Next year's CES is expected to be one of the most exciting ever. Sony is already rumoured to be preparing a pair of 16GB and 32GB Touchscreen Walkman personal media players which may put Apple's iPod touch in the shade thanks to some clever features.
The unnamed device will come with a 3-inch OLED screen which will be able to display far richer colours and 100 percent colour reproduction across a wider viewing angle compared to the average LCD screen (ed : some say 3.3-inch 400x240 WXGA screen).
Sony Insider, which broke the story, also understands that Sony will be partnering with online e-tailer Amazon to allow users to purchase MP3 files over the air and listen at them through the inbuilt S-master digital amplifier.
To keep up with the iPod Touch, Sony will also have a fully-compliant web browser although it is not known whether it will be using Opera or not and whether it will support Flash.
Businesses are being warned over the increased prevalence of ‘longlining’, a form of phishing attack that combines the traditional mass bombardment of bogus messages with customised targeting, creating an assault that overwhelms security defences.
The worrying trend was highlighted yesterday by author and financial crime expert Jeffrey Robinson, who was speaking at the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit in London. Robinson said organisations are failing to keep up with the new breed of cybercriminals, who are fusing a number of different hacking techniques to bypass typical data protection.
“We’re now into the second or third generation of very bright people fooling around on the Internet, because [hacking] is the back door into your business,” Robinson said.
Spear-phishing, which attempts to lure specific individuals into online traps by tailoring messages to make them appear convincing, is “yesterday’s news,” according to Robinson. “Today’s news is longline phishing… What longline phishing does is combine regular phishing with spear-phishing. It targets you and can send you a hundred thousand emails to lure you onto the [infected] site from 50,000 IP addresses, so that your filters and all your defences forget it. You can block two IP addresses, you can block 10,000. You’re not going to be able to block 50,000.
“Longline phishing is the latest thing because it gets right past all your defences and comes right in your back door,” he added.
Robinson also cited statistics that claim “99 per cent of mobile apps have at least one vulnerability,” which was providing cybercriminals with a convenient gateway to commit fraud.
Meanwhile, the author said the situation was worsened by the fact that out of the 55 per cent of businesses (US-based) who suffer a data breach, only 33 per cent actually report the incident. The determination among businesses to preserve their reputation and trust means little intelligence is brought to light, which damages the war on cybercrime as a whole, Robinson argued.
ITProPortal is also attending Gartner’s Business Process Management Summit in London today, so stay here for more on this week’s conference.
Budding broadband provider Hyperoptic is now delivering its "real fibre revolution" to some 20,000 premises in London, with as much as 60 per cent of that user base enjoying access to the firm's top 1Gbit/s package.
To that into context, a 1Gbit/s transfer rate could deliver maximum download speeds of around 125MB/s – meaning that a typical 1080p film with a file size between 5GB and 7GB would take around a minute to download.
"You might not need one gigabit now, but history shows people will use it as time goes on. I wouldn't pretend there is a need for a gigabit, but there isn't a need for a Ferrari either," said Hyperoptic MD Dana Tobak.
She added that remote workers in particular could gain immediate benefit from super high-speed broadband.
"We hear of some people using the service to work from home as they get a better connection than they can get in their office. It delivers a much better service in terms of stability without the fluctuations you can get with congested DSL networks, even if they're fibre to the cabinet."
To date, Hyperoptic has focused its deployment efforts on furnishing residential properties, but the company said it plans to expand into the enterprise space in the near future.
"Our main focus has been on residential properties but we will have our first business block online soon," Tobak commented.
Unfortunately, a quick search of ITProPortal staff post codes didn't bring up any Hyperoptic availability - like a great many we expect, we'll have to content ourselves with registering our interest for the time being.
Where available, Hyperoptic's 1Gbit/s "Hyper-sonic" service costs £50 a month - just £15 more than Virgin Media's top-of-the-line 100MBit/s broadband offering (£35) and only £10 dearer than BT's 76Mbit/s package, which costs £40 a month.
Indeed, those with less demanding download expectations can get a 100Mbit/s Hyperoptic package for as little as £25 a month - one of the best value broadband packages we're aware of right now.
A. No. The Storage Resource Provider (SRP) utilizes Storage Spaces Direct which does not support SAN storage. This does not mean longer term Azure Stack could not add support for SAN storage but it is not there in the Technical Preview.