IT Executive news

• Use the internet? This Linux flaw could open you up to attack

  10-08-2016 22:21
  
  A flaw in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used by Linux since late 2012 poses a serious threat to internet users, whether or not they use Linux directly.That's the key finding of a research study that's scheduled to be presented Wednesday at the USENIX Security Symposium in Austin, Texas.The TCP weakness, identified by researchers from the University of California at Riverside, enables attackers to hijack users’ internet communications completely remotely. It could be used to launc
  
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• HP pushes for AR at work with its Elite x3 phone and HoloLens

  10-08-2016 22:14
  
  HP wants to add augmented reality to its Elite x3 smartphone, and it's looking at Microsoft's HoloLens as one way to do it.The Elite x3, which runs Windows 10 Mobile, was scheduled to ship last month starting at US$699.99 but has been delayed. HP believes the smartphone has the horsepower to be a PC in a pinch. It might also become an AR device that could be used in enterprises.Universal Windows applications made for the HoloLens AR headset will work on smartphones, and they could be used on the
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Open vSwitch becomes a Linux Foundation Collaborative project

  10-08-2016 22:07
  
  The Linux Foundation has bagged another open source networking project. The open source virtual switch Open vSwitch (OVS) has become a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
  Just a few weeks ago CORD(Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) became a Linux Foundation project, joining other open source networking projects, including the SDN platform OpenDaylight and the SDN network operating system ONOS.
  “Having been involved with the OVS project since 2012, it’s been great to
  
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• Bugs & Bugs: DARPA, bug bounties & thousands of bees

  10-08-2016 22:03
  
  Black Hat & Def Con provided plenty of fodder for our new installment of Bugs & Bugs, as seen in our Facebook Live stream on the latest news about computer bugs and real insects.
  Network World's Bob Brown and Tim Greene discussed, as you can see in the saved edition of the video below, new research that shows affluent communities tend to attract more different species of insects and other arthropods -- and that's a good thing. We also explored the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge that took p
  
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• Samsung's massive 32TB SSD includes cutting-edge 3D chip technology

  10-08-2016 22:00
  
  The size of SSDs are ramping up at a dizzying pace, and Samsung is intensifying the race with its highest-capacity 32TB SSD.
  Samsung's SSD -- which will ship next year -- has just over twice the capacity of the company's PM1663a SSD, which shipped in March.
  The 32TB SSD doesn't match the capacity of Seagate's recently announced 60TB drive, but it is denser. The drives are being shown at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, this week.
  Samsung's SSD can fit in smaller 2.5-inch slot
  
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• 8% to 20% off Multiple Fitbit Tracker Models - Deal Alert

  10-08-2016 21:54
  
  Fitbit trackers come in various models and fitting each individuals fitness needs. Discounts are now being offered for many of these models.  Below are several of the models that are currently discounted on Amazon.Fitbit Flex—a slim, stylish device that tracks all-day activity like steps, distance, calories burned and active minutes. See how every day stacks up with LEDs that light up like a scoreboard as you get closer to your goal. Then wear it at night to measure your sleep qu
  
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• Should you buy a Jawbone tracker before it gives up on wearables?

  10-08-2016 21:47
  
  Rumor has it Jawbone is trying to sell its wearables business, and the company reportedly halted production of its UP fitness trackers. Jawbone also hasn't released a new UP tracker since the spring of 2015. Meanwhile, though, you can buy UP trackers at heavily discounted prices — as much as half off — from Amazon.com.But is buying an UP wearable during this time of Jawbone's uncertainty a good or bad idea? Here is one good reason to purchase an UP, followed by four reasons to a
  
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• City-funded broadband just lost a big fight in court

  10-08-2016 20:43
  
  Some city-funded broadband networks may be in trouble after a U.S. appeals court struck down Federal Communications Commission rules that prohibited states from restricting those projects.The FCC has no authority from Congress to prohibit state laws that limit municipal funding of broadband networks, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said in a decision released Wednesday.In February 2015, the FCC voted to overturn laws in North Carolina and Tennesse
  
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• When will your phone get Android Nougat?

