Enterprise social networking is a waste of time

Posted on July 4, 2014 by - News

crystalballBig companies which thought that it would be a wizard wheeze to set up social networking sites on their corporate nets are regretting the investment.

It is not because the social networking sites are being misused, but rather that they are not being used at all.

Enterprise social networking (ESN) software, designed to boost interaction and collaboration, is being completely ignored.

It sounds so good on paper. A successful ESN deployment means you get a Facebook- and Twitter-like system for your workplace, with employee profiles, activity streams, document sharing, groups, discussion forums and microblogging and employee’s that work together.

The managers thought that staff could use it for brainstorming ideas, answering each other’s questions, discovering colleagues with valuable expertise, co-editing marketing materials, sharing sales leads and collaborating on a new product design.

Carol Rozwell, a Gartner analyst, told IT World   that between 70 percent and 80 percent of companies are struggling with Enterprise Social Networking.

She said it is often rolled out by leaders who are thrilled with the technology, and they see how quickly consumer social networks like Facebook have grown. They think they’ll accomplish the same growth rate and participation if they buy the right tool and staff will use it.

However Gartner predicts that through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve their intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.

However despite the fact that no one is using them, it seems that management still think they are a brilliant idea. MarketsandMarkets claims that spending on this type of software is expected to grow from $4.77 billion this year to $8.14 billion in 2019.  It sounds like it would be money better spend on a horse.

NSA dubs Linux forum a home for terrorists

Posted on July 4, 2014 by - News

National-Security-Agency--008US spooks have classed an open source Linux forum alongside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and is targeting its visitors for special treatment.

The Linux Journal is a happy place where weirdy beardy types can get together to discuss the Linux operating system and slag off Microsoft.  IT is the go-to site for headlines like “How YARN Changed Hadoop Job Scheduling” and “rc.local, Cron Style”.

It turns out that NSA has a programme called XKEYSCORE which decides which traffic to keep indefinitely. XKEYSCORE uses specific selectors to flag traffic, and the article reveals that Web searches for Tor and Tails software.

It is something that the Linux Journal has run a number of articles on because it helps to protect a user’s anonymity and privacy on the Internet.

According to DasErste.de which found the XKEYSCORE source code, and if you look closely at the rule definitions, you will see linuxjournal.com/content/linux* listed alongside Tails and Tor. This means that the NSA considers Linux Journal an “extremist forum”,

This means that merely looking for any Linux content on Linux Journal, not just content about anonymizing software or encryption, is considered suspicious and means your Internet traffic may be stored indefinitely.

Ironically it means that the best way to peruse the Linux Journal is to use Tor, which actually does look jolly suspicious and might flag a response from a curious NSA.

Encryption foils coppers nine times in the US

Posted on July 4, 2014 by - News

pressieIt appears that while coppers using wiretaps are fairly effective, streetwise criminals are starting to adopt better encryption mentions.

According to Wired in nine cases during 2013, state police were unable to break the encryption used by criminal suspects they were investigating.

This is not high, but it is more than twice as many cases as in 2012, when police reported encryption preventing them from successfully spying on a criminal suspect for the first time.

To put the figure into perspective, Federal and state police eavesdropped on US suspects’ phone calls, text messages, and other communications at least 3,500 times in 2013. Of those thousands of cases, only 41 involved encryption at all. In 32 cases police managed to get around suspects’ privacy protections to eavesdrop on their targets.

The figures seem to suggest that warnings from government agencies like the FBI that the free availability of encryption tools will eventually lead to a dystopian future where criminals and terrorists use privacy tools to make their communications invisible to police.

This complaint has become common. Last year the Drug Enforcement Agency leaked an internal report complaining that Apple’s iMessage encryption was blocking their investigations of drug dealers.

However the statistics from police reports shows that encryption use is on the rise, even if the number of cases remains small and most encryption use is pointless.

Apple needs to wake up and smell the coffee

Posted on July 4, 2014 by - News

ipad3Fruity cargo cult Apple has huge difficulties calling a spade a spade without out hyping it up into something it is clearly not, writes Nick Farrell.

After all, marketing was what made Apple’s iPad a success, while Microsoft’s tablet, languished on the shelves for years.  But sometimes Apple’s desire to market everything does the trick.  An example is calling its support staff Apple geniuses clearly in the spotty face of all evidence.

However it appears that when Apple advertises for someone to make the coffee, they need to have hyped the role to make it sound like it is crucial to business design operation.

A job advert appeared on the website calling for someone to brew fresh coffee for its employees, and it calls the position an “iCup Technician”. Apparently they will work in Apple’s “iCup Services” department.

The technician must be “on call” for employees’ coffee needs during business hours at Apple’s Santa Clara Valley, campus.

