Новости за 17.03.2016

 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has sent warning letters to 12 smartphone app developers for allegedly compromising users' privacy by packaging audio monitoring software into their products.

Pre-fabricated, shipping container-like stackable modules, containing data center gear are the future, according to Keystone NAP, a startup vendor, who’s recently obtained new funding.

Last week the Enterprise Connect trade show was held in Orlando, Florida. The show is the collaboration industry’s largest event and because of that, there were dozens of vendors that issued press releases touting the latest and greatest innovations in the market.

IDC released its wearable report today predicting continued wearables growth reaching 110 million units by the end of 2016. All types of wearables, smartwatches, health and fitness bands and other are included in this forecast growing at a year over year rate of 38.2%. IDC expects the category to grow to 237 million by 2020.

Like Apple, Samsung is trying to link its devices so they work better together. A new effort bridges the gap between the company's Android handsets and Windows devices.

Sidewalks Labs, a unit of Alphabet, is teaming up with the U.S. Department of Transportation to build a data and analytics platform that promises to help cities understand where people go and how they get there.

Amazon just got dumped by DropBox.

At first it seemed the relationship would last forever. A rapidly growing cloud storage startup relies on Amazon Web Services’ cloud for most of its infrastructure needs, allowing Dropbox’s engineers to focus on its product and not investing in costly infrastructure to run it.

But DropBox has decided it would rather be single. The company announced in a blog post this week that it would build up its own infrastructure stack and move mostly off of AWS. Читать дальше...

Reports that Apple will increase its use of Google's Cloud Platform while simultaneously building up its own data centers and decreasing its spend on Amazon Web Service's cloud could amount to somewhat of a coup in the cloud wars.

Security researchers exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities in Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Flash Player to compromise the latest versions of OS X and Windows during the first day of the annual Pwn2Own hacking contest.

Alexa, the voice-activated service that's part of Amazon's Echo interactive speaker, can order products, play music and wake you up in the morning. But can Alexa be taught to talk and control a wider range of smart devices with custom commands?

They have been springing up here and there … and should become a fixture in every community: “Safe Exchange Zones” for conducting the physical interaction oftentimes necessitated by person-to-person online commerce.

Tim Cook gave a long interview to Time magazine about Apple’s fight with the FBI over its refusal to create “GovtOS,” a more crackable version of iOS to side-load onto the seized iPhone 5c used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The edited version is here, and Time also published the full transcript.

The network NASA uses to deliver telemetry ground-based tracking, data and communications services to a wide range of current and future spacecraft needs a serious bump in security technology.

In much of the enterprise-software world today, data is data and chat is chat, and rarely the twain shall meet. Looker aims to change all that.

A new email-based attack campaign is targeting key employees from companies in the U.S., Middle East and Asia with the goal of compromising their computers and email accounts.

Android N is the smartphone equivalent of a Russian nesting doll. Google has built in a lot of interdependent features in the preview version of its next major operating system update. Changes to notifications, a new split-screen multitasking feature, and other tweaks build on one another and show how the operation system may grow to be more fluid and useful.

A pair of research reports on cloud storage behaviors reiterates what has been an enduring and entirely unnecessary reality about data storage: The greatest threat to your store is not outside hackers, it's your own staff. 

Tweeting under the influence may not get you in as much trouble as drunk driving does, but it can still mean a whole lot of hot water. Now there's an algorithm that can tell when you're drinking while tweeting -- and also figure out where you're imbibing.

By and large, people use Python because it’s convenient and programmer-friendly, not because it’s fast. The plethora of third-party libraries and the breadth of industry support for Python compensate heavily for its not having the raw performance of Java or C. Speed of development takes precedence over speed of execution.

Visual tour of the Spark ecosystem

Image by Dawn Hudson via Public Domain Pictures

VMware patched two cross-site scripting issues in several editions of its vRealize cloud software. These flaws could be exploited in stored XSS attacks and could result in the user's workstation being compromised.

Messaging services on Android devices get dinged by users for being too complex and fragmented, at least when compared to the universal app approach with Apple iMessage on iOS devices.

Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana is one of the major additions to Windows 10 -- and it's a winner. Turn it on and Cortana alerts you to upcoming meetings; searches your PC and the Web; tells you about the weather, news and sports; and a lot more.

At this point, it seems that there's truly no end in sight for Apple's ongoing legal battle with the FBI. While the FBI and the DOJ have made it clear that they want Apple to create a new version of iOS designed to bypass iOS security mechanisms, Apple has made it clear that it's not even going to entertain the idea. Quite the opposite, Apple CEO Tim Cook even categorized the FBI's request as akin to asking Apple to create the software equivalent of cancer.

Apple has moved some of its iCloud and services data from Amazon Web Services to Google's cloud platform, in what is seen as a bid by the iPhone maker to diversify its cloud service providers, according to reports.