IT Executive news

• US to require registration process for drones

  19-10-2015 21:46
  
  Hobbyists and companies alike are trying out drones for fun and commercial purposes, and as the sky starts to get crowded there is a growing cry to regulate the remote-controlled aircraft. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation on Monday said it would form a task force that will come up with a registration process for drones by Nov. 20.The task force will be composed of 25 to 30 representatives of drone and airplane manufacturers, federal officials and other interested parties. Companies including Goo
  
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• AtScale looks to easily add BI on Hadoop

  19-10-2015 20:49
  
  During his tenure as vice president of Engineering in the Advertiser Analytics unit at Yahoo!, and later as vice president of Development in the User Data & Analytics unit, David Mariani's team was responsible for running data pipelines, connecting business users with the company's ever-growing store of data."We had this whole notion of never throwing data away," he says. "That was a golden rule at Yahoo!. We just about broke the bank with NetApp and EMC. That's why we invented Hadoop.""The
  
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• Lenovo's 360-degree Yoga 900 laptop answers the Surface Book's challenge

  19-10-2015 20:30
  
  Lenovo’s new Yoga 900 should be one of the strongest competitors against the surprise Surface Book flagship from Microsoft. If nothing else, it has the best answer to the Surface Book’s dual-fulcrum hinge: a strong, elegant watchband hinge, a carryover from the Yoga 900’s year-old predecessor, the Yoga 3 Pro.
  Crafted from more than 800 individual pieces and capable of 360-degree rotation, there’s still nothing else like this mechanism on any other device, and it remains
  
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• Tricky new malware replaces your entire browser with a dangerous Chrome lookalike

  19-10-2015 19:23
  
  Security researchers have discovered a fiendish form of browser malware that stands in for your copy of Google Chrome and hopes you won’t notice the difference.
  As reported by PCRisk, the “eFast Browser” works by installing and running itself in place of Chrome. It’s based on Google’s Chromium open-source software, so it maintains the look and feel of Chrome at first glance, but its behavior is much worse.
  First, makes itself the default and takes over several syst
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Apple 4K Retina iMac reviews roundup

  19-10-2015 18:38
  The latest version of Apple's 21-inch iMac sports a 4K Retina screen, and many consumers are no doubt wondering if it's worth buying. Fortunately, a slew of reviews of the new 4K iMac have been released, and the buzz from critics seems mostly positive with a few caveats.The Ars Technica review of the 4K iMacAndrew Cunningham at Ars Technica notes the lack of a Fusion drive option in the new 4K iMac:
  The best thing about the 4K iMac is that you don't have to use a gigantic 27-inch model if you wa
  
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• Microsoft and Asus could team up on new HoloLens augmented reality hardware

  19-10-2015 18:05
  
  Microsoft’sHoloLens augmented reality headsetwon’t ship to developers until early next year, but the company is already looking to PC makers for future versions.
  The first collaboration could come from Asus, which has been talking to Microsoft about building its own HoloLens headset, CNET reports. Microsoft’s Windows and devices head Terry Myerson said the decision is ultimately up to Asus, with CEO Jonney Shih saying the company was “still evaluating” the possibil
  
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• Privacy watchdogs give EU, US three months to negotiate new Safe Harbor deal

  19-10-2015 18:00
  
  European data protection authorities have given the European Commission and national governments three months to come up with an alternative to the Safe Harbor agreement swept away two weeks ago by a ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union.But any new agreement must protect the personal data of European citizens from massive and indiscriminate surveillance, which is incompatible with EU law, the data protection authorities making up the Article 29 Working Party said late Friday.Sinc
  
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• IoT standards groups get ready to rumble at CES

  19-10-2015 18:00
  Like prizefighters in intense training, two groups trying to define the Internet of Things are headed for a big showdown in Las Vegas early next year. 
  Visitors to the International CES in early January should get to see products certified by the AllSeen Alliance and the Open Interconnect Consortium. Each group is promoting its own approach to making connected devices and the applications running on them work together. 
  AllSeen announced the start of its certification program on Monda
  
