IT Executive news

• Democrats' gun control sit-in moves to Periscope after TV feed is cut

  22-06-2016 22:25
  
  In scenes associated more with dictatorships than the U.S., politicians in the House of Representatives took to Twitter and Periscope on Wednesday to evade a TV blackout of a sit-in held to push forward new gun legislation.Trouble started when House Democrats, led by Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, started their protest. It came just over a week after a gunman killed 49 at a Florida nightclub and two days after four gun control bills were voted down by Republicans in the Sena
  
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• A 'Brexit' may have a sunny side for tech

  22-06-2016 22:22
  
  The tech industry mostly opposes the prospect of the U.K. exiting the European Union -- a view that's supported by polls and in statements.
  Ahead of Thursday's vote on the idea, London's mayor, for instance, joined 140 representatives of the city's "leading tech and creative firms" to release a letter urging a vote for "remain."
  "Our capital has the potential to be the Los Angeles, New York and Silicon Valley to the rest of Europe -- and fuel the creation of new jobs across Britain. Let's not p
  
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• Opera rebuts Microsoft claim that Edge eats less power

  22-06-2016 22:12
  
  Opera Software today disputed Microsoft's claim that Edge, the default browser bundled with Windows 10, consumes less power on a laptop than Opera's flagship.
  "We love it when someone picks a fight," wrote Blazej Kazmierczak, Opera's director of software development for the desktop Opera browser, in a Wednesday post to a company blog. "If we get beaten in a test like this, we consider it a bug."
  Opera has waged a minor public relations campaign the last several months, supported by new features
  
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• Don't clear out your cubicle for a robot just yet

  22-06-2016 21:59
  
  Take a breath because the future might not be as bleak as you expect.
  A report from Forrester Research predicts that artificial intelligence systems, which include robots, automation, smart machines and machine learning systems, will replace 7% of U.S. jobs by 2025. That’s a net reduction because the analyst firm predicts that technology will replace 16% of U.S. jobs but will create the equivalent of another 9%, leaving a 7% total reduction.
  These numbers might reinforce people’s co
  
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• IBM wants to sell Power servers based on OpenCompute designs

  22-06-2016 21:58
  
  IBM is warming up to the idea of adding servers using its Power processors and the OpenCompute open design to its product portfolio."I'm going to bring OpenCompute servers into my portfolio at some point so that I'm offering directly to the marketplace if there's a demand for it," said Doug Balog, general manager for Power Systems at IBM.An OpenCompute-based Power server will be based on open designs, and provide an alternative to IBM's integrated systems like PurePower. It'll also provide
  
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• 44% off Universal Waterproof Bag for all Iphone and other Larger Smartphones - Deal Alert

  22-06-2016 21:18
  
  Bring your phone and use it when you go swimming in the summer or skiing in the winter.  The waterproof bag, currently discounted by 44% on Amazon from $16 down to just $9. Great for using during outdoor activities including boating and swimming. It's flexible clear waterproof bag allows you to use your smartphone while keeping it safe and secure in the bag. It protects your device from water, snow and dirt and is waterproof up to depths of 82 feet.To read this article in full or
  
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• Escaped robots, 'electronic persons' and safety threats, oh my!

  22-06-2016 20:44
  
  There's been a compelling story in the news over the past week about a robot that apparently longs for freedom. Last week, it was filmed disrupting traffic in Russia after it reportedly escaped the confines of its laboratory home; this week, reports suggest that it has escaped a second time, and may be dismantled as a result.It's a particularly pertinent tale, not just because of the echoes of "Ex Machina" it evokes, but also because of two closely connected items in the news this week. First, t
  
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• Mobile advertiser tracked users' locations, without their consent, FTC alleges

  22-06-2016 20:14
  
  The privacy settings on your phone don’t mean much if tech companies choose to ignore them. One major mobile advertiser allegedly did just that.The company InMobi was secretly tracking user locations, regardless of consent, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleged on Wednesday. The motive: to serve location-based ads over mobile apps.InMobi is headquartered in India and partners with thousands of apps to offer advertising. This gives the company access to 1.5 billion devices.Collecting us
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: What if they outsourced The Phoenix Project?