  10-08-2016 20:39
  
  It’s the eternal question that we all face when it’s time for a new version of Android: when will I get it?
  We have the answer! Well, sort of. Android is a fragmented mess customized by many different smartphone makers, so finding out when exactly you’ll get Nougat depends on a lot of different factors.
  However, a lot can be learned from previous updates as well as announcements and leaks (see this research from Computerworld for more about past update performance). Here&rsquo
  
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• A new $500,000 iOS bug bounty beats Apple's offer

  10-08-2016 20:14
  
  A security firm is offering up to US$500,000 for information on zero-day vulnerabilities in iOS, surpassing Apple's bug bounty just days after it was announced.On Tuesday, Texas-based Exodus Intelligence said it will give between $5,000 and $500,000 for zero-day vulnerabilities relating to iOS version 9.3 and higher.These zero-days are software flaws that have gone undetected by Apple, making them potentially very valuable, especially for cyber criminals who can use them to hack iPhones. Ex
  
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• BrandPost: Best Practices to Improve Cybersecurity

  10-08-2016 19:50
  The threat environment—i.e. malware and zero-day attacks, drive-by downloads, watering hole attacks, and denial and distributed denial of service (DoS/DDoS) attacks—is worsening, and the news and analyses paint a dismal picture for cybersecurity: it’s not a case of if you’ll be attacked, but when. However, making your environment more secure—and if not eliminating, at least drastically reducing your risk—is achievable by implementing the appropriate policies,
  
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• Raspberry Pi roundup: Keys to Pi foundry changing hands; Pi in the ocean, sky

  10-08-2016 19:24
  
  One reason the Raspberry Pi’s runaway success has been a fun story to cover is that it’s very non-corporate – there’s relatively little branding silliness or careful PR stage management involved, and journalists like me instead get to write about an inventive little tool that is letting normal people around the world accomplish interesting and creative things.
  Yet the business side does, occasionally, rear its ugly head – late last month, U.S.-based electronics ven
  
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• Hortonworks DataFlow 2.0 focuses on enterprise readiness

  10-08-2016 18:04
  
  Hortonworks Wednesday unveiled the latest version of its Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF) integrated system for dataflow management and streaming analytics. Together with Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), HDF forms the core of the company's Connected Data Platforms offering.Jamie Engesser, vice president of product management at Hortonworks, says the HDF 2.0 release reflects much increased interest in streaming analytics as customers wrestle with data in motion from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, cl
  
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• Disable WPAD now or have your accounts and private data compromised

  10-08-2016 18:03
  
  The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol (WPAD), enabled by default on Windows and supported by other operating systems, can expose computer users' online accounts, web searches, and other private data, security researchers warn.Man-in-the-middle attackers can abuse the WPAD protocol to hijack people's online accounts and steal their sensitive information even when they access websites over encrypted HTTPS or VPN connections, said Alex Chapman and Paul Stone, researchers with U.K.-based Context Inf
  
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• Four things to consider before upgrading your data center net to 25G

  10-08-2016 17:43
  
  This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
  Hyperscale public cloud providers and social media giants have already made the jump to 40Gbps Ethernet for their server and storage connectivity for lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and operational efficiency, and now they are migrating to 50 and 100Gbps Ethernet.
  Forward thinking enterprises are looking
  
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• CIO Career Coach: How to tell it's time to leave your job (video)

  10-08-2016 16:55
  
  Welcome to the first episode of "CIO Career Coach," a video series I created with CIO.com and IDG.tv, the video division of CIO's parent company, IDG. The first subject I plan to cover is something I am sure is near and dear to many of you: Running an effective IT executive job search. I have been recruiting IT executives for 11 years, and if I have learned anything, it's that the more strategic you are in your job search, the more opportunities you will have. As an IT executive, you are go
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: How to prepare your healthcare practice for the conversation on payment reform

  10-08-2016 16:37
  
  A revolution occurring is occurring. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is rebuilding financial incentives and care models that impact every patient in every provider's facility. This won’t transform your patient’s experience tomorrow, but change is coming quickly. Your parents, grandparents, sons, and daughters soon will be treated by physicians working for participating providers shifting from volume to value. The satisfaction of the patient will matter.The Medi
  
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• Facebook joins battle to kill ad blockers

  10-08-2016 16:28
  
  Facebook this week took a stand against the makers of ad-block software by providing more controls for users to opt out of targeted advertisements. The company says today's ad blockers are part of the problem, so it designed a new way to bypass ad blockers in desktop browsers and force ads through.A number of motivations likely influenced Facebook's decision. While it stands to benefit financially from the strong-arm play, the move is also symbolic, and the company should earn tremendous goodwil
  
