84291685
submission
dkatana writes:
The ICT Scoop reports that the GSMA Mobile World Congress Americas will Launch in San Francisco in September next year
The new event will combine the CTIA's Super Mobility show with the global reach of the GSMA MWC. The London based wireless association will organize the new conference.
The GSMA wants to have a huge event in San Francisco. The new Mobile World Congress Americas It is expected to attract 30,000 attendees and 1,000 exhibitors, when it opens in September next year.
Super Mobility 2016 will be held as scheduled this year, before it evolves into the new joint event — Mobile World Congress Americas — with GSMA in 2017 and beyond.
84026615
submission
dkatana writes:
The University of Calgary paid C$20,000 ransom this week after an attack on May 28 targeted computers used by staff and faculty members, crippling multiple systems and encrypting data files and email accounts.
After determining that they were unable to recover the data the ransom was paid to “protect the quality and nature of the information we generate at the university.”, said an official in a press release.
The fact that higher education institutions are now being targeted by ransomware is raising serious questions about their ability to protect their data and critical information systems.
Universities had a false sense of security, and their IT systems are not prepared to deal with sophisticated attacks.
83718853
submission
dkatana writes:
Two revolutionary computer products were born in 1981: the IBM PC, that brought computing to the masses, now a museum piece, and the HP 12c, a financial calculator that has been one of the most successful products of our generation.
The HP 12c was designed by a team led by Dennis Harms, a former Iowa farm boy, under orders of Bill Hewlett. Now, thirty-five years later, it is still selling in its original form and is used by over 100 million people worldwide.
83698657
submission
dkatana writes:
Some US companies, wary of having to comply with new anti-encryption laws, are looking at European cloud services and providers of secure encryption products to keep their data safe — and out of reach of US intelligence services and other government requests.
Sensitive American data moving to Europe is landing mostly in places such as Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, where new cloud providers offer security, anonymity, and zero-knowledge encryption.
82451375
submission
dkatana writes:
T-Mobile and Verizon just joined the 5G race requesting special temporary authority (STA) licenses from the FCC to test millimeter band 5G services.
Verizon is concentrating on the 28 GHz band, working together with Ericsson, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung, looking to launch limited 5G services by 2017 with a Samsung handset, Qualcomm chipset and network equipment from Ericsson.
T-Mobile will be testing the 28 GHz and 39 GHz bands to evaluate the performance of equipment from Nokia and Ericsson. Their immediate plans to offer the service have not been disclosed.
Last month AT&T requested the first 5G trial license to test several potential frequencies, 3.5GHz, 4GHz, 15GHz and 28 GHz, focusing more on IoT and other types of connectivity.
5G technologies operating on the lower bands can provide long- range connectivity with extremely low latency, something necessary for the next generation of connected devices. It will also be critical for C2X (car to infrastructure communications), self-driving cars, and remote management of self-driving trains.
82395523
submission
dkatana writes:
The Network Time Foundation is responsible to keep all computer clocks synchronized through the Network Time Protocol (NTP).
The nonprofit Network Time Foundation, which Harlan Stenn launched in 2011, saw its funding increase by $90,282 in 2015 for a total of $192,282 to support the NTP project. But there's still much work ahead to ensure the system works smoothly.
The NTP, as other widely used technologies on the internet, such as OpenSSL and DNS, are based on open source code. The means that anyone can use it, but their maintenance falls mostly on volunteers submitting changes to a handful of engineers.
VMware, the biggest contributor, donated $60,000 last year, and others contributed the other half. Services such as cloud computing rely on NTP to keep their servers in sync.
Donations may be may be made via the Network Time Foundation website, or sent to stenn@nwtime.org through PayPal.
82371265
submission
dkatana writes:
Harlan Stenn, "Father Time", is the chief maintainer of the Network Time Protocol (NTP).
In the past year, security researchers have raised a number of concerns about the protocol, which Stenn is addressing even as he prepares a move of half the NTP infrastructure.
"NTP is critical as used as the legal basis for time stamps by equity, bond and financial instrument trading systems on Wall Street. It's used to time medical procedures in clinics and hospitals, and chemical processes in manufacturing, along with hundreds of other uses. Windows, Linux, and Unix computers all rely on NTP open source code for their system time-coordination with other computers." says Charles Babcock on InformationWeek.
"Security issues have been taking up half... no, three-quarters of my time since September," Stenn said, something new in a schedule already filled with maintenance issues for the protocol that must be kept running smoothly across many versions of Linux, Windows, and Unix.
