Structure News: Can Michael Dell pull off one last miracle?

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where The Headphone Jack Lives Forever September 9th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about some of the big gambles that aging enterprise tech companies are making, why you should protect your information like the Secret Service protects the White House, and how ransomware appears to be getting worse. BIG PICTURE There was a time -- one that must baffle those still on the happy side of their first boom-bust tech cycle -- when Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel ruled the tech world. While they're all still alive and kicking, they're not setting the pace, and the moves they make over the next year or two are critical. All three companies have good reason to be proud of the contributions they've made to technology. But they have made some questionable decisions trying to extend their run at the top of the tech food chain, and Intel and HPE decided this week to cut some of those losses. Intel sold a controlling stake in Intel Security, offloading the unitformerly known as McAfeefor $4.2 billion after acquiring it for $7.6 billion in 2011. HP sold $8.8 billion worth of software assets, with CEO Meg Whitman telling The New York Times "there are elements of our world that are shrinking." That might be an understatement. But Intel and HP's gambles on security and software pale in comparison to what Michael Dell is going to try and pull off, now that the historic $67 billion acquisition/merger of EMC and its associated companies is complete. It's really hard to see how this merger can end any other way but badly, which makes it all the more fascinating. (The Next Platform has a good overview of how Dell will try and pull this off.) Intel is in the best position to have an outsized impact in this new world, having shed decades of orthodoxy about chip design and manufacturing to embrace a more flexible business model that listens to its customers. HPE lacks a compelling story outside of its mysterious "Machine" project; I've been cracking up for weeks at the overly dramatic and unintentionally hilarious ads for its security services shown before Season 1 of Mr. Robot on Amazon Prime, and it just sold that division. And the new Dell Technologies, well, we're going to have to wait a bit to see how that goes. There are only a handful of companies that have navigated multiple transitions in computing across decades, and fewer still that have thrived amid those changes. As the pace of change gets faster and faster, that's not likely to change. STRUCTURE NEWS WHY CISOS SHOULD TAKE A PAGE FROM THE SECRET SERVICE WHEN SECURING THEIR NETWORKS There's no bigger target in the world than the President of the United States. Nathaniel Gleicher of Illumio (pictured), worked inside the White House for several years advising the Obama administration on information security matters, and thinks the Secret Service has some lessons to teach the information security community on how to protect high-value targets. Gleicher will expand on this idea in a talk at Structure Security, and this week he shared a bit of a preview of his upcoming remarks. Structure Security will take place September 27th and 28th at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco. Gleicher is one of several speakers from some of the most innovative startups in the security world scheduled to appear at the conference, including Todd McKinnon of Okta, Stuart McClure of Cylance, and several others. More information on our speakers is here. INDUSTRY NEWS INTRODUCING DEEP LEARNING: BOOSTING SECURITY WITH AN ARTIFICIAL BRAIN Information Week's Dark Reading site has a nice overview of how deep learning techniques can be used to improve security, which well discuss in detail at Structure Security. Automating malware detection could allow us to find far more threats and find those threats faster than human oversight would allow. MICROSOFT WORKING ON SKYPE TEAMS, ITS OWN SLACK COMPETITOR. I had sort of thought that Microsoft's bet on workplace collaboration tools would come out of Yammer, but apparently the company is developing such a tool under the hood of another service it acquired: Skype. MSPoweruser reports that Microsoft's would-be Slack killer supports threaded conversations, which has to be one of the top feature requests thrown at Slack. EXASCALE MIGHT PROVE TO BE MORE THAN A GRAND CHALLENGE Looks like Fujitsu's huge exascale supercomputer project has hit a snag, as The Next Platform reports that the project has been delayed by at least a year. Avoiding delays on a project of that size is probably impossible, but those looking for ARM server processors operating at scale will have to wait even longer. THIS LEAKED CATALOG OFFERS WEAPONIZED INFORMATION THAT CAN FLOOD THE WEB The underground market for software exploits is full of interesting and shady characters, and Motherboard looks at one company that once advertised hacking services to basically anyone with money. It's not clear whether Aglaya's products or services did any damage (one person described them as "crap"), but there appears to be pretty strong demand for hacking tools. GOOGLE JUST BLEW UP ITS ALL-IN STRATEGY FOR PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE Google and Box cut a deal this week at BoxWorks to allow Google Apps users to work on documents stored in Box through Google's popular tools, according to IDG News Service. It's a user-friendly approach that acknowledges that some customers don't want to put all their eggs in one basket, and a nice coup for Box. HOW RANSOMWARE BECAME A BILLION-DOLLAR NIGHTMARE FOR BUSINESSES We've talked about the ransomware problem several times this year, and believe it or not, the situation does not appear to be improving. The Atlantic takes a look at the state of the ransomware market and how people and businesses can fight back against this scourge. QUOTE OF THE WEEK This is a change or die business and we absolutely know that and, you know, are prepared to change." Michael Dell, on CNBC, on his historic merger with EMC Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

Structure News: Is a fork in Docker's future, right as containers get huge?

