Archive for March 29, 2018

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My Fitness Pal Pwned…. 150 Million Accounts In The Wild

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

Under Armor has a slogan which is “Protect This House.” Well, they did a craptastic job of that as they’ve told the world that My Fitness Pal which is an online fitness and nutrition website/app that they own has been pwned by hackers to the tune of 150 million accounts which may include usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. And it happened in February though they only found out about it last week. Payment info wasn’t swiped. Users of the fitness site/app should change their passwords immediately. Also they should ensure whatever password that used here isn’t used elsewhere. If it is, those need to be changed as well.

Now the company is working with law enforcement on this, but this is not trivial and it underscores the need for government to smack companies who get pwned silly so that they take whatever measures are required to ensure that pwnage doesn’t happen.

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US Tech Workers Are Fleeing To Canada: Axios

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

Canada is attracting an exodus of tech workers from the U.S., with some Canadian companies seeing two to three times the number of applicants from a year earlier, according to an Axios report. A survey of 55 companies, conducted by the MaRS, a research hub in Toronto found the following:

  • 53% of the companies said their international applications rose in 2017
  • 82% of new applicants were from the US.
  • According to the report, the applicants primarily worked in a variety of tech jobs, with 47% engineers, 24% data scientists and 10% researchers.

In terms of the reasons for this movement of tech workers to Canada, the report said this:

The spike in applications and hiring adds to the evidence suggesting that President Trump’s immigration crackdown is resulting in a loss of tech workers to Canada.

That’s got to be horrifying for US tech companies. Let’s see if anything happens in the US to stop this trend.

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Apple Aims To Not Be Facebook With New Privacy Features In iOS 11.3

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

Apple has had iOS 11.3 in beta for a while now, but the timing couldn’t be better as it’s release today brings a ton of privacy related changes that were likely prompted by the enormous new European data protection regulation GDPR. From the press release that Apple put out today:

iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4 introduce updated data and privacy information that makes it easier than ever for users to understand how their personal data may be used. A new privacy icon and detailed privacy information will appear whenever Apple asks for access to personal information to enable features, secure Apple services or personalize an iOS experience.

Ignoring the fact that they’ve pretty much confirmed that macOS 10.13.4 is due any day now, they’re likely un-intentionally trolling Facebook when users upgrade to iOS 11.3. I say that because after the upgrade, you’ll see this screen:

iOS_11.3_privacy_buddy_screen_03292018

In a backhanded way they’re saying that Apple is not Facebook. And you will know every time an app asks to use your personal info, unlike Facebook. I guess it also in a backhanded way ties into an interview that Apple CEO Tim Cook had yesterday when he said this:

If that’s not a mic drop moment, I don’t know what is.

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#PSA: iOS 11.3 Brings The Ability To Monitor Battery Health In iPhones…. Here’s How You Use It

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

One of the things that Apple committed to when #BatteryGate broke out was to give users move visibility into the health of the battery on their iPhone via a software update. Today Apple released iOS 11.3 and that functionality is here. Before I explain how you access it, let me take a moment to explain the purpose behind this functionality.

What this functionality does is:

  • It offers details on maximum battery capacity relative to when it was new.
  • Information on if and when a device is being throttled with performance management features to prevent unexpected shutdowns. And the ability to disable that if you so desire. I wouldn’t. But that’s just me.
  • What apps are using your battery the most.

To utilize this functionality, go to Settings and Battery. You will then see this:

IMG_1407

Note the section called Battery Health (Beta). I find it interesting that this is classified as a beta. But in any case, click that and you’ll see this:

IMG_1408

In my case, my year old iPhone 7 Plus has lost only 4% of its maximum charge since I got it which is pretty impressive. If your battery is 80% or lower in terms of its maximum capacity, you might want to consider replacing it.

Now if you’ve had an “unexpected shutdown” as Apple calls it, the Peak Performance Capability section will look different. It will tell you that you’ve experienced an “unexpected shutdown” and that the phone is in a performance management mode (aka: it is being throttled) to extend battery life. You’ll also be able to disable it here if you so choose to get maximum performance.

