Talkaholiq The Blog

I BM this week announced Watson for Cyber Security, a powerful new ally for organizations that want to protect their data from Net marauders. The new offering bolsters the ability of information security pros to analyze the flood of information from the roughly 200,000 events that pour into their Security Operations Centers, or SOCs, every day. About 20 percent of that flood is comprised of structured data that can be analyzed with database tools, but as much as 80 percent of it is unstructured data such as security blogs, white papers, Twitter feeds and forum threads. It's data that contains valuable nuggets, but finding them is difficult. "What Watson does is take all that information -- structured, unstructured, as well as other information from the operations center -- and put it in a cognitive system," explained Denis Kennelly, vice president of development and technology at IBM Security. "There it can be used to help the SOC operator to triage the securit...

Apple CEO Tim Cook has called for a campaign against fake news. Its purveyors -- largely interested only in getting the most clicks -- are defeating the people who are trying to tell the most truth, he told the UK's Daily Telegraph in an exclusive interview last week. Fake news is "killing people's minds in a way," Cook said. The worldwide epidemic of fake news requires a crackdown by both government and tech, he said, but care must be taken not to step on the freedoms of speech and the press. Cook suggested the impact of fake news could be curbed by building public awareness with a massive public service campaign. Tech can do its part to fight the spread of fake news by creating tools to reduce its volume on the Internet, he added, while government can support the cause by bringing the fight into the classroom. "Kids will be the easiest to educate," he told the Telegraph. "At least before a certain age, they are very much in listen and unders...

Dozens of applications for Apple's mobile devices are vulnerable to WiFi snoopers, a security researcher reported this week. Will Strafach, CEO of the Sudo Security Group, identified 76 popular iOS apps available at Apple's App Store that were vulnerable to wireless eavesdroppers, even though the connections were supposed to be protected by encryption. There have been 18 million downloads of the vulnerable apps, he said. Strafach categorized 33 of the vulnerable apps as "low risk." Potentially intercepted information included partially sensitive analytics data about a device and partially sensitive personal data, such as an email address or login credentials. VivaVideo, Snap Upload for Snapchat, Volify, Loops Live, Private Browser, Aman Bank, FirstBank, VPN One Click Professional, and AutoLotto: Powerball, MegaMillions Lottery Tickets are some of the apps he assigned to the low-risk category. Riskier Apps Strafach categorized another 24 iOS apps as "medium ...

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that occasionally stops gaping at contentious Senate confirmation hearings and votes to peruse the latest gadget announcements. This time around, we're looking at some of the gadgets that perhaps got a little lost in the noise after CES in January but caught our eye, for better or worse. Among them are a 4-D arcade machine and a robot designed to carry all the things you don't want to. As ever, dear readers, this is not a review column, in part because these products have yet to reach the public sphere, but mostly because the chances of my actually ever using said products are slim. The ratings relate only to how much I'd like to try them, should the stars align. Reality Bites Regular readers will know that I've played games my entire life. I hold deep reverence for the care and attention that go into creating these experiences, and I've rarely met a game I didn't want to conquer. Yet I am nervous about vi...