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| | | You Know That Silly Fear About Alexa Recording Everything and Leaking It Online? It Just Happened | | The Register | It's time to break out your "Alexa, I Told You So" banners – because a Portland, Oregon, couple received a phone call from one of the husband's employees earlier this month, telling them she had just received a recording of them talking privately in their home. The recording had been sent from the couple's Amazon Alexa to the employee's phone, who is in the husband's contacts list, and she forwarded the audio to the wife, Danielle. Suffice to say, this episode was unexpected. The couple had not instructed Alexa to spill a copy of their conversation to someone else. "I felt invaded," Danielle said. "A total privacy invasion. Immediately I said, 'I'm never plugging that device in again, because I can't trust it.'" | | The New Gmail Steals Some Great Ideas and Invents Some Fresh Ones | | PCWorld | In April, Google launched its first major Gmail redesign since 2013, and in a sense it was an acknowledgement of all the ways Google had fallen behind. But as Gmail gets with the times, it’s also introducing some new ideas that haven’t yet occurred to its competitors. The result is a much-needed game of feature leapfrog, which will hopefully compel other email apps to invent even more ways to make email less painful. To that end, here’s a look at what’s new—and not-so-new—with Gmail’s big upgrade. | | VPNFilter Botnet Has Hacked 500,000 Routers. Reboot and Patch Now! | | The State of Security | "At least half a million routers and storage devices in dozens of countries around the world have been infected by a sophisticated botnet, in preparation for an alleged planned cyber attack on Ukraine. Should you be concerned if you aren’t based in Ukraine? Well, of course you should!" writes security expert Graham Cluley. "Even if you aren’t in imminent danger of being targeted by the botnet itself, you certainly don’t want to be part of the problem. If you follow basic security hygiene it’s not hard to protect your own IoT devices, but if you don’t you are making things more dangerous for everybody else on the internet." | | 24 Best Free Security Tools | | CSO | Who doesn't love free software? Infosec professionals are fortunate to have many good free tools for a range of tasks. The following list of two dozen tools include everything from password crackers to vulnerability management systems to networks analyzers. Whatever your security role is, you'll find something useful here. |
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| | | G Suite Pro Tips: How to Sync One Spreadsheet to Another in Google Sheets | | The Keyword | When it comes to analyzing data at work, we often have to pull information from several different sources in order to see the big picture. But if you need to manage product inventory or report on quarterly sales figures, spending time flipping between spreadsheets or manually copying and pasting data into one place can take up too much time. There’s a better option. | | How to Keep Ethernet, TV, and Power Wires Tidy Using Cable Covers | | MakeUseOf | Cables strewn everywhere? It’s a pain when you need to keep things tidy, but the architecture of your home says no. The answer is trunking, adhesive plastic tubes that hide your cables from view, known as cable covers. Here’s what you need to know about choosing and installing cable covers for your power, data, and AV cables. |
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| | | What Companies Really Want When Hiring a CIO | | CIO | Indeed.com analyzed jobs postings for chief information officers between April 2017 and March 2018 and found 10 sought-after skills in almost every posting. This mix of hard and soft skills provides a good guideline for aspiring IT executives as to what hiring companies are looking for in their next CIO. |
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| | | Email Is Dangerous | | The Atlantic | Electronic mail as we know it is drowning in spam, forged phishing mails, and other scams and hacks. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. |
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| | | Updates to Hangouts Meet Home Screen and Screensaver on In-room Displays | | G Suite Updates | When joining a meeting, having the right context is important. That’s why Google has added some new features to the Hangouts Meet TV display, such as a more informative home screen, screensaver, and custom wallpapers to quickly orient users. | | Multizones: Your Data Where You Want It | | Box Blog | Box announced multizone support for their flagship Box Zones offering, providing customers with the ability to store data in and collaborate seamlessly across any of Box’s existing seven Zones, all from a single Box instance. With multizone capabilities, all multinational organizations are able to take advantage of Box Zones, regardless of where they are based. | | Oktane Days 1 and 2: Addressing the Challenge of Our Time | | Okta Blog | The first two days of Oktane18 have officially come and gone. Whether you were there in person or are following along from afar, here are some of the highlights. |
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