Now to be clear, this functionality is specific to the iPhone. Apple has introduced a new iPad charge management for tablets that are plugged in for long periods of time. In other words, you won’t see any of this if you have an iPad. Regardless, this is a top shelf reason to update your iPhone to iOS 11.3 today.

 

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LinkedIn Launching New Marketing Solutions

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

LinkedIn today has announced two major updates that will build upon its position as the most effective platform for marketers to engage professionals in a quality environment. These updates will help marketers improve brand awareness and ROI by telling rich, compelling stories in the LinkedIn feed. They are:

  • Video for Sponsored Content: Native video ads represent the next evolution of LinkedIn Sponsored Content that lets you  engage with business decision-makers throughout the buyer’s journey on Linkedin. Unlike pre- or post-roll video ads, video for Sponsored Content ads live directly on the news feed as standalone posts.
  • Company Page Video: With Company Page video, organizations can now share first-hand looks into their culture, products, news, and events to attract talent, and drive engagement and conversation with professional audiences right from their Company Page on LinkedIn.

More detail on this announcement can be found in this LinkedIn Blog post from Phil Spitzer who is the Product Manager at LinkedIn.

 

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VMware Updates vRealize Cloud Management Platform

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

VMware today announced new releases across its integrated VMware vRealize® cloud management platform (CMP) that will make it easier for customers to implement, use, and manage hybrid cloud environments. Guided by customer feedback, the new updates to the vRealize platform will combine to simplify how customers innovate and enable IT governance through new ‘self-driving’ operations capabilities that optimize workload performance and capacity across their hybrid clouds as well as through new and enhanced IT automation and productivity capabilities.

The new product releases — vRealize Operations 6.7, vRealize Automation 7.4, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, vRealize Orchestrator 7.4, vRealize Log Insight 4.6 and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 — will come together in the VMware vRealize Suite to enable customers to manage and provision compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments at scale. The new operations, automation and lifecycle management features and enhancements across the integrated platform are designed to provide customers with faster overall time to value, improved ease of use, and increased control of VMware’s software-defined data centre (SDDC) stack.

Self-Driving Operations to Assure Performance and Optimize Capacity Based on Intent

VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will introduce several new and enhanced performance and capacity optimization capabilities to help customers address operational challenges. This new release will enable customers to adopt a ‘self-driving’ approach to monitoring and managing their data centres and cloud environments. VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will also feature enhanced monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to better predict, prevent, and remediate problems via integrations across VMware’s SDDC stack. New features will include:

  • New Capacity Analytics Engine: VMware vRealize Operations 6.7 will introduce a new capacity analytics engine to provide customers with real-time visibility into capacity usage and demand to predict and improve capacity utilization. The new capacity analytics engine will feature ARIMA techniques and layer on periodicity, trend, and spike detection, along with a simplified user experience to help manage capacity as well as plan and forecast more accurately and faster than before. The new capacity management capabilities, which include cost analytics, will enable customers to more efficiently identify savings via automated reclamation of idle resources as well as right-sizing of environments; run “what-if” scenarios to plan for future projects; and plan capacity based on demand across clouds including VMware vSphere-based private clouds, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware Cloud on AWS and their associated costs. The new capacity analytics engine will set the stage for the introduction of machine learning capabilities over time.
  • New Performance Automation based on Business and Operational Intent: This new release is designed to provide customers with continuous performance optimization of vSphere-based private clouds today, and VMware Cloud on AWS in the future, to meet application performance needs based on business intent (e.g., workload balancing to reduce software license costs by enabling license enforcement and separation or to meet performance SLAs) or operational intent (e.g., leaving headroom for business critical apps or to densify clusters). The software uses predictive analytics and enhanced automated workload balancing to drive the continuous optimization. Deep integration between vRealize Operations 6.7 and vRealize Automation 7.4 will deliver enhanced initial workload placement capabilities based on intent to provide customers with a closed loop operations experience. Customers will be able to turn on self-driving operations to continuously and automatically optimize workloads.
  • New Wavefront by VMware Integration: vRealize Operations 6.7 will feature a new out-of-the-box integration with Wavefront by VMware to empower IT and application owners to triage and resolve issues faster. This integration will help to rapidly on-board Wavefront through the automatic discovery of applications and the installation and management of the required agents. Additionally, this will enable IT to provide app monitoring capabilities to their DevOps teams for apps such as Cassandra, Kafka, and Redis, along with traditional apps.
  • New User Interface: This new release will be even simpler to use featuring a persona-based ‘Quick Start’ dashboard to help customers quickly perform operational tasks. It will also include updated workflows for enterprise-wide troubleshooting with metrics and logs.

