India wants everyone who shares location data to get a license
While the bill states that the security vetting agency will concern itself only with information pertaining to sensitive areas like military bases, it’s clear that this is an over-reaching and poorly thought out plan to police mapping apps. It’s also likely to do little to stop terrorist attacks. Since the rules in the bill only apply within India and to Indians outside the country, it won’t restrict foreign military forces and terrorists beyond India’s borders from sourcing map data from elsewhere. Although Kiren Rijiju, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs of India promised that, “We won’t create hurdles for business and technological development,” it’s hard to imagine the bill doing anything but create logjams for apps and digital projects that require map data in the country and force developers and individuals to wade through red tape, if it comes into effect.
Mobile backend as a service: Features and deployment options
Organizations that aren't comfortable adopting public cloud services or have a large and growing portfolio of mobile apps can opt to deploy many of these MBaaS products as a private cloud on internally managed systems. We don't think security concerns are a valid excuse for shying away from cloud services, but a traditional on-premises software deployment may be more cost-effective for organizations with a large app development pipeline and that are also looking for a fully integrated suite encompassing app design, development, testing, project management and runtime back end. We would still be cautious about this route, since the mobile backend as a service market is extremely dynamic, with new features constantly being added and niche vendors -- like FeedHenry -- being acquired and incorporated into larger cloud portfolios.
3 women who radically changed the course of technology
When we think of innovators of the technology space we largely think of blokes like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk – the zeitgeist is largely male. But that hasn’t always been the case. As a matter of fact, for the first decade or so programming was a ‘pink-collar’ industry. The vast majority of early coders were women. What’s more, it’s an industry created by women. Two centuries ago (when computers were made of flywheels and cogs), Ada Lovelace was the matriarch behind programmable computers. The world’s first developer, who lay down the foundations for the future we’re currently living in, was a woman. Almost a hundred years after she published her seminal documents on programmable computers, Alan Turing used them as inspiration for the modern, electric machines we still use today.
Riverbed SD-WAN design goes beyond optimization
The SteelConnect gateway features a built-in next-generation firewall and unified threat protection. And in future versions available later this year, SteelConnect will support a variety of routing protocols, including Open Shortest Path First and the Border Gateway Protocol. Later this year, Riverbed will add its network visibility and application performance apps to SteelConnect Manager, and it will also add support for third-party applications, giving users access to a diverse array of services. The new switches and APs, meantime, will give Riverbed some additional ammunition as it courts customers ready to upgrade their branch sites with hardware that consolidates functions now spread across myriad devices, IDC's Casemore said.
Protecting the rainforests with IoT and recycled phones
Topher White and David Grenell, the founders of Rainforest Connection, developed a solution that uses the sound of loggers’ tools, such as chainsaws and trucks to haul away the logs, against them. They install sensors in rainforests that each monitor the sounds in a square-mile area. Villagers and local authorities are alerted when the sound of chainsaws or trucks is detected. Designing a rugged solution that's also affordable and easy to install is hard. It has to work in extreme humidity, operate in heavy rainfall and be self-powered. Applying some good old-fashioned ingenuity, White and Grenell decided to repurpose some of the more than 150 million phones discarded every year in the U.S. as the sensors for this project. Rainforest Connection adapts old phones, making them waterproof and powered by solar panels.
The Rise of Knowledge Workers Is Accelerating Despite the Threat of Automation
There is no doubt that machines are getting smarter, faster, more powerful and more dexterous—and potentially capable of doing more and more of the tasks that humans do. It’s easy to find warnings of the imminent risk of a jobless future. Most dramatically, a group of researchers at the University of Oxford warned three years ago that technology was on the cusp of destroying nearly 47% of U.S. jobs in coming years. It’s only been three years since that prediction, but so far new knowledge jobs are easily eclipsing the jobs that are disappearing. Even as machines get smarter, many jobs have critical components that are social, emotional, creative or relational. These are overwhelmingly likely to be classified as non-routine types of jobs. The prospect of robots or automation replacing all of them remains remote. In other words, there’s good reason to think knowledge work will continue to grow.
Ramsomware Should Haunt You All The Time
Businesses also need to find out where the attackers went within the network to discover where they might have buried malware for use at a later time, he says. Often the ransomware attack is used as a distraction so network security pros don’t notice other types of attacks. One of the best protections against ransomware attacks is effective backup, but it’s not foolproof. For example, if it is inserted in machines and lies dormant the ransomware itself can be backed up, so machines restored with the backup will still be infected. That’s why forensics are important to determine when and where the malware was placed. And it’s important to reimage machines, not just restore data. “You have to ask did your backups backup everything? Do so recently enough? Do they have integrity?” he says.
What's Really Happening Inside the Dell, EMC Merger
How will this relationship, the largest-ever union of two IT companies, have to work to be successful? Huge companies with multiple thousands of employees tend to be good at doing what they've always done, but are less successful at recognizing changes in the markets and then turning quickly to satisfy those new developments. This is what small, agile startups are particularly good at doing. New-gen IT buyers in their 20s and 30s, at least those contacted by eWEEK, are shrugging off this deal. They're never going to buy what this new company produces on a wide scale, unless the new Dell Technologies can convince them otherwise—and that will be a tall order. This is a large company that's going to sell to other large companies, and, if it can do that on a global basis, maybe that will be enough to be successful. But the midrange is where the growth in IT will be for the next two decades.
4 Benefits of Switching your Contact Center Agent Software to WebRTC
Contact centers are rapidly changing, moving towards becoming omnichannel machines where customers can skip across channels while the context of their interactions is maintained. This is not always the case. I had my own share of broken interactions across channels - getting it right isn’t easy. Most enterprises cannot invest in a full blown transformation of their contact center. That costs too much and comes with great risks (as any IT project does). A different approach is to take baby steps towards a full solution - one in each certain areas of the contact center are modernized and replaced. One such area which is popular for modernization with small and medium contact centers is the agent VoIP client. In a contact center, each agent is designated a phone. This is how they receive calls.
Securing SSDs with AES Disk Encryption
Encrypted SSDs not only operate at full speed without impacting system performance, but offer a number of advantages over software-based disk encryption. Security-wise, just like any other disk-encryption solution, encrypted SSDs perform transparent, complete encryption of all files including hidden and temporary files that may store sensitive information. However, the cryptographic hardware and encryption key is isolated from the host system, making the encryption process robust against attacks or viruses on the host system. Authentication with encrypted SSDs happens pre-boot. All user space data, including the operating system, is completely inaccessible until the user is authenticated. Sanitizing encrypted SSDs is fast and secure. On the other hand, sanitizing a conventional hard drive or SSD requires overwrite procedures that can take hours or days, or physical destruction that could still leave data on the drive.
Quote for the day:
"All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last." -- Marcel Proust
