Facebook suffers huge outage, along with WhatsApp and Instagram
If you've had trouble accessing Facebook today, you're not alone. Users in the US, Europe and Asia struggled to access not only Facebook, but also the WhatsApp and Instagram services owned by the social media giant.
Facebook has said little about this incident which comes just a month after it suffered its worst outage ever, causing problems for users for over 24 hours. This weekend's outage led to #FacebookDown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown hashtags trending on Twitter, and numerous reports of problems were posted to Downdetector.
Leaked: Microsoft's Xbox One S All Digital console
The future of the Xbox console certainly appears to be a disc-less one. German website WinFuture has obtained images and details of the console which could be officially revealed in the coming days.
The name has already been spotted on packaging, so we can be fairly sure that it is the final name. As the moniker suggests, the Xbox One S All Digital eschews discs in favor of game downloads -- the packaging itself proclaims "disc-free gaming". The box also reveals some details about the hardware specs of the Xbox One S All Digital.
Microsoft reveals hackers gained access to its web email services for three months
Microsoft has confirmed that hackers were able to access customers' web-based email accounts for a period of three months at the beginning of the year. Between January 1 and March 28, unknown hackers hit the accounts of various Microsoft email services.
The company is in the process of sending notifications to those who have been affected by the issue and it recommends users change their account passwords. (Update: it's worse than first thought!)
In praise of the autoencoder
When you consider all the machine learning (ML) algorithms, you’ll find there is a subset of very pragmatic ones: neural networks. They usually require no statistical hypothesis and no specific data preparation except for normalization. The power of each network lies in its architecture, its activation functions, its regularization terms, plus a few other features.
When you consider architectures for neural networks, there is a very versatile one that can serve a variety of purposes -- two in particular: detection of unknown unexpected events and dimensionality reduction of the input space. This neural network is called autoencoder.
Chrome OS 75 has full USB support in Linux apps
Google has added full USB support for Linux apps in the dev build of Chrome OS 75. The new feature arrived in build 75.0.3759.4 of the operating system and helps to improve the experience of running Linux apps on a Chromebook.
While USB support is not a brand-new feature, anyone who has tried using Linux apps on a Chromebook will be well aware that it has been a bit, well, ropey to say the least. Now this changes.
Apple adds subscription confirmation to the App Store
Apple has added a new confirmation pop-up to the App Store when users opt into a subscription using Touch ID or Face ID.
While Apple has not said as much, the confirmation screen gives users a second chance to back out of a subscription. It also helps to avoid the problem of accidental sign-ups and mitigates against apps that try to trick people into starting a subscription.
Data center and server room considerations: What you need to know
In the rapidly-evolving data-hungry IT environment, data center management is becoming increasingly intensive and complex. Team that with the constant pressure to control costs while increasing efficiency and capacity, data center traffic is projected to more than triple by 2020, driven primarily by our dependence to do business, communicate, and entertain over the Internet.
The immense amount of data needed to support these activities requires not only a growing number of data centers, but new kinds of data center builds, which also necessitates new ways to manage them. In addition, green initiatives driven by power concerns and the implications of size and scale, coupled with the adoption of new technologies, are creating a confluence of often conflicting forces that require new and innovative data center management solutions.
The biggest data security risk? Downloading data to a spreadsheet
These days, it seems like every time you turn around another company announces a data breach. At the same time, organizations spend millions on their data warehouses, security solutions, and compliance initiatives. But all of that spend can instantly be rendered useless by the everyday business workflow of downloading data to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
Of course, business experts aren’t looking to circumvent enterprise governance practices. They’re just trying to get the answers they need to make better business decisions. And because they lack the SQL programming expertise or extensive training required to work with data directly in most business intelligence (BI) tools, they are often powerless to answer the questions raised in the last meeting or email. So they turn to what they know best: the spreadsheet.
10 ways digital accessibility improves the user experience
As companies vie for customer attention and online business, they are discovering an important and largely untapped market: accessible content for those who have a disability. With more than a billion people around the world with some type of disability, businesses cannot afford to exclude this portion of the population.
Loyalty is critical when it comes to customer satisfaction and return business. How your users experience your website will help determine whether they become the kind of loyal customers that make up your consumer base. If they feel as though you care for their needs and provide a positive experience on your website, you will create customers that will both buy and come back again.
The evolution of data and disparate systems
The weird thing about evolution is that it affects us even though we are deeply aware of its mechanisms and processes. There's something unavoidable and inexorable about it. While that's true of physical processes governed by natural selection, perhaps it's less true of human culture and technology. Or is it?
Over the long history of IT and its use in and by big business, we've seen constant innovation, sometimes incremental in progress but sometimes radically discontinuous. Consider the steady march of microprocessor performance in the former case and the sudden AI deep learning revolution for the latter. But in both cases what's happened before and what's happening now affect and influence what directions tech goes into tomorrow.
VisionTek launches 1TB USB 3.0 XT Pocket SSD for Windows, macOS, and Linux
While many people are turning to the cloud for storage these days, not everyone trusts such a thing. After all, when you upload your files to an online server, you are essentially storing your stuff on someone else's computer. If you prefer complete control over your data, local storage devices are superior.
What if you want to leverage a USB flash drive, but you need better performance? In that case, a product such as the rugged Pocket SSD from VisionTek should meet your needs. These popular devices look like a standard flash drive, but they are much faster. Today, VisionTek launches the next generation -- the XT Pocket SSD. Not only is the top capacity now a massive 1TB, but the drive should last longer too. You see, VisionTek claims special data refresh technology will allow it to last more than 171 years before failing. In other words, it will outlive you!
How to secure Windows 10 -- Microsoft reveals SECCON framework to protect systems
Based on the DEFCON levels, Microsoft has unveiled the SECCON framework -- a series of guides for securing a range of Windows 10 configurations in different environments.
Starting with an "Administrator workstation" at level 1 and building up to "Enterprise security" at level 5, the framework is Microsoft's attempt to simplify and standardize security. While it is not a one-size-fits-all solution, the company says it is "defining discrete prescriptive Windows 10 security configurations to meet many of the common device scenarios we see today in the enterprise".
Dread Pirate Roberts 2, the 'guiding mind' of Silk Road 2.0, jailed for over 5 years
Thomas White, the founder of notorious website Silk Road 2.0, has been jailed for five years and four months by a UK court.
White, also known as Dread Pirate Roberts 2, was charged with not only running Silk Road 2.0 -- the site through which he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars per day on the dark web -- but also the possession of hundreds of indecent images of children.
Gmail now supports the MTA-STS and TLS Reporting security standards
In a first for a major email service, Google has announced that Gmail now supports the MTA-STS and TLS Reporting security standards.
The two standards help to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks, using encryption and authentication to add new layers of security. Google says that Gmail's MTA-STS adherence is now in beta, and the company hopes that by supporting the standard other providers with follow suit.
European financial services industry struggling with lack of data skills
Nearly 40 percent of financial services businesses are failing to implement data initiatives due to a lack of skills, with almost a third saying that their GDPR initiatives are failing, according to a new study.
The report produced by Vanson Bourne for analytics database company Exasol is based on responses from 500 IT and business decision makers, from enterprises in Germany and the UK.
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