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• Official Dota 2 forum hack leaks nearly 2 million user passwords

  10-08-2016 16:27
  
  While theblockbuster International 2016 tournamentplays out on the front page of Dota 2’s website, more sinister machinations are grinding away in the background. Overnight, breach notification site Leaked Source revealed that a hacker has allegedly pilfered sensitive information about nearly two million user accounts on the official Dota 2 message board.
  “This data set contains 1,923,972 records. Each record contains an email address, IP address, username, user identifier, and one
  
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• How to block phishers when they come a knockin’

  10-08-2016 15:48
  
  Just like throwing out a fishing line into the water, a phisher waits for just the slightest nibble before pouncing on a network.
  Eyal Benishti, CEO of IronScales, says the way to cut off the phishers food supply is to first go to the core of the issue: employee awareness. The CEO notes that cybercriminals by nature are lazy. “If your organization is a tough nut to crack, they will move on to find more low-hanging fruit,” Benishti says.
  According to the Verizon data breach investiga
  
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• Google Chrome's plan to kill Flash kicks into high gear

  10-08-2016 15:40
  
  Google is getting serious about ending the reign of Adobe Flash on the web.
  The company recently detailed a timeline for bringing Flash on Chrome to an end—kind of. Even in these late stages of Flash’s life on the web you still can’t kill it off entirely. Instead, Google says it will “de-emphasize” Flash to the point where it’s almost never used except when absolutely necessary.Behind the scenesThe first major change to Flash on Chrome will land in September
  
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• Microsoft patches 27 flaws in Windows, Office, IE, and Edge

  10-08-2016 15:01
  
  Microsoft released another batch of security patches Tuesday, fixing 27 vulnerabilities in Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and its new Edge browser.The patches are organized in nine security bulletins, five of which are rated critical and the rest important, making this Microsoft patch bundle one of the lightest this year in terms of the number of patches.All of the issues resolved this month are in desktop deployments, but Windows servers might also be affected depending on their
  
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• Box extends its global push with new Zones in Canada and Australia

  10-08-2016 15:00
  
  Box has made no secret of its global ambitions, and on Wednesday it advanced them another step by announcing two new regional "Zones" in Canada and Australia."Our mission is to build out the most advanced social cloud," said Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of the California-based company, in an interview. "We want to make sure we can deliver no matter what your security, compliance or data-residency requirements."Different countries have established different requirements for the treatment and st
  
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• Self-driving warehouse robots give Giant Eagle a lift

  10-08-2016 14:37
  
  Wheels turning and forklifts filled—that’s one measure of success in any warehouse. If you can increase the amount of product picked up and put away, the more productive and cost efficient you are.
  For Pittsburgh-based retailer Giant Eagle, the key to making that happen is to operate vision-guided, autonomous vehicles—robots—in its distribution centers.
  + Also on Network World: How IoT helps transplant surgeons track organ shipments +To read this article in full or
  
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• How underemployment contributes to the STEM skills gap

  10-08-2016 14:11
  
  While unemployment remains low, underemployment is a severely underrated problem in today's economy, and it's contributing to the IT skills gap across the board, according to a new report from cloud compensation and benchmarking services provider PayScale.
  The report, The War on the American Worker: The Underemployed, surveyed 962,956 U.S. workers between March 26, 2014 and March 26, 2016, and found that almost half, 46 percent, of workers feel they are underemployed, which PayScale defines as w
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Can the iPad Pro really replace your laptop?

  10-08-2016 14:00
  
  When Apple released the iPad Pro, it made a point of touting it as “more than the next generation iPad.” The company noted that the iPad Pro puts “incredible power that leaps past most portable PCs at your fingertips.”Apple has really pulled out all the stops in trying to convince folks that the iPad Pro should be their next computer, and you can see that in the tone of this recent iPad Pro ad:I love my 12.9-inch iPad Pro but it’s not a laptop replacement
  I have a 1
  
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• Apple Pencil makes these 12 iPad Pro apps pop

  10-08-2016 13:57
  
  iPad Pro apps for productivity and creativityImage by Thinkstock/AppleDespite Apple's claims to the contrary, not everyone believes the iPad Pro can replace a computer. When paired with an Apple Pencil, however, the tablet lets people do things they might never accomplish on a traditional PC or Mac. For example, the iPad Pro lets you create handwritten thank you cards that can then be sent through the mail, write notes on PDFs and sign on the dotted lines, and drain all the color out of photos,
  
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• How to prevent millennials from burning out at work

  10-08-2016 13:53
  
  Millennials have been typecast as lazy, entitled and unwilling to work -- but the rate at which these young professionals burn out suggests otherwise. According to the American Psychology Association, 39 percent of millennials say their stress increased last year, 52 percent report lying awake at night from stress at some point in the past month and 44 percent report feeling irritability or anger because of their stress.
  James Goodnow, attorney at Fennemore Craig, P.C., dubbed "America's Techies
  
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• Does entertainment trump security in connected cars?

