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ComputerWorld

ComputerWorld Independent 

Apple’s wants privacy laws to protect its users

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Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Wed, 08 Jan 2020 06:54:00 -0800

Your iPhone (like most smartphones) knows when it is picked up, what you do with it, who you call, where you go, who you know – and a bunch more personal information, too.

Information is power

The snag with your device knowing all this information is that once the data is understood than that information can be shared or even used against you.

Jane Horvath, Apple’s senior director for global privacy, appeared at CES 2012 to discuss the company’s approach to smartphone security.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

FAQ: Last-minute answers about Windows 7's post-retirement patches

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Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2020 04:53:00 -0800

A week from now, Microsoft will serve customers with the last for-free Windows 7 security update, in effect retiring the 2009 operating system.

However, hundreds of millions of personal computers will still power up thanks to Windows 7 on Jan. 14, and for an indeterminate timespan after that date. Windows 7 may be retiring, but it’s not disappearing.

Microsoft admitted as much more than a year ago when it announced Extended Security Updates (ESU), a program for commercial customers who needed more time to ditch Windows 7. ESU would provide patches for some security vulnerabilities for as long as three years. For a fee.

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(Insider Story)

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Microsoft Patch Alert: December patches hang Win7 Pro endpoints and force Server 2012 reboots

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Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2020 09:55:00 -0800

It was the kind of month admins dread: Mysterious problems on hundreds of machines, with no apparent cause or cure. Toss in the holidays, and we had a whole lot of Mr. and Ms. Grinches in the industry.

Fortunately, it looks like the problems have been sorted out at this point. Individual users had many fewer problems. Microsoft’s left and right hands still aren’t talking on the 1909 team, but what else is new…

Win7 hang on ‘Preparing to configure Windows’

Microsoft dropped a new Servicing Stack Update for Windows 7 on Dec. 10, and it gummed up the works for many. Here’s a good summary on Reddit from poster Djaesthetic:

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Top 3 enterprise tech trends to watch in 2020

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Credit to Author: Michelle Davidson| Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2020 09:46:00 -0800

If blockchain felt more like hype than reality in 2019, prepare for that to change. Industry watchers expect 2020 to be the year the distributed ledger technology matures and we see use cases that go beyond cryptocurrency.

Areas where experts envision growth include data security, the supply chain and electronic health records.

“Someone’s gonna hit me, but I think blockchain as it relates to data security (think access management) is going to have some landmark use cases in 2020,” Siobhan Climer, science and technology writer at Mindsight, said during a recent IDG TECH(talk) Twitter chat.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Amid privacy and security failures, digital IDs advance

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

Frustration over a growing number of privacy and security failuresin recent years is driving the creation of digital identities controlled only by those whose information they contain.

Known as “self-sovereign identities,” the digital IDs will be used by consumers, businesses, their workers and governments over the next few years to verify everything from credit worthiness and college diplomas to licenses and business-to-business credentials.

“We are slowly graduating from crawling to walking. It takes one to two years ’til we have reliable capabilities to spark meaningful decentralized identity adoption,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director at Gartner. “A major non-technical hurdle is for organizations to learn the concept and take the necessary steps to appropriately adapt their business processes to decentralized identity ecosystems.”

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Windows vulnerability

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Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2020 03:00:00 -0800

Pilot fish is working at a bank, but it’s the 1970s, and ATMs are far from common. What this bank has is an after-hours teller window, available from 3 to 7 p.m. It’s located in a small enclosure accessible from the street, and its operation involves a human teller working behind a reinforced-concrete wall.

When the bank develops an online customer system, the night teller is chosen as the testing ground, because the new system will allow for instant posting of deposits instead of waiting for the next day. And fish, a computer science major, will serve as teller/guinea pig.

But first, a new window has to be constructed, right next to the two-story glass façade of the bank. The work includes putting the cabling inside heavy steel pipes to ensure that no one can tap into them.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Ultra Wideband (UWB) explained (and why it’s in the iPhone 11)

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800

One of the new chips in this year’s crop of iPhones is the U1; it provides Ultra Wideband (UWB) connectivity that, in conjunction with Internet of Things (IoT) technology, could offer a myriad of new services for enterprises and consumers.

As Apple puts it, UWB technology offers “spatial awareness” – the ability for your phone to recognize its surroundings and the objects in it. Essentially, one iPhone 11 user can point his or her phone at another and transfer a file or photo.

While the technology isn’t new, Apple’s implementation marks the first time UWB has been used in a modern smartphone.

What is Ultra Wideband?

UWB is a short-range, wireless communication protocol that – like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi – uses radio waves. But it differs substantially in that IT operates at a very high frequency. As its name denotes, it also uses a wide spectrum of several GHz. One way to think of it is as a radar that can continuously scan an entire room and precisely lock onto an object like a laser beam to discover its location and communicate data.

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