Archive for October 24, 2017

LinkedIn Rolls Out Enhanced Smart Replies For LinkedIn Messaging

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 24, 2017 by itnerd

Today, LinkedIn rolls out enhanced smart replies for LinkedIn messaging, a brand new natural language processing recommendation engine to help members save time and respond to messages with greater ease.

Using a machine learning framework developed within LinkedIn, smart replies suggests personalized, contextual messages, enabling members to have a more productive dialogue with their connections.

How does it work? If you message a connection to see if they’d like to get coffee next week, you’ll see suggestions based on the conversation’s context to provide more relevant replies such as “Yes I do” and “What time?” Members are also able to message from any page on LinkedIn, no longer requiring you to leave a profile or company page to start a conversation.

Smart replies are rolling out globally in English first with other languages to come and the messaging is accessible on the LinkedIn mobile app and on desktop.

Members can enable or disable smart replies by going to their settings.

To learn more about the new smart replies, please visit LinkedIn’s blog post and video. For more information on the technical work that goes into generating smart replies, check out this post on the LinkedIn Engineering Blog.

 

Guest Post: NordVPN Discusses How Companies Can Protect Themselves from Breaches

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 24, 2017 by itnerd

An average data breach costs companies around 7 million dollars per year, due to loss of customers, business disruption, the effect on brand reputation, fines, and so on. Small businesses are especially at risk, because many of them do not even have basic security tools in place, such as antivirus, firewalls or encryption software.

At the same time, large companies and even government organizations are also vulnerable. A couple of years ago, one NSA employee took classified material home to work on his computer. As a result, his use of the Russian-made Kaspersky Lab antivirus program enabled Russian hackers to see all the secret files. The theft helped Russian government to evade US cyber espionage and to track American activities. More recently, Equifax – one of USA’s major credit card reporting companies – was attacked, and hackers went away with the personal information of more than 140 million people in the US and other countries.

“The biggest problem of such major hacks is that governments and innocent people will suffer the consequences for years to come,” said Marty P. Kamden, CMO of NordVPN. “When private companies fall victim to such hacks, they should act immediately, inform all affected customers and do everything they can to ensure that people know how to protect themselves. That includes informing them they should change their passwords and possibly even their bank accounts.”

“Of course, we understand that any breach spells disaster for that company’s reputation – so rather than deal with unfortunate consequences, it’s always wiser to prevent major hacks from happening.”

NordVPN offers a solution for companies to protect their privacy by applying military-grade encryption to all data that any company’s employee sends or receives over the Internet. A VPN also protects the company and its employees from the risk of working from unsecured Wi-Fi spots, such as hotels, cafes, or airports.

“Nowadays, alongside other security oriented means, it’s a must for every company to use a VPN,” said Marty P. Kamden. “Due to recently revealed KRACK vulnerability, hackers can now obtain the traffic going through the majority of Wi-Fi connections if they are within the range of that connection. Companies should take their privacy into their own hands. They should teach their employees to use only https sites; they should update their router’s firmware and consider using Ethernet. Also – this goes without saying – companies should invest in a reliable VPN provider that will keep their Internet traffic private.”

VPN is a proven method to transmit any information confidentially to employees or clients. It also allows to safely execute financial transactions and to stay private in countries with high Internet censorship. Additionally, using a VPN will help companies bypass bandwidth throttling, surveillance or tracking by ISPs.

#PSA: Windows 10 Users Now Have A Means To Protect Themselves From Ransomware

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 24, 2017 by itnerd

If you’ve updated your Windows 10 install to the Fall Creators Update, you have a new feature that protects you from ransomware. It’s called controlled folder access. What it does is it prevents suspicious applications from changing the contents of selected protected folders. So if you extrapolate that to a ransomware attack, it should stop ransomware from encrypting your files and holding them hostage.

Here’s how you turn it on:

  • Go to the Windows Defender Security Center App
  • Open the virus & threat protection screen within Defender
  • Click on Virus & threat protection settings
  • Turn on the controlled folder access option

The document that I linked to above also has a way to turn this on in a corporate environment with dozens or perhaps hundreds of computers. There’s no performance penalty by turning this on and you will be better off by doing so. Thus I would recommend that you turn it on today.

UPDATE: In further testing I found that Parallels Desktop does not seem to like this feature if you have turned on sharing of your Mac’s home folders with a Windows 10 virtual machine. It also stops updates to Parallels Tools from taking place. Thus Parallels Desktop users should turn this feature off until Parallels comes out with a fix for this.

 

The Rogers Outage MAY Be Ending As More People Are Coming Back Online

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 24, 2017 by itnerd

It seems that more people are coming back online from the almost week long outage that kept some Rogers TV, home phone and Internet customers offline. Overnight I got these Tweets from readers of the blog:

But there are still many who continue to be offline:

https://twitter.com/craiger_bombs14/status/922784552589905920

So it looks like there continues to be progress in terms of getting people back online. But it also seems that this issue cannot be filed under the “resolved” pile. Adding to this are the people who are looking for compensation for this outage, along with those who are fed up and are looking to leave Rogers for the competition. In terms of compensation, if I were Rogers, I would be very proactive on that front. But only after all customers are online.

Watch this space for updates.

UPDATE: I just got an email from a Rogers customer who is none too happy with the telco. I’ve reprinted his email below:

Rogers continues to lie to me and really need to get their message straight. Rogers store where I got a new modem says that they have no idea about failure to activate new modems (this was on Monday)….also getting message that everyone is getting hooked back up…really???…so I guess I’m just the unfortunate one…sorry for the inconvenience…and sorry we have no idea when we’ll be able to hook you back up (finally a kernel of truth)…even senior management is frustrated…really??? Goodbye Rogers..hello TekSavvy…5 days without service and counting…

This is another data point in terms of the challenge that Rogers has when it comes to putting this issue to bed once and for all. Hopefully as people are coming back online, Canada’s largest telco is formulating a plan to assuage the discontent within its user base.

UPDATE #2: A look at Canadian Outages indicates that people are continuing to come back online, and there is some scale to it. Thus I really think that there’s a light to the end of this tunnel.

UPDATE #3: The Rogers customer who sent me the e-mail above is online as of a few minutes ago. He’s now waiting to see if Rogers compensates him for this before he decides if he will leave Rogers or not.