IT Executive news

• AWS glitch strikes Netflix and Tinder, offering a wake-up call for others

  21-09-2015 23:24
  Netflix, Tinder and other major websites were affected for a time Sunday by glitches in Amazon Web Services' Northern Virginia facility, offering a cautionary lesson to other companies that rely on the cloud service for mission-critical capabilities.The problem manifested itself primarily in the form of higher-than-normal error rates. Sites affected reportedly also included IMDb and Amazon's Instant Video and Books websites.At the heart of the snafu were issues with AWS's DynamoDB database, but
  
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• Data analytics are ‘gold’ for pharmaceutical distributor

  21-09-2015 22:53
  
  H. D. Smith overcame a several-years-long struggle to rein in its supply chain information using analytics software that tracks data on the 100,000 products, including prescription drugs, health, wellness and beauty products, the company ships to hospitals and drugstores. CIO David Guzman, who led the initiative for the Springfield, Ill.-based company, says analytics have also helped reduce costs and boost sales and will eventually help customers improve their patient outcomes."Analytics and dat
  
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• Dropbox wants shadow IT to drive enterprise adoption

  21-09-2015 22:11
  
  Dropbox is one of the great success stories of the consumer cloud. The startup's vision of a folder that can sync across a user's computers and mobile devices has translated into a multibillion dollar valuation and widespread consumer adoption.But that hasn't meant success in the business market. Dropbox is facing massive competition from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Box and other companies that want to push their solutions. CEO Drew Houston told an audience at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Franc
  
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• Apple reportedly sets 2019 date for first electric car

  21-09-2015 20:19
  Apple is targeting its first electric car for release in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.The newspaper said the company has recently begun accelerating its efforts in the space and is planning to triple the 600-person team already working on the technology after investigating the area for a year.Details of work at the secretive company are still thin on the ground, including exactly what type of car Apple is developing under the codename "Titan."Apple has been talking with offic
  
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• Marines test Google's latest military robot

  21-09-2015 20:05
  
  The latest version of a walking, quadruped battlefield robot from Boston Dynamics, the military robotics maker owned by Google X, was tested by U.S. Marines last week.Spot weighs about 70kgs, is electrically operated and walks on four hydraulically-actuated legs. It's controlled via wireless by an operator who can be up to 500 meters away.It underwent trials and testing at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia as part of evaluations by the Marines on future military uses of robotic technol
  
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• Critical Flash Player updates patch 23 flaws

  21-09-2015 19:42
  Adobe Systems released new updates for Flash Player to patch critical vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to install malware on computers.
  The updates fix a total of 23 flaws, of which 18 can potentially be exploited to execute malicious code on the underlying systems. Adobe is not aware of any exploits being publicly available for the fixed vulnerabilities.
  The other flaws could lead to information disclosure, bypassing of the same-origin policy mechanism in browsers and memory leaks. T
  
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• iOS 9 on track to become Apple's most popular software ever

  21-09-2015 19:37
  
  iOS 9 has been out for less than a week, and even though some reported problems installing the upgrade right out of the gate, Apple says more than 50 percent of devices have already adopted the latest version of iOS.[ Related: 7 tips and tricks for iOS 9 ]That means iOS 9 is on track to become Apple’s most popular software upgrade of all time. Apple announced the adoption rate in a Monday press release about iPhone 6s and 6s Plus availability, which is also expected to break records. The p
  
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• Michigan sues HP over $49 million project that's still not done after 10 years

  21-09-2015 19:35
  
  Hewlett-Packard has faced no end of financial and legal woes in recent months, and on Friday it was hit with one more: A new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a $49 million project the state says is still not completed after 10 years.The contract dates back to 2005 and called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s that is used by more than 130 Secretary of State offices.HP was given a 2010 deadline to deliver a replacement, but it failed to do so, the stat
  
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• FTC’s actions put CSOs on high alert

