Amazon’s Echo smart speakers and Google Home can already turn on your lights, adjust your thermostat, play music, and even unlock August Smart Locks. But the next skill coming to your smart home speaker could be the biggest yet: phone calls. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here …
Users of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant can now ask it questions about the contents of their Microsoft-hosted calendars. On Wednesday, the assistant gained the ability to interact with calendars from Outlook.com and Office 365, similar to how it works with Google Calendar. Amazon didn’t make an announcement for the new feature. When asked about the…
U.S. legislators have reintroduced bills that would place curbs on warrantless access by the government to electronically generated geolocation information of Americans, including on the use of cell-site simulators that can capture cellphone data. Bicameral legislation introduced Wednesday, called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act, aims to create clear rules for when law enforcement agencies…
The Swedish network giant Ericsson will have a lot of prospective 5G equipment to show to gearheads at Mobile World Congress later this month, but the future cloud capabilities it demonstrates may be just as important for a subscriber’s experience. In addition to fast broadband speeds, Ericsson’s technologies for next-generation networks will be able to…
What happens if a bad actor turns off your heat in the middle of winter, then demands $1,000 to turn it back on? Or even holds a small city’s power for ransom? Those kinds of attacks were among the top threats that security experts worried about at the RSA security conference this week. While consumers…
Vendors at this week’s RSA cybersecurity show in San Francisco are pushing artificial intelligence and machine learning as the new way to detect the latest threats, but RSA CTO Zulfikar Ramzan is giving visitors a reality check. “I think it (the technology) moves the needle,” he said on Wednesday. “The real open question to me is how…
The internet of things needs to be regulated and soon before it becomes even more of a tool to facilitate cyberattacks, and that means coming up with civic-minded technologists to help formulate government policies, security expert Bruce Schneier told an RSA Conference 2017 audience. +More on Network World: RSA: Watch out for a new weapon…
Microsoft earlier this month quietly extended the life of Windows 10’s debut edition, the version launched in July 2015. Rather than end support for Windows 10 v. 1507 — Microsoft labels the OS by year and month — in March, as announced last year, the company will issue the version’s final security updates in May,…
The mantra that all companies need to become software companies is starting to sound familiar. PaaS clouds are the key to making this happen, by providing the means to get customer-facing applications up and running quickly, Heroku CEO Adam Gross argued this week at a developer’s conference. Gross said that even companies not known for…
IT managers are finding it difficult to keep their applications and data safe in the cloud, and many are slowing cloud adoption because of it. That was one of the findings of an Intel cloud security report that surveyed 2,000 IT professionals in different countries and industries last fall. The issue isn’t with the cloud…