Onion Browser brings encrypted mobile browsing to the iPhone
In an era when security is at the top of our minds, mobile web browsers seem to be lagging behind. There are few options for secure web sessions on smartphones, but a new iPhone app called Onion Browser is changing that. Onion Browser connects to the Tor network to encrypt all your data.
The Tor Onion router network is essentially a series of virtual tunnels that your connection will bounce through before reaching the destination. While connecting through Tor is slower than a non-tunneled connection would be, it has the upshot of making it almost impossible to monitor your activity online — it’s the closest you can get to anonymity online. Read more...
Charting H-1B users, as attention shifts to L-1
Offshore outsourcing firms rely heavily on the H-1B visa to deliver services, and the chart accompanying this story provide data on the top users of the visa since 2009.
The chart, compiled from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) data, provides figures on approvals of both new H-1B visas and renewals of existing visas (H-1B visas must be renewed every three years). To calculate largest users of H-1B visas, Computerworld consolidated various versions (and spellings) of some company names, such as IBM Corp. and IBM India Private Ltd.
You can use the form below to search through the full, original database of H-1B visa approvals. Read more...
SAS promises pervasive BI with new tool
SAS Institute this week unveiled new technology designed to allow a broad swath of enterprise users to do advanced analytics on massive volumes of data.
The new Visual Analytics technology, part of the SAS High-Performance Analytics suite, allows business users to explore data gathered from corporate databases and the Web, and to generate easy to understand charts, graphs, dashboards and the like.
SAS said the Visual Analytics technology takes advantage of in-memory processing techniques to handle data at much faster speeds than the company's existing analytics tools can support. Read more...
You are naked on the Internet
Unless you’re Ted Kaczynski circa 1985, living deep in the woods of Montana far from one of the roving homeless 4G connections we so conveniently enjoy here at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, your illusion of privacy is a sad, pathetic, ridiculous joke.
Providing a much-needed wake-up call to those of you who think your spouse or partner will never know about your dalliances at the local hot-sheets motel (as long as you protect your password), “Sex, Dating, and Privacy Online Post-Weinergate” described the myriad ways in which every step you take, every move you make, is online and searchable.
You don’t have to be a prominent politician sexting pics of your junk to be vulnerable to the brave new world of naked data, panel members said. You may have heard that Facebook and dating-site messages are commonly subpoenaed by divorce lawyers. Read more...
Comment 4 inShare154 Yandex, Google’s Russian Rival, Is Twitter’s New Real-Time Search Partner
A significant step for Twitter in its international growth: Yandex, Russia’s search giant, today announced that it will carry Twitter data in all of its search results.
The news also underscores one possible route to revenue generation for Twitter: Yandex describes this as a licensing deal. The terms of it were not disclosed but Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30 million for a similar search agreement.
The agreement with Yandex will see Twitter’s data firehose appear both in Yandex’s blog search, as well as through a dedicated URL, twitter.yandex.ru. Read more...
Enterprise gets social: Twitter-style data streams, engagement ‘apps’
Enterprise software developers are just as talented as their free-wheeling consumer-facing peers, but are shackled by the need to prioritise enterprise security over personal utility, and by the fact that IT buyers differ significantly from IT users, as 37 Signals' Jason Fried has pointed out. But a new breed of enterprise software seeks to overlay and augment crufty old systems with dynamic, user-friendly social software, and may well become a $4bn market within the next five years, according to Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard.
Data, not surprisingly, is both the engine behind this shift and the glue sticking it all together.
Enterprise software systems, new or old, throw off immense amounts of data, or "digital exhaust". With the rise of programmable interfaces, or APIs, getting access to that exhaust is easier than ever, but data is only useful if harnessed, made comprehensible, and turned to business value.
Unfortunately, most data is "exhaust" in the traditional sense of the word: waste. If enterprises collect data they do so in data warehouses that sit largely untapped. This is a shame given the potential of data to transform the way we work.
Enter the data stream. Read more...
The top 10 H-1B visa users in the U.S.
Offshore outsourcing companies continued to make up the majority of the top 10 H-1B visa users in 2011, according to new government data. These offshore firms have been adding employees by the thousands as their revenues increase.
Cognizant, a New Jersey-based IT services provider with major operations overseas, led the list. The company had 4,222 initial or new visas approved and 1,493 renewal petitions.
Google was last on the list, with 383 new H-1B visas and 232 renewals.
Offshoring is showing signs of being a major political issue this year, but opinions remain divided.
President Barack Obama highlighted it in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. But he hasn't coupled offshore outsourcing with visa usage. One of the leading Republican candidates, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, has called for eliminating the H-1B cap and says the cap policy is wrong.
The data for this story comes from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. One list shows new applications for H-1B visas; the second list shows the combined totals for new visas and renewals. A H-1B visa must be renewed every three years. Read more...
The Patriot Act and your data: Should you ask cloud providers about protection?
Worries have been steadily growing among European IT leaders that the USA Patriot Act would give the U.S. government unfettered access to their data if stored on the cloud servers of American providers -- so much so that Obama administration officials last week held a press conference to quell international concern over the protection of data stored on U.S. soil.
Patriot Act Games
The unease over the reach of Patriot Act provision -- which expands the discovery mechanisms law enforcement can use to access third-party data -- has been amped up by the sales and marketing efforts of some European cloud providers, seeking to set apart their services as a way to keep corporate data out of the hands of the American government. The most blatant examples are two Swiss companies touting their cloud options as "a safe haven from the reaches of the U.S. Patriot Act," but it's become a popular topic at negotiating tables across the continent.
