IT Executive news

• Intel exec pushes geotagging to address Euro privacy laws

  18-11-2015 23:33
  
  The tech industry avoids regulation when it can, and the issue of protecting data across national borders is no exception. So an Intel executive on Wednesday proposed a technology solution to ensuring compliance with European data privacy laws.Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel's data center group, was asked how, given Europe's strict laws governing movement of personal data, service providers can link data centers in different regions while staying in compliance with regulations."We’r
  
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• Microsoft pulls Windows 10 support from Intel's Galileo boards

  18-11-2015 22:23
  
  Microsoft says it is pulling support for a pared-down, IoT version of Windows 10 from the latest version of Intel's Galileo board computer because it doesn't have the hardware capabilities to support the OS.Intel's Galileo is an uncased board being used by makers to build robots, appliances, wearable devices and other devices. The latest Gen2 version of Galileo sells for between US$45 and $75.With support for Galileo boards, Microsoft's goal was to reach more enthusiasts and do-it-yourselfers, a
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Now for Something Completely Different

  18-11-2015 22:02
  
  For at least the last 30 years, we’ve organized enterprise IT functions by functional disciplines (data center, infrastructure layer, security, application development and application maintenance, etc.). This model was remarkably effective and served enterprises well in driving high-quality capability at affordable or low costs. However, borrowing the famous catchphrase of many Monty Python comedy sketches … “now for something completely different” … we need to re
  
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• The US government wants in on the public cloud, but needs more transparency

  18-11-2015 21:14
  
  The U.S. federal government is trying to move more into the cloud, but service providers' lack of transparency is harming adoption, according to Arlette Hart, the FBI's chief information security officer. "There's a big piece of cloud that's the 'trust me' model of cloud computing," she said during an on-stage interview at the Structure conference in San Francisco Wednesday. That's a tough sell for organizations like the federal government that have to worry about protecting important
  
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• How Anonymous really targets ISIS

  18-11-2015 20:42
  
  With the ISIS attacks on Paris, Anonymous declared war on ISIS. The reality is that is more hype than fact, and misleading.
  After terrorist attacks, people love to see retribution. The bombings of Raqqa by French airplanes were a welcome site. The Internet then became excited about the Anonymous declaration of war on ISIS. People love the principle of an unbridled party, without rules, reeking havoc on the enemy. However, the reality of the implications of the declaration of war is less sensati
  
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• U.S. may be financing encryption apps to stay ahead of terrorists

  18-11-2015 20:39
  
  The U.S. government's financial support for the development of smartphone encryption apps doesn't surprise security experts.
  U.S. intelligence agencies are probably involved in funding commercial encryption apps through the government's Open Technology Fund to stay on top of terrorists and organized criminals that use encryption to cloak their communications, several security experts said Wednesday.
  "It would not surprise me if federal agencies were funding encryption apps because it is possibl
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: What IBM's willingness to share source code with China means

  18-11-2015 20:30
  
  About a month ago, several articles appeared in the press covering IBM's willingness to share source code with officials from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. At the time, the preponderance of firms in the U.S. tech industry and some public officials were taking the stance that such sharing could lead only to theft of intellectual property and a disadvantaged U.S. position. In this view, they were not entirely wrong.The political backdrop for this moment was tarred with U
  
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• 353 million smartphones sold last quarter as emerging markets dominate

  18-11-2015 20:29
  
  Emerging markets like China drove global smartphone sales growth in the third quarter of 2015, according to the latest figures from Gartner Research. A total of 353 million smartphones were sold over those three months, which represents a 15.5% uptick over the same period one year ago.
  The availability of cheaper smartphones helped push sales numbers higher in emerging markets, research director Anshul Gupta said in a statement. While those markets saw 18.4% year-over-year growth in the quarter
  
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• Sprint looks to spur growth with new half-off-rivals' rates plan

