Новости за 22.12.2016

A math story

Image by NASA

The film Hidden Figures details an inspiring story about three particular African-American women mathematicians who were highly indispensable to the achievement of early spaceflight. The movie also involves some cool old mainframes and other high tech gear. Take a gander.

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The cyberespionage group blamed for hacking into the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) earlier this year has also infiltrated the Ukrainian military through a trojanized Android application used by its artillery units.

Nokia has filed new patent infringement lawsuits against Apple on Thursday, a day after it weighed in on a licensing dispute with the company by filing claims in Germany and the U.S.

By now, everyone in our industry has provided 2017 cybersecurity predictions and I’m no exception.  I participated in a 2017 infosec forecast webcast with industry guru Bruce Schneier, and ESG also published a video where I exchanged cybersecurity prophecies with my colleague Doug Cahill (note: I am an ESG employee).

At Amazon Web Services' (AWS) re:Invent conference two years ago, the company introduced AWS Lambda, a mind-blowing service that allows developers to specify and set up specific functions that would run in the event of particular events.

Apple has alerted app developers that it will not be accepting new app or app update submissions from Dec. 23-27, so the clock is ticking...

As the festive season approaches, there is nothing better than a good surprise. If you follow my blog regularly, you’ll have read my position on Polar codes—great technology, but perhaps not quite ready for prime time.

Developers of the popular Signal secure messaging app have started to use Google's domain as a front to hide traffic to their service and to sidestep blocking attempts.

Here’s a prediction you don’t hear very often: The cloud computing market, as we know it, will be obsolete in a matter of years.

Why do we monitor things (user experience, transactions, applications, virtual servers, physical servers, datastores, etc.)? Because we want them to work well all of the time.

Alibaba’s Taobao.com marketplace is in the eye of a storm after the U.S. Trade Representative included the vastly popular online Chinese marketplace in the list of ‘Notorious Markets’ for 2016, after a long break.

Diversity (or lack of it) is still a major challenge for tech companies. Poised to revolutionize the world of work in general, some organizations are leveraging technology to root out bias, better identify and screen candidates and help close the diversity gap.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is keenly worried that President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will step up surveillance activities and pass laws to curtail electronic rights.

After years of teases, tantalizing promises, and Kickstarter campaigns, virtual reality finally became actual reality in 2016, with VR’s mere existence thrusting the entire PC industry into glorious, wonderful turmoil. Despite being around for just a handful of months, virtual reality has already inspired totally new genres of computers, wormed its way deep into Windows, and sent the price of graphics cards plummeting.

Microsoft is now more than a year into reworking its Outlook clients and server software to truly support its mission to bring its Office communications tools everywhere: the Mail, Calendar, People (contacts), and Notes components in Outlook.

(Insider Story)

There are more free information security tools out there than you can highlight with a fist full of whiteboard pointers. While many are trial ware-based enticements designed to lure decision makers to purchase the pricey premium counterparts of these freebies, many are full-blown utilities. A few important categories include threat intelligence tools, tools to build security in during the development stage, penetration testers, and forensics tools.

Whether quantum computing is 10 years away -- or is already here -- it promises to make current encryption methods obsolete, so enterprises need to start laying the groundwork for new encryption methods.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) encrypt internet connections between two points, to secure them from casual snoopers and hackers. These VPN services are particularly useful when accessing the internet from an untrusted location, such as a hotel, café or coworking space.

The financial services industry lives with a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it is at the heart of everything from economic health and growth to the daily reality of how consumers pay for housing, transportation or even a coffee on the go to start their day.

As you may have noticed, 2016 was a very good year for Amazon, pretty much across the board. 

A significantly zany year

Image by Reuters/ Thomas Peter

As we close out the year and look at some of the, shall we say more interesting, stories of the year we find quite a tech collection. Everything from NASA’s poop challenge and the most significant advances in Ethernet’s illustrious history to the rise of robot doctor overlords. Take a look at 30 of the year's weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories.

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It's been a year of change in the enterprise software market. SaaS providers are fighting to compete with one another, machine learning is becoming a reality for businesses at a larger scale, and containers are growing in popularity.