This person must have “prior experience with coffee machines,” someone who “continually grows in knowledge” and has “some computer skills”.

Of course it looks better on your resume to say you are an iCup technician than to say “tea lady” but we would thought many future employers would see through it.  After all it is not, as the name implies, someone who designs space age talking coffee cups.

Intel fined for illegal wi-fi use

Posted on July 3, 2014 by - News

intel_log_reversedChipmaker Intel has written a $144,000 cheque to make the US Federal Communications Commission watchdog stop snapping at its heels.

An FCC investigation found the chip maker operated prototype wireless devices without FCC clearance.

It can’t have been much of an investigation given that Intel itself reported its non-compliance to the regulator.

Apparently Intel was worried in 2012 that it might have violated the agency’s rules when it tested prototype digital device models in residential areas without the FCC’s blessing.

The company also showed off  a prototype device at a trade show without proper labelling.

An Intel spokesman characterised the incident as a terrible mistake and not something it would do normally.

He said that the company had created a programme that gives the FCC confidence that it is doing its best to help ensure future compliance with the rules.

AMD releases A series APU

Posted on July 3, 2014 by - News

AMD_lassAMD has added the AMD A10-7800 Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) to its A-Series 4th generation APU lineup.

The new chip has 12 compute cores (4CPU + 8 GPU) which AMD claims will unlock the designs full APU potential and Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) features.

The AMD A10-7800 is based around AMD Radeon R7 Series graphics and AMD’s Mantle API.
It can enable accelerated performance across select AMD Gaming Evolved partner titles.

Bernd Lienhard, corporate vice president and general manager, Client Business Unit, AMD said that the 2014 AMD A-Series APUs were the most advanced and developer friendly performance APUs from AMD to date.

The AMD A10-7800 APU supports UltraHD (4K) resolutions and new video post processing enhancements that will make 1080p videos look better when upscaled on an UltraHD-enabled monitor or TV.

The chip comes with a configurable thermal design power option (cTDP) to allow the overclocker crowd to tinker with it.

Sales will start in Japan today with worldwide availability at the end of July.

In addition, AMD announced the introduction of the AMD A6-7400K and AMD A4-7300 APUs, for the home and office market.

With the unifying FM2+ infrastructure for AMD APUs, users are enabled to build smaller lower power form factors for gaming and home theatre PCs.

ISPs sue the spooks over network spying

Posted on July 3, 2014 by - News

snowdenISPs from the US, UK, Netherlands and South Korea with campaigners Privacy International are to sue UK spooks GCHQ for attacking their networks.

According to the BBC, it is the first time that GCHQ has faced such action and is based on allegations about government snooping made by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

What appears to have got the ISP’s goat is attacks which were outlined in a series of articles in Der Spiegel.  They claim that the Intercept, were illegal and “undermine the goodwill the organisations rely on”.

They say that Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom was targeted by GCHQ and infected with malware to gain access to network infrastructure

GCHQ and the US National Security Agency, where Snowden worked, had a range of network exploitation and intrusion capabilities, including technique that injected data into existing data streams to create connections that will enable the targeted infection of users,

The ISPs claim that the intelligence agencies used an automated system, codenamed Turbine, that allowed them to scale up network implants

German internet exchange points were targeted, allowing agencies to spy on all internet traffic coming through those nodes.

Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, said that the widespread attacks on providers and collectives undermine the trust everyone put on the internet and greatly endangers the world’s most powerful tool for democracy and free expression.

The ISPs involved in the action are UK-based GreenNet, Riseup (US), Greenhost (Netherlands), Mango (Zimbabwe), Jinbonet (South Korea), May First/People Link (US)and the Chaos Computer Club (Germany).

GCHQ insists that all its work was conducted in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that its activities were “authorised, necessary and proportionate.”

Kiwis forbidden to hand over data to the FBI

Posted on July 3, 2014 by - News

KiwiKiwi cops have been forbidden from sharing encrypted computer keys belonging to Kim Dotcom with their chums at the FBI.

In 2012, New Zealand police seized computer drives belonging to Kim Dotcom, copies of which were unlawfully given to the FBI. Dotcom wants access to the seized content but the drives are encrypted. He is worried that if he types them in the Kiwi cops will give them to the FBI who will use it against him.

A judge has now ruled that even if the Megaupload founder supplies the passwords, they cannot subsequently be forwarded to the FBI.

In May 2012 during a hearing at Auckland’s High Court, lawyer Paul Davison QC demanded access to the data stored on the confiscated equipment, arguing that without it Dotcom could not mount a proper defence.

But while Dotcom subsequently agreed to hand over the passwords that was on the condition that New Zealand police would not hand them over to US authorities.