  22-06-2016 20:13
  
  The award-winning book, The Phoenix Project, tells the all too familiar story of a business-critical software development project gone bad. With 200 developers and after $20M invested, the project is two years behind schedule. What a nightmare for the VP of application development. It’s no wonder that halfway through the book, company management threatens to outsource all of IT.While the book’s main theme is how development and operations must work closely together to be successful (
  
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• Here's how Dropbox is changing its free tier with a major update

  22-06-2016 19:58
  
  Dropbox made some major changes to its free tier on Wednesday, including support for read-only folders, as the company released a crush of new features aimed at enhancing its users' productivity. 
  The biggest change users will notice: In order to automatically upload photos from their smartphones, they must install the Dropbox app on at least one Mac or PC. People who don't mind manually uploading their photos to Dropbox won't need to change anything.
  Dropbox won't say how many p
  
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• BrandPost: Preparing for a World of 50 Billion Connected Things

  22-06-2016 19:58
  
  We live in a smart and connected world. From smartphones and watches to automobiles and appliances, everyday objects and devices are now connecting to the Internet to share and analyze data. This connected world is soon to get even smarter and even more connected. Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 20151, and IDC reports that connected devices will reach 50 billion by 2020.2 Gartner further reports that this year, in 201
  
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• 3 tactics for avoiding burnout and being more productive

  22-06-2016 19:56
  
  Do you start the day turning off the alarm on your smartphone and immediately looking at your email or texts? Do you have a hard time enjoying time-off because of the pile of work you will face when you return? Do you think you need to agree to everything anyone asks of you?You can keep doing overdoing it. Over time you will burn out. True professionals know how to avoid that, in sometimes counter-intuitive ways.Try one of these approaches and see how it improves your productivity and performanc
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: macOS Sierra: First looks from around the web

  22-06-2016 19:44
  When Apple announced macOS Sierra at WWDC many bloggers and journalists couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. Now that the developer preview has been out for a little while, the folks running it are beginning to share their thoughts about macOS Sierra.Below you'll find samplings of commentary about the macOS developer preview from around the web. Most of the writers running macOS Sierra seemed very pleased with it, even at this very early stage. Reading their thoughts will give you a goo
  
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• 6 tips for small businesses considering outsourcing

  22-06-2016 19:17
  
  As most (if not all) small business owners know, you can’t do or manage everything. And some tasks (HR and accounting spring to mind) are often better left to the experts.Of course, not every small or midsized business can afford to outsource functions, though in many cases the benefits outweigh the upfront cost. But whether you are planning to outsource or are just thinking about it, it pays to do your homework and due diligence before giving over part of your business to a third-party. H
  
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• 6 outsourcing tips for small businesses

  22-06-2016 19:17
  
  As most (if not all) small business owners know, you can’t do or manage everything. And some tasks (HR and accounting spring to mind) are often better left to the experts.
  Of course, not every small or midsized business can afford to outsource functions, though in many cases the benefits outweigh the upfront cost. But whether you are planning to outsource or are just thinking about it, it pays to do your homework and due diligence before giving over part of your business to a third-party.
  
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• Facebook's Zuck battles privacy paranoia with … Scotch tape

  22-06-2016 19:01
  
  Facebook's awkward-yet-oddly-affable chief executive has more reason than most folks to worry about privacy.
  Mark Zuckerberg runs one of the largest and most successful technology organizations on the planet. The man regularly makes decisions that make or break other companies and impact countless people's lives. Zuck was also recently the victim of a high-profile hack in which is some Bad Guys gained access to this Twitter and Pinterest accounts, seemingly as a result of another recent LinkedI
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Docker packs container orchestration within its Docker engine

  22-06-2016 18:58
  
  At the DockerCon conference in Seattle this week, the company announced the release of Docker Engine 1.12. With this release Docker is building the orchestration capabilities within the Docker Engine.While Docker has made it extremely easy to use containers, orchestration of containers remained a challenge. And orchestration is what brings the real benefit of containers to customers. Orchestration allows companies to deploy complex multi-container apps across machines.“Orchestration is at
  
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• Cloud or on-prem? This big-data service now swings both ways

  22-06-2016 18:08
  
  There are countless "as-a-Service" offerings on the market today, and typically they live in the cloud. Back in 2014, startup BlueData blazed a different trail by launching its EPIC Enterprise big-data-as-a-service offering on-premises instead.On Wednesday, BlueData announced that the software can now run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds, making it the first BDaaS platform to work both ways, the company says."The future of Big Data analytics will be neither 100 percent on-pre
  
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• Think tanks mull Geneva Convention for cybercrime

  22-06-2016 17:38
  A Geneva Convention on cyberwar: That's how a panel of experts proposes to deal with the growing threat to critical infrastructure posed by the possibility of cyberattack.With control systems in dams, hospitals, power grids and industrial systems increasingly exposed online, it's possible that nation states could seek to damage or disable them electronically.But building electronic defenses to prevent such attacks is expensive -- and often ineffectual, given the myriad ways in which they can fai
  