  18-11-2015 20:27
  
  Sprint today unveiled a new simplified wireless plan offering 50% off competitors' rates -- part of an effort to lure consumers to try its faster LTE Plus network, which promises speeds of 128Mbps or more.
  Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said the costs of the new program will be more than offset by revenues from new customers. "There's absolutely no way anybody can beat this offer," he said during a briefing with reporters.
  Sprint, the nation's fourth largest carrier with about 59 million customers,
  
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• Weather Company forecasts more big data for IBM Watson Analytics

  18-11-2015 19:43
  
  When Weather Company CEO David Kenny met with Bryson Koehler in 2012 he said he needed someone to turn the company into a big data technology business."You've got three years," Kenny told Koehler. "Can you do it?" Koehler picked up the gauntlet, becoming the company's CIO and CTO that July. Three years later, the Weather Company agreed to a sale to IBM, which will use the Atlanta-based company's assets, including software, infrastructure, intellectual property and data, to buttress its burgeonin
  
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• Google-owned VirusTotal starts analyzing Mac malware in a sandbox

  18-11-2015 19:04
  VirusTotal, the most widely used online file-scanning service, is now executing suspicious Mac apps submitted by users inside a sandbox to generate information that could improve the analysis and detection of Mac malware.This comes at a time when, according to security vendors, the number of potentially unwanted Mac OS X applications, especially adware programs, is at an all time high.VirusTotal, a Google-owned service, allows users to upload suspicious files and scan them with 54 different anti
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: iPad Pro: Charge the Apple Pencil's battery

  18-11-2015 18:49
  
  Apple's new iPad Pro brings with it a new way of working on the iPad: the Apple Pencil. The Apple Pencil is designed to provide much greater precision when working on the iPad Pro. It's whole new way of working with your iPad that will bring out the creative side of you in new ways.But how long does the Apple Pencil last in terms of battery life? Apple is promising roughly twelve hours on the product page for the Apple Pencil. And that's not too bad at all since most people won't be using it for
  
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• Future for Windows in smartphones is grim, Gartner says

  18-11-2015 18:46
  
  Gartner is predicting a grim future for Microsoft's Windows mobile OS, saying it won't make its mark in consumer smartphones, remaining relegated to enterprise users.
  Microsoft's Windows 10 mobile OS is just now reaching devices, but prior versions didn't fare so well. Windows Mobile was in just 5.87 million handsets shipped during the third quarter this year, declining from 9.03 million in the same quarter a year ago.
  That pales in comparison to Android, which was in 298.8 million units shippe
  
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• How to protect your Amazon account with two-factor authentication

  18-11-2015 17:24
  It’s not clear when it happened, but Amazon recently added two-factor authentication as an login option for your Amazon account. This is a key security measure that's long overdue on a site that handles your credit card information.For several years, we’ve encouraged you to add two-factor authentication to your accounts whenever possible, and Amazon is no different. When the new security option is active, signing in is a two-step process. First, you sign-in with your password as usua
  
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• Facebook does iOS alerts with new Notify app

  18-11-2015 17:01
  
  Facebook released a new iOS app last week that does just one thing: notifications. The aptly named Notify is the company's latest attempt to use its own alerts to circumvent the more comprehensive OSes that power today's most popular mobile devices. 
  The app lets you set an array of notifications for weather, news, sports and entertainment, from 72 well-known online publishers, including BuzzFeed.com and The New York Times.FacebookFacebook's Notify news app.To read this article in full or
  
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• New Splice Machine RDBMS unites OLTP and OLAP

  18-11-2015 17:00
  
  Splice Machine yessterday announced the 2.0 version of its relational database management system (RDBMS), which aims to give you the scalability of Hadoop and the performance of Spark without the need to rewrite years' worth of SQL or retrain staff."It is a real breakthrough, I think, in database technology," says Monte Zweben, co-founder and CEO of Splice Machine. "Before now, it was very difficult to have a mixed workload on a single database. What companies had to do is do their real-time, co
  
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• Bing gains search share after Windows 10 gives it a hand

