Cloud security fears exaggerated, says federal CIO
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is not afraid of the public cloud.
Indeed, this agency is vetting cloud providers to host the public websites of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to its CIO, Richard Spires. And the department's use of the public cloud providers is likely to grow, he said.
Spires believes public cloud vendors are on a path to handle more sensitive government information, particularly after the U.S. completes development of a planned security certification system for this industry.
"I am a believer that we are going to, over the next few years, really solve a lot of the cybersecurity concerns that we have with cloud-based services," said Spires. Read more...
Apple Talk: Lion review – a roaring success or will it just make you growl?
I've been using Lion for about five days now. I installed it a couple of days after it was released. In that time I've grown to love it and be slightly infuriated by it in roughly equal measure.
Lion is a major evolutionary step for Mac OS X. The July release comes a few months after Steve Jobs' twin declaration that we are living in a post-PC world and that the Mac is no longer centre of the digital hub, merely another device. A bitter pill for millions of loyal Mac users to swallow.
The evidence of Apple's post-PC philosophy is clear. The Mac's input works with traditional input devices - keyboard and basic mouse, but the flourishes and the benefits are reaped through using devices controlled by touch.
The ideas that Jobs and other executives highlighted in Apple's Back to the Mac conference last year are here and for the large part work well. The big idea was that Apple had learned a fair bit designing and selling iOS devices, particularly the iPad, and wanted to share some of the interface elements and concepts with the Mac. Read more...
‘LONDON IS THE CENTRE OF THE technology WORLD’
Demand for IT jobs in London grew by 18 per cent in the last quarter compared with the same period in 2010.
Meanwhile, code monkey jobs dominated the recruitment market, according to employment outfit CWJobs.
It said London positions now make up 33 per cent of all UK-based IT jobs advertised on its site.
More than 37,000 job ads for positions in the capital were posted on CWJobs in the past three months.
"It's promising to see that the government's investment in the IT sector is being reflected in the recruitment market," said the company's website director Richard Nott. Read more...
A guide to H-1B, green card reform
Unlike with the debt limit debate, there is bipartisan interest in Congress in reforming high-skill immigration. New legislation is on its way, and here's what to watch for.
What bills have been introduced or are coming?
In the House, the most important Democratic initiative is from Silicon Valley's Zoe Lofgren. Her bill will make green cards available to students who earn advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, so called STEM graduates. However, her bill isn't expected to go anywhere.
The person to watch instead is U.S. Rep., Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who heads the House Judiciary Committee. Smith appears interested in some limited immigration changes expected in a bill from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). This bill, which is due "soon," is expected to call for elimination of the per-country limits on green cards. Read more...
10 best practices to prevent data and privacy breaches
The antics of groups like Anonymous and LulzSec over the past few months have made data breaches seem inevitable. If information security vendors like HBGary and RSA Security aren't safe, what hope does an average SMB have? It is true that there is no silver bullet, and no impervious network security, but there are a variety of things IT admins can do to prevent network breaches and protect data and privacy better.
The Web safety and online identity protection experts at SafetyWeb.com and myID.com helped put together a list of 10 different data and privacy breach scenarios, along with suggestions and best practices to avoid them.
1. Data breach resulting from poor networking choices. Names like Cisco and Sun are synonymous with enterprise-level networking technologies used in large IT departments around the world. Small or medium businesses, however, generally lack the budget necessary for equipment like that. If an SMB has a network infrastructures at all, it may be built around networking hardware designed for consumer use. Some may forego the use of routers at all, plugging directly into the Internet. Business owners can improve network security and block most threats by using a quality router, like a Netgear or Buffalo brand router and making sure to change the router password from the default. Read more...
Phisher who hit 38,500 gets long prison sentence
A California man was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison Thursday for his role as the brains behind a widespread phishing scam that took in more than 38,000 victims.
That Tien Truong Nguyen, 34, worked with Romanian scammers to drive users to websites that were set up to look up like they belonged to legitimate financial institutions. After victims entered their information on the sites, Nguyen sold the data to two alleged co-conspirators, Stefani Ruland and Ryan Price, who used the information to set up lines of credit -- typically between US$1,000 and $2,000 -- at instant credit kiosks at Wal-Mart stores.
They used those lines, as well as fake credit cards made using the stolen data, to purchase products from Wal-Mart, which they then sold for cash. Read more...
Survey: Tablets used widely for business
Your employees' promises that they'll use a company-issued tablet for business purposes is probably on the up and up, according to the research firm Social Nuggets.
Business activity accounts for more than 25 percent of all activity on Apple iPads and BlackBerry PlayBooks, while it accounts for just under 20 percent of all activity on Android tablets, research by Social Nuggets shows. Games and shopping where also popular activities on tablets, as shopping accounted for 23 percent of the activity on Android tablets and games accounted for 17.5 percent of activity on iPads. Read more...
Ubuntu dressed in cheap elastic support, sent out in public
Canonical's Ubuntu Linux variant is popular out there on the public clouds of the world, but there is a serious mismatch between how support contracts are sold for bare-metal servers used inside corporate data centers and how virtual servers are deployed and used out there on the cloud. And Canonical wants to fix that and make a bit of money, too.