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• China reportedly tries to hack U.S. businesses the day after agreeing not to

  19-10-2015 17:55
  
  Chinese hackers have gone after seven U.S. tech and pharmaceutical companies since the presidents of both countries agreed not to knowingly carry out corporate espionage, according to security firm CrowdStrike.
  The company says in a blog post that it has identified a known hacking group in China as intruding into the seven U.S. companies starting the day after Presidents Xi and Obama announced the pact.
  “It is important to note that this is not an exhaustive list of all the intrusions fro
  
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• FireEye shows that even security products can have security holes

  19-10-2015 17:11
  
  A zero-day vulnerability in the popular FireEye security appliance was in the news several weeks ago, but it’s still worth discussing. That’s because some people in the security community were outraged that a security product could have an exploitable vulnerability. But why should products from security vendors be any different from other products? Because security vendors should know better? Please don’t tell me you’re going to trust your security career to that naive n
  
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• Microsoft expands Power BI's visualizations with help from users

  19-10-2015 17:00
  
  One of the challenges that business intelligence software users face is generating the right sort of visualizations for the data they have.That's why Microsoft announced support for custom visualizations across its Power BI service Monday. Developers can now use tools provided by the company on Github to create .pbviz files that can then be imported directly into Power BI's web interface for use in analyzing data. (Microsoft will also be making that functionality available to the Power BI Deskto
  
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• Google to enterprises: Ditch your Microsoft contract early for us

  19-10-2015 16:04
  
  Google has been working hard to pitch its Apps productivity suite to the enterprise, but has come across a consistent snag: companies are signed up for long-term volume licensing contracts with its competitors, especially Microsoft. What Google has found is that those companies came calling to look at switching to Apps when their contracts were up for renewal, but were otherwise locked up.
  But Rich Rao, the company's head of global sales for Google Apps, said that the company wanted to change t
  
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• MySQL 5.7 delivers a 3x speed injection

  19-10-2015 16:01
  
  It's been more than two years since the general release of MySQL 5.6, and on Monday Oracle announced that its successor will soon arrive bearing a significant boost in performance along with improved security and scalability.MySQL 5.7 promises speeds as much as three times faster than those of version 5.6. Specifically, in benchmark tests using SysBench Read-only Point-Selects and with 1,024 connections, MySQL 5.7 delivered 1.6 million queries per second, Oracle said."This is very competitive ag
  
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• Why Uganda is an up-and-coming IT outsourcing option

  19-10-2015 15:28
  
  A number of African nations have been working to build their IT service capabilities over the last decade with some degree of success. Here are three examples:South Africa, for example, has made a strong push as a destination for outsourced IT serving both the domestic and global market. The country has a particularly well-developed Westernized market structure which, combined with its rich talent pool, has made it “a highly credible destination” for Web services, application develop
  
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• HP's new Chromebooks are less colorful, but cheaper

  19-10-2015 15:28
  
  It’s getting towards the end of the year, and that means it’s time for Hewlett-Packard’s Chromebook 14 refresh. The 2015 release isn’t as exciting as the $440 touchscreen model that appeared last December, but these are still some nice, well-priced laptops nonetheless. In fact, this year’s Chromebook 14 models drop $50 off the price tag, down to a starting price of $250 compared to 2014’s starting price of $300.
  HP’s new Chromebooks dump the 2014 m
  
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• Trifacta brings data wrangling to the masses with free desktop tool

  19-10-2015 15:00
  Trifacta has already made a name for itself with its data-preparation software for the world of big data, but on Monday it set its sights on a broader audience with a free new tool for the desktop.Called Trifacta Wrangler, the software aims to put self-service data wrangling within reach for any professional who works with data in Excel or visual analysis tools such as Tableau. Tapping Trifacta's research in machine learning, data visualization, human-computer interaction and distributed process
  
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• Teradata gears up for Internet of Things analytics