The police agreed to give Dotcom access to the prompts but only if the revealed passwords could be passed onto the United States.

Justice Winkelmann ruled that if the police do indeed obtain the codes, they must not hand them over to the FBI. Reason being, the copies of the computers and drives should never have been sent to the United States in the first place and they had been illegally handed over.

Google on track to predict world cup winner

Posted on July 3, 2014 by - News

gooGoogle’s Cloud Platform has been crunching large datasets and statistics to predict the outcome of each game in the World Cup and has managed to do far better than any octopus or horse, writes Nick Farrell..

Using the numbers generated by live sports data firm Opta, Google engineers have used Google Cloud Dataflow to ingest data, BigQuery to build features, iPython and Pandas to conduct modelling, and finally the Compute Engine to crunch the data.

This has created a logistic regression approach and predicted the winners.  Google said that this is better than the “poisson regression method” which we thought meant asking chickens when they turn their heads in the opposite direction.

And so far, it seems to be working as the Google Cloud Platform has boasted a perfect record and predicts that there would not be “any major upsets” this last round either.

Google Cloud Platform’s predictions for the quarterfinals were Brazil vs. Colombia: Brazil (71%), France vs. Germany: France (69%), The Netherlands vs. Costa Rica: Netherlands (68%) and Argentina vs. Belgium: Argentina (81%).

Of course it still can’t predict the lottery numbers or tell us why footballers get paid such a ridiculous amount of money.

Facebook falls foul of ICO

Posted on July 2, 2014 by - News

George OrwellYesterday Facebook announced the results of a psychological experiment into human behaviour to find if Facebook could alter the emotional state of its users and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content.

It was all fairly tame stuff, but it did raise the eyebrows of the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

It is concerned that Facebook might have broken data protection laws when it allowed researchers to conduct a psychological experiment on 700,000 unwitting users in 2012 users of the social network.

The ICO monitors how personal data is used and has the power to force organizations to change their policies and levy fines of up to £500,000 pounds ($839,500).

Facebook said that it could do what it liked with the 700,000 because they had signed an terms of use agreement when they joined.  Of course they had not read it, but they had signed it.
It is not clear what part of UK data protection laws Facebook might have broken, but it does seem that if there is not a clause which says you cannot submit the personal data of your customers to scientific experimentation, there should be.

Giants battle over the internet of thongs

Posted on July 2, 2014 by - News

intel_log_reversedMicrosoft has joined Qualcomm and other technology companies in a bid to establish standards for the Internet of fings, fangs, thongs and things, writes Nick Farrell.

The Qualcomm-backed AllSeen Alliance attracting people who want to promote protocols for how smart devices should work together.

Microsoft joined 50 other members in the AllSeen Alliance, including major consumer electronics players Panasonic, LG and Sharp.

However this is not the only standards consortium out there  and chipmakers that compete with Qualcomm plan to launch a rival standards consortium as early as next week.

It looks like we will have another standards war similar to that sparked by the Blu-Ray and HDTV standard.

Apple – known for strictly controlling how other companies’ products interact with its own, in June announced plans for HomeKit, which will integrate control of devices like garage door openers, lights and thermostats.  Of course  Apple gear will be slavishly adopted by Apple fanboys who are keen to have Coldplay playing on their fridge, but will probably not be seen elsewhere.

Last week, Google said it partnered with Mercedes-Benz, Whirlpool Corp and light bulb maker LIFX to integrate their products with Google’s Nest thermostats and smoke detectors.

So far the biggest player, Intel, has stood like Lord Stanley on the sidelines of the Battle of Bosworth waiting for one side to start calling for a horse.  While saying it is keen on the Internet of Thongs,  it is thinking of the internet of bags.

Woz says smartwatches have a way to go

Posted on July 2, 2014 by - Moving People, News

Steve WozniakGadget king and dancing queen Steve Wozniak thinks smartwatches have got a long way to go before being useful.

Woz, who was the co-founder of Apple, was a well-known early adopter of shiny new toys.  He owns a Segway and has a Tesla Motors’ electric-powered car.  He also has an interest in getting a smartwatch that is useful.

Wozniak told xconomy that smartwatches will not be useful until the screens get bigger. He thinks foldable, plastic displays could be the answer to that problem.

He also thinks they will be useless until you can get the whole smartphone on your wrist and not a Bluetooth connection to the smartphone in your pocket.

Samsung, Pebble, and Qualcomm are among the companies that have come out with smartwatches, but thus far, Wozniak’s favorite is one made by Martian. It doesn’t have a touch screen, but a tiny display below the watch hands indicates who is calling, and the watch has a good speaker, Wozniak said.

