29Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Apple announcements for Education

Software Events
Apple announcements for Education Apple took its annual spring event out of California and hosted it at a high school in Chicago this year, promising to focus its newest products toward the education market that’s been dominated by Google and Microsoft. The keynote was condensed into just one hour, most of which revolved around all the things you can do with a newly announced iPad. Here’s a look at all the biggest news today. The star of today’s announcement was the new “affordable” iPad with stylus support. Affordable is in quotations because it costs $299 for schools, but $329 for everyone else — the same price as iPad’s 9.7-inch tablet announced last spring. The biggest update with this iPad is that it’ll finally work with the $99 Apple Pencil ($89 for students…
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28Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

The FTC confirms it’s investigating Facebook over its privacy practices

News Items, Software Events
The FTC confirms it’s investigating Facebook over its privacy practices The Federal Trade Commission has confirmed that it is investigating Facebook’s privacy practices after it was revealed that the company allowed Cambridge Analytica access to the personal data of some 50 million Facebook users without their expressed consent. “The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices,” the agency said in a statement, after declining to comment last week when Bloomberg reported that an investigation has been opened. Specifically, the investigation seeks to find whether Facebook violated a consent decree — which requires the social network to obtain explicit permission from users to share their data with third parties — that it signed…
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25Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Vast amount of Servers are leaking huge amounts of passwords and keys

News Items, Software Events
Vast amount of Servers are leaking huge amounts of passwords and keys Thousands of servers operated by businesses and other organizations are openly sharing credentials that may allow anyone on the Internet to log in and read or modify potentially sensitive data stored online. In a blog post published late last week, researcher Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications. etcd comes with a programming interface that responds to simple queries that by default return administrative login credentials without first requiring authentication. The passwords, encryption keys, and other forms of credentials are used to…
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24Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

IBM reportedly targeted older workers in layoffs

News Items, Software Events
IBM reportedly targeted older workers in layoffs IBM has been put into the spotlight for the wrong reason. The computer giant now deems older workers obsolete and puts them into the front when layoffs occur.  This disregards the federal law on discrimination against aged workers. ProPublica and Mother Jones  co-published an exhaustive report that alleges IBM has for years disregarded age discrimination laws in an attempt to push out employees over 40 and replace them with younger workers. The company is believed to have laid off around 20,000 US employees over 40 years of age over the past five years. Former workers say performance reviews suddenly became much harsher with the pivot in business focus. Some felt forced to accept an early retirement package when the alternative was being fired outright. IBM encouraged some…
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23Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Twitter CEO: Bitcoin will be the world’s ‘single currency’ in 10 years

Software Events
Twitter CEO: Bitcoin will be the world’s ‘single currency’ in 10 years Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey apparently has big visions for bitcoin that he believes that the cryptocurrency will become the world’s single currency within 10 years. “The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be bitcoin.” Dorsey went on to say that the transition would happen “probably over ten years, but it could go faster,” which seems like an extremely unrealistic projection, even considering cryptocurrency’s meteoric rise in popularity over the past few months. Dorsey is also the CEO of Square, which recently added the option to buy and sell Bitcoin directly from the Square Cash app. Maybe Mr. Dorsey should know that On Tuesday, a 15-year-old from…
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