Meeting the Productivity Challenge in a Consumerized IT World

With the introduction of new devices, it's becoming more important than ever for IT to maintain control over what is being accessed, when and where. This requires consideration of the entire context of a user when determining access levels for services. A user's context includes application and data requirements, as well as other variables such as device type, physical location and time of day.
A lot of people are talking about "the consumerization of IT" these days, but what does it actually mean, and how will it impact your workplace?

Employees are growing more comfortable working from their own devices, particularly with the increasing adoption of portable technologies like the tablet computer. They are also accustomed to self-service delivery of applications in their personal lives, with almost instant access to apps and new services. Rather than fight a losing battle with device regulation, IT managers need to learn how to get a handle on these devices, so they can lead the way to the greater user productivity that is possible within a more diverse technology environment.

New Android Scare: Just How Malignant Is That Malware?

A lot of people are talking about "the consumerization of IT" these days, but what does it actually mean, and how will it impact your workplace?

Employees are growing more comfortable working from their own devices, particularly with the increasing adoption of portable technologies like the tablet computer. They are also accustomed to self-service delivery of applications in their personal lives, with almost instant access to apps and new services.

Windows' cut of Microsoft revenue drops to two-year low

Windows' contribution last quarter to Microsoft's revenue hit its lowest point since Vista's swan song more than two years earlier, according to figures released by the company Thursday.

For the quarter ending Dec. 31, the Windows division accounted for 22.7% of the company's total sales, its lowest share since the 20.3% that the group recorded during the third quarter of 2009, at the end of Vista's reign and just weeks before Windows 7 launched.

"Microsoft's Windows division continued to slide," said Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research, in an email late Thursday. "This marked the fifth consecutive quarter of incremental or negative revenue growth for the division."

SOPA Support Goes Sour

The Stop Internet Piracy Act is losing friends fast as website protests Wednesday directed the public's attention toward the proposed legislation. Sites like Google ran home-page links to information on SOPA, and sites like Wikipedia blacked out for the day in protest. Some members of congress have said the bill is as good as dead.The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) appears to be reeling in the face of growing opposition.

Internet heavyweights like Wikipedia, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Facebook have demonstrated their opposition to the proposed legislation, in some cases protesting by temporarily blocking users from accessing content.

BYOD movement is forcing IT to adapt

But user empowerment still allows IT to assess apps and manage mobile devices

IT departments in the age of mobile computing must adapt to newly empowered users who select not only their own devices but their applications as well. This adapation -- as difficult as it may seem -- has a strong benefit: Enabling a modern workforce, said Maribel Lopez, president of Lopez Research at the AppNation conference last week in San Francisco.

"You can look at it [from the perspective that] BYOD is taking control away from IT, or you can look at it as it's an opportunity to mobilize your entire business that you would have never been able to afford before because you wouldn't have bought the devices and you wouldn't have wanted to manage them," Lopez said. Her advice to IT: "Accept that BYOD is happening and build a plan around it -- how to manage it, how to secure it, how to get apps to devices."

Windows 8 on ARM: You can look but you can't touch

Windows 8 was shown on a few ARM-based devices at CES, but Microsoft doesn't want people playing with it before it's readyFor a touch-based interface, it was awfully hard to get hold of. Microsoft's Windows 8 OS was shown on a handful of prototype ARM-based tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, but almost no one was allowed to try it out.

Nvidia had three Windows 8 tablets in its booth but they were all behind glass. Texas Instruments showed a Windows 8 tablet in a meeting room off the show floor, but a reporter who asked to try it was told that wasn't permitted. Qualcomm, the third vendor of ARM-based chips working with Windows 8, wasn't showing it at all.

Supporters Ask Vote Delay on Controversial Internet Copyright Law

In a sign that massive public pressure may be working, six Republican U.S. Senators who previously supported the Protect IP Act, late Friday asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) to postpone a scheduled January 24 vote on the controversial bill.

