distributed Version Control System Adds New Features | Linux.com The development team of the best free, open-source and cross-platform distributed version control system, Git, which is being used by numerous developers worldwide, have announced the release of Git 2.7.2. Git 2.7.2 is the second maintenance release in the stable Git 2.7 series. According to the release notes, which we've also attached at the end of the article for reference, it implements various new features to some of the commands, as well as fixes a few bugs reported by users since the previous point release. 2016-02-23 22:55:00 Softpedia

66 Java finally gets microservices tools Lightbend, formerly known as Typesafe, is bringing microservices-based architectures to Java with its Lagom platform. Due in early March, Lagom is a microservices framework that lightens the burden of developing these microservices in Java. Built on the Scala functional language , open source Lagom acts as a development environment for managing microservices. APIs initially are provided for Java services, with Scala to follow. The framework features Lightbend's Akka middleware technologies as well as its ConductR microservices deployment tool and Play Web framework. Applications are deployed to Lightbend's commercial Reactive platform for message-driven applications or via open source Akka. Lightbend sees microservices as loosely coupled, isolated, single-responsibility services, each owning its own data and easily composed into larger systems. Lagom provides for asynchronous communications and event-sourcing, which is storing the event leading up to particular states in an event, company officials said. Analyst James Governor of RedMonk sees an opportunity for Lagom. "The Java community needs good tools for creating and managing microservices architectures," he said. "Lagom is squarely aimed at that space. " Lagom would compete with the Spring Boot application platform in some areas, according to Governor. "It is early days for Lagom, but the design points make sense," he noted. Typesafe was focused on Scala, which was adopted in some industries, such as financial services, but never became mainstream, he argues. "So [the company now] is looking to take its experiences and tooling and make them more generally applicable with a Java-first strategy. " More about Built Scala 2016-02-23 21:53:00 Paul Krill

67 ANALYSIS-Cyber security startups face funding drought SAN FRANCISCO/BOSTON, Feb 23 (Reuters) - The U. S. cyber security industry, once one of the hottest targets for venture capitalists, is now grappling with a funding slump that has forced some startups to sell themselves or cut spending. Amid widespread concerns about cyber attacks and data breaches, hundreds of security startups have sprung up in recent years, promising "next-generation" technologies to fight cyber criminals, government spies and hacker activists. But many of the new ventures have struggled to gain traction, finding it difficult to stand out from the crowd and provide customers with sophisticated enough security solutions to match the increasingly advanced cyber attacks they face. "Investors are looking at balance sheets and saying, 'You raised $100 million and you have nothing to show for it? "' said Promod Haque, senior managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, which manages about $6 billion in capital. Private investors pumped a record $3.3 billion into 229 cyber security deals last year, according to data from CB Insights. Venture capitalists, dealmakers and entrepreneurs said funding is drying up for all but the most mature cyber startups with substantial sales. "Almost every other company I knew who was on the road raising money at the same time had to pull their rounds back and were not able to close," said Michael DeCesare, chief executive of ForeScout Technologies Inc, a network security firm. ForeScout reported more than $125 million in 2015 revenue and finalized a $76 million financing round last month. Other deals this year include $96 million in funding for risk analytics firm Skybox Security Inc, and Fidelity Investments' $50 million investment in anti-virus software maker Malwarebytes. It now takes six to eight months to close deals, up from about three to four months a couple years ago, said Sean Cunningham, managing director at Trident Capital Cybersecurity. The founder of a cyber startup that raised money two years ago said he sought additional financing for several months but then gave up. The firm, which did not want to be identified, cut spending and plans to seek financing again in about six months. Other startups are looking for buyers. A dealmaker at a large security company, who declined to be identified, said the number of incoming inquiries from businesses looking to sell themselves is up 40 percent this year, compared to the same time in 2015. Last month, iSight Partners - which has uncovered major cyber campaigns from Iran, Russia and other nations - sold itself to FireEye Inc for $200 million in cash plus another $75 million in cash and stock if it meets certain sales targets. Last August, iSight Chief Executive John Watters told Reuters he planned to take the company public in 2016 at a valuation of at least $1 billion. After the FireEye deal was announced, Watters said his plan changed because market conditions shifted, making it more difficult to raise capital to remain independent. FireEye CEO Dave DeWalt said the tough funding environment would spawn more deals. FireEye also bought tiny security software maker Invotas for $30 million last month. The value of cyber M&A activity more than doubled last year to $26.8 billion from $10.3 billion in 2014, according to data from consulting firm EY. The number of deals increased 46 percent to 287. 'INDISCRIMINATE CAPITAL' Cyber stocks had rallied in 2013 and 2014 on expectations the industry would benefit from a seemingly endless streak of headline-grabbing cyber attacks. Private investors, seeing the opportunity, piled onto startups. "You had a lot of indiscriminate capital that came into the space," said Bob Ackerman, founder of Allegis Capital and a longtime security expert. The boom in cyber investing showed signs of faltering last year as earnings of publicly traded cyber companies missed expectations. Too many startups copied technology already on the market, or products that hackers had figured out how to circumvent. Some highly touted products sold by private companies were found to be "obsolete from the moment they were launched," said David Cowan, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Cyber stocks have since underperformed the broader market. FireEye, which this month warned that growth in cyber spending could slow this year, has fallen 35 percent over the past three months, compared to a 12 percent decline in the Nasdaq Composite Index. Qualys Inc tumbled 38 percent over the same period, while Palo Alto Networks Inc dropped 26 percent and the Pure Funds ISE CyberSecurity ETF fell 21 percent. Robert Thomas, CEO of cloud security firm CloudPassage, which raised $36 million last July, said he expects the funding crunch for startups to last. "I feel fortunate that we got in under the wire and were able to raise (money) for the next two years to carry us through," he said. (Reporting by Heather Somerville in San Francisco and Jim Finkle in Boston; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Tiffany Wu) 2016-02-23 16:16:00-05:00 Heather Somerville and Jim Finkle

68 Food printers and eye writing: tech show's quirkiest gadgets BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — While tens of thousands flock to the Mobile World Congress to check out the latest smartphones, the show also offers glimpses of some of the coolest off-beat — and downright strange — innovations. Many of these newfangled prototypes found a niche at the trade show's special corner for start- ups, which gathered here to find business deals for their inventions. Here is a look at the quirkiest of the gadgets and apps on display this week in Barcelona. MAGIC DRAWINGS Remember pop-up books? Chromville takes the idea to another dimension with its augmented reality educational app. Here is how it works: Kids download and print pages with designs that they color in as they wish. Next, they hold a tablet over the page and, via the Chromville app, the drawing turns into a 3-D image they can interact with through the screen. The one on the solar system, for example, lets kids explore the planets, zoom in and out, and learn facts. Other modules teach about the human body, the metamorphosis of a frog, simple geography, or how to build a machine. "It is something like magic. We have to play and enjoy education," said Hector Perez, CEO of the company from Zaragoza, Spain. As of December, a one-time fee of 3.99 euros ($4.39) gives customers the app and access to drawings. FOOD PRINTER Natural Machines co-founder Lynette Kucsma insists her company hasn't replicated Star Trek's "food synthesizer" that made munchies appear at Captain Kirk's mere command. But they sure have come close with their 3-D food printer. The Foodini lays down layer after layer of food from nozzles, ultimately creating treats like ravioli, crackers, or chicken nuggets. The company says you can even make more complex items like hamburgers, though it's not clear what they would look like coming through nozzles. "You become the food manufacturer," Kucsma said, adding that the Foodini would allow cooks to use more natural ingredients to make healthier food instead of buying prepared foodstuffs with added preservatives. The Foodini can also link up with other connected devices. "You can print recipes from a chef who is halfway around the world," Kucsma said. The Barcelona-based company is launching the Foodini with the target of professional chefs to meet the $1,500-2,000 price tag. They plan to later expand to regular customers. "In 10 to 15 years we think 3-D food printers will be as common in kitchens as microwaves," Kucsma said. EYE WRITING We can write with our touch. We can write with our voice. Irisbond is making it easier to write with our sight. Their eye-tracking app, which can work with standard smartphone cameras, allows you to type on a computer. Co-founder and CEO Eduardo Jauregui said the app is designed for disabled users. "They can send emails or write books with their eyes. It changes their lives completely," Jauregui said. But it could also be helpful for professionals, like surgeons, who may have limited use of their hands during work. Irisbond allows users to control a mouse pointer on a virtual keyboard of a smartphone or tablet. Stare for one second over a letter to "push" the button and type. Jauregui said his company based in San Sebastian, Spain, is in talks with smartphone makers, including Samsung, to be acquired. PAPER PROGRAMMING Take paper art, a little round robot, throw in some low-level coding, and, voila! You have the Kamibot, an interactive toy that helps children have fun while learning computer programming. Aimed at kids as young as eight, the Kamibot robot can be covered with paper-made "skins" to turn it into a variety of characters, including Dracula, Frankenstein, and several popular figures in Korea. An app controls the robot's movement, and teaches users how to program routes for the robot to follow. Head of design Asaph Kim said "the idea was making programming fun through characters (children) have seen on TV. " Still at the kick-starter phase, the Korean company 3.14 is hoping to ship its first Kamibots in June. Pre-orders go for $89. PACK ROBOTS One gadget that caused a big stir as it moseyed through the aisles of the trade show was Starship's delivery robot. Don't let the company's name fool you. The tub-sized robot on rollers won't blast you away, but it just might make home delivery more convenient as it creeps its way down the sidewalk. Co-founder Janus Friis, one of the creators of Skype, had the idea to create a fleet of wheeled robots that would work with stores making deliveries from hubs that cover neighborhoods. Keith Cornell, Starship's senior advisor, said customers would gain from being able to decide exactly when they receive their packages, while stores will reduce costs. To ensure the robot doesn't cause mayhem on the street, its max speed is a slow 4 mph and it includes sensors that force it to stop when facing an obstacle. If stuck, it can be taken over remotely by an operator. Customers will use an app to program the drop-offs and unlock the robot once it arrives to retrieve their goods. It can carry up to 20 pounds of stuff. Still in testing phase, these modern-day pack mules are expected to be deployed in 2017. 2016-02-23 13:41:00-05:00 By JOSEPH WILSON, Associated Press

69 Bill Gates Weighs In On Apple Vs. FBI Encryption Battle The debate between Apple and the FBI has sparked a transformative discussion about how far the government can reach in demanding access to information stored on consumer devices. The FBI is trying to access information stored on the iPhone 5c of Syed Farook, one of two suspects killed by police after he and his wife carried out the Dec. 14 San Bernardino terrorist attacks. Apple has been ordered to create a version of iOS designed to bypass security so the FBI can brute-force the passcode and unlock it. Apple has denied the requests. In a letter to the public , CEO Tim Cook explained how such a version of iOS would be akin to a master key, which could be used to unlock any iPhone once it is created. He claims this "backdoor" is something Apple considers "too dangerous to create. " [FAQ: What you need to know about the Apple vs. FBI debate.] Leaders across Silicon Valley have voiced their support for Apple's decision to oppose the court order. However, one notable figure has so far remained silent. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has begun to jump into the discussion. Gates claims it is "worth having a debate" about the FBI's request, but ultimately the government should be able to access information to learn more about terrorist threats. "I think we expect governments to find out everything they can about terrorism," he said in an interview with the BBC. "Particularly when the threat [is] not just of conventional terrorism, but of nuclear and biological terrorism. "Should government be able to access information at all, or should they be blind? " he continued. "That's essentially what we're talking about. " In a separate conversation with the Financial Times (subscription required), Gates stated how government access to the iPhone shouldn't be considered "some special thing," but similar to requests for phone company information or bank records. "Nobody's talking about a backdoor," he said in the interview, going against Cook's rhetoric. "This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They are not asking for some general thing; they are asking for a particular case. " Gates claims Apple has access to the information but is refusing to give it. The courts will ultimately decide whether Apple has to provide the data in question, he continued. Does this mean Gates has officially sided with the government in this situation? Not necessarily. In an interview with Bloomberg TV , he claimed he was "disappointed" by myriad reports stating he was backing the FBI. "That doesn't state my view on this," he said. Gates noted how government access to information is valuable "with the right safeguards," especially for stopping terrorism. However, it's important to strike a balance between government knowledge and consumer privacy. "Clearly the government has taken information historically and used it in ways we didn't expect," he said. "I'm hoping now we can have the discussion. I do believe there are sets of safeguards where the government shouldn't have to be completely blind. " What does this mean for the Apple vs. FBI case? "The courts are going to decide," he replied, repeating his answer to the Financial Times. Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has not openly voiced his opinion, but it has been implied he sides with Cook and the majority of the tech industry. The Financial Times reports a Microsoft spokesperson pointed to a statement from Reform Government Surveillance (RGS), which rejects the FBI's demand. While it acknowledges the importance of deterring terrorists, the RGS states "technology companies should not be required to build in backdoors to the technologies that keep their users' information secure. " Microsoft is a member of the organization. It appears consumers tend to disagree with Silicon Valley on the matter. Pew Research , which conducted a survey among 1,002 adults, discovered 51% believe Apple should unlock Farook's iPhone and 38% disagree. Are you an IT Hero? Do you know someone who is? Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's IT Hero Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-23 13:06:00 Kelly Sheridan

