Chinese smartphone maker ZTE has agreed to pay US$892 million to the U.S. government for illegally selling networking technology to Iran. ZTE entered a guilty plea over the charges, which include violating export controls meant to keep sensitive U.S. technology away from the Iranian government, the U.S Department of Justice said on Tuesday. “They…
Say you just got laid off from your job. Bills are piling up and the pressure to get a new job quickly is building. Your desperation has you taking chances you wouldn’t normally take, such as clicking on a link to a job offer — even if something about it doesn’t quite look right. Research…
Yahoo might be on the verge of being sold to Verizon for a king’s ransom, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t stopped making online tools of questionable usefulness. Its latest effort, Captain, is a chatbot that “streamlines family logistics,” or in simple terms: it keeps you and your family in sync. You don’t need to…
Salesforce is getting into the computer vision business with a new tool designed to let users easily train a custom image recognition system. Einstein Vision, as it’s known, allows users to upload sets of images and classify them in a series of categories. After that, the system will create a recognizer based on machine learning…
Google Assistant is having a great month. Just last week Google started rolling out its voice-activated aide to all Android phones running Marshmallow and Nougat, and now it’s showing off a new trick that will make it much more useful: integration with our messages. For whatever reason, Google Assistant struggled when it came to reading…
WikiLeaks has released more than 8,700 documents it says come from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, with some of the leaks saying the agency had 24 “weaponized” and previously undisclosed exploits for the Android operating system as of 2016. Some of the Android exploits were developed by the CIA, while others came from the U.S.…
It has been almost a year since Cisco jumped into the hyperconverged arena and while the HyperFlex business has done well – landing 1,100 customers — the company is expecting a burst of upgrades to significantly speed and simplify management of its HyperFlex systems. +More on Network World: Cisco, Mitel, NEC and others are targeting…
A five-month-old flaw in Android’s SSL cryptographic libraries is among the 35 critical vulnerabilities Google fixed in its March security patches for the mobile OS. The first set of patches, known as patch level 2017-03-01, is common to all patched phones and contains fixes for 36 vulnerabilities, 11 of which are rated critical and 15…
Watson and Einstein are teaming up, and IBM and Salesforce hope the pairing proves as smart as it sounds. The two companies are working together to bring information from IBM systems into Salesforce’s products through a series of integrations announced Monday. As part of the partnership, joint customers will be able to combine Watson’s insights…
Nearly two-thirds of consumers are worried about home IoT devices listening in on their conversations, according to a Gartner survey released Monday. Those jitters aren’t too surprising after recent news items about TV announcers inadvertently activating viewers’ Amazon Echos, or about data from digital assistants being used as evidence in criminal trials. But privacy concerns…