64155091
submission
alphadogg writes:
Big name academic and vendor organizations have unveiled a consortium this week that's pushing Named Data Networking (NDN), an emerging Internet architecture designed to better accommodate data and application access in an increasingly mobile world. The Named Data Networking Consortium http://named-data.net/ members, which include universities such as UCLA and China's Tsinghua University as well as vendors such as Cisco and VeriSign, are meeting this week at a two-day workshop at UCLA to discuss NDN's promise for scientific research. Big data, eHealth and climate research are among the application areas on the table. The NDN effort has been backed in large part by the National Science Foundation, which has put more than $13.5 million into it since 2010.
64146949
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cisco this week revamped its UCS server line with systems designed to scale form the largest cloud deployment to those with only up to 15 servers. Together, the new products are intended to keep Cisco’s momentum going in the data center server market. Since introducing UCS in 2009 and literally disrupting the data center server market, Cisco – citing IDC figures – says it has gained the No. 1 position in revenue share for x86 blades in the Americas, topping the likes of HP, IBM and Dell.
64095477
submission
alphadogg writes:
In the case of the private cloud, understanding where the actual servers it is based on reside is pretty simple — they’re in your own data center. For the public cloud, however, the question is a lot more complex, and the answer is hazy. Network World takes a look at where the biggest US public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, support their customers and map it out. It turns out locations are largely about minimizing cost.
63923197
submission
alphadogg writes:
Netflix has released three internal tools it uses to catch hints on the Web that hackers might target its services.
“Many security teams need to stay on the lookout for Internet-based discussions, posts and other bits that may be of impact to the organizations they are protecting,” wrote Andy Hoernecke and Scott Behrens of Netflix’s Cloud Security Team. http://techblog.netflix.com/20... One of the tools, called Scumblr, can be used to create custom searches of Google sites, Twitter and Facebook for users or keywords.
63894959
submission
alphadogg writes:
Smartphones sold in California will soon be required to have a kill switch that lets users remotely lock them and wipe them of data in the event they are lost or stolen. The demand is the result of a new law, http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/... into effect on Monday, that applies to phones manufactured after July 1, 2015, and sold in the state. While its legal reach does not extend beyond the state’s borders, the inefficiency of producing phones solely for California means the kill switch is expected to be adopted by phone makers on handsets sold across the U.S. and around the world.
63754047
submission
alphadogg writes:
The depletion of Internet addresses would seem to spell relief for aged routers that are struggling to deal with the Internet’s growth, but the complicated interplay between those trends might cause even more problems. Last Wednesday, some older routers and switches stumbled when the Internet’s table of routes surpassed 512,000 entries, the maximum they could hold in a special form of memory called TCAM. The event drew widespread attention, though it was actually the third time in this young century that the Internet had broken through such a threshold. Devices that don’t have room for all the routes may reboot themselves or fail to route some traffic, but the affected gear was fairly old. Another danger remains, and it comes from the address depletion itself. With fewer IPv4 addresses at hand, users or service providers may want to split them up into smaller routes.
63706677
submission
alphadogg writes:
The German city of Munich, long one of the open-source community’s poster children for the institutional adoption of Linux, is close to performing a major about-face and returning to Microsoft products. Munich’s deputy mayor, Josef Schmid, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung http://www.sueddeutsche.de/mue... that user complaints had prompted a reconsideration of the city’s end-user software, which has been progressively converted from Microsoft to a custom Linux distribution – “LiMux” – in a process that dates back to 2003.
63608641
submission
alphadogg writes:
Challenges among top tech execs to dump ice water on their heads to raise awareness for dreaded disease ALS have been escalating this week. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple SVP Phil Schiller are among those taking the challenge. Meanwhile, Bill Gates, Google CEO Larry Page and Apple CEO Tim Cook have been challenged. Open source outfits such as Cloudera, Black Duck and Red Hat have also joined in the awareness campaign that has swept across social media networks over the past few weeks.
63593055
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said. “If we don’t have the courage to change, if we don’t lead the change, we will be left behind,” Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on a conference call.
63543759
submission
alphadogg writes:
The late actor/comedian Robin Williams increasingly riffed on smartphones and technology in recent years, including Apple Siri and smartphone apps. Here's a look at his recent tech schticks.
62890425
submission
alphadogg writes:
Public certificate authorities (CAs) are warning that as of Nov. 1 they will reject requests for internal SSL server certificates that don’t conform to new internal domain naming and IP address conventions designed to safeguard networks. The concern is that SSL server digital certificates issued by CAs at present for internal corporate e-mail servers, Web servers and databases are not unique and can potentially be used in man-in-the-middle attacks involving the setup of rogue servers inside the targeted network, say representatives for the Certification Authority/Browser Forum (CA/B Forum), the industry group that sets security and operational guidelines for digital certificates. Members include the overwhelming bulk of public CAs around the globe, plus browser makers such as Microsoft and Apple. The problem today is that network managers often give their servers names like “Server1” and allocate internal IP addresses so that SSL certificates issued for them through the public CAs are not necessarily globally unique, notes Trend Micro's Chris Bailey.
62862819
submission
alphadogg writes:
ix years ago the Social Security Administration embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. Nearly $300 million later, the new system is nowhere near ready and agency officials are struggling to salvage a project racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report commissioned by the agency. In 2008, Social Security said the project was about two to three years from completion. Five years later, it was still two to three years from being done, according to the report by McKinsey and Co., a management consulting firm. Today, with the project still in the testing phase, the agency can't say when it will be completed or how much it will cost.
62745781
submission
alphadogg writes:
In its quest to help enterprises seek out and neutralize all threats to their Wi-Fi networks, AirMagnet is now looking to the skies. In a free software update to its AirMagnet Enterprise product last week, the Wi-Fi security division of Fluke Networks added code specifically crafted to detect the Parrot AR Drone, a popular unmanned aerial vehicle that costs a few hundred dollars and can be controlled using a smartphone or tablet. Drones themselves don’t pose any special threat to Wi-Fi networks, and AirMagnet isn’t issuing air pistols to its customers to shoot them down. The reason the craft are dangerous is that they can be modified to act as rogue access points and sent into range of a victim’s wireless network, potentially breaking into a network to steal data.
62745071
submission
alphadogg writes:
A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month. The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference’s website. https://www.blackhat.com/lates... Volynkin, a research scientist with the university’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was due to give a talk entitled “You Don’t Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget” at the conference, which take places Aug. 6-7 in Last Vegas.
62702369
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cybercriminals are spreading a new file-encrypting ransomware program that’s more powerful and resilient than Cryptolocker, a threat recently shut down by the U.S. Department of Justice. The new ransomware threat is called CTB-Locker (Curve-Tor-Bitcoin Locker), but Microsoft anti-malware products detect it as Critroni.A. Its creator has been advertising the program to other cybercriminals on Russian-language forums since the middle of June and it seems that he’s been trying to fix most of Cryptolocker’s faults. Critroni uses a file encryption algorithm based on elliptic curve cryptography, which its creator claims is significantly faster than encryption schemes used by other ransomware threats. This also makes decrypting the affected files impossible without paying the ransom, if there are no implementation flaws.