70 Docker Launches End-To-End Container Management Docker is trying to get out of the spot development business and into managing containerized enterprise applications throughout their lifecycles. On Tuesday, Feb. 23, it released what it has dubbed Docker Datacenter , a platform for managing a container from its conception through production deployment. Docker Datacenter can be viewed as both a pipeline through which a container may pass from inception to end of life in production, as well as a way to establish the container-as-a-service, an automated way to manage containers for maximum ease-of-use. "Three years ago, as Docker was adopted by developers, IT operations managers started saying, 'Wow, how are we going to manage all these containers, keep them running, and offer SLAs?'" recalled Scott Johnston, Docker senior VP of product management. "We started a suite of tools that didn't slow developers down but allowed IT operations teams to manage containers. " Docker Datacenter is the first release of that toolset, consisting of a Docker Universal Control Plane -- a set of tools for managing container life cycles in a new graphical user interface -- working with the existing Docker Trusted Registry. Trusted Registry is a product that stores containers securely and applies Active Directory or directory privileges to their use. Support for the Docker Engine, the formatting system that builds containers for applications, is built into the new Datacenter product. [Want to see how Docker has approached security? Read Docker Tightens Security Over Container Vulnerabilities .] One way Docker Datacenter is distinguished from the open source versions of Docker is that the open source version relies on the command line to run the platform. Datacenter gives the less programmatically oriented operations staff a simpler approach. Docker Datacenter has been in beta for the past six months, with 12 members of the Fortune 500 converting from early, unsupported adopters to paying customers as of Feb. 23, said Johnston in an interview. Among those cited were payroll processing company ADP, which processes one out of every six pay stubs for workers in the US, and large Dutch bank ING. ING went from needing nine months to implement a major change in its infrastructure software "to needing only a matter of hours, a breakthrough change," Johnston claimed. Docker Datacenter provides container-as-a-service for the enterprise data center by giving developers the ability to store their new applications in Trusted Registry, build new containers with Docker Engine, and move the containers to operations for deployment through Docker Swarm, its management software for placing containers on a cluster. Although these pieces have existed in the past, they can now function in a more automated fashion through the GUI and "tight integration" between them in Datacenter, Johnston said. In a similar fashion, he said, developers can self-provision themselves with the containers they need and store them for movement into operations, without waiting for decisions or assistance for IT. The breaking down of monolithic applications into sets of containerized services allows each service to be staged and tested before deployment without risking bringing down the whole application. Access control to the code can be provided for on-premises deployments, whether they're about to run on bare metal servers, in a virtual machine, or in a cloud deployment. The management features work for workloads sent to Amazon Web Services or an OpenStack cloud, said Johnston. Docker will be supported in Windows Server 2016 later this year, opening the possibility of future support for Datacenter on the Azure cloud, he noted. The Datacenter management characteristics that work for Fortune 500 members can also be effectively implemented by midsize and smaller companies as well. Johnston cited Healthdirect Australia and SA Home Loans as two examples of early implementers. SA Home Loans will use Datacenter to convert large, monolithic Microsoft. Net applications into microservices over the next few months. It is an example of a small shop using Datacenter. It plans to run it on a cluster of four nodes, he said. Does your company offer the most rewarding place to work in IT? Do you know of an organization that stands out from the pack when it comes to how IT workers are treated? Make your voice heard. Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's People's Choice Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-23 11:00:00 Charles Babcock

71 Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge: An Up-Close Look Samsung unveiled its latest flagship mobile phones, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, and a 360-degree camera called the Gear 360 during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on Sunday night. The S7 and S7 Edge don't break new ground , but add some features absent from last year's Galaxy S6. And these features are just what the phones needed. Both are water and dust resistant, like the S5, a definite plus in the event of an inadvertent plunge into a toilet bowl or the more common tabletop spill. And both have expandable storage: The hybrid SIM tray accepts a microSD card that allows up to 200GB of storage beyond the 32GB of internal storage. If you've ever struggled with unreliable AirDrop transfers on iOS, you should be able to appreciate the benefits of removable storage. The battery of the S7 is not removeable, though it offers more capacity than last year's model (3,000 mAh for the Galaxy S7 and 3,600 mAh for the Galaxy S7 Edge, compared to 2,550/2,600 mAh for the S6/S6 Edge). That extra capacity helps support the Super AMOLED always-on display, which keeps basic information like calendar entries, date and time, and notifications onscreen, yet knows enough to turn off when the device is in a confined space like a pocket or purse. [See 8 Must-Have Mobile Tools For Road Warriors .] Being able to see the time without tapping a button on the phone turns out to be surprisingly convenient. But the real standout feature of the S7 is its camera, a dual-, 12-megapixel sensor with optical image stabilization. Though the 12-megapixel sensor has fewer megapixels than the 16- megapixel sensor in the S6, the dual-pixel sensor, paired with an ƒ 1.7 lens, captures 95% more light, Samsung claims. In a test of the camera's low-light capabilities at a Samsung media event earlier this month, the S7 camera produced visibly better low-light images than a "leading competitor," Apple's iPhone 6S. The speed of the S7's auto-focus was also noticeably faster than the iPhone's in low light. The S7 and S7 Edge are, according to Samsung, the first smartphones to support the new Vulkan API , a low-level graphics framework similar in concept to the Metal framework in iOS. When mobile games or apps that utilize the API become available, they should perform quite well. Pricing for the S7 ranges from $650-$695, depending on the carrier. The S7 Edge costs about $100 more. Under a 30-month contract, the monthly cost ranges from about $23 to $32, depending on the carrier and model. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U. S. Cellular, and Verizon Wireless plan to sell the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge in stores starting March 11, with pre-orders accepted at 8:00 a.m. EST on February 23. Both devices ship with Android 6.0 (Marshmallow). Get a closer look at some key features of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge with pictures taken at a Samsung event for media Monday at the Hotel Vitale in San Francisco. Then let us know what you think in the comments. Which of these features are a deal-maker or deal-breaker for you? What have you done to advance the cause of Women in IT? Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's Women in IT Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-23 07:06:00 Thomas Claburn 1 of 8 1 of 8

72 Mobile App Development Gets Enterprise Friendly Boost The market for enterprise apps is booming. Research and Markets, a consultancy firm, last year predicted that the global enterprise mobile app development services market will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.4% over the period 2014-2019. Gartner said that by the end of 2017, market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations can deliver them. Yet, more than half of mobile app developers bring in less than $500 per month, revenue that puts them below the "app poverty line," according to the Q3 2015 Developer Economics report from research firm Visionmobile. Typically, these developers are chasing the consumer app gold rush that ended years ago. Rather than eking out a revenue stream through in-app purchases and ad revenue from customers trained not to pay for anything, they might do better to consider enterprise app development. "On the enterprise side, people are willing to pay for applications that deliver value," said Ojas Rege, VP of strategy of MobileIron, a mobile device management firm. Yet, enterprise app development suffers from complexity, specifically the challenge of integrating enterprise mobile management (EMM) frameworks. "Developers and ISVs face having to integrate multiple SDKs and maintain those applications through upgrades," said Mimi Spier, senior director of marketing and strategy at VMware. [ Never underestimate the human capacity for foolishness. Read 10 Stupid Moves That Threaten Your Company's Security. ] To make life easier for developers and IT administrators, JAMF, IBM, MobileIron, and VMware, each of which offers enterprise mobile management services, on Tuesday plan to propose a standard way to integrate enterprise device management services into mobile apps. "The mission of the community is to provide a common approach to enterprise app configuration and security," said Anar Taori, senior director of product management for IBM MaaS360. The four companies, backed by more than 60 partners, are launching AppConfig ( appconfig.org ), an online community that aims to serve as a resource for enterprise app developers, ISVs, and EMM vendors. Beyond discussion forums and resources detailing best practices, the group is offering developer tools, specifically an XML Schema, that provides a consistent way to configure enterprise apps with the data they need to function. This is not a cross-platform development proposal. Rather it provides a small patch of common ground for developers creating apps for native platforms (iOS, Android, Windows). If an application vendor builds an app to this native app specification, the app can be used across any EMM vendor. "With the AppConfig community tools, developers will not require EMM-specific integrations," said Taori. "The intent is to make it really easy and consistent for developers to use the application configuration frameworks," said Rege. "This allows us to provide a better user experience for admins as well. " Initially, appconfig.org will focus on iOS apps. In 2013, as part of iOS 7, Apple introduced the Managed App Configuration framework, which provides a way to integrate with mobile device management software. The four companies backing appconfig.org see it as a vendor-neutral way to allow developers to build EMM support into their apps. Those using the apps and those administering them should benefit from a more consistent experience. "iOS is really the hub of application development right now in the enterprise," said Rege. But, in time, the initiative will grow to support Android and Windows enterprise features. The AppConfig community is open to "all ISVs and EMMs committed to native approaches," as the group's slide deck puts it. Does your company offer the most rewarding place to work in IT? Do you know of an organization that stands out from the pack when it comes to how IT workers are treated? Make your voice heard. Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's People's Choice Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-23 06:06:00 Thomas Claburn

73 Startup touts four-factor authentication for VIP-level access Startup Trusona is launching what it claims to be a 100 percent accurate authentication scheme aimed at corporate executives, premiere banking customers and IT admins who have unfettered authorization to access the most valued corporate assets. The system uses four-factor authentication to assure that the person logging in is the person they say they are. It requires a dongle that is tied to a set of specific devices (phones, tablets, laptops), certain cards with magnetic stripes that the user already owns, and a biometric ID based on how the card is swiped through the card reader on the dongle. The TruToken dongle is the miniaturization of anti-ATM-card cloning technology made by MagTek that reads not the digital data recorded on cards' magnetic strips but rather the arrangement of the pattern of the barium ferrite particles that make the strips magnetic. The particles are so numerous and so randomly placed that no two strips have identical patterns, says Ori Eisen, Trusona's CEO. That also makes the strips unclonable, he says. In order to use the authentication system, the Trusona app on the user's device connects to Trusona's cloud. The user plugs in the dongle, and if the dongle ID and device ID have been paired, the user is prompted to swipe a card with a magnetic stripe that has also been paired with the user. That can be a credit card, driver's license, library card, etc. The barium ferrite particles must match. The way the card is pulled through the card reader on the TruToken is also a unique identifier, Eisen says. People pull them through at different speeds, at different angles and from different directions in a manner that is readable and unique, he says. If all these factors check out, authentication is confirmed to the server the user is trying to log into. All data is encrypted before it leaves the dongle. The system includes a method to make sure the person associated with the TruToken and the cards is the actual person and not someone who has stolen someone else's phone and credit card before purchasing the app and dongle. After registering and purchasing the device online, it is delivered to the customer's home via the U. S. Postal Service and the mail carrier checks the buyer's passport before turning over the device to make sure the person receiving it is the person who bought it. Eisen says he's still working out the deal with the post office. Alternatively, if a corporation wants to set up accounts for multiple staffers, they can issue the devices to their people in person after confirming their identity in whatever way they see fit. While the barium ferrite and card-swipe readings can help identify the user, they can also prevent attackers from capturing the data from one session and replaying it for a later one, Eisen says. They register a high percentage of matching factors in order to confirm the user, but they are never exactly the same, so if identical attempts occur, that indicates a compromise. For example, with the card swipe, a 60 percent match is enough to confirm the card is authentic. In a demonstration of the technology, the first swipe registered 83 percent and a second swipe of the same card registered 79 percent. A swipe of two legitimate Arizona driver's licenses issued to Eisen registered only a 4 percent match. The system includes a means to derail attempts to physically force a legitimate user to log in, say at gunpoint. Users can register so-called duress cards with the service that, if run through the scanner, signal that the user is being forced to authenticate against their will. The attempt is shut down. In addition to the $99 cost of the dongle, Trusona charges $1 per transaction. Each customer can have three devices, three tokens and three magnetic cards registered to their account. Eisen says the product is aimed at users whose authorizations carry a lot of weight, such as bank customers who are capable of moving thousands or millions of dollars or corporate executives with access to critical data. Founded in 2015, Trusona is the second company founded by Eisen, who used to run fraud detection for American Express, in collaboration with Frank Abagnale, the former con-man and subject of the movie "Catch Me If You Can," who is now a consultant to the FBI on working fraud and identity theft cases. The earlier company, 41 st Parameter, which dealt with fraud prevention, was bought by Experian. The two men worked together to hone the Trusona architecture. Eisen would work out what he thought was a feasible solution, and Abagnale would poke holes in it. Eisen would fix them and Abagnale would try again until they came up with the system. They say they are motivated by helping to stop the crime typically funded by thefts related to identity compromises such as drug dealing, human trafficking and child pornography. "We want to leave a better network to the next generation than the one we got," Eisen says. Trusona is based in Scottsdale, Ariz., and has received an $8 million investment from Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield, and Byers. 2016-02-23 04:36:00-08:00 Tim Greene