  21-09-2015 19:22
  
  If someone had asked Jay Leek two years ago if advanced threat detection should be part of every institution’s core security stack, he would’ve replied that it’s “nice to have, but it only becomes core in more mature programs.” But today, the chief information security officer at The Blackstone Group in New York is taking a new look at what’s considered reasonable care in protecting information.
  “Today, I would say advanced threat detection capability i
  
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• Review: WatchOS 2 offers timely (and needed) tweaks

  21-09-2015 19:14
  
  WatchOS 2 is the second version of the operating system that powers the Apple Watch lineup, and it arrives about five months after the wearable's debut -- and five days after it was originally expected. Even though it's been only a few months since supplies caught up with the initial high demand, development of the underlying operating system has continued.
  watchOS 2.0 is downloaded using the Watch app on the iPhone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
  
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• China 'must stop' cyberespionage, warns US National Security Advisor Rice

  21-09-2015 19:08
  
  China's government must halt economic espionage in cyberspace, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice warned on Monday, days before Chinese President Xi Jinping is due in Washington, D.C., on an official visit.The issue has become a major thorn in the side of U.S.-China relations in the last year, especially in the wake of the breach of personal information of tens of millions of U.S. government workers at the Office of Personnel Management. The U.S. hasn't publicly accused Chi
  
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• Windows 10 begins to eat into Windows 7's usage share

  21-09-2015 18:40
  
  Although it initially tempted Windows 8.1 users, Windows 10 has increasingly grown its usage share at the expense of the much more widely used Windows 7, an encouraging sign for Microsoft's efforts to convince the old guard to switch.
  Using data from Irish analytics company StatCounter, Computerworld calculated the changes in usage share -- a measurement of desktop-and-laptop-driven online activity -- of the various editions of Windows since 10's debut on July 29.
  For the first four weeks after
  
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• Facebook drives increase in social media satisfaction

  21-09-2015 18:31
  
  User satisfaction with ebusiness is up, driven by strong gains in social media, according to a new report.The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report 2015 — which surveyed 5,400 users on social media, search engines and news sites — found that user satisfaction with social media is up for the second straight year, climbing 4.2 percent to an ACSI score of 74 on a 100-point scale. Just two years ago, social media ranked among the bottom three industries.The ACSI g
  
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• CIO Leo Brand zet digitalisering Vopak op de kaart

  21-09-2015 18:15
  Op het moment van zijn 400-jarig jubileum staat Vopak aan de vooravond van een ingrijpende vernieuwing. Het bedrijf bereidt een grootschalige digitalisering voor van zijn tankopslagsystemen en het standaard ERP-systeem wordt vervangen door zelf ontwikkelde software die beter aansluit op de... lees meer
  
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• All your big data will mean nothing without systems of insight

  21-09-2015 17:28
  
  Your relationship with your customer has become increasingly personal. Your business is starving for customer analytics that help you better understand each individual customer — not just a broad customer segment.
  That focus on individual customers means we’re entering a world of extreme segmentation. This new focus is a key strategy for companies that realize that understanding and meeting individual customer needs addresses what Forrester data has identified as businesses’ t
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: The only job search guide you'll ever need

  21-09-2015 17:00
  
  Face it: at some point in your executive technology career you’re going to be looking for a new job. Even if you’re in a great job and you’ve never been happier, there may come a day when circumstances thrust you into the job market. And when that day arrives, will you be ready with a plan and a process?I’ve interviewed and coached hundreds of accomplished IT executives who share the same counterproductive traits when it comes to the care and feeding of their careers: the
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: How Tim Gunn makes supportive leadership work

  21-09-2015 16:08
  
  “Hello Designers…”
  With his first words, Tim Gunn affirms the artistry, person and vision of each person on Project Runway. When Tim Gunn walks into the workroom, there is an electricity in everyone. You may want to hear what he has to say or you may fear what he has to say, but everyone wants to please him. They know that no matter what he says, Tim’s comments will help them find their way.
  Do your team members anticipate interactions with you with the same excitement
  
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• Box, LinkedIn and WhatsApp share open source advice