  18-11-2015 16:56
  
  Search queries on Bing in the U.S. last month increased by the largest margin since Windows 10's launch, hinting that Microsoft's strategy to embed the search engine in the OS may be working.target="new">Bing's query volume climbed 2.6% to 3.8 billion in October, according to measurement vendor comScore, easily trumping the 1.6% increase of September. Meanwhile, Bing's share of the U.S. desktop search market grew to 20.8% last month, a one-tenth of a percentage point gain, up four-tenths of
  
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• What Microsoft's new developer strategy means for CIOs

  18-11-2015 16:37
  
  Connect 2015, Microsoft’s online developer event being held this week, is crammed with announcements of new developer tools and sneak peaks at the future of Visual Studio and C#. If you take a step back from the flood of details, though, there’s a clear direction emerging.Microsoft is leveraging open source and cross-platform development tools to reach a wider range of developers. Those changes mean CIOs need to think differently about what projects Microsoft’s development tool
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Pair the Apple Pencil and the iPad Pro

  18-11-2015 16:32
  
  Apple's new iPad Pro is now available, and one of the best things about it is the Apple Pencil. The Apple Pencil is designed to provide much greater precision than a finger when using the iPad Pro.But before you can use the Apple Pencil with the iPad Pro, you need to pair the two of them, and I'll show you how in this tip.How to pair the Apple Pencil with the iPad ProIt's very easy and quick to pair your Apple Pencil with the iPad Pro, and here's how you can do it:1. Remove the cap from your App
  
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• This new tool helps software developers make money from their Windows 10 apps

  18-11-2015 16:30
  
  Microsoft has teamed up with mobile video ad network Vungle to give developers a new way to monetize new apps they're building for Windows 10. The Vungle Software Development Kit for Windows 10 is designed to let developers of applications that reach across traditional PCs, tablets and phones easily add video advertising to what they're building and get paid when users look at those ads. The videos are built to use Windows 10's native players, and don't require the use of Flash.While Vungle
  
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• Microsoft’s revised privacy policy curbs Windows 10 fears with more specificity

  18-11-2015 16:30
  
  Microsoft’s privacy policy is looking a little less frightening with a set of revisions that quietly landed last month.
  As documented by Ed Bott at ZDNet, the updated policy appears to address fears over data collection in Windows 10, and on services such as OneDrive and Outlook. In many cases, Microsoft has added specifics and examples to show exactly where and why it accesses personal data.
  For instance, one passage previously described how Microsoft will “access, disclose and pre
  
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• Microsoft's Graph wants to turn user data into business intelligence it can sell

  18-11-2015 16:30
  
  How does data become information? Through context. And that’s what Microsoft’s new Microsoft Graph aims to do: Collect data points about you, then turh around and sell it to apps and services--with your permission, of course. 
  In March 2014, Microsoft announced what it called the “Office Graph,” which aggregated data points like your calendar, business relationships, company hierarchy and other factors to paint a more complete picture of your life. Microsoft took a
  
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• Microsoft ups its DevOps game with a raft of new tools

  18-11-2015 16:30
  
  It would be tough for Microsoft to top the seismic waves it created at last year's Connect developer conference when it announced the open-sourcing of its .Net application framework, but this year the software giant has plenty up its sleeve.The company on Wednesday is making a boatload of announcements, all dedicated to providing a development environment that serves any developer working on any application and on any device or platform.From an enterprise perspective, some of the key highlights
  
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• 4 ways running IT is like directing a Hollywood movie

  18-11-2015 15:51
  
  CIOs will need to run IT departments more like Hollywood film studios to achieve the best results in the future.That's the view of Dan McClure, an expert in innovation at Chicago-based technology consultancy ThoughtWorks.He points out that the big Hollywood studios abandoned 50 years ago the idea of making movies using talent they had signed under exclusive contracts. Instead they began assembling casts and crews for each movie they made using the best people available from a much larger industr
  
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• 8 reasons to buy an iPad Pro vs. a MacBook (and vice versa)