In a letter sent to Reid on Friday, the six lawmakers said that the bill needs to be more thoroughly debated on the Senate floor before it can be voted on.

"We have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights," Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), John Cornyn (R-Texas) Mike Lee (R-Utah), Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) said in the letter.

New details surface on the UPU: A next-generation CPU architecture

New CPU architectures don’t come along very often — which is why more details on the Harmony Unified Processing Architecture being built by Chinese developer ICube are so interesting. Historically, instruction set architectures (ISAs) are risky bets. Not only are they exceptionally difficult to design, it takes an enormous additional effort to create tools that can leverage new capabilities. Even then, companies face an uphill fight to persuade vendors and software developers to recompile existing software to take advantage of the new design.

ICube is led by Fred Chow and Simon Moy. Chow is primarily a software designer and was chief architect of the Open64 compiler and the specific Pathscale iteration of that product, while Moy was a top-line engineer with Nvidia for seven years and worked on both the first GPUs as well as the G80. Details on ICube’s silicon are still limited, but the expertise of the two men helps shed a bit of light on what the chip looks like.

AMD Positions Lightning Bolt to Take on Intel's Thunderbolt

Advanced Micro Devices has what it says is an answer to Intel's Thunderbolt technology and the smaller chip maker has eschewed any sort of nuance in naming its own single-port, high-speed data transfer protocol, which is called Lightning Bolt.

That's got more than a few folks rolling their eyes, but AMD was happy to explain to PCMag.com that thunder is "just a bunch of noise," whereas lightning "really brings the heat." We got a look at an early prototype of Lightning Bolt during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week and the standards-based technology looks pretty impressive in its early stages.

Pirate Bay Veers from Torrent Tactics

Digital piracy might be an official religion in Sweden, but continued legal challenges are clouting the future of The Pirate Bay. The most popular torrents site on the Internet says it will stop serving torrent files indefinitely in around a month, according to a TorrentFreak report, perhaps signaling the end of an era in file sharing.

The Pirate Bay is now serving by default magnet links instead of typical torrent files, the site explains in a blog post. One of the biggest disadvantages of torrent files is that they are vulnerable to legal threats, as they store information that could lead to file-sharers, if the content of the torrent is pirated material.

Magnet linkshowever, have only data associated with them and contain no information on the location of a resource. On the downside, magnet links take longer than a torrent file to start, especially if only a handful of people are sharing a certain file. The Pirate Bay team also says magnet links save on bandwidth costs and are not as easy to block as torrent files.

It’s still unclear how the change to magnet links will affect The Pirate Bay. Most modern Bitorrent clients do support the magnet protocol, so theoretically the move should make downloading easier, especially for those whose ISPs are blocking or throttling torrent files or P2P traffic. Some other torrent sites are already using magnet links as an alternative downloading method.

The switch to magnet links does not appear sufficient to keep The Pirate Bay out of legal trouble, though. Only this week a Dutch court ordered two ISPs to block customer access to the site, in a continued tirade of attacks on the file-sharing site, facing fines of up to $12,000 per day if access is not blocked within ten days.

Source: PC World

Google’s Plan to Make Android Beautiful: Carrots And Sticks

Yesterday Google unveiled Android Design, a very nicely done (and sorely need) portal that instructs third-party developers on how they should go about designing their applications, both in terms of making them look nice, and in providing a consistent experience for users.

But while these guidelines are a big step forward for Android, there’s another issue: Google doesn’t really have any way to ensure that developers actually follow them. After all, there’s essentially no approval process for an application to get admitted to Android Market — provided you aren’t bundling malware or violating Google’s Terms of Service, you’re in.

So what is Google’s plan?

Yesterday I spoke with Matias Duarte, the Director of User Experience for Android (and the man ultimately responsible for its look and feel). And while he was coy about Google’s plans, he did give some hints. Namely, that Google will be working to give developers significant incentives to follow the UI guidelines.