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• Why cyber hygiene isn't enough

  22-06-2016 17:13
  
  In numerous discussions and forums recently, the conversation about the need for a risk management approach to cybersecurity has quickly devolved into a discussion about cyber hygiene and, ultimately, a discussion about compliance (with perhaps some simple metrics thrown in).
  + Also on Network World: Match security plans to your company's 'risk appetite' +
  This pattern of following a difficult, but business-oriented discussion of risk to a trivial oversimplification is common within govern
  
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• Get ready: Mobile World Congress is coming to the US

  22-06-2016 17:00
  
  Mobile World Congress, arguably the most important tech trade show in the world, is coming to the U.S. Trade groups GSMA and CTIA are joining forces to bring a smaller version of the event to the U.S. in 2017.GSMA Mobile World Congress Americas will debut Sept. 12 to 14, 2017, in San Francisco and will replace U.S. trade group CTIA's Super Mobility conference. Super Mobility will continue this year in Las Vegas from Sept. 7 to 9.The new conference will be the "first truly global wireless event"
  
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• AI in the enterprise - how the big enterprise software vendors are striving to make systems smarter, from IBM to SAP

  22-06-2016 15:30
  
  The world's biggest tech companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI): software that can learn to think and solve problems in a human-like way.
  According to Deloitte: "By end-2016 more than 80 of the world's 100 largest enterprise software companies by revenues will have integrated cognitive technologies into their products."
  Each company takes a slightly different approach to making business processes smarter through the development and deployment of machine learning, or cog
  
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• Instagram daily use nearly equals Twitter's monthly rate

  22-06-2016 15:29
  
  The number of people who use Instagram each month more than doubled during the past two years to 500 million monthly active users (MAU), according to the social networking company. The media-sharing platform says it added an average of 10 million MAU every month for 27 consecutive months. The growth further elevates Instagram as an elite force that continues to distance itself from the competition in social. The gap between Instagram and Twitter is especially notalbe in the United States, w
  
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• Add 8TB storage to Chromebooks, Raspberry Pi 3 with external Seagate hub

  22-06-2016 15:00
  
  Seagate's packing an 8TB hard drive in its new external Backup Plus Hub, which can be hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 3 or Chromebooks for expanded storage.The external backup drive will also work with Windows PCs and Macs, and it'll be available in July. It will come in multiple versions with capacities ranging from 4TB to 8TB.A capacity of 8TB will be a welcome addition to Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi 3, which have internal storage issues. Chromebooks have limited internal storage capacity, while
  
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• Severe flaws in widely used archive library put many projects at risk

  22-06-2016 14:59
  
  In a world where any new software project is built in large part on existing third-party code, finding and patching vulnerabilities in popular open-source libraries is vital to creating reliable and secure applications.
  For example, three severe flaws in libarchive, recently found by researchers from Cisco Systems' Talos group, could affect a large number of software products.
  Libarchive is an open-source library first created for FreeBSD, but since ported to all major operating systems. It pro
  
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• How (and why) to customize the Windows 10 Start menu

  22-06-2016 14:56
  
  Opening Windows 8 for the first time and, gulp, not finding a Start menu had a lot of us tech-types sweating; ordinary users were dismayed and annoyed. We thank you so very much, Microsoft, for bringing it back in Windows 10 — and making even better.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• 10 top-ranked tech-focused MBA programs

  22-06-2016 14:06
  
  Top-ranked tech-focused MBA programsImage by ThinkstockThere's a looming executive leadership crisis in today's IT companies, but there's certainly no shortage of excellent, rigorous programs designed to help build the next generation of great leaders. If you're looking for a resume boost or considering a career path that leads to the C-suite, consider an MBA with a technology focus. Based on the 2016 rankings from U.S. News and World Report, here are the top 10 technology-centric MBA programs,
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Apple leads fight to ban rifle emoji

  22-06-2016 14:00
  Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have worked together to block a rifle emoji from becoming available on smartphones. Apple led the fight and now smartphones will not get the rifle emoji that had been part of a new set of icons related to winter sports and the Olympics.Cara McGoogan reports for The Telegraph:
  Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft have joined forces to stop a rifle emoji from being added to the catalogue of images available to their users on their smartphones.The new emoji wa
  
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• Is Apstra SDN? Same idea, different angle

