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Submission + - Ford CEO: More Tech Means Less Driver Distraction (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: ""There's a tsunami headed your way," a journalist commented to Ford's CEO at a dinner at the CES confab last week, referring to the National Transportation Safety Board's recent call for banning cell phone use while driving.

When asked whether Ford is prepared to deal with such legislation, potentially coming state-by-state, CEO Alan Mulally was resolute: "This [technology] is the way the world is going...people aren't going to be disconnected in a connected world." Mulally said he thinks auto manufacturers will collectively find a way through this issue and noted that Ford is investing a lot of money and resources to address it. Ultimately, he thinks technology will be the solution, not the problem: "The solutions we have in place...absolutely will remove driver distraction," Mulally said.

Check out the future tech--and concept car--that Ford showed off at CES 2012."
Supercomputing

Submission + - Supercomputer Cools Off Using Groundwater (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "The Department of Energy is no stranger to supercomputers, and its Pacific Northwest National Lab has proven that it can continue to be an innovator in the field by using what the lab calls a unique groundwater-fed cooling system in the lab's newest supercomputer, Olympus.

The novel cooling system translates normal groundwater into big savings for the new 162 teraflop supercomputer, which is being used in energy, chemical, and fluid dynamics research.

The setup translates into 70% less energy use than traditionally cooled systems."
Security

Submission + - Zappos Breach: 8 Lessons Learned (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "Today, companies get judged on the steps they take to prevent a data breach, as well as how they respond in the wake of a breach. Zappos' preparation is notable, especially when compared with other major data breaches from the past year, including the Sony and Nasdaq incidents.

Here, security experts rate the shoe retailer's response to hack that exposed data on up to 24 million customers. Consider the eight lessons learned for other businesses.

Of course, this isn't the end of the Zappos data breach story. The company has yet to answer many related questions--such as when the breach occurred and how long attackers had access to its systems before the breach was discovered."
Android

Submission + - NSA Releases Secure Android Version (informationweek.com) 1

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "The National Security Agency has made its first public release of SE Android, a secure version of Google's Android platform.

SE Android aims to close Android's security gaps by isolating apps from one another, mitigating problems with flawed or malicious apps, instituting permission and other security checks, restricting use of system facilities by apps, and taking related steps.

The project is based on SE Linux, a security-hardened version of Linux which the NSA initially released in 2000."
Cloud

Submission + - Salesforce.com Hires Former U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "Salesforce.com announced Monday that it has hired former U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra to serve as the vendor's executive vice president of emerging markets, a role in which he will be a highly visible face to the market, particularly for major public-sector projects around the globe.

Hired as the nation's first official Chief Information Officer in 2009, Kundra was given a mandate by the Obama Administration to better manage and coordinate $80 billion in annual federal IT spending. Kundra led open-government initiatives such as launching Data.gov, which offers open access to government data, and he created the Federal IT Dashboard, which sheds light on major IT projects, exposing delays and cost overruns. He also championed cloud computing and data center consolidation initiatives aimed at cutting cost and improving security.

Yet while he outlined big changes to federal IT strategy, he resigned as federal CIO in August, 2011, leaving the implementation work to his successor, former Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel. This highlighted federal IT's continuing revolving door problem."
Iphone

Submission + - Apple Lies About Your iPhone Signal (informationweek.com) 2

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "At CES 2012, Wilson Electronics (which makes cell phone signal boosters) demonstrated the efficacy of their devices using a small Faraday cage. This cage was a wooden-framed box with copper mesh screening around the insides. Invented by the great Michael Faraday in 1836, a Faraday cage blocks external electric fields from penetrating and this includes RF, or radio frequency emissions such as cell phone signals. Faraday cages are commonly used to create an RF-free environment in which to test RF devices.

While testing my own iPhone 4S in the box we were moderately surprised to see that, some time after the lid had been shut on it, it still had five bars. We took video to explore the truth about your phone signal and those bars."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Turns 10: What's N (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "Bill Gates fired off his famous Trustworthy Computing memo to Microsoft employees on Jan. 15, 2002, amid a series of high-profile attacks on Windows computers and browsers in the form of worms and viruses like Code Red and "Anna Kournikova."

The onslaught forced Gates to declare a security emergency within Microsoft, and halt production while the company's 8,500 software engineers sifted through millions of lines of source code to identify and fix vulnerabilities. The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million.

Today, the stakes are much higher. 'TWC Next' will include a focus on cloud services such as Azure, the company says."
Security

Submission + - Hack Attacks Now Leading Cause Of Data Breaches (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "The majority of data breaches stem from hack attacks, followed by data that's lost while physically in transit. That's according to a forthcoming study from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), which assessed all known information relating to the 419 breaches that were publicly disclosed in the United States in 2011. A copy of the report was provided to InformationWeek in advance of its release.

