News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
These days we hear a lot of terms thrown about like the “Consumerization of IT” and “Bring your own device” (BYOD), and “Network health”. This is because corporations are starting to warm up to the idea that maybe if they let you bring in your personal computing devices such as smartphones and tablets, they won’t have to pay to give you one. The flip-side of letting employees bring their consumer devices into the corporate fold is that … [Read more...]
Android has been plagued by malware, security vulnerabilities, and now, privacy issues. It started with HTC's logging application which over-zealously logged aspects of phone use in insecure ways which made that data accessible by any application, and more recently has come to a head with the discovery of the carrier IQ application. The Carrier IQ application is supposedly a diagnostic tool which sits on a variety of phones including Android, iPhone, … [Read more...]
As the various intelligence agencies, computer security companies, and hackers prepare for the week of convention carnage that is Blackhat (Going on now), Defcon, and BSidesLV, it's important to remember how easy it is for security professionals to end up on the dreaded "wall of sheep" (a very public listing of usernames and partially-redacted passwords pilfered from the network and displayed to all). It's not considered a surprise to get hacked and … [Read more...]
There has been a lot of hype in the last week or so around the launch of Google+, the new social media project from the search engine juggernaut. Even the talk about the rumors surrounding the fall launch of iPhone 5 have been dwarfed by the topic. I have not yet had the pleasure of gaining access to G+, but I am awaiting my invite any day. Based on preliminary reviews and the features that it claims to have mastered, I believe G+ has great … [Read more...]
A few years ago, Washington D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department revolutionized its patrols, the backbone of law enforcement, by installing laptops into squad cars, allowing officers to have true two-way communication with dispatchers, keep track of other calls and incidents in real time, simplify paperwork, locate other cars, and make their exact coordinates known to dispatchers via GPS for efficient tasking. Now D.C.'s neighbor and eighth largest … [Read more...]
Dear readers, With traffic increasing we have outgrown our current servers. This is, of course, a good problem to have and we thank you for giving us this issue! We are moving the CTOvision.com blog, as well as most of our other sites, to a new Rackspace Cloud Site capability. Rackspace, as you probably know, is a pioneer in turning new scalable cloud computing concepts into reality. We hope our move will not result in much downtime, but … [Read more...]
Looxcie is a great device that lets you film exactly what you see. I've been testing one out for the last several weeks and have enjoyed learning about it and thinking about its potential uses in the enterprise. It has a lightweight, over the ear form factor that frees your hands and eyes up while capturing video and audio. Looxcie (pronounced Look-See) is fun to use and when combined with its very low cost and well engineered capabilities will likely … [Read more...]