Monday, August 17, 2015

HTC is dead in the water

Just how close are Apple and IBM these days? | Large-screen smartphones are slaughtering the tablet and PC business

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HTC is dead in the water
The sole value in the company now is the $1.4 billion it has in the bank. Read More


WHITE PAPER: Blue Coat Systems

Optimizing Application Traffic on MPLS WAN Links
MPLS is a common type of service offering that removes much of the cost and complexity of more traditional point-to-point networks. The change from point-to-point to any-to-any or cloud networking presents new application delivery challenges, requiring a response from services that depend on the packet delivery infrastructure. Learn more >>

In this Issue


WHITE PAPER: Absolute

The Cost of Data Breach: Healthcare Settlements
With a host of new data protection regulations and increasingly high settlement fees for data breaches, data security has never been more important to Healthcare organizations. Download this whitepaper to read about some of the most costly data breaches that resulted from lost or stolen devices. Learn More

Just how close are Apple and IBM these days?
Almost exactly a year after Apple and IBM announced a big enterprise deal, word has surfaced that IBM will be purchasing up to 200,000 Macs every year. That's a lot of Macs, and it's easy to see it as a validation of last year's deal.See also: What's missing from Apple's big enterprise deal with IBM? But despite the big buy, there's still something essential missing here. Like many other observers, when the deal came out last year, I was shocked at how much things had changed from the days when Apple was locked in an existential battle over PCs with IBM (and Microsoft, of course). But the deal was all about boosting iOS in the enterprise, it did not include any mention of Apple's line of Mac computers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

Large-screen smartphones are slaughtering the tablet and PC business
More bad news has just come in for the tablet market as large smartphones are becoming do-all devices. PCs aren't safe, either. Q2 2015 worldwide tablet shipments have fallen 11% year-over-year to 42.5 million units, according to new numbers from consultant and analyst Canalys. The problems affecting the market aren't going away either. The analyst thinks that a new wave of Windows 10 two-in-one combination devices is poised to grab market share.Enterprise demand Tablet demand for business use has some legs, though. As does the lust for premium devices, such as the iPad in established markets. That area has slowed, but hasn't disappeared and isn't likely to, according to one analyst.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

Facebook axes a future intern for exposing a privacy flaw
After being accepted for an internship at Facebook, Harvard University student Aran Khanna continued to embrace the same entrepreneurial spirit that helped launch the site on the very same campus over a decade ago. Ironically, his efforts cost him his chance at working at the company.Khanna discovered a privacy flaw in the default settings of Facebook's Messenger app for Android that automatically shared users' detailed location data. To draw attention to the flaw, Khanna launched an Android app called Marauder's Map that mapped Facebook users' locations based on their activity on Messenger in May, according to Boston.com. The app showed that the location sharing was accurate to within a three-foot distance and shared users' location data even with Facebook users they were not Friends with.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

AdBlock Plus allegedly improves network performance, but at a cost
Site ads are a nuisance, we all know that. Some of them are obnoxious in the extreme, such as videos that autoplay without your approval. This has given rise to advertising blockers, most notably AdBlock Plus, which has earned the ire of major advertising firms like Microsoft and Google.German publishers have gone so far as to take Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, to court. However, in May a Munich court ruled completely in Eyeo's favor. Even the CEO of Secret Media, which works to help companies get around ad blockers, said this was a big mistake.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More


: CrowdStrike

Case Study: Cardinal Innovations
Learn how monitoring information assets using the CrowdStrike Falcon Platform helps Cardinal Innovations better understand the adversary tactics, ultimately providing better protection for the vast store of PHI inside their organization. View now

Cyber-physical attacks: Hacking a chemical plant
When it comes to hacking chemical plants, for an attacker to go hackedity-hack-hack and then the plant goes boom fortunately only happens in the movies. But “if you plan to improve your financial posture” now and at least in the five years is a good time for security researchers to jump into cyber-physical systems security where you will be most concerned about attacks that cause physical damage.Granted, you and attackers may know a lot about the IT world, and even Industrial Control Systems (ICS) aka SCADA, but hacking a chemical plant means also needing to know some physics, chemistry and engineering. The Damn Vulnerable Chemical Process was developed to help you master new skills; it’s the “first open source framework for cyber-physical experimentation based on two realistic models of chemical plants.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

How to watch football: A guide to streaming the 2015 NFL, college football season
The rise of online video streaming has made it easier than ever to watch sports. But with so many options available, how can you know that you're getting the best deal? The only thing worse than not being able to watch a big game is finding out you're paying too much to watch it.In addition, mobile apps are incorporating more and more content beyond just the live game broadcast, from fantasy sports tracking to in-depth in-game analytics.Here's a guide to navigating the streaming world for the 2015 football season, for both the NFL and college football.Considerations for those sticking with cable If you're not planning to go beyond basic cable, which will include the major broadcast TV networks as well as ESPN, there are a few things to keep in mind. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

Do you know how much your smartphone costs?
Late last week, Verizon announced that it was ending its long-standing practice of offering substantial smartphone subsidies in exchange for a 2-year service contract. The move by the nation’s largest mobile carrier follows similar marketing approaches from much smaller competitors like T-Mobile and Sprint. Even though I’ve been buying subsidized iPhones on 2-year contracts for almost 5 years now, I’m a big fan of this “new” approach—at least philosophically. Assuming that the dollars work out the same (not at all a safe assumption, unfortunately), I believe it’s better for everyone to understand the true prices of the devices they buy and the services they use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