  18-11-2015 15:47
  
  “Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said recently. “They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones.”I don’t fully buy Cook’s assertion. The iPad Pro is indeed Apple’s most capable tablet ever, and I’m finding it to be fast and powerful. It offers features and capabilities I don’t get from my 13-inch MacBook Air. Then
  
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• New CIO appointments, November 2015 edition

  18-11-2015 15:31
  
  GE Capital Julie Stansbury, CIO of GE CapitalBy now, executives are knee deep in planning for next year and beyond, and the sound of plows and snow blowers — at least here in the Northeast — can't be too far off. As we prepare for winter and the year's end, we see a number of new CIO appointments.Julie Stansbury was promoted to CIO of GE Capital. Stansbury was previously CIO for GE Capital Americas.MasterCard promoted Ed McLaughlin to the newly-created role of CIO. Previous
  
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• 10 dumb security mistakes sys admins make

  18-11-2015 15:02
  
  Security isn’t merely a technical problem -- it's a people problem. There’s only so much technology you can throw at a network before dumb human mistakes trip you up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Developers can design their own compute instances in Google's cloud

  18-11-2015 15:00
  Google made a big move to woo developers Wednesday, announcing that they can create compute instances with custom configurations of virtual CPUs and memory on the company's cloud platform.The company calls its new feature Custom Machine Types, and it allows users to essentially build their own compute instance to fit an application's needs. Instances can have between 1 and 32 vCPUs, incremented by even numbers of processors. To that, developers can add up to 6.5GiB of memory per vCPU in an
  
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• New ad-fraud botnet targets major corporations, universities

  18-11-2015 14:11
  
  A new botnet is specifically targeting large corporations, taking over user machines to generate high-value ad fraud, according to a new report from Pixalate.
  The Xindi botnet first appeared last fall, but has really taken off since August. It has already infiltrated around 8 million machines at more than 6,000 enterprises, said Amin Bandeali, CTO at Pixalate.
  "We noticed an uptick of behavior from these enterprises on a high scale," he said.
  Pixalate monitors advertising networks for fraud, an
  
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• 5 email helpers you need to install right now

  18-11-2015 14:10
  
  Email is causing too much overload. According to productivity expert Nathan Zeldes, we spend about 20 hours per week processing email. Of that, at least one third of that time is spent dealing with unimportant messages. There has to be a better way, right? Luckily, there’s no shortage of email helpers designed to trim down how much time you spend ferreting through your inbox. They help weed out unimportant messages automatically, track who has not replied to a message, and flip email
  
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• Exploit kit activity up 75 percent in third quarter 2015

  18-11-2015 14:04
  
  In a sign of the increasing professionalization of the space, exploit kit activity increased 75 percent in the third quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, based on DNS activity, according to the latest edition of the Infoblox DNS Threat Index.
  The index measures the creation of malicious DNS infrastructure, including exploit kits. Four exploit kits—Angler, Magnitude, Neutrino, and Nuclear—accounted for 96 percent of total activity in the category for the third
  
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• What CRM data tells you about your sales methodology

  18-11-2015 13:56
  
  While there have been CRM systems tailored to specific sales methodologies, I don’t believe that any of them have been commercial successes. Too many sales organizations have their own flavor-of-the-year sales methodology, or think they’ve come up with a completely new one that could not possibly be covered by one of the standard ones. So the smart CRM vendors have kept agnostic, creating a platform that enables any sales methodology, and encouraging vendors to create nice add-on pro
  
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• How to crowdsource your way to better security

  18-11-2015 13:27
  
  The best defense is a good offense, as the saying goes, and nowhere is that more true than in enterprise security. Finding vulnerabilities and exploits before hackers do can prevent devastating breaches, data loss, and prevent crippling hits to your operations and your reputation.Most enterprises use one of two approaches: manual, by which a human tests for potential weaknesses; or automated, in which a vulnerability scanner screens networks for exploit potential. But neither of these approaches
  
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• Why companies are hiring from the Silicon Prairie