vRealize Automation 7.4 Delivers Increased Productivity and Faster Time to Value
VMware vRealize Automation 7.4 will introduce key innovations and improvements to help customers achieve consistent operations, greater productivity and faster time to value. This latest release will feature new modern consumption and service delivery capabilities, enhanced multi-tenancy and increased product integration including:

  • New and Enhanced Curated Blueprints and OVF Files: This release will dramatically speed up application blueprinting by offering 120-plus free, curated blueprints and OVF (Open Virtualization Format) files out-of-the-box. VMware has teamed with Bitnami to add 20 new blueprints and 100-plus new OVFs of popular applications and databases such as GitLab, Hadoop, Jenkins and MongoDB to speed application development and deployment.
  • New Custom Form Designer: This will enable IT teams to easily build rich service request forms for vRealize Automation 7.4 catalog items and reduce blueprint sprawl.
  • Enhanced Multi-Tenancy Capabilities: The new release will introduce filter-based networking services visibility and filter-based infrastructure elements visibility per tenant as well as support the latest release of vRealize Orchestrator, which is now multi-tenant.

vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager Now Extends to IT Content Management
Last September, VMware introduced vRealize Suite 2017 which took a leap forward in simplifying daily administration and operations of the suite with new built-in, automated lifecycle management of Day 0 through Day 2 tasks. The lifecycle management capabilities help customers speed time to value by automating the deployment, configuration and upgrading of products in the suite. The new VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 will extend lifecycle management to integrated IT content management across infrastructure and cloud environments. New features include:

  • New In-Product Marketplace: This release will introduce a new and integrated “app store”-like experience for customers to consume out-of-the-box solutions from VMware and ecosystem partners. These solutions will span vRealize Operations management packs, vRealize Log Insight content packs, and vRealize Automation blueprints and plug-ins. Within the Lifecycle Manager, customers will be able to access, download, deploy and delete relevant packaged applications and content.
  • New IT Content Lifecycle Management: This release will also enable IT content lifecycle management including automated release pipeline for content capturing, testing and deployment; storing and versioning of content via integration with GitLab; and, support for multi-developer use cases. The content management capabilities will allow customers to treat infrastructure content as applications and apply DevOps principles to manage vRealize content with speed, quality and consistency across multiple environments.

Today’s news bookends the recent VMware Cloud Services updates including the introduction of VMware Log Intelligence and enhancements to Wavefront by VMware and VMware Cost Insight. VMware is innovating across its cloud management portfolio while providing customers with choice of how to consume its offerings – as a service via a subscription model or on-premises via a license model.

 

Product Availability
VMware vRealize Automation 7.4, VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7.4, VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.6, VMware vRealize Operations 6.7, vRealize Orchestrator 7.4, VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.2 are all expected to become available by the end of VMware’s Q1 FY19 (May 4, 2018).

Here’s some links with additional information from VMware:

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Toronto-based Company’s Latest Product Speeds Enterprise Data Integration Projects By Up To 75%

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

Next Pathway, a leading provider of enterprise big data and digital transformation software, today launched FUSE, a product designed for business users to automatically enrich and transform data inside of big data environments. FUSE significantly reduces the deployment time for large-scale data transformation projects by allowing business users to define data requirements in terms familiar to them, which in turn automatically moves that information to a target data model.

FUSE’s automation means organizations can save up to 75 per cent of the development time on their data integration projects, while allowing business users to access data on-demand.