82102311
submission
dkatana writes:
There is no shortage of news about the fight between Apple and the Justice Department to unlock the iPhone of a suspect in the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist case.
Apple can take a page from the fight BlackBerry had back in 2010 with some governments in the Middle East and Asia. At that time, afraid to lose a lucrative business, RIM cave in and allowed those governments to access its secure BBM messaging service. The rest is history.
If Apple complies with the Justice Department request, according to Craig Federighi, senior VP of software engineering at Apple, it "..would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all."
81425193
submission
dkatana writes:
This year the GSMA expects 2,100 exhibitors, more than 95,000 delegates, over 4,000 journalists and analysts, and 160 government delegations. Under the slogan “Mobile Is Everything,” the show will showcase the latest trends, devices and technologies for mobile, IoT, connectivity and networks.
Metro workers have announced a partial strike during the show. All efforts to reach an agreement and avoid the strike have failed. The metro will only work at 50% capacity on Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 to 9.30 h and from 16:00 to 20:00 h, and with 30% capacity the rest of those days. The metro will operate normally all other days.
80870613
submission
dkatana writes:
The US contract with ICANN,the organization responsible for registering all Internet domain names, ends on Sept. 30th. If the US government doesn’t act, it is effectively allowing the Chinese, Russian or others to censor a part of the Internet worldwide.
The concerns stem from controversy swirling around ICANN's 2012 decision to allow anyone to buy a Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) and to resell the registrations of the domain without supervision.
The controversy started in 2011, when ICANN decided to auction off gTLDs as a way to raise funds. ICANN raised over $64 million from new gTLDs registrations. The .app TLD raised $25 million alone. Critics say the organization is not effectively upholding the lack of restrictions traditionally associated with TLDs.
80804677
submission
dkatana writes:
Bring Your Own Watch? this is the new BYO nightmare for IT managers and CIOs.
Now C-Level executives are not contempt to have everything on their iPhones, they want to see all relevant information with a glimpse of their new shiny watches.
Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) services are struggling to catch up, but it is difficult to be ready for the 34.3 million smartwatches that will ship this year, plus the 20 million already out there.
80799005
submission
dkatana writes:
The City of London will get a grant of £13 million ($18.5m) from the Government scheme called ‘Go Ultra Low Cities’, that aims to make the use of electric and sustainable vehicles easier.
London will use the money to fuel its plans for rapid charging hubs across the capital, to meet the needs of commercial operators including taxis, private hire and delivery vans. TfL has a target of having 300 rapid chargers in the capital by 2020.
London expects to have over 70,000 EVs in the capital at the end of the decade.
80049967
submission
dkatana writes:
According to "Offshore Shell Games 2015," Apple is the Number One American corporation, across all industries, using offshore subsidiaries to save approximately $59.2 billion in US taxes for 2015.
But when Apple's CEO Tim Cook is asked avoid the issue, he fights back denouncing the US Tax code as unfair and outdated.
Apple's way of maneuvering on taxes is too complex to unravel in one sitting. The company is storing key intellectual property, designs and development specs leading to important products, in an offshore subsidiary. This helps the company claim that profits belong to that subsidiary, Apple Sales International, instead of the US parent company.
But Apple is not breaking any laws, it is just taking advantage of an international complex system. If the US tax code is outdated, it should be revised to match the European Union system that is forcing Apple to pay local taxes for the sale of their products in each country.
79677075
submission
dkatana writes:
AWS started out defining its virtual CPUs as being composed of EC2 compute units, or ECUs, which it defined as an equivalent to a physical Xeon processor.
However, a virtual CPU now looks suspiciously variable... A virtual CPU is whatever Amazon wants to offer in an instance series. The user has no firm measure to go by.
79060253
submission
dkatana writes:
"Your role as a citizen in participating in the betterment of your city or your democracy does not end with the simple act of voting. We have the responsibility to be active, engaged citizens beyond the ballot box." Juliana Rotich said during an interview at Barcelona's Smart City World Congress.
And she continued.."What we’ve seen with Ushahidi is that it can be useful during elections, where people can protect their votes, from Bangladesh to Panama, Zambia and Tanzania. Organisations are using a platform to crowdsource information relating to their votes or elections, crowdsourcing information about whether the polling stations are open or if there was a threat in a particular area, you know things like that."
She also criticized Facebook's internet.org for misleading people.. “There are people coming online who think that Facebook is the internet. That is worrisome in many ways because it can remove possibilities of creation and adding to the web. If somebody thinks this is the only thing you can do on the internet, they couldn’t possibly know you could learn online, or even contribute to the web.”