  18-11-2015 13:15
  
  U.S. businesses are increasingly looking outside Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley to find IT talent, especially in mature industries. Talent from the so-called Silicon Prairie -- outside of California and the New York City Tech corridor -- can help organizations cut costs, improve retention and employee engagement as well as reduce time-to-hire."One of the big catalysts is cost, but that cuts both ways. It's often cheaper for companies to hire talent in an 'off-metro' area, but it's a benefit fo
  
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• West-Europese werknemer ziet IT-afdeling bovenal als technisch hulpverlener

  18-11-2015 12:27
  Werknemers in West-Europese landen kloppen bij de IT-afdeling aan als er een technisch probleem is, maar strategisch advies inzake het inzetten van technologie halen ze elders. Een grote meerderheid acht zichzelf namelijk technisch onderlegd, aldus een studie van Gartner.Acht op de tien respondenten geeft aan... lees meer
  
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• Vetting researchers builds trust in bounty programs

  18-11-2015 12:16
  
  Conservative enterprises have been tentative about joining forces with hackers, but third-party bug bounty platforms have proven that their vetting process ensures a highly qualified and trustworthy talent pool. Because security researchers are able to discover vulnerabilities and alert enterprises to flaws in applications before a breach, there is value in trusting ethical hackers.
  Bugcrowd’s recent State of Bug Bounty report noted that many bug bounty programs are commonly run on t
  
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• Extreme tech positions of the presidential candidates

  18-11-2015 12:11
  
  This is an election where extreme positions have become the norm, and the implications for science and technology may be huge.In some cases, the Republican and Democratic candidates have stated positions with clarity. But many of ideas are still vague, roughly sketched out and incomplete.These emerging proposals, the ones with the most impact on technology, deserve attention. The surviving candidates are certain to refine them in the months ahead. But here's a look at some tech implications of t
  
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• Feds fund encryption apps that some officials say could cloak terrorists

  18-11-2015 12:01
  
  U.S. government funds have recently been used to support the creation and maintenance of commercially-available smartphone encryption apps, according to public records.
  At the same time, U.S. security officials and some elected officials have complained to software makers that their encryption software allows terror groups to communicate over the Internet in secret. Some experts have even tied encryption and darknet communications to deadly attacks like the one by ISIS in Paris last week.
  The U
  
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• Review: OpenShift 3 rocks Docker containers

  18-11-2015 12:00
  
  Last year OpenShift 2 was my favorite open source PaaS. I said at the time, “OpenShift is outstandingly easy to use, manage, and install, and it presents little learning curve for developers familiar with Git and administrators familiar with Puppet. Enabling automatic horizontal scaling is as simple as checking a box in the application configuration. Automatic gear idling is enabled by default and allows for very high application density. And updating an application is as simple as doing
  
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• Qualcomm faces antitrust probe in South Korea

  18-11-2015 09:46
  Qualcomm confirmed Tuesday it is under antitrust investigation in South Korea in connection with its licensing practices.The company said it had recently received the Korea Fair Trade Commission's staff-generated case examiner’s report (ER), which commences a process that allows Qualcomm to defend itself.The issues in the investigation include the allegation that the company's practice of licensing patents only at the device level and requiring that its chip customers be licensed to its in
  
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• SentinelOne adds feature to restore files hit by ransomware

  18-11-2015 09:05
  SentinelOne has added a feature to its endpoint detection products that can restore files encrypted by cybercriminals, a common type of attack known as ransomware.
  The "rollback" feature will be available in the 1.6 versions of its Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) and the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) products at no charge, said Dal Gemmell, director of product management.
  SentinelOne is among several vendors that are trying to displace traditional antivirus vendors with products that
  
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• In wake of Paris attacks, legislation aims to extend NSA program

  18-11-2015 06:58
  A U.S. senator plans to introduce legislation that would delay the end of the bulk collection of phone metadata by the National Security Agency to Jan. 31, 2017, in the wake of security concerns after the terror attacks last Friday in Paris.Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, believes that the termination of the program, scheduled for month-end under the USA Freedom Act,  "takes us from a constitutional, legal, and proven NSA collection architecture to an untested, hypothetical
  