"I don't see how you have a pitch meeting with one of these European cloud providers and not have subject of the Patriot Act concerns come up," says Alex Lakatos, a partner and cross-border litigation expert in the Washington, D.C. office of Mayer Brown.
Anxiety was heightened last year when a Microsoft UK managing director admitted that he could not guarantee that data stored on the company's servers, even those outside the U.S., would not be seized by the U.S. government.
"Some of it certainly is companies trying to take advantage of the Patriot Act to market against U.S. competitors," Lakatos says. "Some of it is just the general concern Europeans have about the Patriot Act." While the 9/11-inspired legislation has been misused in a variety of ways, says Lakatos, some of those perceptions don't necessarily mesh with reality. Read more...
IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms
IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data.
The breakthrough may someday allow data storage hardware manufacturers to produce products with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's hard disk and flash drives.
"Looking at this conservatively ... instead of 1TB on a device you'd have 100TB to 150TB. Instead of being able to store all your songs on a drive, you'd be able to have all your videos on the device," said Andreas Heinrich, IBM Research Staff Member and lead investigator on this project.
Today, storage devices use ferromagnetic materials where the spin of atoms are aligned or in the same direction.
The IBM researchers used an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism, where atoms spin in opposite directions, allowing scientists to create an experimental atomic-scale magnet memory that is at least 100 times denser than today's hard disk drives and solid-state memory chips. Read more...
Study: iPhone 4S users consume the most data
iPhone 4S users consume twice as much data as iPhone 4 users, signaling that operators will have to continue to battle with growing data volumes, according to a report published by network management software vendor Arieso.
Apple's iPhone has put some operator networks under immense pressure since the first version arrived, as users download more data than their networks can handle. The iPhone 4S takes data consumption to new levels, according to Arieso's report, which looks at usage patterns of at least 1,000 phones of each model, the company's CTO Michael Flanagan said.
The latest addition to the iPhone family is the champion among smartphones when it comes to data usage. Owners of the iPhone 4S download almost three times as much data as users of the iPhone 3G, which Arieso uses as the benchmark, and twice as much as the iPhone 4, whose users were the most demanding in last year's survey.
Reasons for the growing data volume include the addition of Siri and iCloud, according to Flanagan. Read more...
Flaw in Web app frameworks pushes Microsoft to patch ASP.net promptly
Many Web app frameworks are vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack targeting the way they handle hash tables, researchers revealed Wednesday, prompting Microsoft to announce an "out-of-band" patch for its ASP.Net platform just hours later.
Hash tables are used to store and retrieve data rapidly, allocating the data to different slots in the table based on the results of a calculation -- the hash function -- performed on the data itself. Ideally, the hash function would return a different result, or hash, for each possible item of data, but this is not achievable in practice, so implementations of hash tables have to deal with "hash collisions," where two or more different pieces of data generate the same hash.
A collision slows the storage and retrieval of the data involved, the time taken for those operations typically increasing with the square of the number of items involved in the collision, according to Alexander Klink of German security consultancy N.runs and Julian Wälde of Darmstadt Technical University. Read more...
ross-site scripting flaws plague Web apps, report says
Cross-site scripting flaws are the most prevalent vulnerabilities found in Web applications, posing a risk to data and intellectual property, according to a study of thousands of applications by vendor Veracode.
Veracode, a company that specializes in finding vulnerabilities in code, analyzed more than 9,900 applications that were submitted to its cloud-based scanning service over the last 18 months.
For Web applications, 68 percent contained cross-site scripting flaws, Veracode found in its study. Cross-site scripting is an attack in which a script drawn from another website is allowed to run even though it shouldn't and it can be used to steal information or potentially cause other malicious code to run. Read more...
Red Hat RHEL 6.2 boosts storage performance and cuts cost
Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with new technologies designed to cut the cost and improve performance of enterprise storage, the company announced Tuesday.
RHEL 6.2 also offers new features to boost reliability and improve I/O performance.
"As systems get more complex, and [run] more consolidated workloads, it becomes increasingly important to be able to efficiently deploy and manage these large-scale systems," said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of Linux engineering.
For storage, RHEL 6.2 is the first version to fully support iSCSI extension of RDMI (Remote Directory Memory Access). This will allow organizations to achieve the throughput of a SAN (storage area network) using iSCSI disks and Ethernet. "iSCSI obviates the need for separate Fibre Channel hardware, enabling you to use commodity Ethernet channels for your storage infrastructure," Burke said. As a result, "RHEL 6.2 can be used as a storage server." Read more...
Four rising threats from cyber criminals
Criminal hackers never sleep, it seems. Just when you think you've battened down the hatches and fully safeguarded yourself or your business from electronic security risks, along comes a new exploit to keep you up at night. It might be an SMS text message with a malevolent payload or an errant signal designed to jam GPS receivers.
Whether you're protecting corporate data or simply trying to keep your personal files safe, these threats -- some rapidly growing, others still emerging -- put your systems at risk. Fortunately, security procedures and tools are available to help you win the fight.
1. Text-message malware
While smartphone viruses are still fairly rare, text-message attacks are becoming more common, according to Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at mobile messaging company Neustar and director of the Conficker Working Group, a coalition of security researchers that came together to fight the malware known as Conficker. PCs are fairly well protected today, he says, so some black-hat hackers are now targeting mobile devices. Their incentive is mostly financial: Text messaging provides a way to break into devices and make money.
Khoi Nguyen, group product manager for mobile security at Symantec, confirmed that text-message attacks aimed at smartphone operating systems are commonplace now that people are increasingly reliant on mobile devices. It's not just consumers who are at risk, he adds. Any employee who falls for a text-message ruse using a company smartphone can jeopardize the business's network and data and possibly cause a compliance violation. Read more...