  19-10-2015 15:00
  
  Teradata today introduced two new software services — Teradata Listener and Teradata Aster Analytics on Hadoop — aimed at helping customers operationalize Internet of Things (IoT) data."This is about the Internet of Things coming of age," says Chris Twogood, vice president of Product and Services Marketing for Teradata. "When people can start to analyze data at this volume, that's where real value happens."With the new software capabilities, Teradata aims to eliminate the complexity
  
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• Teradata doubles down on IoT with two new tools

  19-10-2015 15:00
  
  The Internet of Things is a big part of what makes big data so big, and on Monday, analytics provider Teradata unleashed two new tools to help make sense of the vast troves of data it produces.
  Teradata Listener and Teradata Aster Analytics on Hadoop help users "listen" to massive streams of IoT data in real time and then use analytics to find the distinctive underlying patterns.
  Teradata Listener is self-service software for ingesting and distributing individual or multiple data streams from s
  
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• 6 reasons Apple Notes still can't replace Evernote

  19-10-2015 14:40
  
  With iOS 9 and Mac OS X El Capitan, Apple finally bulked up its minimalist note-taking apps. The upgrades are welcome, but the latest Notes apps aren't going to persuade many people to give up Evernote, OneNote or even Google Keep.6 things Evernote does that Apple Notes still can't
  1) Capture complete Web articlesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: How to stay sane in a dysfunctional environment

  19-10-2015 14:00
  
  It’s happened again. The craziness at work has you frustrated, angry, and maybe even ready to quit.It seems like the decisions being handed down are not well thought out and are causing more problems than they were meant to solve. Morale is low and some of your key players may have left the company.As an IT leader you’re trying to keep your game face on for your team, but you’re finding it harder to do these days.Headed for a shipwreck
  You used to enjoy your IT leadership job.
  
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• How managing employee stress leads to a healthier company

  19-10-2015 13:35
  
  In the IT industry, stress is a given, and in the startup-fueled frenzy of Silicon Valley, stress may as well be included as part of every job description. Smart businesses are turning to technology to help their employees identify and cope with stress to better improve the well-being not just of the employees themselves, but the business as a whole.Generally speaking, Silicon Valley startups tend to be forward-thinking in their attempts to help employees both work hard and maintain work-life ba
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Is mind mapping a legitimate project management tool?

  19-10-2015 13:33
  
  Mind mapping. Wikipedia defines a mind map as “a diagram used to visually organize information. A mind map is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank landscape page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those.” It further states that “it has been suggested that mind mapping can improve le
  
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• Flash Player emergency patch fixes one flaw already being exploited, and two others

  19-10-2015 13:33
  Adobe released a patch for a critical vulnerability in Flash Player faster than it originally anticipated in response to high-profile cyberespionage attacks against governmental targets.The latest Flash Player updates released Friday address a flaw that's already exploited by a Russian espionage group known as Pawn Storm, as well as two other critical vulnerabilities reported privately to Adobe.The CVE-2015-7645 vulnerability is actively exploited by the Pawn Storm group in attacks targeting sev
  
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• 7 technology lessons retailers learned in 2015

  19-10-2015 13:13
  
  As the autumn air turns crisp and the leaves fall, retailers around the country are gearing up for what they hope is a highly profitable holiday season. But besides making sure they’re fully stocked with the holiday gifts customers want, they are also taking stock of everything they learned in 2015 – so they can up their game after the New Year rolls around. This is particularly true in the realm of sophisticated technology tools, which can now be found in every nook and cranny
  
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• Ondernemers laten kansen liggen in smart industry

  19-10-2015 13:07
  Vele ondernemers zijn nog niet ver genoeg met digitalisering van hun bedrijfsvoering waardoor ze niet aan nieuwe manieren van produceren en nieuwe business modellen toekomen en niet toetreden tot nieuwe markten. Onderzoek van de Kamer van Koophandel onder 2000 ondernemers duidt hierop. Terwijl de industrie,... lees meer
  
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• Mobile apps that deliver hefty ROI