  21-09-2015 16:06
  
  SAN JOSE — No single programming language will be a panacea for developer teams, but picking the right open-source code for specific tasks, and for scale, is paramount to any project, according to Sam Shillace, senior vice president of engineering at Box, who spoke at Facebook's @Scale developer conference last week. Shillace and his counterparts from LinkedIn and WhatsApp discussed the challenges they face and tough choices they must make about programming languages, but they also ca
  
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• Test, deploy, release ... repeat

  21-09-2015 15:53
  
  The term "release management" might bring images to your mind of meetings that run from 4 p.m. - 8 a.m. and involve a build, sign-offs and lots of coffee, soda and vending machine snacks. 
  Or you might think of a programmer clicking a deploy link. 
  Not all companies can trigger a deployment whenever they're ready (relying on the version control safety net, of course), and not all should, but most can benefit from moving away from the first example and toward the last. 
  I’ve
  
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• Curved Microsoft Band 2 may track stair climbing

  21-09-2015 15:44
  
  Most expect Microsoft to announce a second-generation Microsoft Band at its event in early October. If so, images of the Microsoft Band 2 may have leaked over the weekend.
  Spanish site MicrosoftInsider published what the site claimed to be leaked images of new Band, complete with a curved display that better conforms to the user’s wrist. The site could dig up little else on the Band 2’s new features, although Microsoft’s hybrid productivity solution/fitness band now appears to
  
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• Rating programming languages – Swift is hot, Dart is not

  21-09-2015 15:32
  
  Apple's Swift programming language is enjoying a meteoric rise in popularity and gaining new followers at an unprecedented rate, according to a recent study.Swift has earned itself a Top 20 spot in developer research firm RedMonk's “Programming Language Rankings: June 2015” study less than a year after the language's launch. By contrast Google's Go, another language that has enjoyed explosive growth in popularity, took almost four years to make it in to RedMonk's Top 20.To read this
  
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• Malware implants on Cisco routers revealed to be more widespread

  21-09-2015 15:31
  Attackers have installed malicious firmware on nearly 200 Cisco routers used by businesses from over 30 countries, according to Internet scans performed by cybercrime fighters at the Shadowserver Foundation.Last Monday, FireEye subsidiary Mandiant warned about new attacks that replace the firmware on integrated services routers from Cisco Systems. The rogue firmware provides attackers with persistent backdoor access and the ability to install custom malware modules.At the time Mandiant said
  
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• Google Drive for Business boosts data retention features in crowded market

  21-09-2015 15:00
  
  One of the key ways of getting businesses to adopt new technology is to ensure that it meets with all of users' discovery and compliance requirements, including data retention and deletion.
  If a company already deletes some or all of its data after a certain period of time, a new service needs to comply with that.
  Google is better addressing that market with its own cloud storage and collaboration product, as a result of new changes announced Monday morning. Drive for Work now features deeper i
  
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• BrandPost: How Geography Affects Mobility

  21-09-2015 15:00
  
  Stats have a great way of identifying trends, not to mention significant regional differences. The recent CIO Survey shows that although mobility is on the rise regardless of industry or geography, European nations are far more aggressive when it comes to embracing opportunities to expand mobile reach. Specifically, 61 percent of European respondents say their organizations are aggressively investing in mobility, versus only 39 percent across North American respondents.The reason is simple &mdas
  
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• Indian draft rules on encryption could compromise privacy, security

  21-09-2015 14:55
  India's government is trying to ensure that its law enforcement agencies have easy access to encrypted information, but it could be compromising security and privacy in the process.A draft policy on encryption issued by the Indian government aims to keep a check on the use of the technology by specifying the algorithms and the length of the encryption keys used by different categories of people.Consumers will also be required to store the plain texts of encrypted information for 90 days from the
  
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• HP's divide, layoff and conquer strategy a challenge for managers