74 Oracle snags cloud startup Ravello to aid in battle with AWS, Microsoft Azure Oracle is acquiring cloud startup Ravello in a deal reportedly worth $500 million. "Ravello will join in Oracle's IaaS mission to allow customers to run any type of workload in the cloud, accelerating Oracle's ability to help customers quickly and simply move complex applications to the cloud without costly and time-consuming application rewrites," Ravello's CEO said in a blog post . As a late entrant to the cloud party, Oracle is now battling competitors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure while trying to convince customers to sign up for its own cloud services. Vendors often make acquisition to gain technology they don't already have, but it's also not unusual to buy young companies to "take them off the table" and keep them out of competitors' reach, said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT. Both of those scenarios could explain Oracle's purchase of Ravello, King said. With customers including Arista, Brocade, Red Hat, SUSE and Symantec, "the young company seemed to be doing pretty well on its own," King noted. As part of Oracle, its offerings should "fit well within and help to extend Oracle's cloud solutions and services," he added. "But it's also likely that Ravello would have complemented the cloud efforts of other enterprise- focused vendors, including IBM and HP," King said. "For the modest reported sum of $500 million, Oracle has ensured that it will be the sole benefactor of Ravello's innovations. " 2016-02-23 04:08:00-08:00 Katherine Noyes

75 IBM says its new software links all your IT to the cloud The digital-transformation imperative looms large in the business world, but it's not always clear how on-premises software and data fit into the picture. IBM says it can help. The company on Monday announced a new series of “connect” tools for IBM Cloud that are designed to make it easier for companies to extend existing IT investments to the cloud. "There are billions of dollars of investment and install-days in IT that will not and should not disappear," said Jim Comfort, CTO and general manager for architecture with IBM Cloud. "But we must make it easier to make it more relevant in the cloud. " A key piece of the offering is WebSphere connect, which extends IBM's longstanding WebSphere middleware to the cloud. With more than 200 million global instances, WebSphere boasts the largest population of Java developers of any platform, IBM says. Now, those developers can connect their apps to the cloud more easily. The tool also extends WebSphere access to a whole new community of Node.js and Swift developers. From now on, all WebSphere customers will access new feature updates via the cloud, IBM said. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are a big part of IBM's integration effort, and that's the focus of API connect, another piece of its new suite. API connect aims to let any client publish its IT as an API, making it easy to find, call and connect over the cloud. It also enables the automated creation of APIs and provides built-in security and governance, IBM said. App connect is a new software-as-a-service offering that provides hundreds of pre-built connectors to cloud and on-premise applications, with a focus on making life easier for line-of- business professionals. Targeting analysts, developers, data scientists and data engineers, meanwhile, DataWorks is a service based on Apache Spark that makes it possible to prepare and move data from on- premises or off-premises sources to an analytics cloud ecosystem for analysis and visualization. Message connect is a new BlueMix service that links IBM's Message Hub portfolio to the BlueMix Message Hub for connectivity to open message formats like Apache Kafka , while z/OS connect creates APIs and RESTful interfaces for apps running on IBM z Systems. DB2 Connect focuses on helping companies connect developer tools, desktops, mobile devices, application server software and applications directly to their mainframe DB2 data. Finally, WebSphere Blockchain connect is a new service available to all WebSphere customers that provides a "safe and encrypted passage" from a blockchain in the cloud back to the enterprise, IBM said. The new z/OS connect tool is available now. WebSphere connect will be delivered in the first quarter of this year, followed by the remaining connect offerings in the second quarter. Overall, the goal is to enable companies to connect to any data, application or transaction system, "unlocking billions in investments and allowing you to move with speed to assemble the parts you need," Comfort said. With similar goals in mind, IBM on Monday also announced a partnership with VMware that will help VMware users extend their existing workloads from on-premises software-defined data centers to the cloud. The two companies will jointly market and sell new offerings for hybrid cloud deployments. Tags IBM More about Apache 2016-02-23 02:53:00 Katherine Noyes

76 Case study: National Rail Enquiries tackles website uptime issues with AWS and SOASTA The National Rail network plays host to around 1.6 billion passenger journeys a year, prompting around 500,000 people on an average day to visit its website for route planning purposes. On days such as Monday 28 October 2013, when large swathes of the UK’s rail network were brought to a halt by the after effects of the St. Jude’s Day storm, it is not uncommon to see visits to the National Rail Enquiries (NRE) site increase dramatically. This is fine, as long as the infrastructure underpinning the site it is equipped to cope with such a large surge in visitors. This turned out not to be the case on 28 October, when winds of up to 99mph lashed some parts of the British Isles. 2016-02-23 00:00:00 Caroline Donnelly

77 Samsung Pay processes $500m in first six months Around five million people have signed up to Samsung’s smartphone payment system, with around $500m spent in the six months since its launch in the US and South Korea. Samsung Pay launched in South Korea in August 2015 and in September 2015 in the US. It is a competitor of Apple Pay, which preceded it with a launch to iPhone users in the US in November 2014. Injong Rhee, head of research and development, software and services at Samsung, said: “We’ve seen significant consumer adoption and we continue to see great momentum. Our aim is to expand Samsung Pay to more locations worlwide. Our customers should expect to see more features in the year to come.” Samsung will make the service available worldwide in 2016, starting with China in March. This will be followed by Australia, Brazil, Singapore, Spain and the UK later in the year. In comparison, Apple said more than one million credit cards were registered the US in the first three days of availability of Apple Pay. In the first month of US availability, Apple Pay was responsible for 1% of digital payments in the US. The service launched in the UK in July 2015. Mobile phone payments could become the main way to pay for things in the UK, with one-third (33%) of Brits believing more payments will be made using smartphones than on credit or debit cards by 2020, according to the Banking Moving Forward study released in 2015 by Experian. The research revealed 67% of the 2,000 UK adults questioned thought cash would decrease in popularity, and 41% predicted a decline in the use of credit and debit cards. 2016-02-23 00:00:00 Karl Flinders

78 4 of the slickest versions of XMBC Kodi is a great way to stream third party content as well as your own, and it comes with a range of add-ons to improve your viewing experience. We've put together a list of our favourite add-ons for Kodi, but if you want to get streaming straight away you can download a Kodi build instead. Simply put, these ready-made versions of Kodi come with popular add-ons already installed, so you can start streaming in an instant. There are loads of builds to choose from, so we've picked out 5 of the best. If you're after a neat stylish build for Kodi, you could do worse than Nemesis. Featuring all your favourite add-ons like CartoonHD ready to go, Nemesis uses a clean, functional interface that runs well on almost anything. Thanks to a three line menu system, it's easy to skip straight to the content or add-ons you want, so you can get streaming as soon as possible. If you're after something fresher looking than your average Kodi build, Evolution could the Kodi build for you. Based on the airy, futuristic Arctic Zephyr skin, Evolution looks great - and is equally agreeable to use. Like most builds, Evolution comes with all of the most popular Kodi add-ons, but focuses on family entertainment, so you can keep the whole family's attention. Kodi is available on a wide range of devices, but it's sometimes sluggish on smaller devices like the Amazon Fire TV Stick. Thankfully there are a range of builds out there tailor-made for your device, and Ray's Fire Stick build does exactly what it sounds like. Although it might not look like the prettiest app, Ray's Fire Stick build gives you everything you'd want from a Kodi installation - and it's quick and repsonsive, too. If you're already an experienced Kodi user, Megamind is ideal. Megamind is not accessible as some builds, but it gives you the most popular add-ons around in every category - and wraps them in a gorgeous, stylized UI. Everything is here; from classic, cult cartoons to paid subscription services and live sport - so it's not hard to find something to watch. 2016-02-23 00:00:00 Comment Now

79 Java 9 to address GTK GUI pains on Linux Plans are afoot to have Java 9 accommodate the GTK 3 GUI toolkit on Linux systems. The move would bring Java current with the latest version of the toolkit and prevent application failure due to mixing of versions. The intention, according to a Java enhancement proposal on openjdk.net, would be to support GTK (GIMP Toolkit) 2 by default, with GTK 3 used when indicated by a system property. Java graphical applications based on JavaFX, Swing, or AWT (Advanced Window Toolkit) would be accommodated under the plan, and existing applications could run on Linux without modification with either GTK 2 or 3. The proposal was sent to the openjfx-dev mailing list by Oracle's Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at the company, which oversees Java's development. Java 9 is expected to be available in March 2017. "There are a number of Java packages that use GTK. These include AWT/Swing, JavaFX, and SWT. SWT has migrated to GTK 3, though there is a system property that can be used to force it to use the older version," the proposal states. "This mixing of packages using different GTK versions causes application failures. " The issue particularly affects applications when using the Eclipse development platform. The proposal also notes that while GTK 2 and 3 are now available by default on Linux distributions, this may not always be the case. Also identified as GTK+, the cross-platform toolkit features widgets and an API and is offered as free software via the GNU Project. It has been used in projects ranging from the Apache OpenOffice office software suite to the Inkscape vector graphics editor to the PyShare image uploader. An alternative to backing both GTK 2 and 3, according to the Java proposal, would be to migrate Java graphics to support only GTK 3, thus reducing efforts required in porting and testing. But this plan could result in a higher number of bugs not detected by testing, require additional effort with the AWT look and feel, and necessitate both or neither of JavaFX/Swing being ported. Such a port also would require more coordination between AWT and Swing. But a former Java official at Sun Microsystems questioned the demand for this improvement to Java. "I've not seen very many Java-based desktop applications on Linux, so not sure how big a market this is addressing,” said Arun Gupta, vice president of developer advocacy at Couchbase and a former member of the Java EE team at Sun. More about Advanced Apache Eclipse Linux OpenOffice Oracle Sun Microsystems Toolkit 2016-02-22 21:53:00 Paul Krill