Last year, data breaches triggered by hacking--defined by the ITRC as "a targeted intrusion into a data network," including card-skimming attacks--were at an all-time high, and responsible for 26% of all known data breach incidents. The next leading cause of breaches was data on the move (18%)--meaning electronic storage devices, laptops, or paper reports that were lost in transit--followed by insider theft (13%).

But how accurate is the underlying data? "Breaches have long been unreported, or underreported," Karen Barney, ITRC's program director, said."
Oracle

Submission + - Oracle Makes Big Data Appliance Move With Cloudera (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "Oracle released its Big Data appliance Monday, in partnership with Hadoop leader Cloudera. When Oracle announced its Big Data Appliance at October's Oracle Open World, the company offered no release dates or details about its planned distribution of open-source Apache Hadoop software. Some took that as a sign that Oracle was stalling. But by releasing the product early this year in partnership with Cloudera, which has more customers and years in the market than any other Hadoop software and services provider, Oracle has made it clear that it is wasting no time and taking no chances with unproven technology.

Pricing works out to less than $700 per terabyte, which is in line with the low costs big data practitioners expect from deployments built on commodity hardware."
Intel

Submission + - Intel Touts Ultrabooks Design Potential (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "The ultrabook, an Intel trademarked term, is more or less a tablet with a keyboard. It exists because tablets and mobile phones have been selling better than notebook computers and because Apple has proven that a notebook stripped of its optical drive and juiced with the speed of flash memory has market appeal. It exists because Intel has to offer an alternative to ARM-based chips, which are powering more and more mobile devices. To bring its chip-based vision to market, Intel last year set up a $300 million Ultrabook Fund to help make the necessary components more affordable.

You can find 15 models now; Intel says 75 more are coming in 2012. But from clamshell to hybrid, designs will vary widely."
Google

Submission + - Google Apps Conversion Smooth Sailing For NOAA (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has completed its move of 25,000 users, marking the largest government agency switch to Google Apps in 2011, according to Google.

For Google, NOAA's endorsement of the security of Google Apps serves as a counterbalance to the embarrassing withdrawal of the Los Angeles Police Department from a Google Apps migration that the City of Los Angeles committed to in 2009."
Security

Submission + - Virtualization Meets ATMs, To Secure Banking Data (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "Automatic teller machine maker Diebold has taken a novel approach to protecting bank customer data: virtualization. Virtualized ATMs store all customer data on central servers, rather than the ATM itself, making it difficult for criminals to steal data from the machines.

In places including Brazil, customer data has been at risk when thieves pulled or dynamited ATMs out of their settings and drove off with them. With threats increasing worldwide at many retail points of sale, such as supermarket checkout counters and service station gas pumps, Diebold needed to guarantee the security of customer data entered at the 50,000 ATMs that it manages.

Diebold last year partnered with VMware to produce a zero-client ATM. No customer data is captured and stored on the ATM itself."

Submission + - FBI's Troubled Sentinel Project Delayed Again (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "The FBI's Sentinel project, a digital case-management system meant to replace outdated, paper-based processes, has been delayed again. The FBI's CIO and CTO bet big on using agile development to hasten the project's completion.

But now performance issues have arisen in testing and deployment has been pushed out to May.

It's the latest in a series of delays to build a replacement for the FBI's 17-year-old Automated Case Support system. In 2006, the FBI awarded Lockheed Martin a $305 million contract to lead development of Sentinel, but it took back control of the project in September 2010 amid delays and cost overruns. At the time, the FBI said it would finish Sentinel within 12 months, using agile development strategies."
Security

Submission + - Kiss Off: Anonymous Hacker Took On Gene Simmons, F (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "Federal authorities have arrested an alleged member of Anonymous in connection with an "Operation Payback" attack against the website of Kiss frontman Gene Simmons. The charges stem from a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against Simmons' website over a five-day period in 2010.

Simmons apparently drew the ire of the Anonymous set after he lambasted their peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading proclivities during a 2010 MIPCOM entertainment content media conference panel discussion, where he lamented the failure of the music industry "to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material.""
Cloud

Submission + - 5 Worst Cloud Washers Of 2011 (informationweek.com)

Submitted by
gManZboy
gManZboy writes: "The cloud has come to connote flexibility, scalability, and economy of scale. Wouldn't you want those attributes to be on your side when you're trying to make the sale? There's just one problem. Not everything deserves to be called cloud. 2011 has seen far too much vendor cloud washing--renaming of existing products, after a few tweaks, with the word "cloud" inserted.

This worst offenders list starts with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, aka "cloud in a box." "What's in the box, judging by the price tag, is a whole bunch of lifetime licenses for previous generation software," writes Charles Babcock. "This is pre-cloud middleware and applications wrapped up in a cloud bow." He has plenty to say about Lawson, HP, and other cloud-washers, too."

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