Last June, Canonical rejigged its support services for companies deploying Ubuntu Linux server and desktop variants with its Ubuntu Advantage offering. Even though this new support structure offered tiered support levels in terms of coverage time and features, and even had add-ons to give companies a break if they were deploying Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud to build an internal clone of Amazon's EC2 cloud, what it did not do is provide pricing for support contracts running on external public clouds like EC2. Read more...
Replacing legacy applications: Four problems solved
Legacy applications are one of the most difficult issues to face within IT. A rip-and-replace approach is expensive, difficult to cost-justify and tends to interrupt business. Meanwhile, the legacy software lingers in accounting's ledgers, outlives its welcome in sales and causes poor network performance throughout the organization.
And it gets worse. An old mapping application in a transportation department, for instance, is a disaster waiting to happen. As the months and years go by, the problem becomes more serious and harder to address.
In the examples below -- each featuring a slightly different legacy application problem -- the key to finding a solution involved business analysis. IT staffers helped figure out how the legacy app was being used, in what ways employees depended on it and how the company would be affected by a disruption in service caused by a failure of the software. Application failures, of course, typically lead to a loss of productivity that continues during the time needed to install new software and train employees to use it.
"A core element in all these cases is that the existing portfolio [of IT applications] ought to be continuously managed for its balance of delivered value to cost and risk," says Jim Duggan, a Gartner analyst who studies enterprise IT applications. Read more...
How to make Mac OS X Lion more like Snow Leopard
So you've downloaded Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store and updated your Mac. You're delighted by many of the new features, but there are some that rub you the wrong way. You may wish you could revert some of them to the behavior they had in OS X Snow Leopard. Maybe you just can't get used to the changes, or perhaps you simply don't find them appealing. Here's a look at some of the many new features that you can revert to the old way. While it may be a good idea to get used to the way Lion does certain things, it's certainly understandable that you might want to change some of them back -- I know I did.
(Note that when I mention preferences that can be changed, unless I name a specific application, all these preferences are found in the System Preferences application, which you can access from the Apple menu.)
General behavior
Scroll direction: The first thing you probably saw when launching Lion was a video informing you that the default scroll direction has changed. In the past -- since the advent of scrolling mice and trackpads -- when you scrolled up, the content of your window went down, and vice versa. Now, scroll up with either a scroll wheel or a mouse, or with two finders on a trackpad, and the window content follows your movement. Read more...
Former NASA CTO launches cloud appliance
The former CTO of NASA and co-founder of OpenStack unveiled on Wednesday a new appliance designed to make it easy for enterprises to build private clouds.
The idea is to eliminate the customization required to build most private clouds, said Chris Kemp, CEO and founder of Nebula, the company offering the appliance. "In order to see enterprises adopt private clouds, it has to be turnkey. They can't be in a position where they have to spin up a huge consulting effort and develop a customized cloud," he said.
Nebula has loaded OpenStack onto an appliance, adding security and management features aimed at making the appliance work well with existing compliance and security procedures in enterprises. It's designed to work with the cheapest available servers. Each appliance has a 10GB switch and 48 ports, so 24 2U servers can connect to it, Kemp said. Read more...
Google Maps gives SAP’s business intelligence a new direction
SAP and Google have teamed up to bring Google Maps and Google Earth to SAP's business intelligence software.
The idea behind the tie-in is to allow large volumes of data to be presented visually, helping users make quicker decisions based on real-time information.
If businesses know the geographical context of their information, SAP believes they can better understand local, regional and global business trends and how different approaches work in different places. Read more...
Microsoft pushes Windows Phone Mango out to Japan
The next version of Windows Phone, codenamed Mango, is with device manufacturers and looks like it will hit Japanese shelves in September, with the rest of the world having to wait a little longer.
Version 7.5 of Windows Phone is being touted as a proper version 1, a grown-up version that finally brings multi-tasking to the platform as well as some interface improvements and integrated services. Mango was officially released to manufacturers on Tuesday, according to the Microsoft blog, and KDDI wasted no time announcing that it would be launching the first Mango handset in Japan by September. Read more...
HP’s fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you’re No 2
After just one year, the iPad is making more revenue than Apple's 30-year-old personal computer division. It's almost bringing in as much as Dell brings in from PCs. This is a huge business, already. And nobody can quite say what their iPad is good for. If ever a computer was a means to an end, then the iPad is it – rather than doing anything uniquely iPad-ish, it takes lots of "ends" a laptop (or Kindle, or smartphone) gets you to, and just gets you there slightly more conveniently. PCs are going to be around a long time; the iPad will be right there alongside them.
I've had a long weekend with HP's rival, which is probably the best of the challengers. Our Reg Hardware review hits several nails firmly on the head – I won't repeat too much of it below.
But what a dilemma the iPad poses for its rivals. Read more...
IEEE sets standard for ‘white spaces’ networking at up to 22 Mbps
A just-published standard for using the abandoned "white spaces" between TV channels could offer wireless networking at speeds of as much as 22 Mbps over distances as great as 62 miles.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers announced on Wednesday that it has published the IEEE 802.22 standard, which defines the unlicensed use of frequencies between TV channels in the VHF and UHF bands.
The IEEE 802.22 Working Group began its standards effort after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission started exploring the use of these frequencies by unlicensed devices. But the group said its standard could be used around the world, especially in rural areas and developing countries where there tend to be more vacant TV channels. Read more...