80 Zuckerberg Hits MWC To Talk Drones, AI, VR BARCELONA – In his keynote address on the opening day of Mobile World Congress here, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered an overview of Facebook's latest project: Bringing Internet access to the unconnected. Zuckerberg also announced a new open source telco project Facebook is undertaking in partnership with Nokia, Intel, and several carriers, and shared his views on the future of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg's plans for delivering Internet access to underserved regions includes a drone and laser beams. Within the year, he said, there could be a solar-powered drone with the wingspan of a Boeing 747 and the weight of a car that's able to remain airborne for three to six months. If stationed over regions that don't have existing connectivity infrastructure, it could offer a fast way to give those populations Internet access, according to Zuckerberg. According to the Connected Society Programme , operated by GSMA, the trade association which hosts Mobile World Congress, 4 billion people around the world are unable to access the Internet today. Zuckerberg expressed his disappointment with the way the wireless industry is focusing on 5G network development. He earned a round of applause when he said building faster connections for rich people was not enough, that the industry needs to "finish our job" and get everyone on the planet connected. [Virtual reality is hot at Mobile World Congress. Read Samsung, LG And HTC Launch VR Offerings At MWC.] Facebook's Internet.org initiative aims to bring "Internet access to the next billion" people in the poorest regions of the world. Connectivity isn't the only challenge facing the unconnected. Some simply can't afford to pay for data plans. With that in mind, the organization offers a service known as "Free Basics by Facebook," which provides a limited free data plan that enables users to experience select apps on basic smartphones. The service is available in 37 countries, according to Internet.org. While this is a way to bring the Internet to millions of people who can't pay for data services, Facebook and the carriers involved in the program control which apps are made available and which are not. Because of this, the Indian government delivered a critical blow to that initiative two weeks ago. It declared the Free Basics service incompatible with the country's net neutrality rules. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, when announcing the decision, said that mobile phone companies should not be allowed to "shape the user's Internet experience" by excluding certain applications from the free data service. In his MWC keynote, Zuckerberg said that, although he disagrees with the Indian government's decision, one thing he has learned so far through work with Internet.org is that "every country is different. " Some solutions work well in some places and not in others, he noted. According to Zuckerberg, Internet.org will continue working in India, but with a different approach, working to lower the price for data services by helping operators reduce the cost of delivering data. Zuckerberg also weighed in on a government issue closer to home: Apple's battle with the US government over whether it should override the operating system features of an iPhone used by one of the shooters involved in last year's mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., so that the FBI can gain access to data on the device. Zuckerberg said he backed Apple CEO Tim Cook's decision to fight a federal order to develop a backdoor into the iPhone in question. "We're sympathetic with Apple on this one. We believe in encryption," he said. While acknowledging his company's responsibility to help fight terrorism, Zuckerberg said, "I don't believe that building backdoors is the right thing to do. " Meanwhile, for its telco project, Facebook is working with Nokia, Intel, and several wireless carriers to create the Telecom Infra Project , an open source hardware and software platform designed to make it easier and faster to build communications networks. It's modeled on the Open Compute concept. According to Zuckerberg, such an undertaking would encourage competition and reduce overall costs of creating a communications network, which could translate into better pricing for consumers. Facebook has saved more than $1 billion with its Open Compute Project , he said. Zuckerberg also made a surprise appearance on the eve of Mobile World Congress Sunday, during a Samsung event. There, he talked about a Samsung-Facebook alliance that would bring 360 streaming video to Samsung's Gear VR. The companies will also work on improved 3D and virtual reality experiences. He expanded on that topic during his keynote, saying that the next thing for social media users will be to "share an immersive experience of moments of your life. " He said he expects to use a 360 camera, such as the new Samsung Gear 360 , to record the first steps of his daughter, who is now three months old. Artificial intelligence is the next frontier, Zuckerberg said, and it is one of his own personal projects. Most AI at this stage is simply pattern recognition, he said, and not something to be alarmed about. But using pattern recognition has already delivered new applications in medicine and security, and will soon enable autonomous driving and simultaneous translation to come to market. Does your company offer the most rewarding place to work in IT? Do you know of an organization that stands out from the pack when it comes to how IT workers are treated? Make your voice heard. Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's People's Choice Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-22 20:06:00 Pablo Valerio

81 Adobe rolls out new enterprise app creation service Adobe has merged two of its app development services into one in an attempt to help businesses easily build professional-looking apps, without requiring a whole lot of coding know-how. The Digital Publishing Solution and Adobe Experience Manager Apps components of the company’s Marketing Cloud services are now under one Adobe Experience Manager Mobile umbrella. Using the new-ish service, teams inside a business can work together to build a snazzy-looking application without requiring a whole lot of code. Experience Manager Mobile is designed to allow a designer to create a rich canvas with which to display content that includes assets from Creative Cloud applications like Photoshop and Illustrator. After that, a marketer can update the app’s content without needing code and the two of them can have the flexibility to call in a developer to create custom code for the resulting app. With the launch of this particular service, developers can also connect those apps to critical business systems like CRM, ERP and product information management software. What’s more, the final product can be published to the Android and iOS app stores, so businesses can distribute the resulting app to the public. It can also be distributed privately as an application binary, for companies that just want to keep it inside the firewall, or share with a select network of partners. Administrators will be able to oversee the applications from a unified dashboard, meaning that IT departments can leave development of these applications to employees, but still be able to keep an eye on and manage them if a problem arises. Companies that are already using Adobe Content Manager Sites and Assets as a content management system can also use those existing tools to help build out applications using Experience Manager Mobile. Apps built with Experience Manager Mobile also integrate with the rest of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, which means that businesses can actually track the usage statistics of their internal applications, just like they would an external app build with other tools. In some ways, it’s similar to what other companies like Microsoft and SkyGiraffe are doing with their respective enterprise app creation platforms. But those products are really aimed at empowering everyday employees to easily create lightweight applications that might not look the best, but let them easily push data from line of business applications out to coworkers’ mobile devices. Experience Manager Mobile is designed to create richer, more full-featured apps, but at the cost of requiring more people with specialized skills get involved with creating the application itself. It’s a trade-off that has benefited companies like Under Armour, which created a virtual catalog application for its sales force using Experience Manager Mobile. Tags MWC 2016 More about Creative Microsoft 2016-02-22 15:54:00 Blair Hanley Frank

82 Popular Linux distro hit by hacked version on official site over the weekend When you download an operating system, you certainly don't expect to be installing an altered version with a backdoor in place, but sadly this is what happened to some folks who downloaded a popular version of Linux over the weekend. To be precise, we are talking about Linux Mint – specifically the 17.3 Cinnamon edition. As the makers of Mint announced in a blog post, what actually happened was a malicious party made a modified version of said OS (containing a backdoor) and hacked the official website to point to this compromised download. The maliciously modified version was available for a time on Saturday (February 20) before the issue was discovered, so if you downloaded and installed Mint from the official site on that day, then you've got a problem (and if this was a machine with business data on, a potentially even bigger problem). If you grabbed another version aside from Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition, then you're fine, and equally if you downloaded from elsewhere other than the official website (say via torrents) then you're also okay. The list of valid signatures is provided in Clem's blog post , and further advice is given on what action to take if you did install this backdoor-laden OS (take the PC offline, reinstall the OS or format the partition, and change any passwords you may have used on the machine). Apparently the compromised ISO was loaded with Tsunami botnet malware. At the time the attack was discovered, Lefebvre said that it was traced to Bulgaria, but the motivation wasn't known. However, ZDNet later spoke to a lone hacker from Europe by the handle of 'Peace' who claimed to be responsible, and said they had successfully compromised a few hundred machines running Mint. The hacker also claimed to have stolen a complete copy of the Mint website's forum on two occasions, containing personal information of users including birthdates, email addresses and passwords (although the latter were encrypted). However, the passwords are in the process of being cracked by all accounts (simple passwords will be particularly susceptible to being brute-forced), so if you're a forum member, you should take action on that front too and change your password (and other instances of that password if you've used it elsewhere – of course, it goes without saying that's very bad security practice). The Mint team was quick to respond to this whole incident, and transparent in dealing with it, although the fallout from the compromise is likely to be considerable in the short-term. Article continues below 2016-02-22 12:47:00+00:00 By Darren Allan Operating systems

83 Verizon to buy XO Communications' fiber-optic business Verizon Communications , the No.1 U. S. wireless service provider, said it would buy Carl Icahn -owned XO Communications' fiber-optic network business for about $1.8 billion. Verizon said the deal will include XO's fiber- based Internet protocol and Ethernet networks that will help serve its enterprise and wholesale customers. Carl Icahn, the chairman and sole shareholder of XO Holdings, which owns XO Communications, said the deal does not represent a significant annualized return on investment but was the best achievable outcome. Icahn, who started buying senior debt of XO in 2001, said he helped bring the company out of bankruptcy in 2003 and has since had to inject additional capital several times to keep it operating. Verizon expects more than $1.5 billion in cost savings after the deal, the company said on Monday. Most Americans own a mobile phone and a saturated U. S. wireless market has Verizon and its rivals turning to new businesses. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2017. Verizon also said it would simultaneously lease available XO wireless spectrum, with an option to buy it by the end of 2018. Citigroup Global Markets acted as financial adviser to Verizon, while Evercore served as XO's financial adviser. Debevoise & Plimpton acted as legal adviser to Verizon, and Thompson Hine was XO's legal adviser. 2016-02-22 10:19:36-05:00 CNBC

84 Mobile App Dev: 3 Trends That Will Shake Up Your Strategy The way mobile apps are built and maintained is undergoing a major shift this year. In my work as an industry analyst, I'm seeing technologies and architectures coming to market simultaneously that will support modular apps and flexible, speedy, collaborative development processes. Whether you're building mobile apps for your enterprise users or for your company's external customers, it is an iterative process. Waterfall development practices that lead to monolithic apps are increasingly unable to support the demand on developers to create and update apps to meet the requirements of modern mobile users. Platforms are supporting increased flexibility though granular, componentized, and agile architectures and practices. It's my recommendation that CIOs and others involved in DevOps think about how to divide systems into smaller pieces so they can be independently and quickly updated. This will help your organization keep up with the constantly accelerating pace of change. Adopting a modular approach to building mobile experiences will create a number of opportunities for efficiency. Adjusting development organizations to easily move development talent across projects will help better utilize scarce developer talent. Collaboration among developers, designers, and marketers will also lead to a more streamlined operation. [Which languages are worth considering for your mobile development? Read 6 Top Programming Languages for Mobile Development .] So, where do you begin? Here are three emerging technology trends that will get your mobile app development teams headed in the right direction. The use of microservices in the backend enables mobile app development teams to operate efficiently and create flexible apps. Microservices are not really a specific technology so much as an architecture that supports faster iteration. They are a pattern for architecting small backend services that can be developed independently of each other, and then connected together via APIs. Each microservice can be built to complete a certain function and combine with other microservices to create a unique, full-featured service. For example, a flight reservation app might contain a number of microservices such as: Because microservices are glued together with APIs, there are no dependencies for developers to track. Consequently, dynamic development organizations are possible, as different developers can work independently on various microservices. This also makes apps easier to maintain and scale. In the front end, the idea of a standalone mobile app is also beginning to splinter as card-based UIs gain traction. Popularized by Pinterest, cards present data and images in rectangular shapes on the home screen and can be layered and moved. Most dating sites have copied Tinder's card-based user interfaces, in which each potential match is represented in a unique card. The flexibility of this layout enables brands to experiment with different ways to present the information that is most relevant to the user and device. Much like microservices, each card is focused on a specific thought or action. However, instead of connecting components with APIs the way microservices do, deep links can be used to connect cards to each other or connect to specific pages in a completely different app. These developments will change the mobile experience for the end-user, as walls between apps become porous and eventually disappear. In this scenario, the days of apps with well thought out user interfaces and menus give way to a collection of UI widgets or cards. The concept of component-based architecture is being leveraged in new Native JavaScript frameworks as well. Mobile operating system vendors have opened up access to the JavaScript engines in their platforms. With this access, using these frameworks (like NativeScript from Telerik or React Native from Facebook), developers can call native UI features and APIs with JavaScript. These bits of native code are componentized or wrapped with declarative language, so they can operate without dependencies and be easily incorporated into apps. Developers can also build custom native components in native languages that can be accessed through the JavaScript frameworks. This approach is a step beyond WebViews, since apps built this way are developed in JavaScript but run natively. This means that apps are easier to build than pure native apps, but perform better than hybrid architectures and have a native and consistent look and feel. The emergence of JavaScript frameworks may negate the debate between native and Web. Developers may no longer have to choose between performance and ease of development. As a result, developers and users win with flexible apps that offer improved performance. Flexible technologies will enable increased experimentation. It's important that your teams test and measure every aspect of user experience and tweak UIs in order to drive app engagement and retention. This will be how brands compete in the mobile ecosystem going forward. The bottom line? Your mobile app is never done. So build your dev infrastructure and strategy around this assumption. Are you an IT Hero? Do you know someone who is? Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's IT Hero Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-22 10:06:00 Peter Crocker

