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In the next decade, there will be tens of billions of connected devices—from thermostats and cell phones to parking meters and cars. Increasingly, these connected devices that make up the Internet of Things will be imbued with intelligence so that they can not only communicate, but transact, negotiate, collaborate and exchange value. The Internet of Things needs a Ledger of Things How will we handle this mind-boggling volume of data being transmitted, and do it in a secure way? “The Internet of Things needs a Ledger of Things,” says Alex Tapscott, coauthor with his father, Don Tapscott, of the "Blockchain...

Cisco released software updates this week to patch several high severity vulnerabilities in the company’s cable modems, residential gateways and security appliances. A couple of serious flaws in Cisco’s residential gateways were reported by Kyle Lovett, and Chris Watts of Tech Analysis. Lovett discovered an information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2016-1325) that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to access sensitive data on affected devices. The issue, caused by improper access restrictions, affects the Cisco DPC3941 Wireless Residential Gateway with Digital Voice and the DPC3939B Wireless Residential Voice Gateway. Watts identified a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw affecting the Cisco DPQ3925 8x4 DOCSIS 3.0 Wireless...

Cisco has scrambled to fix a serious vulnerability in its Adaptive Security Appliances and Next-Generation Firewalls products which can be used to remotely take over and reboot the devices. Unauthenticated remote attackers can exploit a bug in the internet key exchange (IKE) version 1 and 2 protocol code running on Cisco ASA software, and trigger a buffer overflow. IKE is used to authenticate connections and to set up secure virtual private networks, landing on the firewalls. Security researchers David Barksdale, Jordan Gruskovnjak and Alex Wheeler said the algorithm for reassembling fragmented IKE payloads "contain a bounds-checking flaw that allows a...

News articles concerning the most influential political donors in America typically list the same names: The Koch brothers, George Soros, Sheldon Adelson and, lately, Tom Steyer. But as we reach the end of 2015, none of these billionaires has spent big in the 2016 contest, at least not at an individual candidate level. In their absence, a number of lesser known donors are shaping up to be major players in 2016. Here are five to watch: 1. The DeVos Family We're cheating by including a whole family in our list, but there is no way of separating out this high-spending...

Californian tech giant Cisco has released an advisory statement explaining that its chat client Jabbar is currently vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. Found in the Windows client of Jabbar, the vulnerability could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to perform a STARTTLS downgrade attack. Discovered by Renaud Dubourguais and Sébastien Dudek from Synacktiv, a French cyber-security firm, versions affected include the 10.6.x, 11.0.x, and 11.1.x releases. Currently the client does not verify that the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) connection has been established with Transport Layer Security (TLS). XMPP enables the near-real-time exchange of structured yet extensible data between any...

Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who is preparing to position himself as a viable alternative to frontrunner Donald Trump, will meet about 300 pastors and faith leaders Monday at a ranch owned by conservative billionaire Farris Wilks near Dallas.The meeting in Cisco, a tiny city about two hours west of Dallas, is being organized by Keep the Promise PAC, one of four main super PACs supporting Cruz, who is second to real estate magnate Trump nationally and is the frontrunner in the latest poll in Iowa, according to The Texas Tribune.The meeting is "designed as an open...

Carly Fiorina may come from the executive suite, but that hasn’t stopped other executives from slamming her record. The latest critique comes from Steven Rattner, a former Wall Street banker and private equity executive. Rattner, in an opinion piece in the New York Times on Saturday, called Fiorina’s time as the CEO of HP “short and disastrous.” Rattner said HP’s acquisition of Compaq, pushed through by Fiorina, caused an amount of divisiveness at the company that Rattner says he never saw in his 33-year career on Wall Street. He said that while Fiorina did serve during a tough period for...

A comparison of the tenures is a battle of bad vs. worse. It’s well known by now that GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina has never held political office and is running on her business record. As many commentators have pointed out, that’s a dicey proposition since her highest-profile job as CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005 was sort of a disaster.But in an interview with Fortune contributor and Yale School of Management professor Jeffery Sonnenfeld, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump—who has made a habit of criticizing Fiorina—took aim at a different stage of her career.When asked about what he thought...

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

Authorities say that one person was killed after at least two tornadoes touched down Saturday in northern Texas as forecasters upped the risk of sever storms for a large area of the state. The fire chief in Cisco confirmed that one person was killed after a tornado hit the ground late Saturday near Cisco, about 100 miles west of Fort Worth. Authorities told Fox4News.com that at least two homes were destroyed in the twister that came after slow-moving thunderstorms had dumped heavy raim across the Dallas-Fort Worth area that caused street flooding and led to water rescues in some areas....