  21-09-2015 14:44
  
  On Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman announced the company plans to lay off go an additional 25,000 to 30,000 workers in an attempt to "enable a more competitive, sustainable cost structure" for the new company -- or, companies.
  Whitman says the job cuts are part of a larger restructuring of HP into two separate companies: HP Enterprise, which will focus on cutting-edge, high-growth technologies like cloud and cybersecurity while HP Inc. will stick with slower-growth commodity solutions l
  
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• France rejects Google's appeal on right to be forgotten

  21-09-2015 14:21
  
  France's privacy regulator has rejected Google's request that it just forget about a ruling extending the "right to be forgotten" to all Google's websites, not just those with European domain names.The decision requires Google to close a loophole that enabled searchers to defeat a judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) last year.The CJEU recognized the right to be forgotten in May 2014, allowing people to ask search engines to not display certain links resulting from a sea
  
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• Are robots really going to steal your job?

  21-09-2015 14:00
  
  A robot won Jeopardy in 2011, so J.P. Gownder's Forrester report, The Future of Jobs, 2025: Working Side-by-Side With Robots, shouldn't come as a surprise. It was only a matter of time before robots rose up to steal our jobs and make an honest living. Except, there's not really a reason to fear robots.Sure, humans will work closer with robots than ever before, but you also have to consider the actual definition of a robot. As pointed out in a blog post from Forrester, robots in this case can mea
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: How to manage scope creep when purchasing enterprise software

  21-09-2015 13:49
  
  All enterprise software projects should start with a defined scope. The success of these projects depends on managing the risks associated with each project, and one of those risks is scope creep. Scope creep is defined as continually adding requirements as a project progresses. If the scope grows too large, it can even cause a project to fail. While this is a danger when developing software, it sometimes also happens when purchasing cloud or off-the-shelf software.Gathering requirements is a jo
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Who wins when projects collide?

  21-09-2015 13:47
  
  Who wins when two projects collide over an issue or a resource or access to equipment or funding? Well, the answer is probably…no one really. It’s never good to have conflict or competition in your own organization over something you truly need to get your job done. It can end up like an ugly presidential debate where everyone is from the same party, has primarily the same goal and mission, but they start going at each others’ throats because they have to for survival.What&rsq
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: How to fight denial of service - choose your battles, save your dollars

  21-09-2015 13:42
  
  Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are probably the scariest online attack a business faces. Not because of the amount of damage done (data breaches are typically much more costly), but because there is so little you can do about them. Earlier this year, I surveyed my collegues to find out what they considered the number one critical security topic.DoS was the unanimous winner.A very hard problem
  The economics of DoS make defense a nightmare. After all, the attack simply depends on overwhelmin
  
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• How ‘joint employer’ ruling impacts IT outsourcing customers

  21-09-2015 13:15
  
  The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling in late August that companies using workers employed by a business, such as staffing agency or service providers, may now, in certain circumstances, be mutually responsible for any labor violations of that external partner.Previously, the NLRB’s standard for joint employment required that a company have direct control over an individual’s working conditions. However, citing the steady increase of third-party staffing and sub-contractin
  
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• New social network aims to find news tech pros really care about

  21-09-2015 13:05
  
  When Sandy MacPherson, a former climate change scientist, launched Quibb in 2013, she set out to build a destination where an exclusive community of tech professionals could share and discuss industry-related content.“I saw how tech professionals were using Twitter as a social RSS where they’d look to experts and thought leaders at other companies to get an understanding of what news and content was interesting,”she says. “But there’s a content problem—there a
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: New CIOs don't always have time to ease into their new role

  21-09-2015 13:00
  
  You are a new CIO. You are looking forward to laying out a 100-day plan to meet your customers, understand the business, and dig into the solutions to the issues that caused you to be hired. If you are taking over for someone who retired after a long and storied career, and you had a nice, six-month transition period, you may have a 100-day honeymoon in which you can visit with everyone and get in the groove. For the other 99 percent of you, however, the clock is ticking and it is not ticking d
  
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• Bimodal IT: A two-pronged approach to delivering innovation and maintenance