85 8 Reasons Cloud Email Is A Smart Move Now Earlier this month, Gartner reported that cloud email adoption is picking up significant steam in the enterprise. Additionally, the research firm said that those who haven't yet looked into migrating their internal email to a cloud provider "should question assumptions that public cloud email is not appropriate in their region, size, or industry. " In other words, the benefits of a cloud- operated email system likely outweigh the drawbacks. Gartner reports that 13% of publicly listed, global companies use cloud-based email -- almost exclusively from Microsoft or Google. So clearly, the market has plenty of room to grow. But many IT decision makers are not even considering the idea of cloud email because of preconceived notions and misinformation about reliability, ease of management, security, and industry regulations. As with any new technologies, someone has to be the test case. In the United States, it's common for early adopters to be found in educational institutions. A few universities sought to adopt cloud email early on, sometimes with incentives from the provider. And while some schools ran into issues with migration, uptime, and accessibility, the majority of those problems were quickly resolved and the lessons learned have made the transition smooth these days. Slowly but surely, a handful of enterprise organizations noticed the benefits gained by universities -- as well as by small businesses that were early adopters. It only took several successful cloud cases in the enterprise for adoption to really start to take off. Here, we offer eight views on the current state of cloud-managed email services. You'll find information about various benefits, debunking of inaccurate beliefs, and details on the conveniences of cloud-hosted email. Our goal is to point out why cloud email is worth considering -- as well as put to rest any misinformation floating around regarding reliability and security concerns. The bottom line: Many organizations are recognizing that email is becoming another commodity application that's more at home in the hands of a trusted partner versus a private data center. What's your opinion on cloud email? Has your organization already migrated? If so, how did it go? And if you still don't think that cloud email is right for you, please let us know why and share your concerns with the InformationWeek community in the comments section below. 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. 2016-02-22 07:06:00 Andrew Froehlich 1 of 9 1 of 9

86 Hacker Explains How He Put 'Backdoor' in Hundreds of Linux Mint Downloads A lone hacker who duped hundreds of users into downloading a version of Linux with a backdoor installed has revealed how it was done. Lefebvre said in a blog post that only downloads from Saturday were compromised, and subsequently pulled the site offline to prevent further downloads. The hacker responsible, who goes by the name "Peace," told me in an encrypted chat on Sunday that a "few hundred" Linux Mint installs were under their control -- a significant portion of the thousand-plus downloads during the day. But that's only half of the story. Peace also claimed to have stolen an entire copy of the site's forum twice -- one from January 28, and most recently February 18, two days before the hack was confirmed. Read more at ZDNet 2016-02-22 06:35:00 ZDNet

87 Basic software that held key to shooter's iPhone went unused WASHINGTON (AP) — The county government that owned the iPhone in a high-profile legal battle between Apple Inc. and the Justice Department paid for but never installed a feature that would have allowed the FBI to easily and immediately unlock the phone as part of the terrorism investigation into the shootings that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California. If the technology, known as mobile device management, had been installed, San Bernardino officials would have been able to remotely unlock the iPhone for the FBI without theatrics of a court battle that is now pitting digital privacy rights against national security concerns. The service costs $4 per month per phone. Instead, the only person who knew the unlocking passcode for the phone is the dead gunman, Syed Farook, who worked as an inspector in the county's public health department. The iPhone assigned to Farook also lacked a Touch ID feature, meaning the FBI cannot use the dead gunman's thumbprint to unlock it now. The FBI found the phone in a car after the shootings. A U. S. magistrate last week ordered Apple to provide the FBI with highly specialized software that could be loaded onto the work-issued iPhone 5C used by Farook. He died with his wife in a gun battle with police after killing 14 people in December. The software would help the FBI hack into the phone by bypassing a security time delay and feature that erases all data after 10 consecutive, unsuccessful attempts to guess the unlocking passcode. This would allow the FBI to use technology to rapidly and repeatedly test numbers in what's known as a brute force attack. The FBI said it wants to determine whether Farook had used his phone to communicate with others about the attack. FBI Director James Comey said the agency owes it to the victims of the San Bernardino terror attacks to try to gain access to a cellphone used by one of the gunmen. In a message posted Sunday night on the Lawfare blog, Comey said the FBI "can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead. " Apple has said it will protest the ruling and has until Friday to intervene in court. San Bernardino had an existing contract with a technology provider, MobileIron Inc., but did not install it on any inspectors' iPhones, county spokesman David Wert said. There is no countywide policy on the matter and departments make their own decisions, he said. MobileIron has confirmed that if the software were installed on the iPhone, it would unlock it. Wert disputed the value of the remote management technology because he said Farook — or any other county employee — could have removed it manually. That would have alerted county technology employees and led them to intervene. In many offices and classrooms, officially issued smartphones include the installed management software. It can unlock the phone, delete all information in case of loss or theft, track the device's physical location, determine which apps are installed, check battery life and push software updates. The technology is intended to make such products more suitable in corporate environments, where tighter controls are important to protect company secrets. "This is the business case" for mobile device management, said John Dickson, a principal at Denim Group Ltd., a security consultancy. "The organization simply has no control or influence or anything over the device unless they have some MDM authority. The ability to do remote air updates, the ability to do remote wipe, the ability to control certain settings. Those are the standard kinds of things you do in mobile device management. " Dickson said "the big question now going forward, it builds the case for, is why this guy would have an essentially uncontrolled device. " This is the first time since the county issued its first Blackberry device in 2003 that law enforcement has needed access to a locked county-owned phone, Wert said. Prosecutors said in court filings that the county gave its consent to search the device. County policy said digital devices can be searched at any time and Farook signed such an agreement. Apple executives said Friday that the company had worked hard to help federal investigators get information off the locked iPhone, suggesting they use an iCloud workaround while the phone was connected to a familiar wireless network so that it would begin automatically backing up and provide access to data. The executives spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing legal process. The executives said Apple sent engineers to work with the FBI on the workaround but the effort ultimately failed. The FBI said it worked with the county to reset the iCloud password a few days after the attack to try to get immediate access to the data. That effort eliminated the possibility of the Apple suggested workaround actually succeeding. But if the county had installed the management device it had bought onto Farook's phone, none of these efforts would have been necessary. Ted Olson, a lawyer for Apple, told ABC's "This Week" Sunday that the legal fight had evoked an important debate about privacy and civil liberties. But he warned there'd be no limiting what the government could require Apple to do in the future if the Justice Department got its way this time. "Apple has a responsibility to maintain the trust and faith of millions of people who've depended upon Apple to produce a product that protects their privacy — their intimate, personal life," said Olson, a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush. "This is a Pandora's box. " Gartner Inc., a technology research firm, estimated that over 60 percent of large enterprises — meaning business, government and educational entities — used some kind of MDM software as of last year, though not necessarily on all company-owned devices. That percentage is likely higher now than when the research was done months ago, said Terrence Cosgrove, a research director with Gartner's mobile and client computing research group. Cosgrove said MDM adoption rates are generally higher among government users. Many workers balk at the idea that the software can monitor and track their personal phones, said Alex Heid, chief research officer at the cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard Inc. But if the company provides a phone, it's considered reasonable practice to use such software. "If a company's assumption is that they might not be able to get back into a device one day, then it's not really a company asset at that point, it's a gift," he said. Fowler reported from New York. Follow Tami Abdollah on Twitter at https://twitter.com/latams and Bree Fowler at https://twitter.com/APBreeFowler 2016-02-22 05:14:00-05:00 By TAMI ABDOLLAH, Associated Press

88 Beware of Hacked ISOs If You Downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th! Clement Lefebvre writes: I’m sorry I have to come with bad news. We were exposed to an intrusion today. It was brief and it shouldn’t impact many people, but if it impacts you, it’s very important you read the information below. What happened? Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it. Does this affect you? As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition. Read more at Linux Mint Blog 2016-02-22 02:10:00 Administrator

89 Facebook's Zuckerberg at crossroads in connecting the globe But a central element of his Internet.org campaign was controversial even before it was shut down in a key market this month. Indian regulators banned one of the pillars of the campaign, a service known as Free Basics, because it provided access only to certain pre-approved services—including Facebook—rather than the full Internet. That leaves the social media mogul at a crossroads. Though he has vowed not to give up, Zuckerberg hasn't said whether he'll alter his approach. Facebook declined to make executives available for comment. Zuckerberg could shed light on his plans when he speaks Monday at Mobile World Congress, an annual industry event in Barcelona, Spain, where he has touted Internet.org in previous years. "Everyone in the world should have access to the Internet," Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook this month, arguing that online connections can improve lives and fuel economic development. To achieve that goal, Zuckerberg has high-flying dreams for someday providing Internet connections through a network of drones, satellites and lasers. But his near-term plan is simpler: Facebook works with wireless carriers in poorer nations to let people use streamlined versions of Facebook and certain other online services, without paying data charges. While the drones may someday connect people in areas too remote for cables or cell towers, Free Basics is intended for people who live in areas with Internet service but still can't afford it. A low-income resident of urban Manila, for example, can use Free Basics to view the Philippines' GMA News site. "He can be informed. He can research. He can read the news," Ederic Eder of GMA News said. The program varies by country, in offerings and effectiveness. In South Africa, for instance, Facebook partnered with the third-largest wireless carrier, Cell C. But Johannesburg resident Priscilla de Klerk said she couldn't get Free Basics to work on her phone. "Cell C is much cheaper as far as everything else is concerned, but their free Facebook is not a reality," she said. Last fall, Facebook announced a major expansion in Africa, where another regional carrier, Bharti Airtel, said it will offer Free Basics in 17 countries. "They're getting a lot of traction in Africa," said Danson Njue, a Kenya-based telecom analyst with the Ovum research firm. Tech rivals Google and Microsoft also have programs to expand Internet access, he noted, but their approaches are content neutral and involve extending networks to underserved areas. Facebook doesn't pay wireless companies for the cost of Free Basics. Carriers make money if new users eventually move to a paid data plan. Facebook also says it makes no money, as it doesn't show ads, though Zuckerberg has conceded it benefits from gaining users in the long run. While the company hasn't released detailed usage figures, Facebook says Free Basics has brought more than 19 million people online for the first time. That counts any user who didn't have Internet access before, regardless of whether they're currently active. On the Internet.org website, mixed in with videos about impoverished students using Free Basics to study and laborers starting small businesses, Facebook boasts more than 1 billion people "have access" to the service. That's the combined population of regions where it's available, not the number of users. Free Basics is now in 36 countries. It was suspended last year in Egypt, on the anniversary of anti-government protests that were organized partly on Facebook. An earlier version of Free Basics, known as Facebook Zero, was shuttered three years ago in Chile, after authorities said Internet providers couldn't offer discounts for accessing some content but not others. Similar concerns turned India into the program's biggest battleground. Free Basics enrolled more than 1 million Indians in its first year, according to Facebook's wireless partner, Reliance Communications. But critics, including many in the country's growing tech community, complained it was a predatory scheme: If low-income users couldn't afford anything besides Free Basics, opponents said, that meant Facebook was deciding which online services the nation's poor could use. "The government should not allow big players to monopolize the Internet," said Manu Sharma, who runs a software development company in New Delhi. Facebook responded last fall by announcing it would open Free Basics to any app that met its technical requirements for systems with limited capacity. Zuckerberg also changed the program's name to Free Basics, after critics complained "Internet.org" sounded like a nonprofit, when it's part of a for-profit company (the overall campaign is still called Internet.org). But opponents still worry that Facebook could change requirements at any time, force competitors to pay higher rates to get into the program, or even block services that run afoul of powerful politicians. "The fact that it could decide what apps could be hosted ... was a huge problem for me," said Basit Zaidi, a New Delhi attorney. As Indian regulators began studying the issue, Facebook drew more resentment with a public- relations blitz that critics called heavy-handed and patronizing. The regulators effectively banned Free Basics after concluding Internet providers shouldn't be allowed to charge different rates for certain services, because that discriminates against other content. U. S. regulators have endorsed the concept of "net neutrality," which says all websites and apps should be treated equally by Internet providers. They're now studying whether "zero rating" programs, which offer some content for free, should be allowed. Net neutrality supporters are hoping India's decision will influence other nations. Facebook has also launched a program that helps Internet providers offer reliable Wi-Fi service in underserved areas at affordable rates and without limits on content. The program's been limited to tests in a few countries. The giant tech company could use its resources and clout with carriers to offer a similar wireless service, perhaps at limited speeds or volume, but without any restrictions on content, said Josh Levy of Access Now, a nonprofit that supports net neutrality. Zuckerberg has suggested in the past that such a service would be too expensive and difficult to offer. Some Indians, meanwhile, say their country could have benefited from Free Basics. "Ultimately, something is better than nothing, even if that something is flawed," said Uday Singh Tomar, a software engineer in New Delhi. "If a person is hungry and getting nothing, a free meal is good enough. " Explore further: Facebook rebrands free Internet service, expands 2016-02-22 00:00:00 phys.org

