Government study makes a speciality of how privacy-enhancing technologies and massive-scale analytics will shape the way forward for big data. Internet Of items: 8 Cost-Cutting Ideas For Government (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) White House counselor John Podesta is leading a 90-day government study that explores the intersection of huge data and privacy. Consistent with Podesta, now could be the time to take a better take a look at big data analytics and other comprehensive data-mining techniques which could shape future policies. “The study is fundamentally a scoping exercise. We wish to examine the administration’s consumer privacy blueprint and take a harder seriously look into existing policies,” said Podesta during a March 3 workshop on big data, organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, inclusive of privacy and tech experts, joined Podesta on stage to speak about the significance of privacy enhancing technologies and enormous-scale analytics. Experts cited using cryptography in databases and Web applications, and... Read More »

Motorola Mobility updates Android data migration app with ability to address iPhone data. 7 Mistakes Microsoft Made In 2013 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) A friend should help you progress, but a real friend should help you progress a body, or so it’s said. This witticism might describe the client relationship sought by companies like Motorola Mobility with products like Motorola Migrate, its migration assistance technology. For the sake of your friendship and future patronage, Motorola can help you you progress the corpus of your data from whatever Android or iOS smartphone has fallen from favor. On Tuesday, the Google-owned company updated Motorola Migrate, an Android app designed to transfer data to at least one of 5 Motorola phone models, having the ability to access Apple iPhone data, through that company’s iCloud service. “One of the most biggest pains of a brand new phone is forsaking important stuff to your old phone,” Motorola explains in its Google Play... Read More »

The promise of the cloud is getting the foremost resources on your money. Nonetheless it leaders must carefully evaluate potential cloud services before they take the plunge. Like many technical innovations, the cloud’s value proposition is that it makes IT faster, easier, and less expensive. Put in a different way, the implicit and explicit promise of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), unified communications as a service (UCaaS), and similar offerings is set getting more for less. Who doesn’t want that? Startups, for instance, can keep investors happy by buying resources from the cloud and only scaling them up only when their creation begins to take off. There’s very little capital investment required. Established companies with legacy technology can migrate functions to compliant platforms with no need to rebuild their infrastructures. Young or old companies with big IT departments might reduce overhead by moving specific workflows and responsibilities to off-site providers. Hooray for the cloud! But... Read More »

Appliances that link on-premises systems to cloud resources will mean datacenters with less equipment – in smaller facilities. On the eve of the millennium, a shot was fired that hardly registered contained in the walls of datacenters. Launched in 1999, Salesforce.com would go from being an extra dotcom to reshaping the way in which businesses buy and deploy software. Its “no software” campaign really meant no software running on your datacenter. It pushed CRM software out of the datacenter and into the cloud. In its wake, a brand new category would emerge. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) quickly spread way beyond CRM to assimilate other software packages, forsaking a graveyard of once-mighty software empires. Siebel who? But a number of big iron remained in place, unruffled by the limited power available to software that runs too far-off from the datacenter, where most data still lives. Ultimately, SaaS has only managed to capture a sliver of the information essential to run most businesses. The emerging category of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)... Read More »

The security firm SplashData publishes its list of the 25 worst passwords of 2013. 10 Top Password Managers (Click image for slideshow.) Thanks to the Adobe security breach last year, which exposed the IDs and encrypted passwords for 38 million Adobe.com users, we now know that probably the most usual password on the web is “123456.” As such, SplashData, a working laptop or computer security firm that makes password management apps, recognized “123456” because the “Worst Password of 2013.” The corporate says its list of the 25 worst passwords relies at the frequency of passwords found online by reason of disclosures — largely but not exclusively from the Adobe incident. The convenience with which these passwords can be cracked using brute-force methods shouldn’t be taken under consideration. A two-time runner-up, “123456” has dethroned “password,” a native favorite using its jaw-dropping obviousness and its always amusing self-referential nature. It slipped only to No. 2 at the list and will regain the... Read More »