FUSE core capabilities include:

  • Business Capability alignment to industry standard data models
  • Automatic creation of an Atomic Data Warehouse in big data environments and the cloud, based on a desired target data model. An Atomic Data Warehouse is a data model that includes all the base data used in data transformation.
  • Automatic generation of data transformations to move data to an Atomic Data Warehouse
  • Automatic lineage capture to metadata management solutions

 

FUSE is the latest product in Next Pathway’s portfolio, which also includes Cornerstone, a data manufacturing pipeline that enables customers to automatically ingest large volumes of data to big data environments or the cloud, without writing a single line of code; SHIFT, which automates the conversion and translation of legacy code when moving to big data environments; Array, which helps organizations expose back-end services automatically via a service-oriented architecture; and Mercury, which automates microservices development, helping organizations modernize their monolithic applications.

FUSE is available immediately.

Next Pathway is a technology company that develops, licenses, and provides services to support its big data and digital transformation products.  Through innovation, automation and extensibility, Next Pathway’s products have revolutionized the way companies prepare data for analytics and leverage modern architectures for digital enablement. For more information, please visit nextpathway.com.

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Don’t Be An April Fool: Why World Backup Day Is No Joke

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

For anyone who’s ever lost their files, they know it’s no laughing matter. We all know we need to back up our files, but how many of us really do it? That’s why a few concerned users on reddit got together to create World Backup Day on March 31st. The independent initiative was created to raise awareness about regular backups and data preservation.

According to the independent sponsoring group behind World Backup Day:
  • Thirty percent of people have NEVER backed up
  • Twenty-nine percent of [data] disasters are caused by accident
  • One in 10 computers are infected with viruses each month
For those in the data backup and recovery business like Commvault, this is an issue they are helping their customers address 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. But having a day to mark in the calendar helps bring home the importance of why having good data hygiene is important. So, in the spirit of World Backup Day, Commvault leaders have got together and are offering some commentary on why this is such an important issue (besides the obvious reason of looking like an April Fool when your data goes missing and you can’t retrieve it).
Backing up data is not just a “nice to have” but an essential in a world where we’re collecting more data than ever before and it’s driving businesses’ bottom lines.
For more information, please see a recent blog post on World Backup Day by Greg Odgen on dispelling endpoint data protection myths.
These include:
  • Endpoint protection is just backup.
  • End users and administrators can’t handle the extra workload
  • There are no deployment models that fit their business
  • No vendor can do everything that’s required for backup.

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PaMu: Wireless & Water Resistant Earbuds For $29

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

PaMu is the closest thing to what people have always wanted in a sports earphone – a pair of lightweight and compact earbuds that stay connected, stay in, and sound amazing. You can call it a technology-packed solution!

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  • Auto-Pairing simply removes these earbuds from the charger and connects them with your smartphone and you are ready to go in just seconds.
  • Intuitive Touch Control with Microphone – play music and take calls, leaving your smartphone in your pocket.
  • Ergonomic Design – stay comfortable while knowing they will never fall out.
  • Waterproof – designed to keep rain and moisture out to keep you focused on your activities.
  • Starts at only $29 (Retail starting at $109) for a limited time and limited quantity!

Get yours here.

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Boeing Pwned By WannaCry Ransomware

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 29, 2018 by itnerd

Jet maker Boeing has been hit by the WannaCry ransomware according to The Seattle Times. This is the same ransomware that pwned the NHS in UK among other places on Earth last May:

Boeing was hit Wednesday by the WannaCry computer virus, raising fears within the company that it could cripple some vital airplane production equipment. Mike VanderWel, chief engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplane production engineering, sent out an alarming memo calling for “All hands on deck.” “It is metastasizing rapidly out of North Charleston and I just heard 777 (automated spar assembly tools) may have gone down,” VanderWel wrote, adding that he’s concerned the virus will hit equipment used in functional tests of airplanes ready to roll out and potentially “spread to airplane software.” Indicating widespread alarm within the company at the potential impact, VanderWel said the attack required “a battery-like response,” a reference to the 787 in-flight battery fires in 2013 that grounded the world’s fleet of Dreamliners and led to an extraordinary three-month-long engineering effort to find a fix.

My first thought upon reading this is if their infrastructure is fully patched as having up to date patching is how this ransomware spreads. If they didn’t up their patching game given the events of a year ago, then that’s a serious problem. My other thought is if this is a new variant of this ransomware. It isn’t clear from the story but if that’s the case, then that’s a huge problem. Either way, Boeing doesn’t look good at the moment because of this and I would hate to be the guy who runs IT over there.

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