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where When We Come To A Fork In The Road, We Plan A Conference September 2, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about what might prove to be a crossroads for one of the most exciting infrastructure projects to date, why containers are so important to security, and why the FBI is still gearing up for a fight about encryption. BIG PICTURE Although I understand Linus Torvalds likes all kinds of F-words, one of most consistent ways to get a reaction from an open-source community is to invoke the prospect of a fork. The notion that some members of the Docker community might consider forking the project to create a more stable container implementation provoked quite a bit of discussion this week about the conflicts that can arise when an open-source project and a for-profit company that owns that project appear to be moving in different directions. The New Stack kicked it off earlier this week with an article entitled "A Docker Fork: Talk of a Split Is Now on the Table." Docker is arguably the hottest company in enterprise tech over the last few years, and it got that way by making container-based software development easier for developers to use. As a result, a cottage industry has sprung up around container implementation, most notably around container orchestration, in which Google (through Kubernetes), Mesosphere, and Docker itself are scrambling to make their products the standard by which companies manage container-based development. The problem, according to some of those folks, is that Docker is moving too fast and breaking too many things for enterprise customers to keep up. As you might guess, Docker isn't exactly sorry for the rapid pace of improvements it has made to the core Docker product, but people like Bob Wise of Samsung have seen enough: "It is now critical to the success of those building boring infrastructure systems to openly and transparently collaborate on a minimum essential container implementation," he wrote on Medium. Them's fighting words, and much of the debate that followed was predictable: old-guard vendors threatened by the success of a younger company, large organizations standardizing on containers starting to worry about maintenance, and whether open-source projects and for-profit companies that develop those projects will always be at loggerheads. This is all just talk until somebody actually starts a formal process to create a forked boring infrastructure project. But it shows that Adrian Cockcroft's prediction at Structure 2015 that 2016 would be the year companies got serious about containers in production was dead on. And it gives us a juicy topic to kick around at Structure 2016. STRUCTURE NEWS WHY CONTAINERS WILL ALSO BE A BIG PART OF STRUCTURE SECURITY Regardless of what happens with the Docker project, container security will be a big topic at Structure Security this September. Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS (pictured) will be on hand to talk about the state of container security and why reluctant CIOs and CISOs might find themselves better off adopting containers in their organizations. We'll also hear from Jay Leak of Blackstone and Bob Lord of Yahoo on how exciting new technologies like containers are adopted at large companies with a lot to lose. Structure Security will take take September 27th and 28th at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco's Presidio District. Now is a great time to buy a ticket before signing off for your holiday weekend, and you can do that here: use our special discount code "LABORDAY" to save $300 before midnight Sept. 5th. INDUSTRY NEWS GE, THE 124-YEAR-OLD SOFTWARE STARTUP We've showcased several times how one of America's oldest companies is transforming itself in the cloud era, featuring GE's Chris Drumgoole at Structure 2015 and getting ready to host GE Wurldtech CEO Tom Le at Structure Security. The New York Times had a great in-depth examination of GE's progress over the last few years, and it's worth your time if you're considering a similar transformation at your company. GOOGLE PARTNERS WITH OKTA TO ENABLE SECURE MULTI-CLOUD DEPLOYMENTS Okta (whose CEO, Todd McKinnon, will be at Structure Security) held its big Oktane conference this week, and one of the highlights was a deal with Google to use Okta's single-sign-on technology inside Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps. ZDNet reports that the deal is a further sign of coziness between the two companies, who share a common competitor in Microsoft. BAIDU AND NVIDIA TO BUILD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM FOR SELF-DRIVING CARS Baidu's Andrew Ng told Structure Data 2016 attendees that he thinks self-driving cars will be in mass production in five years, and if that's going to hold true, Baidu will need some help. This week the company announced a deal with Nvidia, whose chips appear to be the early front-runner for AI and machine learning research, to build a platform that can be used by Chinese automakers to deploy self-driving cars in China, according to Fortune. CLOUDERA ASKED INTEL FOR $1 BILLION TO BUILD A CLOUD SERVICE Structure Data veteran Cloudera might be looking to build a full-fledged cloud service for its big data customers, if a report by Venturebeat is correct. The report suggests Cloudera asked Intel, one of its major investors, for an additional $1 billion to start the project, but it's not clear if Intel followed through or if Cloudera is actually working on such a project. HOW TECH GIANTS ARE DEVISING REAL ETHICS FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Can we trust the tech industry to self-regulate when it comes to artificial intelligence? We're going to find out, as The New York Times reports on a partnership between several leading companies -- Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft -- to make sure AI is used in ways that help people. Profitably help people, of course. FBI DIRECTOR WANTS 'ADULT CONVERSATION' ABOUT BACKDOORING ENCRYPTION Don't miss the subhead on this story from The Register about a speech that FBI Director James Comey made about encryption that's sure to once again rile up supporters of the technology. In case you didn't see what Comey did there, implying that concerns about backdoors over the last several months have been childish hardly furthers the debate. QUOTE OF THE WEEK Enterprise adoption, not enterprise vendor complaints, should be the litmus test for Docker standardization." Matt Asay, TechRepublic Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

How does machine learning help enhance information security?

Meet pioneers in machine-learning advances at Structure Security. Machine learning is transforming almost every area of computing; the natural evolution of big data, advances in computing power, and a growing understanding of how to train machines to anticipate external events and react accordingly. This movement is starting to have a big impact on security thinking. At Structure Security we'll feature pioneers in machine-learning advances, such as Kevin Mahaffey, co-founder & CTO of Lookout Security, Carson Sweet, co-founder & CTO of Cloud Passage, Mark Terenzoni, CEO of SQRRL, Stuart McClure, CEO of Cylance, and Oren Falkowitz, CEO of Area1 Security. These experts will examine how machine learning can benefit your organization, why most organizations should probably focus on more basic defenses, and the latest machine learning techniques for security applications. Don't miss this chance to separate the hype from the reality. Register now. SPEAKERS Oren Falkowitz Area 1 Security Kevin Mahaffey Lookout Stuart McClure Cylance Carson Sweet CloudPassage Mark Terenzoni Sqrrl Stacy Stubblefield TeleSign SPONSORS HEADLINE PRIMETIME SHOWTIME HEADLINE MEDIA PARTNER PARTNERS SEPTEMBER 27-28, 2016 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.