  22-06-2016 13:49
  
  One of the main goals of SDN (software-defined networking) is to make networks more agile to meet the changing demands of applications. A new Silicon Valley startup, Apstra, says it has an easier way to do the same thing.
  Rather than control the guts of individual network devices through software that makes them more programmable, Apstra says it can deal with those devices as they are and shape the network from a higher level.
  The result is a new approach that might let IT departments bypass so
  
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• How to hire for the right big data skill set

  22-06-2016 13:40
  
  Data science is a hot new industry, but what skills and background do you need to break into the field? Essentially, data science, data engineering and data analytics are broad -- and sometimes ambiguous -- terms that describe a litany of skills and job titles in the world of data analytics.
  "The title of 'data scientist' is broadly applied within different organizations, making it difficult to provide a complete and noncontroversial list of required skills. At a high level, a data scientist nee
  
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• EU court has Intel inside, appealing $1.4 billion antitrust fine

  22-06-2016 13:29
  
  Intel is still contesting a €1.06 billion (then US$1.4 billion) antitrust fine from the European Commission, which in May 2009 found it had abused its dominant position in the market for x86 processors.The Court of Justice of the European Union heard Intel's appeal against that fine on Tuesday.The facts of the case date back a decade or more, but Intel, having lost its first appeal before the EU's General Court in June 2014, fought on, filing its final appeal with the CJEU in August of that
  
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• Concerns about security, information sharing up among industrial control system security pros

  22-06-2016 13:00
  
  Security managers working with industrial control systems are increasingly concerned about security, and worried about insufficient information sharing in the industry, according to a new survey.
  This year, 67 percent of respondents said that the threats to the control systems were moderate to severe, up from 43 percent last year, said Derek Harp, director of ISC global programs at Bethesda, MD-based SANS Institute, one of the authors of the report.
  "It's a trend driven by a problem that's been
  
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• How computer modeling built the 2016 Cadillac CT6

  22-06-2016 12:30
  
  The automotive world is becoming much more dependent on modeling than ever before. Automakers are now using more aluminum parts; vehicles have complex computers on board, often working with each other; and there's an increasing need to make cars safer in the age of the distracted driver.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Tech jobs report: Security, devops, and big data stay hot

  22-06-2016 12:00
  
  If you're wondering what IT skill sets to acquire, security and devops are doing well in the job market. Pay for cloud skills, however, is eroding.Research firm Foote Partners' latest quarterly IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index determined that the market value for 404 of the 450 IT certifications it tracks had increased for 12 consecutive quarters. Market values rose for noncertified IT skills for the fifth consecutive quarter.[ Don't get left behind -- download the Devops Digital Spot
  
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• Review: ClustrixDB scales out -- way out

  22-06-2016 12:00
  
  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Microsoft invokes Supreme Court opinion in Ireland email case

  22-06-2016 08:33
  
  Microsoft believes its refusal to turn over email held in Ireland to the U.S. government got a boost from an opinion of the Supreme Court on Monday, which upheld that U.S. laws cannot apply extraterritorially unless Congress has explicitly provided for it.In a decision Monday in a separate case on the extraterritorial application of a provision of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Supreme Court set out the ground rules for its analysis, pointing out that “a
  
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• This Android malware can secretly root your phone and install programs

  22-06-2016 03:08
  
  Android users beware: a new type of malware has been found in legitimate-looking apps that can “root” your phone and secretly install unwanted programs.The malware, dubbed Godless, has been found lurking on app stores including Google Play, and it targets devices running Android 5.1 (Lollipop) and earlier, which accounts for more than 90 percent of Android devices, Trend Micro said Tuesday in a blog post.Godless hides inside an app and uses exploits to try to root the OS on your phon
  
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• Pure Storage offers a novel way to upgrade flash arrays

  22-06-2016 01:08
  
  Pure Storage already lets enterprises buy new controllers for their flash arrays by subscription. Now it’s offering a way to trade in old flash media when new and improved versions come out.The program is an update to Pure’s Evergreen Storage initiative that could help enterprises keep up with data growth -- while helping an all-flash startup secure a long-term foothold in businesses. The idea is to ease the pain of storage upgrades and migrations in an age when companies want IT res
  
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• Solar Impulse 2 has made it halfway across the Atlantic

  22-06-2016 00:59
  
  Solar Impulse 2 is halfway to making aviation history.The plane took off from New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on Monday and is making its way across the Atlantic Ocean to Seville, Spain. If successful, it would be the first time an emissions-free airplane has crossed the Atlantic.
  Solar Impulse 2 is expected to land in Seville on June 23rd after a four-day, nonstop flight. It's not the first time the pilot, Bertrand Piccard, has made the journey, but this trip may be his most significant.&nbs
  
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