FBI investigates US-China group hack

The FBI is reportedly investigating an alleged hack that extracted a number of internal e-mails from networks administered by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The security breach was first publicized by an Indian hacktivist belonging to the "Lords of Dharmaraja," a group which recently leaked the source code of a Norton antivirus product. 



According to "YamaTough," the e-mail extraction was executed by Indian government operatives (under the auspices of military intelligence) who also infiltrated other sensitive US government networks using backdoors purportedly supplied by RIM, Nokia and Apple (RINOA SUR).

New Storage Device Is Very Small, at 12 Atoms

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.
The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will consume significantly less power. And they may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing.

“Magnetic materials are extremely useful and strategically important to many major economies, but there aren’t that many of them,” said Shan X. Wang, director of the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology at Stanford University. “To make a brand new material is very intriguing and scientifically very important.”

Until now, the most advanced magnetic storage systems have needed about one million atoms to store a digital 1 or 0. The new achievement is the product of a heated international race between elite physics laboratories to explore the properties of magnetic materials at a far smaller scale.

Check Point Takes Security Products To Amazon

Check Point Software Technologies is giving customers the option of extending the security features in its on-premise software and appliances to Amazon's cloud computing platform.

The cloud service is priced the same as Check Point's on-premise software, which starts at $2,000 for a perpetual license. "It's like bringing up another security gateway," Fred Kost, Head, Product Marketing, Check Point, said. Amazon charges a separate monthly fee for its infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Check Point sells a number of security products, including firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, URL filtering and data loss prevention. All the functionality available through Check Point's on-premise software will be available on Amazon, Kost said. In addition, customers can use the vendor's management console to deploy the same rules and policies in the cloud.

Dell Introduces De-dupe Appliance, Moves Compellent To 64-bit Software

Dell has introduced its de-duplication appliance based on its Ocarina technology and upgraded the software for its enterprise-class Compellent storage line with 64-bit technology.

The moves, along with others including a new storage solution for Microsoft SharePoint and new storage support for its own Force10 and for Brocade technology, were unveiled at the Dell Storage Forum in London.

The updates to Dell's storage lines came in the wake of several acquisitions in the last couple of years which have turned Dell from a developer of low-end storage and a reseller of EMC's enterprise storage to one of the top providers of enterprise-class storage based on its own intellectual property.

“As a result, Dell now has a number of different technologies which it can start applying across its multiple storage lines,” said Mike Davis, Director, Product Marketing, NAS and Back-up Storage Products, Dell.

"It will be a long process to bring these together with a common management platform. It is part of our five-year storage roadmap," said Davis.

AMD hopes to take down Intel's Ultrabooks on price

Advanced Micro Devices demonstrated its upcoming mobile chips for thin-and-light laptops, which the company said will lead to cheaper but equally speedy alternatives to Intel's expensive Ultrabooks. "Ultrabooks" is "Intel's trademarked term for a thin, lightweight, fast-boot laptop similar to Apple's MacBook Air.

AMD said its chips, code-named Trinity, draw around 17 watts of power, roughly the same as upcoming Ultrabook chips based on Intel's Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. Laptops based on Trinity are being shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and will be released later this year.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Give iPad some credit for Apple's brisk Mac sales. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ]

Google's Schmidt Does the Android Definition Boogie

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt doesn't seem to like it when the word "fragmentation" is applied to his company's Android mobile OS. Android isn't fragmented, he said during a recent interview -- it's "differentiated." But to developers and users, the change of wording may not make much difference. "If developers say Android is fragmented, then it is," said Flurry Analytics CEO Simon Khalaf.

Washington Does the Security Watusi

Government agencies are enacting new regulations to temper their cybersecurity resilience, including a new DoE/DHS effort called the "Electric Sector Cybersecurity Risk Management Maturity Project." However, "This initiative does have the potential to fall into the category of the many public-private sector coordination committees that have historically achieved mixed results," CACI's Bruce A. Brody said.