90 Zuckerberg to press on with Internet access despite setback He said the banned service, Free Basics, was only one program in his Internet.org campaign, so he could proceed with other initiatives. Indian regulators banned Free Basics this month because it provided access only to certain pre- approved services—including Facebook—rather than the full Internet. "Facebook isn't a company that hits a roadblock and gives up," Zuckerberg said at the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona, Spain. "We take the hits and try to get better. " Though Zuckerberg termed the regulatory defeat "disappointing for the mission and a major setback," he said every country was different, and "the model that has worked in one country may not work in another. " This was his third appearance at the Barcelona show to promote Internet access to everyone in the world. He has argued that online connections can improve lives and fuel economic development. To achieve that goal, Zuckerberg has high-flying dreams for someday providing Internet connections through a network of drones, satellites and lasers. Zuckerberg said Monday that Internet.org would launch its first satellite over Africa this year and "we are about to test flying Internet drone solar planes that can fly three months a year. " While the drones may someday connect people in areas too remote for cables or cell towers, Free Basics is intended for people who live in areas with Internet service but still can't afford it. Facebook works with wireless carriers in poorer nations to let people use streamlined versions of Facebook and certain other online services, without paying data charges. A low-income resident of urban Manila, for example, can use Free Basics to view the Philippines' GMA News site. "He can be informed. He can research. He can read the news," Ederic Eder of GMA News said. The program varies by country, in offerings and effectiveness. In South Africa, for instance, Facebook partnered with the third-largest wireless carrier, Cell C. But Johannesburg resident Priscilla de Klerk said she couldn't get Free Basics to work on her phone. "Cell C is much cheaper as far as everything else is concerned, but their free Facebook is not a reality," she said. Last fall, Facebook announced a major expansion in Africa, where another regional carrier, Bharti Airtel, said it will offer Free Basics in 17 countries. "They're getting a lot of traction in Africa," said Danson Njue, a Kenya-based telecom analyst with the Ovum research firm. Tech rivals Google and Microsoft also have programs to expand Internet access, he noted, but their approaches are content neutral and involve extending networks to underserved areas. Facebook doesn't pay wireless companies for the cost of Free Basics. Carriers make money if new users eventually move to a paid data plan. Facebook also says it makes no money, as it doesn't show ads, though Zuckerberg has conceded it benefits from gaining users in the long run. While the company hasn't released detailed usage figures, Facebook says Free Basics has brought more than 19 million people online for the first time. That counts any user who didn't have Internet access before, regardless of whether they're currently active. On the Internet.org website, mixed in with videos about impoverished students using Free Basics to study and laborers starting small businesses, Facebook boasts more than 1 billion people "have access" to the service. That's the combined population of regions where it's available, not the number of users. Free Basics is now in 36 countries. It was suspended last year in Egypt, on the anniversary of anti-government protests that were organized partly on Facebook. An earlier version of Free Basics, known as Facebook Zero, was shuttered three years ago in Chile, after authorities said Internet providers couldn't offer discounts for accessing some content but not others. Similar concerns turned India into the program's biggest battleground. Free Basics enrolled more than 1 million Indians in its first year, according to Facebook's wireless partner, Reliance Communications. But critics, including many in the country's growing tech community, complained it was a predatory scheme: If low-income users couldn't afford anything besides Free Basics, opponents said, that meant Facebook was deciding which online services the nation's poor could use. "The government should not allow big players to monopolize the Internet," said Manu Sharma, who runs a software development company in New Delhi. Facebook responded last fall by announcing it would open Free Basics to any app that met its technical requirements for systems with limited capacity. Zuckerberg also changed the program's name to Free Basics, after critics complained "Internet.org" sounded like a nonprofit, when it's part of a for-profit company (the overall campaign is still called Internet.org). But opponents still worry that Facebook could change requirements at any time, force competitors to pay higher rates to get into the program, or even block services that run afoul of powerful politicians. "The fact that it could decide what apps could be hosted ... was a huge problem for me," said Basit Zaidi, a New Delhi attorney. As Indian regulators began studying the issue, Facebook drew more resentment with a public- relations blitz that critics called heavy-handed and patronizing. The regulators effectively banned Free Basics after concluding Internet providers shouldn't be allowed to charge different rates for certain services, because that discriminates against other content. U. S. regulators have endorsed the concept of "net neutrality," which says all websites and apps should be treated equally by Internet providers. They're now studying whether "zero rating" programs, which offer some content for free, should be allowed. Net neutrality supporters are hoping India's decision will influence other nations. Facebook has also launched a program that helps Internet providers offer reliable Wi-Fi service in underserved areas at affordable rates and without limits on content. The program's been limited to tests in a few countries. The giant tech company could use its resources and clout with carriers to offer a similar wireless service, perhaps at limited speeds or volume, but without any restrictions on content, said Josh Levy of Access Now, a nonprofit that supports net neutrality. Zuckerberg has suggested in the past that such a service would be too expensive and difficult to offer. Some Indians, meanwhile, say their country could have benefited from Free Basics. "Ultimately, something is better than nothing, even if that something is flawed," said Uday Singh Tomar, a software engineer in New Delhi. "If a person is hungry and getting nothing, a free meal is good enough. " Explore further: Facebook rebrands free Internet service, expands 2016-02-22 00:00:00 phys.org

91 All eyes on Zuckerberg at Barcelona fair as security debate rages The controversy emerged earlier this month when Apple refused to help the FBI break into an iPhone belonging to the late Syed Farook, who along with his wife went on a deadly shooting rampage in California's San Bernardino in December. Apple claims that cooperating with the probe would undermine security for its devices, while the US government counters it is a one-time request that will aid an important investigation. Zuckerberg, who will give a keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress at 6:00 pm (1700 GMT), has been at pains to plug privacy features on Facebook in recent years. The 31-year-old has not yet spoken publicly about the spat but last week Facebook issued a statement in support of Apple. The social media giant said that while it condemned extremism it would "continue to fight aggressively against requirements for companies to weaken the security of their systems. " "These demands would create a chilling precedent and obstruct companies' efforts to secure their products," it added. Apple has vowed to fight a judge's order that it should create an operating system that would allow the FBI to brute force its way into the iPhone. Just like Facebook, Apple CEO Tim Cook warned last week that complying with the order would set a dangerous precedent and open the door for governments and even criminals to access sensitive data in the future. Facebook and privacy Apple's dispute with the US government is just the latest clash between a tech firm and authorities, and many of the sector's biggest names have sided with the iPhone maker. Richard Yu, consumer devices chief for Chinese electronics giant Huawei, said Sunday in Barcelona that privacy was "the most important thing to the consumer. " "We should really protect the consumer's privacy and security. Personally, I support Apple's, Tim Cook's idea," Bloomberg quoted him as saying on the sidelines of the presentation of Huawei's first laptop. Zuckerberg's address in Barcelona will also be watched closely for any comment on concerns in Europe over how the world's largest social network handles personal data . Facebook was long accused of brushing aside users' privacy concerns, and while Zuckerberg has strived to win back trust with a flurry of features, the social network is still in the eye of the storm. Earlier this month, it was given three months by France's CNIL privacy watchdog to stop storing data on people who do not have an account with the social network. The decision comes after Facebook lost a similar fight with Belgium's privacy watchdog in November when a court ordered it to stop storing personal data from non-users. On a regional level, the European Union's 28 privacy watchdogs have been coordinating probes into possible violations of EU law by Facebook's policy for handling personal photos and data. Ahead of the speech, though, Zuckerberg appeared relaxed, posting photos of himself jogging in Barcelona on his Facebook page. He also made a surprise appearance at Samsung's press conference late on Sunday to unveil its new flagship smartphones. Explore further: European privacy watchdogs join forces to probe Facebook 2016-02-22 00:00:00 phys.org

92 IBM Extends Support for Swift Programming Language The IBM Swift runtime preview and Swift Package Catalog will help bring Swift to the cloud to simplify app development. LAS VEGAS—IBM today announced the next phase of its roadmap to bring the Swift programming language to the cloud with a preview of a Swift runtime and a Swift Package Catalog to help enable developers to create apps for the enterprise. IBM boasts of being the first cloud provider to enable the development of applications in native Swift —unlocking its full potential in radically simplifying the development of end-to-end apps on the IBM Cloud. IBM made its Swift announcement at its IBM InterConnect 2016 conference here. IBM announced it was getting behind Swift in a major way at the end of last year when Apple open-sourced the technology. At that time, Phil Buckellew, vice president of enterprise mobile for the IBM Software Group, called the move a game changer. At the time, IBM also launched its Swift Sandbox , which is a Website where developers can upload their code and see Swift running in action on the server. Today's announcement is a key next step in IBM and Apple's shared journey to help enterprises advance their mobile strategy with innovative app design, analytics, process transformation and integration required for a mobile-first experience. As one of the largest users of Swift for mobile app development, IBM has a deep understanding of the advantages of Swift and the knowledge to assist enterprises in maximizing the true potential that server-side Swift will provide. Introduced in 2014, Swift is one of the fastest growing and most widely used programming languages. In just over two months since Apple open-sourced the Swift language and IBM released its Swift Sandbox for early exploration of server-side programming in Swift, more than 100,000 developers from around the world have used the IBM Swift Sandbox and more than half a million code runs have been executed in the Sandbox to date. IBM is committed to maturing the use of Swift as a server-side language for enterprise development. Traditionally, different technologies are used to develop the application on the client and the business logic on the server. By bringing Swift beyond the client to the server, IBM is breaking down barriers between front-end and back-end development, which can provide enterprises with a single language to build rich experiences and back-end business logic. Enterprises can benefit from increased speed and efficiency while simultaneously taking advantage of growing availability of Swift skills. Using Swift on the server also introduces a simpler, more secure tool chain for end-to-end application development. "Modern digital apps require a modern programming language. Swift is easy-to-learn, reliable, fast and interactive, the key traits that CIOs look for when building the next generation of enterprise mobile apps," said Michael Gilfix, vice president of IBM MobileFirst Offering Management, in a statement. "Swift on the Cloud is an opportunity for enterprises to radically simplify the development of end-to-end applications and therefore reach new levels of productivity. " IBM Swift engineers are also working with the growing Swift.org developer community and are most notably focused on contributing to concurrency on multicore hardware, which is critical for enterprise-scale workloads. IBM is excited to announce the release of a number of resources that will further enable the community to explore, build and share Swift assets. IBM said developers can start exploring the benefits of Swift on the IBM Cloud in three ways: experimenting in the Swift Sandbox; starting to build applications on Bluemix and quickly deploying them with Kitura, a new open-source Web server released by IBM, on both OS X and Linux; and sharing Swift resources and using code across projects by creating packages and submitting them to the Swift Package Catalog on Bluemix to encourage sharing of new Swift resources with the global developer community. "The IBM Swift Sandbox is an interactive Website that lets you write Swift code and execute it in a server environment—on top of Linux," said John Petitto, an IBM software engineer and one of IBM's Swift developers located at IBM's Mobile Innovation Lab in Austin, Texas. "Each sandbox runs on IBM Cloud in a Docker container. In addition, both the latest versions of Swift and its standard library are available for you to use. " 2016-02-22 00:00:00 Darryl K. Taft