  10-08-2016 13:49
  
  Reduction in sales and damage to brand are potential bottom line impacts that auto manufacturers need to be concerned about when it comes to security risks and connected cars. 
  According to a newly released IOActivereport , "Commonalities in Vehicle Vulnerabilities", authored by senior security consultant Corey Thuen, "39 percent of vulnerabilities are related to the network. This is a general category that includes all network traffic, such as Ethernet or web."
  Using security best pr
  
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• Bridging IT’s growing generation gap

  10-08-2016 12:45
  
  Do millennials make up a substantial portion of your IT staff? If not, they will soon. Within a few years, millennials — roughly defined as people born after 1981 — will comprise the biggest demographic in the country, overtaking the baby boomers, who are today's most populous generation. By 2020, one-third of U.S. adults will be millennials, according to researchers at the University of Southern California. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that they will also account for more than 5
  
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• The 16 most pivotal events in Windows history

  10-08-2016 12:00
  
  Thirty years of WindowsImage by Jeff ChristensenFor better or for worse, Windows has defined the modern era of personal computing. Microsoft’s signature OS runs on the vast majority of PCs worldwide, and it has also worked its way into servers, tablets, phones, game consoles, ATMs, and more. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
  
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• Review: 13 primo Python web frameworks

  10-08-2016 12:00
  
  If you are developing a web application and have picked Python as the language to build it in, that’s a smart move. Python’s maturity of development, robust libraries, and breadth of real-world adoption have helped make it a no-brainer for web development.
  Zope2. Zope is not for simple RESTful APIs (per Bottle or Flask) or even basic websites with interactivity (à la Django). Rather, it’s meant to be a full-blown, enterprise-grade application server stack, similar to of
  
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• Microservices, Java-on-Java top Oracle’s JVM design goals

  10-08-2016 12:00
  
  Oracle's plans for the Java Virtual Machine include greater language support, as well as accommodations for microservices and a heavier reliance on Java programming itself.
  "We want a VM that will continue to be polyglot, that will interoperate with unmanaged languages, implement well-managed languages," said John Rose, Oracle JVM architect, during the company's recent JVM Language Summit conference in Silicon Valley. "Maybe in the next decade or so we'll see C programs or C++ programs running
  
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• Oracle says it didn’t ask employee to cook cloud accounts

  10-08-2016 09:13
  
  Oracle has denied in a California federal court charges leveled by a former manager that she was sacked after she refused to cook accounts in the company’s cloud business and threatened to blow the whistle on the accounting practices.The software and cloud computing giant appears to be fleshing out its original stand that the employee had been terminated for poor performance and not as a whistleblower, which would give her a number of protections under securities laws.In a filing in June i
  
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• Raspberry Pi in the sky: How to build this awesome $115 airplane tracker

  10-08-2016 02:36
  
  If you've ever looked up at a plane and wondered where it's headed, this simple project is for you. Thanks to cheap, miniaturized electronics, you can now build a receiver that connects to your smartphone and shows details about all the aircraft in the sky around you. It takes less than an hour and costs about $115.
  The device receives and decodes ADS-B, a data broadcast from aircraft that transmits a callsign, location, altitude, speed and a few other bits of information. If you live near an ai
  
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• Intel snaps up Nervana for a crash course on deep learning

  10-08-2016 01:45
  
  Intel is buying deep-learning startup Nervana Systems in a deal that could help it make up for lost ground in the increasingly hot area of artificial intelligence.Founded in 2014, California-based Nervana offers a hosted platform for deep learning that's optimized "from algorithms down to silicon" to solve machine-learning problems, the startup says.Businesses can use its Nervana cloud service to build and deploy applications that make use of deep learning, a branch of AI used for tasks lik
  
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