Few Americans could fathom the notion that the United States is so indebted to China that one of Beijing’s spies could get away with espionage – especially with an White House in love with espionage prosecutions. But that might be the only reasonable explanation for the Obama administration’s decision to pass on prosecuting a State Department contractor who was allegedly paid thousands of dollars to someone believed to be a Chinese agent seeking information on Americans. According to Fox News, a November 2014 FBI affidavit that was filed in U.S. district court in Maryland indicates that the FBI launched a...

More Hillary Cronyism Revealed – How Cisco Used Clinton Foundation Donations to Cover-up Human Rights Abuse in China In her 2014 memoir “Hard Choices,” Clinton reiterated her support for human-rights advocates in China. She specifically criticized the Great Firewall, writing that after she made comments about the right to dissent in China in 2011, “censors went right to work erasing mentions of my message from the Internet.”But the issue of Chinese repression — and Cisco’s role — was already known by then. In 2009, weeks after Clinton’s State Department had named Cisco a finalist for the secretary of state’s Awards...

SAN FRANCISCO — Cisco Systems may be doing a little better than Wall Street expects, considering its technology and sales challenges. But that doesn’t mean the company will avoid layoffs in the coming months. On Wednesday, Cisco released fourth-quarter earnings that illustrated its troubles as one of the tech industry’s giants competing in a rapidly changing environment. Fourth-quarter revenues, Cisco said, were $12.36 billion, down from $12.42 billion in the same quarter a year ago. Net income was $2.25 billion, or 43 cents a share, down from $2.27 billion a year ago. Using nonstandard accounting common to many tech companies,...

Cisco reports its fourth quarter earnings on Wednesday, and rumors have begun circulating that another round of layoffs are coming, maybe announced next week, maybe in October. We can’t confirm those rumors, which stem from an anonymous source who tipped off Cisco blogger Brad Reese. But a source did tell us that Cisco is working on a reorganization of some of its engineering teams. Reese broke the news on last year’s surprise layoffs which also came from an anonymous tip. Last August, Cisco shocked the world by reporting a better-than-expected quarter, and a solid year, and that it was still...

Cisco CEO John Chambers has sent a letter to President Obama calling for rules ensuring that both needs of national security and product integrity are met, according to reports. The Financial Times and Re/code are reporting that Chambers sent a letter dated May 15 to Obama, warning that confidence in an open Internet is being "eroded by revelations of governments' surveillance" and asking him to create new standards of conduct about how the government collects data. "Absent a new approach where industry plays a role, but in which you, Mr. President, can lead, we are concerned that our country's global...

Biggest security purchase since Intel wolfed down McAfee Intrusion prevention's a hot topic in the world of security, as reflected in the $2.8bn price tag Cisco has paid to complete the acquisition of network security specialists Sourcefire.The purchase - which was announced in July - is the largest security firm purchase since Intel's $7.7bn acquisition of McAfee in 2010. And it's a huge personal payday for Marty Roesch, creator of the open-source intrusion protection system Snort. He took Snort's basic technology and built commercial code under the Sourcefire brand since 2001."I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sentimental. When...

Cisco stock plunged Thursday, a day after it announced plans to lay off 4,000 employees, or 5 percent of its work force. The company said it will take a charge for the restructuring in the fiscal first quarter. Shares of the world's biggest network equipment maker were down more than 8 percent in premarket trading Thursday. A Cisco executive, Chris Dedicoat, defended the job cuts Thursday, saying the company had to try to predict where the growth opportunities were and where workers were needed. "We have to make sure we have the right people with the right skill sets in...

Cisco's chief executive John Chambers said that "the economic recovery is slower and more inconsistent". The cuts come as the company looks to reduce costs as it sees demand for its networking equipment remain uncertain. Cisco also predicted that its revenues in the current quarter would be at the lower end of analysts' forecasts. Its shares fell more than 9% in after-hours trading. ... Mr Chambers said the job cuts were due to weaker sales in Japan, China and Europe, which had weighed on revenue growth. "The environment in terms of our business is improving slightly but nowhere near the...

Cisco Systems was preparing to lay off about 1,300 workers just a few months after the world’s largest maker of computer networking equipment warned that growing economic uncertainty is making it tougher to close deals. The cuts announced Monday represent about 2 percent of Cisco System Inc.’s payroll of 65,000 workers. The upcoming layoffs represent the San Jose company’s latest austerity measure. Last year, Cisco shed about 10,000 jobs as part of a program aimed at saving about $1 billion annually.

Well, I'm clearly approaching desperation, or I wouldn't be posting something like this. OTOH, if help doesn't appear on FR, it might not be had anywhere. So here's the situation: I installed a brandy-new Cisco router (E1200) for a client who uses an ancient Macbook. Many pages load fine but Google -- the one that matters for her because she uses Gmail -- times out or takes many minutes to load. It's not unheard of -- I've found it brought up on different help forums but there seems to be no consensus on the fix and, disappointingly, no accountability whatsoever...