93 Spark Spreads, Apache Arrow Accepted: Big Data Roundup It's been a busy week in big data land. We've got news about a free community edition of Apache Spark plus more news from Spark distributor Databricks, a new Apache Software Foundation project for big data called Arrow, Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics, and more. Llet's start with the news from Databricks, the main commercial distributor of Apache Spark. This week at the Spark Summit East in New York, the company rolled out a beta release of Databricks Community Edition , a free version of the cloud-based big data platform. It comes with a set of training resources, including a massive open online course (MOOC), "Introduction to Big Data with Apache Spark. " According to Databricks, the new service provides data scientists and IT pros with the technology they need to get started with Spark, including access to a microcluster and a cluster manager and notebook environment. The free version will be generally available in the second quarter. [ Want the tech perspective on the Super Bowl? Read NFL CIO: Super Bowl 50 Tech Was A Game Changer . ] Databricks said it will continue to develop Spark tutorials and training materials to be part of the Community Edition over time. "As developers at heart, we find value in empowering professionals to tackle big data problems, and as a result, we are committed to the development of the Spark engine and the healthy growth of the community," said Ion Stoica, executive chairman at Databricks, in a prepared statement. "We're happy to contribute back to the community by releasing Community Edition of Databricks for free and we're excited to see how users experiment with the platform. " During Spark Summit East, Databricks also launched Databricks Dashboards as an expansion to its enterprise Spark platform. Databricks said the Dashboards are intended to enable data pros to transform complex results into visual formats that are easy for business users to consume. Speaking of Spark, SAP announced support for the technology in its Predictive Analytics 2.5 platform, and also announced the acquisition of a mobile visualization company to enhance its advanced analytics portfolio. Apache Arrow has been accepted as a full-fledged project by the Apache Software Foundation. The technology is designed to improve the performance and speed of big data components that work together as part of a larger system. The project is backed by Tomer Shiran and Jacques Nadeau, the founders of Dremio , who are also the force behind Apache Drill. The technology is designed to enable various projects within the big data Hadoop ecosystem to talk to each other more easily, and to enable multiple development languages to work with the ecosystem. Gartner released its 2016 Magic Quadrant report for Advanced Analytics , and we covered the details in a report this week. Plus, we've got an update on the state of the chief data officer , and a look at best approaches for enterprises to take as they await interpretations of the EU-US Privacy Shield. Finally this week, we've got some news about a new Cognitive Computing Competition. The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a $5 million competition challenging teams to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with cognitive technologies to tackle the world's greatest challenges. Every year leading up to TED2020, teams will go head-to-head at IBM's World of Watson annual conference to compete for interim prizes and the chance to advance to the next year's competition. Three finalist teams will deliver TED Talks in 2020 to provide demonstrations of what they have achieved, according to the competition's website. A panel of judges will evaluate ideas for technical validity, and the winners will be chosen by TED and XPRISE communities "based on the audacity of their mission and the awe-inspiring nature of the teams' TED Talks in 2020. " IBM said it believes the competition can accelerate the creation of landmark breakthroughs. What have you done to advance the cause of Women in IT? Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's Women in IT Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-21 10:06:00 Jessica Davis

94 Apple Fixes iPhone Error 53 With iOS Update Apple has rolled out an iOS update to address Error 53. The issue has been rendering iPhones useless among owners who got third-party repairs and then updated by connecting via iTunes. The Error 53 debacle has been plaguing iPhone and iPad owners who had their Touch ID- equipped smartphones repaired at third-party shops. If their home button was replaced, users would encounter Error 53 when they connected to iTunes for a software update. Apple initially claimed Error 53 was a security measure intended to validate Touch ID. If the Touch ID sensor button was replaced with a non-Apple component, the check would fail. The iPhone would be "bricked" and beyond repair. [Apple races Google and Tesla for talent to build self-driving cars .] Anyone who encountered Error 53 was previously out of luck. Apple would not issue a replacement device because the third-party hardware used in repairs is not included under its warranty. A new software update for iOS 9.2.1 will reportedly restore the iPhone and iPad for people with who have encountered Error 53, which Apple claims was never supposed to reach the public. "Error 53 appears when a device fails a security test," the company wrote on a new support page. "This test was designed to check whether Touch ID works properly before the device leaves the factory, and wasn't intended to affect customers. " The support page contains a list of instructions for fixing the problem, which is fairly straightforward: Quit iTunes, unplug the device, download the update, connect the iPhone via USB, and click Update in iTunes. The fix will try to reinstall iOS without erasing data. Customers who encountered Error 53 and consequently paid for an out-of-warranty replacement should contact Apple to request reimbursement, the company noted. The newest iOS update does not include features other than the Error 53 fix. If you update your iPhone over the air, or never had your iPhone repaired by a third party, there is no need to download it. While the patched version of iOS 9.2.1 fixes the Error 53 issue and restores the iPhone, it will not re-enable Touch ID. Apple claims this is for security reasons -- if it reconnected the sensor to the secure enclave where fingerprints are stored, it could potentially allow unauthorized users to reach your data. Those who want to keep Touch ID will have to send their devices to Apple for repair, which is an expensive process. The fees Apple charges to fix broken screens ($99 to $149) are often the reason its customers go to third-party shops in the first place. The Error 53 problem is leading Apple into the courtroom. Law firm Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala (PCVA) is filing a class-action lawsuit, claiming Apple did not warn customers their phones would be rendered useless if they downloaded a software update following third-party repair. PCVA says Apple's initial statement, in which it claims Error 53 was a security measure, leaves some room for explanation. "If security was the primary concern, then why did the phones work just fine, sometimes for several months, without the software update," said Darrell Cochran, the case's lead attorney, in a statement. "Error 53 only rears its ugly head when downloading a newer version of Apple's operating system. " The lawsuit is seeking the cost of damages and new, working iPhones for class members. Are you an IT Hero? Do you know someone who is? Submit your entry now for InformationWeek's IT Hero Award. Full details and a submission form can be found here. 2016-02-20 11:06:00 Kelly Sheridan

95 Windows 10 Lands At DoD, Outlook Web Launch: Microsoft Roundup Microsoft's news cycle this week delivered updates on Lumia, Outlook.com, Microsoft Translator, and the growth and new features of Windows 10. The new OS got a major boost when the US Department of Defense (DoD) announced plans to upgrade 4 million PCs to Windows 10. The Secretary of Defense has instructed DoD agencies to begin immediate upgrades to laptops, desktops, and mobile devices running legacy Windows. This project is intended to lower IT costs, streamline IT operations, and improve security for an organization that already spends $44 billion each year to protect against cyber-attacks. The DoD aims to finish the rollout by February 2017. [Microsoft published a patent app for a modular PC design.] Windows Insiders in the Fast ring received preview build 14267. Unlike the last few preview builds, which primarily focused on minor bug fixes , this one both addresses errors and introduces new features. Some of these updates include a music search icon in Cortana and an option to add photos to Skype messages. Microsoft Edge now has an updated favorites bar, and you can choose to clear your browser history upon exit. On the mobile front, Microsoft this week launched its $200 Lumia 650 smartphone. The Windows 10 Mobile device is aimed at enterprise users who want a business-friendly tool but don't want to splurge on a premium phone. The Lumia 650 has Microsoft's Office apps and Cortana pre-installed, with a one-click setup for Office 365. It also lets IT pros test software updates against line-of-business systems and apps, so they can ensure everything looks good before deploying to end-users. Mobile app updates include the launch of free group video calls on iOS and Android, which will be globally available by March. Group calls are in HD and can handle a maximum of 25 people. Skype notes participants can be added via unique links, even if they aren't Skype account holders. The Microsoft Translator apps for iOS and Android have been updated with new features for offline translation and image translation. Its Android app has been updated with a Deep Neural Network-powered offline engine. This will bring deep learning, the machine-learning technology from Microsoft Translator, to people who cannot access the Internet in remote parts of the world. The iPhone app now includes an image translation feature, otherwise known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). iPhone users will be able to translate text stored in their camera roll rather than typing or speaking out loud. Outlook.com exited preview mode this week. The email service is powered by Office 365 and comes with many of the same features, including the option to automatically add flights to your calendar, and a smart address book designed to recognize your frequent contacts. Other features include the abilities to view and edit documents in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel while replying to a message, move Wunderlist lists to email, and @Mention people in messages. You will also see prompts to re-attach files from previous messages. With Outlook.com as part of the Office 365 platform, Microsoft promises more frequent and consistent features will roll out in the future. Improved Skype integration is one capability reported to be on its way. 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. 2016-02-20 10:05:00 Kelly Sheridan

96 US would let Apple keep software to help FBI hack iPhone WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration has told a U. S. magistrate judge it would be willing to allow Apple Inc. to retain possession of and later destroy specialized software it has been ordered to design to help the FBI hack into an encrypted iPhone used by the gunman in December's mass shootings in California. The government made clear that it was open to less intrusive options in a new legal filing intended to blunt public criticism by Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, who said the software would be "too dangerous to create" because it would threaten the digital privacy of millions of iPhone customers worldwide. "Apple may maintain custody of the software, destroy it after its purpose under the order has been served, refuse to disseminate it outside of Apple and make clear to the world that it does not apply to other devices or users without lawful court orders," the Justice Department told Judge Sheri Pym on Friday. "No one outside Apple would have access to the software required by the order unless Apple itself chose to share it. " Meanwhile, the legal fight continued to reverberate on the presidential campaign trail as Republican candidate Donald Trump called on Americans to boycott Apple until it complies with the court order. Trump made the comment during a question-and-answer session in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, where he's campaigning ahead of Saturday's first-in-the-South Republican presidential primary. Trump says Cook wants to prove "how liberal he is" and told the crowd to "boycott Apple until such time as they give up that security. " In the latest volley between the federal government and one of the world's most respected companies, the Justice Department argued that Apple has the technical ability to comply with a court order issued this week — but won't do so because of its marketing strategy. "Apple has attempted to design and market its products to allow technology, rather than the law, to control access to data which has been found by this court to be warranted for an important investigation," the filing states. The Justice Department's motion, which seeks to force Apple to comply with Pym's order, appears aimed at rebutting some of the key objections of Apple and its supporters. It says that the software the government seeks, contrary to Apple's assertions, is not akin to a "master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks. " And it also rejects the idea that the court order placed an unreasonable burden on the company, saying Apple already has the technical wherewithal to satisfy it. "To the extent that Apple claims that the order is unreasonably burdensome because it undermines Apple's marketing strategies or because it fears criticism for providing lawful access to the government, these concerns do not establish an undue burden," the government wrote. Apple's written objection, already signaled by Cook in a message to Apple customers, is due next Friday. Senior Apple executives said during a phone call with reporters Friday that the company had worked for hours, even days, with federal officials and investigators to try to gain access to Farook's iPhone. The executives, who insisted on anonymity to speak freely amid ongoing legal proceedings, said they went to the FBI in early January with four suggestions, including a workaround using iCloud. Prosecutors noted the four methods and their "deficiencies" in a footnote in their Friday court filing. The magistrate on Tuesday ordered Apple to provide the FBI with highly specialized software that could be loaded onto the work-issued iPhone 5C used by Syed Farook, who died with his wife in a gun battle with police after killing 14 people in December in San Bernardino, California. The U. S. has said the attacks were partly inspired by the Islamic State terror group. Although the judge instructed Apple to create the software for the FBI, she said it could be loaded onto the phone at an Apple facility. But the Justice Department made explicit Friday that Apple could retain custody of the software at all times. The specialized software would bypass a security time delay and self-destruct feature that erases all data after 10 consecutive, unsuccessful attempts to guess the unlocking passcode. This would allow the FBI to use technology to rapidly and repeatedly test numbers in what's known as a brute force attack. In their filing Friday, prosecutors explained that investigators would be willing to work remotely to test passcodes, while Apple retained both possession of the phone and the technology itself. That's a good "compromise position" because "they're giving all the power to Apple," said Jason Healey, a former director on cyber policy at the White House. "They're telling Apple, 'You hold the software, we're not asking you to put a backdoor in the encryption, we just want to be able to brute force this thing,'" Healey said. "If the precedent is this, that they deliver the phone to Apple and Apple does it, I think that's a pretty good precedent that can't be done en masse on the next thousand iPhones. " The government said the county-owned phone could be valuable as evidence because Farook appeared to use the device to communicate with his wife in the months before the shootings as well as with some of his co-workers who were killed in the attacks. Two other personal phones were found crushed beyond investigative value in the trash behind the couple's home. The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Friday invited Cook and FBI Director James Comey to appear before it to discuss encryption technologies and issues of privacy and national security, asking both to tell Americans how they plan to move forward. A hearing in the federal case has been set for March 22 in Riverside, California. Follow Tami Abdollah on Twitter at https://twitter.com/latams and Eric Tucker at https://twitter.com/etuckerAP . 2016-02-20 03:12:00-05:00 By TAMI ABDOLLAH and ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