  21-09-2015 12:30
  
  It's a feeling that's all too familiar in many an IT department: On the one hand, staffers need to keep the lights on, the systems humming, the uptime up. On the other, they're being asked to help their companies innovate, and to do so at an ever-faster pace. It's almost as if they're being torn in two.
  Given that pressure, some IT leaders are taking the bull by the horns and creating what's called bimodal IT -- where one group is tasked with the keep-the-lights-on functions while the other han
  
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• Mandy van Tilborg, Rabobank: “We willen de gaten zoeken in fintech en daar inspringen”

  21-09-2015 12:28
  Hoe innoveert een traditionele financiële institutie zoals de Rabobank? Mandy van Tilborg, IT en innovatiemanager bij de bank, komt daarover vertellen en verrast haar gehoor met haar enthousiasme, gedrevenheid en opmerkelijke aanpak.Ook binnen de bank heeft Van Tilborg menigeen verrast met haar onorthodoxe visie... lees meer
  
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• When artificial intelligence is everywhere, all the time

  21-09-2015 12:15
  
  It's easy to dismiss virtual assistants as parlor tricks, irrelevant gimmicks or even fatally flawed.
  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella didn't help matters last week when a demo of his company's Cortana virtual assistant failed spectacularly. At Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event in San Francisco, Nadella tried to show off Cortana as a business tool by asking it: "Show me my most at-risk opportunities." Cortana understood the request as: "Show me to buy milk at this opportunity."
  The demo failed not b
  
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• iOS 9 breaks VPNs, prevents server access for many

  21-09-2015 12:00
  
  Apple's iOS 9 has several features meant to increase its strong enterprise-grade security. But it also breaks a key security method: VPN connections to some corporate servers. As a result, users won't be able to access some servers over some VPN connections -- but they'll be able to access other servers with no problem.
  The bug appeared in iOS 9's beta. It was not fixed in the final version of iOS 9, and it is not fixed in the current beta of iOS 9.1.[ InfoWorld's Mobile Security Deep Dive. Dow
  
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• 11 cutting-edge databases worth exploring now

  21-09-2015 12:00
  
  Only a few years ago, database work was among the most boring of tasks in IT -- in a good way. Data went into one of the major SQL databases and it came out later, all in one piece, exactly as it went in. The database creators had succeeded in delivering rock-solid performance, and everyone started taking it for granted.
  Then the nature of what we wanted to store changed. Databases had to move beyond bank accounts and airline tickets because everyone had begun sharing data on social networks. S
  
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• 6 quirky features of Windows 10

  21-09-2015 11:25
  
  Issues with new featuresBy most measures, Windows 10 is a huge improvement over Windows 8 and 8.1, and it’s a very worthwhile upgrade from Windows 7. But, of course, no new OS is perfect upon launch. Here are 6 issues with some of its new features. Many of these could be considered minor infractions (and can be adjusted by the user), so we rank them from “this is not that big of a deal” to “OK, this could be bad.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, p
  
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• Review: Parallels 11 delivers seamless Windows/Mac integration

  21-09-2015 11:23
  
  If you’re an end user who wants the best-of-both-worlds experience of running Windows on a Mac, or if you’re an IT admin who wants to gain more control over the Macs running on your network, Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac is a great option.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Kim Dotcom's US extradition hearing begins

  21-09-2015 08:46
  A hearing for the extradition to the U.S. of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom began Monday in Auckland, New Zealand, with a number of civil rights activists, including Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, opposing the hand over.Dotcom and colleagues, and two companies including the file-sharing site Megaupload, were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia in January 2012 and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement and money
  
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• Apple brings down malware-infected apps from store

  21-09-2015 06:21
  
  Apple has brought down a large number of apps from its store after it was found that around 40 iOS apps had been infected by a modified version of the company's software for developers.
  Christine Monaghan, an Apple spokeswoman, told news outlets that the company removed apps from the App Store that it knows have been created with the counterfeit software, to protect its customers.
  Palo Alto Networks reported last week that a new malware, called XcodeGhost, modified the Xcode integrated developm
  
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