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• How Cisco is trying to keep NSA spies out of its gear

  18-11-2015 04:55
  Cisco is working to build the confidence of prospective customers in its products, two years after disclosures of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency seeded doubt, particularly in China.
  It is increasingly putting more stringent security requirements on its suppliers and has launched a beta program that allows customers to analyze its products in a highly secure environment before buying.
  The efforts are intended to introduce more transparency to allay growing concerns over how supply c
  
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• Citrix spinning off GoTo collaboration business, laying off 1,000 people

  18-11-2015 04:30
  
  Citrix Systems has decided to spin off its GoTo collaboration products business into a new company, to focus on its core business in the secure delivery of apps and data.The mobile workspaces company expects to completely separate the GoTo business, consisting of products like GoToMeeting, GoToAssist, GoToWebinar, OpenVoice, Grasshopper and GoToMyPC, into a separate publicly traded company by the second half of next year.For the trailing twelve months ended Sept. 30, unaudited revenue from the G
  
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• DJI is removing mandatory no-fly zones from its drones

  18-11-2015 03:01
  
  One of the leading manufacturers of consumer drones is loosening the control it has over whether the craft can take off in restricted areas, such as near airports.DJI said on Tuesday that a new version of its drone control software to be released in December will allow pilots to fly in restricted areas after they have self-certified they have permission to do so.At present, DJI's software simply blocks the drone from taking off if it's found to be within a restricted area such as within 5 miles
  
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• HP Enterprise teams up with Intel for IoT edge computing

  18-11-2015 02:44
  
  Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the latest partner to work with Intel on the Internet of Things, announcing it will develop products for computing at the edges of networks.
  The Intel IoT Platform is the chip company's set of technologies for building and running networks of connected things. The platform is designed in part to help Intel take on silicon rivals that use the mobile-friendly ARM architecture, but it also includes software and security components that could be used independent of Int
  
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• Daimler to recycle electric car batteries for massive energy storage systems

  18-11-2015 01:31
  
  Daimler AG announced that it is cobbling together used lithium-ion batteries from electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles to create massive power storage systems for commercial use.
  The first of Daimler's "2nd use battery storage units" will consist of 1,000 smart electric drive vehicle batteries and have a 13 million watt hour (MWh) capacity. It is expected to be connected to the electrical grid in Lünen, Germany early next year. DaimlerThe battery systems are being built in Daimle
  
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• Google+ rides again with a redesign focused on communities of interest

  18-11-2015 01:06
  
  Google isn't done with its attempts at running a social network. On Tuesday, the company gave Google+ a redesign focused on people getting together around shared interests.When Google+ launched in 2011, it was designed as a competitor to Facebook, focused on connecting people with their friends through a series of "circles." That proved unsuccessful, but people started using the service to discuss things that they're passionate about, like books and astronomy. Google has built its new desig
  
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• EMC helps VMAX, VNX storage arrays hook up with public clouds

  18-11-2015 00:55
  
  Public clouds will be the next big spot for some enterprises to store data, and EMC wants to help them get there through its arrays.
  On Tuesday, the company introduced automatic tiering of data from its VMAX and VNX systems to public clouds including Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform. It's the latest extension of EMC software that can move data around based on how quickly an enterprise wants each application to respond.
  Organizations are starting to use public clouds for stor
  
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• 6 must-have gifts for Apple's biggest fans

  18-11-2015 00:45
  
  New iPhones, new Apple TV, and new iPad Pro. If you happen to love anything and everything “designed in Cupertino, California,” then you have plenty of new Apple gadgets to add to your holiday wish-list in 2015. But for casual gift-giving, the iPad Pro is probably not going to make the most reasonable (or affordable) stocking stuffer.
  This holiday gift guide for Apple fanboys and fangirls features some of our favorite accessories to personalize and enhance your Apple gear, plus the
  
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