The worst smartwatch that Woz was the Samsung Galaxy Gear which he sold on eBay because it was so worthless and did so little that was convenient.

The interview did not reveal anything about what Woz thought of the coming Apple iWatch and whether it would tick any of his boxes.  Our guess is that it didn’t.

T-Mobile profited from SMS scams

Posted on July 2, 2014 by - News

shut-up-and-take-my-moneyThe US Federal Trade Commission claims mobile phone service provider T-Mobile USA, made hundreds of millions of dollars by placing charges on mobile phone bills for unauthorised “premium” SMS subscriptions.

T-Mobile received anywhere from 35 to 40 percent of the total amount charged to consumers for subscriptions for content such as flirting tips, horoscope information or celebrity gossip that typically cost $9.99 per month, the FTC claims.

The watchdog said that T-Mobile in some cases continued to bill its customers for these services offered by scammers years after becoming aware of signs that the charges were fraudulent.
It appears to have gotten away with it by burying the information in the phone bill where it was unlikely to be seen.

FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said it was wrong for a company like T-Mobile to profit from scams against its customers when there were clear warning signs the charges it was imposing were fraudulent.

She said that the FTC wanted to make sure that T-Mobile repays all its customers for these crammed charges.

The FTC has alleged that because such a large number of people were seeking refunds, it was an obvious sign to T-Mobile that the charges were never authorised by its customers.

The refund rate likely significantly understates the percentage of consumers who were scammed.
The complaint against T-Mobile alleges that the company’s billing practices made it difficult for consumers to detect that they were being charged.

T-Mobile’s full phone bills, which can be longer than 50 pages, made it nearly impossible for consumers to find and understand third-party subscription charges.

The FTC charged that T-Mobile refused refunds to some customers, offering only partial refunds of two months’ worth of the charges to others, and in other cases instructed consumers to seek refunds directly from the scammers – without providing accurate contact information to do so.
Sometimes T-Mobile claimed that consumers had authorised the charges despite having no proof that they had.

A third of US people don’t trust the internet

Posted on July 2, 2014 by - News

pressieA study has revealed that while 85 percent of Americans use the internet, a third of the nation were hopeless at it.

The study was conducted by John Horrigan, an independent researcher suggests that the digital divide has been replaced by a gap in digital readiness.

More than a third of Americans were not digitally literate or don’t trust the internet. That subgroup tended to be less educated, poorer, and older than the average American. It’s the unternet, then.

It appears that those with essential Web skills “tend to be the more privileged” and it is only these who are getting any mileage from the digital revolution.

The study of 1,600 adults measured their grasp of terms like “cookie” and “Wi-Fi.” It asked them to rate how confident they were about using a desktop or laptop or a smart phone to find information, as well as how comfortable they felt about using a computer. Of those who scored low in these areas, about half were not internet users.

Horrigan said that politicians have ignored the problem of digital readiness while concentrating on providing people with access to the internet.

There has been little effort paid to teaching people the necessary skills to take advantage of online classes and job searches.

The tech industry has also been bad at working out that not all users possess the same digital skill levels and that they need to make accommodations for those with less knowledge.

Microsoft allowed to execute Bladabindi and Jenxcus

Posted on July 1, 2014 by - News

GuillotineSoftware giant Microsoft has been given permission to disrupt malware by known as Bladabindi and Jenxcus, writes Nick Farrell.

Although Vole has worked with the FBI and others to disrupt communications channels between hackers and infected PCs, it is rare to act on its own. This is also the first high-profile case involving malware written by developers outside of Eastern Europe.

The operation, which began on Monday under an order issued by a federal court in Nevada, Microsoft said the two malwares operated in similar ways and were written and distributed by developers in Kuwait and Algeria.

Microsoft said that it would take days to determine how many machines were infected. Voles’ own, anti-virus software alone has detected some 7.4 million infections over the past year and is installed on less than 30 percent of the world’s PCs.

The developers marketed their malware over social media, including videos on YouTube and a Facebook page. They posted videos with techniques for infecting PCs.

The court order allowed Microsoft to disrupt communications between infected machines and Reno, Nevada-based Vitalwerks Internet Solutions.

Boscovich said about 94 percent of all machines infected with the two viruses communicate with hackers through Vitalwerks servers.

Registries will direct suspected malicious traffic to Microsoft servers in Redmond, Washington, instead of to Vitalwerks.

Vole will then filter out communications from PCs infected with another 194 types of malware also being filtered through Vitalwerks.

Vitalwerks and its operational subsidiary No-IP claim to have a very strict abuse policy. To be fair Microsoft has not accused Vitalwerks of involvement in any cybercrime, though it alleges the company failed to take proper steps to prevent its system from being abused.