97 Npm Inc. explores foundation for JavaScript installer Npm, the command-line interface that developers run when using the popular Npm package manager for Node.js and JavaScript, will be moved to the jurisdiction of an independent foundation. A governance model for the technology is under exploration, said Npm founder Isaac Schlueter, CEO of Npm Inc., which currently oversees the project. He hopes the move will expand participation in Npm's development, as participating today could be awkward because the program is owned and maintained by a single company. Plans call for completing the move by the end of this year, with Npm Inc. still participating. Other companies are already interested in working with the foundation, Schleuter said, though he would not reveal their names. The command-line client works with the Npm registry, which features a collection of packages of open source code for Node.js. The Npm system lets developers write bits of code packaged as modules for purposes ranging from database connectors to JavaScript frameworks to command-line tools and CSS tooling. Enterprise connectivity vendor Equinix, for example, will offer its upcoming AquaJS microservices framework via Npm. Schleuter has called the module system a "killer feature" of Node.js and a big reason for the server-side JavaScript platform's success. Npm Inc. says there are nearly 242,000 total packages and about 3.5 billion downloads in the past month alone. Schleuter said that efforts would be made to keep the project on strong footing, adding "what we really don't want to do is break something that's working. " There are transparent development processes already in place, he said, and in addition to encouraging more outside participation in NPM's development, the foundation should ensure the project's continuity. Node.js itself was moved to an independent foundation , simply called the Node.js Foundation, last year, after gripes arose with Joyent's handling of the project and a fork of the technology occurred called io.js. But io.js has since been folded back into Node.js. "I think [developing a governance model] will be a lot easier than it was with Node because the team is more on the same page and there are not as many hurdles to jump through," Schlueter said. Npm Inc. runs the open source Npm registry as a free service and will continue to do so after the foundation is formed. The company also offers tools and services to support the secure use of packages in a private or enterprise context. More about Equinix Inc. 2016-02-19 21:53:00 Paul Krill

98 Facebook updates Messenger app to handle several accounts SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook has redesigned its popular Messenger app so several people can use it on the same smartphone or tablet without relinquishing their privacy. The update announced Friday initially will only be available on devices running on Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system. Facebook didn't set a timetable for making similar changes to its Messenger app for Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iPad. The new feature will accommodate multiple accounts without allowing people sharing the more versatile app to get into each other's queue of messages. Facebook added the ability to switch accounts within the Messenger app after getting requests from people who share their smartphones and tablets with family and friends. More than 800 million people currently use Messenger. 2016-02-19 15:33:00-05:00 CNBC

99 Outbreak threat: should we use antivirus software on our phones? We all know we're supposed to have some form of antivirus software on our computers, but even with (hopefully) most people running some form of protection, malware is still rampant. Panda Security reports that in 2015 32.13% of the computers it scanned were infected in some way and over 84 million new malware samples were detected. Of those infections, not all fall under the label of viruses. The majority of infections were found to be malicious programs, known as Trojans. A virus, on the other hand, is something which attaches itself to an existing program to cause harm. Other malware includes worms, adware and PUPs (potentially unwanted programs), the latter being unwanted software which installs at the same time as something you actually do want - more annoying than dangerous. Yet despite smartphones basically being pocket computers, and therefore surely at risk of infection, antivirus software seems to be more seen as optional than essential. So should we be worried about viruses and other malware on our phones? Or are there enough built in protections already? We asked Tony Anscombe, Senior Security Evangelist at AVG Technologies whether phones really are at risk. He told techradar that: "Ultimately, all devices are at risk from malicious viruses, but as we become increasingly dependent on our smartphones for all aspects our daily lives they become a much more attractive target for hackers. "Think about the amount of information stored on your phone: personal ID, bank and credit card details, browsing history, app data, medical notes – and that's just scratching the surface. Today, smartphones hold everything a hacker needs to steal money and, at worst, your identity. " Of course the answer here could simply be to change how you use your phone, so that there won't be all that personal information for thieves to find. It's also perhaps unsurprising that an antivirus company would present viruses as a significant risk, yet the evidence so far seems to be that on smartphones they're not as much of a worry as you'd expect. There aren't yet close to the same number of viruses on smartphones as on desktops, with a recent report from Motive Security Labs finding less than 1% of mobile devices infected with malware. Compared to PCs that's a tiny proportion and while they still present a risk it's a pretty tiny, and largely avoidable, one. The way our phones pick up malware also differs from how we're most likely to get it on a PC. Gert-Jan Schenk, VP of Lookout EMEA, told us: "One thing to pay particular attention to is phishing. Mobile devices' small form means we interact with them pretty differently than desktop computers," he said. "In fact, studies have shown that users are three times more likely to click on a malicious link from their smartphone than a PC, which makes phishing emails or messages a serious issue on mobile. " Text messages are another vulnerable area. Anscombe explained that: "One of the most vulnerable aspects for smartphone users is text messaging – simply because we're not conditioned to recognise malicious content in the same way when we get a text message. " So it seems the risks could be lower still once people wise up to them. In general, if you get a link in a text message from a number that's not in your phone it's probably sketchy, even (or especially) if it claims to come from a reputable institution, like your bank. Similarly, some messages will ask you to call a number, warning of - for example - suspicious activity on your account. To be on the safe side always use a number that you can identify as official, such as one that's come directly from the institution's website. It can take longer to hunt out, but it keeps you safer. 2016-02-19 13:00:00+00:00 By James Rogerson Mobile phones

100 How Tim Cook, in iPhone Battle, Became a Bulwark for Digital Privacy Letters from around the globe began pouring into the inbox of Timothy D. Cook not long after the publication of the first revelations from Edward J. Snowden about mass government surveillance. Do you know how much privacy means to us? they asked Apple's chief executive. Do you understand? Mr. Cook did. He was proud that Apple sold physical products — phones, tablets and laptops — and did not traffic in the intimate, digital details of its customers' lives. That stance crystallized on Tuesday when Mr. Cook huddled for hours with lawyers and others at Apple's headquarters to figure out how to respond to a federal court order requiring the company to let the United States government break into the iPhone of one of the gunmen in a San Bernardino, Calif., mass shooting. Late Tuesday, Mr. Cook took the fight public with a letter to customers that he personally signed. "We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U. S. government," wrote Mr. Cook, 55. "Ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect. " Mr. Cook's standoff with law enforcement officials is indicative of his personal evolution from a behind-the-scenes operator at Apple to one of the world's most outspoken corporate executives. During that time, he has moved a once secretive Silicon Valley company into the center of highly charged social and legal issues. While Mr. Cook's predecessor, Apple co-founder Steven P. Jobs , was considered a business icon, he never took aggressive positions on such matters as Mr. Cook now has. Being at loggerheads with the United States government is risky for Apple and may draw a torrent of public criticism of the world's most valuable company at a time when its growth rate has significantly decelerated . Yet people who know Mr. Cook said he did not believe he had a choice but to be vocal. Mr. Cook, who became Apple's chief executive in 2011, has long said that businesses and their leaders should think of themselves as important members of civic society. In September, he emphasized that this responsibility "has grown markedly in the last couple of decades or so as government has found it more difficult to move forward. " Mr. Cook "says what he believes, especially in difficult situations," said Don Logan, the former chairman of Time Warner Cable who has been friends with Mr. Cook since he became chief executive of Apple, bonding over their shared alma mater, Auburn University. Of Mr. Cook's opposition to the court order, Mr. Logan said: "Tim is currently dealing with a very difficult situation and he knows the decision he has made has lots of ramifications, good or bad. But he wants to do the right thing. " Apple declined to make Mr. Cook available for an interview. The company is preparing to file an opposition brief against the court order. Mr. Cook's ideas about civic duty were partly formed during his childhood in rural Alabama. In a speech at the United Nations in 2013, he recounted how Ku Klux Klansmen had once burned a cross on the lawn of a black family's home and how he yelled for them to stop. "This image was permanently imprinted in my brain, and it would change my life forever," he said. At Apple, which he joined as a senior executive in 1998, Mr. Cook was a quiet figure for much of the period when he worked for Mr. Jobs, a showman who prized secrecy at the company. After Mr. Jobs stepped down because of ailing health, Mr. Cook began making Apple more open, publishing an annual report on suppliers and working conditions for more than a million factory workers. In 2014, Mr. Cook revealed he was gay , a move widely seen as making a statement about gay rights. Last year, he wrote an editorial decrying religious freedom laws that had been proposed in more than two dozen states that would let people skirt anti-discrimination laws that conflicted with their religious beliefs. His outspokenness has drawn criticism, with some investors questioning how nonbusiness initiatives — including some of Apple's environmental moves — would contribute to the company's bottom line. Mr. Cook responded at a shareholder meeting that it is important for Apple to do things "because they're just and right. " Privacy has long been a priority for Mr. Cook. At a tech conference in 2010, he said Apple "has always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley. " He cited the iPhone's feature that shows where a phone — and presumably its user — is and said fears about abuse and stalking had compelled the company to let consumers decide whether or not their apps could use their location data. Mr. Cook's views on privacy hardened over time as customers globally began entrusting more personal data to Apple's iPhones. At the same time, Apple was growing tired of requests from government officials worldwide asking the company to unlock smartphones. Each data-extraction request was carefully vetted by Apple's lawyers. Of those deemed legitimate, Apple in recent years required that law enforcement officials physically travel with the gadget to the company's headquarters, where a trusted Apple engineer would work on the phones inside Faraday bags, which block wireless signals, during the process of data extraction. Processing these requests was extremely tedious. More worrisome, the data stored on its customers iPhones was growing more personal, including photos, messages and bank, health and travel data. And some government officials were not exactly instilling confidence in Apple's engineers. In one case, after law enforcement officials rushed a phone to Apple's headquarters for data extraction, the engineers discovered their target had not enabled the device's passcode feature. So Mr. Cook and other Apple executives resolved not only to lock up customer data, but to do so in a way that would put the keys squarely in the hands of the customer, not the company. By the time Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, iOS7, in September 2013, the company was encrypting all third-party data stored on customers' phones by default. "People have a basic right to privacy," Mr. Cook has said. By then, Mr. Snowden's disclosures about how the National Security Agency had cozied up to some tech companies and hacked others to gain user data were reverberating worldwide. The disclosures included revelations of a comprehensive, decade-long Central Intelligence Agency program to compromise Apple's products; C. I. A. analysts tampered with the products so the government could collect app makers' data. In other cases, the agency was embedding spy tools in Apple's hardware, and even modifying an Apple software update that allowed government analysts to record every keystroke. Letters from alarmed Apple customers started flooding into Mr. Cook's inbox, fortifying his stance on privacy. Apple's eighth mobile operating system, iOS8, which rolled out in September 2014, made it basically impossible for the company's engineers to extract any data from mobile phones and tablets. For officials at the world's law enforcement agencies, the new software was a clear signal that Apple was growing defiant. A month after iOS8's release, James Comey, the director of the F. B. I. , told an audience at the Brookings Institution that Apple had gone "too far" with the expanded encryption, arguing that the operating system effectively sealed off any chance of tracking kidnappers, terrorists and criminals. Government agencies began to press Apple and other tech companies for so-called back doors that could bypass strong security measures. With tensions rising, some form of technical compromise — whether in the form of a chip, a back door or a key — was off the table by 2015. At Apple, Mr. Cook and others continued to work with investigators to the extent the company could and complied with court orders. Last October, a federal judge in New York said the government was overstepping its boundaries by using a centuries-old law, the All Writs Act, as the basis for its request that Apple open an iPhone for a drug investigation. Apple's lawyer sided with the judge in the case. The matter has not been resolved. After December's San Bernardino attack, Apple worked with the F. B. I. to gather data that had been backed up to the cloud from a work iPhone issued to one of the assailants, according to court filings. When investigators also wanted unspecified information on the phone that had not been backed up, the judge this week granted the order requiring Apple to create a special tool to help investigators more easily crack the phone's passcode and get into the device. Apple had asked the F. B. I. to issue its application for the tool under seal. But the government made it public, prompting Mr. Cook to go into bunker mode to draft a response, according to people privy to the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The result was the letter that Mr. Cook signed on Tuesday, where he argued that it set a "dangerous precedent" for a company to be forced to build tools for the government that weaken security. "Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk," he wrote. "That is why encryption has become so important to all of us. " Far from backing down from the fight, Mr. Cook has told colleagues that he still stands by the company's longstanding plans to encrypt everything stored on Apple's myriad devices, services and in the cloud, where the bulk of data is still stored unencrypted. "If you place any value on civil liberties, you don't do what law enforcement is asking," Mr. Cook has said. 2016-02-19 09:44:38-05:00 Katie Benner and Nicole Perlroth

Total 100 articles. Created at 2016-02-25 12:01