$32 RollJam Device can break into most cars and garage doors
When car manufacturers hear Samy Kamkar’s name, they likely cringe as Kamkar has been on a car-cracking spree. About a week after he unveiled OwnStar, Kamkar was at Def Con 23 presenting “Drive It Like You Hacked It: New Attacks and Tools to Wirelessly Steal Cars.”At the end of July, Kamkar revealed his $100 OwnStar device that could “locate, unlock and remote start any vehicle with OnStar RemoteLink after intercepting communications between the RemoteLink mobile app and OnStar servers.” GM quickly patched the OnStar app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More


WHITE PAPER: BMC Software

A Call To Action To Automate Breach Response
Discover how to quickly remediate aggressive security threats. Read this report from Forrester Research and see how new automated compliance processes will reduce your organization's risk. Learn More

The industrial IoT gets strategic: WS02 secures $20M funding from Pacific Controls
The technology industry tends to articulate things in a way that leaves people thinking that nothing existed before the technology industry discovered it. But our industry often takes an existing idea and looks at it through a new lens. That may be disruptive, but it's not completely novel.A good case in point is the Internet of Things (IoT), the oft-discussed idea that in the future there will be billions of sensors and devices connected to the Internet. The IoT, however, isn't completely novel. For decades, industrial companies have been running vast networks of devices and machines. The difference in the IoT world, however, is that these things will run on more general networks and protocols rather than the heavy, proprietary and siloed systems of old. And therein lies the interesting aspect - if you're a company that has been delivering these sort of industrial connectivity solutions for years, the IoT is a potentially disruptive change.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

When the data is the product, Thomson Reuters introduces an API platform
Thomson Reuters is all about data. It provides a number of products that give businesses and professionals deep data about corporations and economic trends. Powered by one of the world's most well-known news organizations, Thomson Reuters is perhaps best known for the terminal products it supplies to trading rooms across the world. Take a visit to these otherworldly locations and you'll see proprietary screens glowing with screens of financial information - it is companies like Thomson Reuters, and its competitor Blomberg, that sell these screens. But for Thomson Reuters, there is another, less visible, part of its business. It has an enterprise division that delivers services for the enterprise market. This division is focused on providing data feeds which help Thomson Reuters clients build their own applications on top of the data Thomson Reuters holds. I spent time talking with Brennan Carley who runs the services division, and got an insight into the new Elektron API family that the company has just launched.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

How to become an IoT hero for your organization
You can't get away from the Internet of Things lately. It's coming and it's going to take over everything. Cisco says it will push the number of internet-connected devices to 50 billion by 2020. But you already knew that, because it's all everybody is talking about.So, since the IoT is going to take over your organization eventually anyway, you can look at this as an opportunity. You can be the one who introduces it and all the benefits it brings.But just how, exactly, do you go about introducing this kind of technology? How do you identify the opportunities, and how do you pitch it to the higher-ups in your organization?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

Why I won't write a requiem for Google+
Over the last couple years, this TechWatch blog has been home to requiems for a number of products and services that have either died or pretty much died, collapsing to the point where they no longer resemble their once-great former selves. To date, I’ve written requiems for Blackberry, AOL, and RadioShack, but when I sat down to write one for Google+, I just couldn’t do it. Maybe that’s because Google+ isn’t actually dead yet: In fact, rumors of its demise are based around Google delinking Google+ accounts from YouTube accounts and announcing that the company will no longer require Google+ accounts to access other Google services. Since using those other, far more popular, services was often the only reason anyone would want a Google+ account, this move was widely seen as the beginning of the end for Google’s ambitious attempt to create a full-fledged mainstream social network to take on Facebook. Google pretty much admitted all this in the blog post from Bradley Horowitz, VP of Streams, Photos, and Sharing, that announced the change.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

Researchers exploit ZigBee security flaws that compromise security of smart homes
If you have an Internet of Things device, then it’s highly likely that you are using ZigBee whether you know it or not. There are other possibilities, including that your IoT devices use the Z-Wave protocol, which was beat up a couple ago by security researchers who used it to attack automated homes. ZigBee is a wireless standard used for connectivity to controls IoT devices. It’s used in “tens of millions of smart meters” and there are 1,088 items listed as ZigBee Certified products. It depends who you listen to, I suppose, as to whether you believe ZigBee is great or if ZigBee is a great threat to the Internet of Things due to critical wireless security flaws that can be exploited to compromise smart lights, door locks, motion sensors, smart switches, temperature sensors, HVAC systems and other “smart” home devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More

Wi-Fi can see through walls, researchers say
If you thought Wi-Fi was merely good for getting online, think again. Surveillance, military combat awareness and thwarting hostage-taking are three new uses for the technology. Researchers say that they have figured out a way to use every-day home wireless Wi-Fi signals in a similar way to radar. They say they can see movement through walls with it.Radar “In a security situation, if somebody’s hiding in a room, as long as there’s wireless in there you might be able to detect them,” says Professor Karl Woodbridge, of University College London’s (UCL) Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, in a university-published document about the tech on the Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More


SLIDESHOWS

User guide to Windows 10

Windows 10 officially launches this week, so if you're going for an immediate upgrade from your Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 computer, this guide will get you up to speed as quickly as possible.

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