  19-10-2015 12:30
  
  Mobile apps aren't just for retailers and banks anymore. A wide variety of businesses are using apps to attract and retain customers, create a powerful new marketing channel or give their employees or business partners tools that enable them to be more efficient and productive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• 11 hidden tips and tweaks for Windows 10

  19-10-2015 12:05
  
  You’ve gotten your Windows 10 upgrade from Microsoft. It still has that new OS smell. Now what? Before you take your laptop out for a spin, you need to tune it into tip-top running condition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Why your gadgets sound so good

  19-10-2015 12:02
  
  Have you noticed how great technology sounds these days? Smartphones are getting great speakers, and great speakers are getting wirelessly connected to smartphones.
  That dimension of gadget sound is overt. We notice it.
  The story is more interesting when you realize how much effort and ingenuity is put into making every little sound super appealing -- the subtle noises hardware makes, or the audio cues our apps produce.
  The reason some companies go to such lengths is because people don't know e
  
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• 9 bad programming habits we secretly love

  19-10-2015 12:00
  
  We've all done it: snagged a cookie when mom wasn't looking, gone around Deadman's Curve a bit too fast. We've even let the car sit in a parking spot after the meter expires. Yes, we've all violated any number of the cardinal rules of programming, the ones that everyone agrees are bad. And we secretly liked it.
  We've thumbed our nose at the rules of good programming, typed out code that is totally bad -- and we've lived. There were no lightning bolts from the programming gods. Our desktops didn
  
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• Drowning in security data? Here’s how to make threat intel work for you

  19-10-2015 11:43
  
  How does a company operationalize its risk and security programs? More specifically, with all of the talk about big data, how does a company operationalize its threat intelligence process?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Magento sites targeted by Neutrino exploit kit

  19-10-2015 05:56
  Some websites running the e-commerce platform Magento appear to have been infected with code that directs victims to the Neutrino exploit kit.
  It's not exactly clear how the Magento sites were infected, wrote Denis Sinegubko, a senior malware researcher with Sucuri, a Delware-based security company.
  "At this point, we can suspect that it was some vulnerability in Magento or one of the third-party extensions that allowed it to infect thousands of sites within a short time," he wrote.
  The Ma
  
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• Facebook warns users of potential state-sponsored attacks

  19-10-2015 03:59
  Facebook will now warn people if it has a strong suspicion an account is being targeted by a nation-state.The social networking service already takes steps to secure accounts that may have been compromised but has decided to directly alert users of the type of attack that's under way, wrote Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief security officer.Since state-sponsored attacks can be more sophisticated "having an account compromised in this manner may indicate that your computer or mobile device has been i
  
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• Apple-1 computer relic hits the auction block

  19-10-2015 00:56
  
  Auctioneer Christie's is currently taking online bids for an Apple-1 personal computer, as yet another owner tries to capitalize on the interest in the 39-year-old device that launched the California company climb to fame.Christie'sThe Apple-1 was originally sold as a stand-alone circuit board without a case, keyboard, monitor or even power supply.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
  
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• Customers petition Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, demand changes to Windows 10 update practices

  19-10-2015 00:55
  
  Windows 10 users have petitioned Microsoft's CEO to let them not only delay feature and functionality updates, but also ignore them, a plea that if granted would upend the company's model of delivering the OS as a service.
  The Change.org petition had collected more than 1,600 virtual signatures as of early Saturday.
  "To effectively implement and use Windows 10 in our homes and businesses, Microsoft must make changes to both the operating system and the policies the company put in place to suppo
  
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• Report: US Government will require drone owners to register

  19-10-2015 00:52
  The days of largely unregulated hobbyist drone flights in the United States seem to be quickly coming to an end. NBC News reported Friday evening that the US Government will soon require all drone buyers to register their new toy—just as you would register your car with your state’s DMV (though hopefully, without the lines).
  According to NBC, the Government will “[require] anyone buying a drone to register the device with the U.S. Department of Transportation.” Acco
  
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