Apple

Apple and IBM Partner

Apple and IBM Partner Bringing iPhone and iPad To The Enterprise

In a deal aimed at breaking down long-standing barriers to Apple in the workplace, the Cupertino company has announced a partnership Tuesday to implement Apple’s mobile products – the iPhone and iPad – in businesses around the world. In a joint statement, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO and Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, said the partnership will seek to fuse IBM’s prowess in data analytics and deep ties to the enterprise with Apple’s design and consumer savvy. IBM will work with Apple to develop enterprise mobile applications for iPad and iPhone specifically for industry under the IBM MobileFirst for iOS brand. The company will also offer mobile device management, security, data analytics and cross-platform integrations that leverage IBM’s cloud services. There will be IBM-managed offerings around mobile device activation, supply and management tailored to businesses. Apple will begin offering a version of its (popular) AppleCare product support service that is tailored to the needs of enterprises. Finally, IBM will sell […]

FDA: Regulators Can’t Scale To Police Mobile Health Apps

A senior advisor to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tossed cold water on speculation that the Agency might try to police mobile health and wellness applications, saying the FDA couldn’t possibly scale up to meet the challenge of policing the hundreds of new apps appearing every month. Correction: The article was changed to clarify Mr. Patel’s comments. He was not responding to a direct question about the FDA setting up an office to regulate mobile health applications. He was commenting on the possibility of creating a platform to evaluate and rate mobile health applications.  Also, he said “It’s not do-able,” not “it’s not possible.” We apologize for any confusion created by the article. – PFR July 10, 2014. The sheer pace of innovation in the mobile health application space and the numbers of such applications already available on mobile marketplaces like the iTunes App Store and Google Play mean that many mobile health applications will escape scrutiny by federal […]

Is HyperCat An IoT Silo Buster? | ZDNet

Steve Ranger over at ZDNet has an interesting write-up on HyperCat, a UK-funded data sharing open specification for Internet of Things devices. The new specifications has the backing (or at least interest) of major players and could become an alternative to proprietary standards such as Apple’s HomeKit or Google Nest. HyperCat is described as an “open, lightweight, JSON-based hypermedia catalogue” that is designed to “expose information about IoT assets over the web.” The goal is to provide a set of open APIs and data formats that startups and other smaller firms can use to built ecosystems of connected objects. Smart devices are typically developed using common technologies and platforms: RESTful APIs, JSON (Javascript Object Notation) for data formatting and HTTP (or secure HTTP) as the main communications protocol. However, the Internet of Things is badly “silo’d” – meaning that interoperability between IoT devices happens only when those smart devices happen to use the […]

Wired Imagines Our Dystopian Connected Home Future

Over at Wired.com, the ever-provocative Matt Honan has a great little thought exercise on the “nightmare” that could come from connected home technology gone wrong. His piece, The Nightmare on Connected Home Street, is a first person narrative of a man who wakes up to discover he’s transformed into a cockroach  inhabiting a virus infected home. “Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal.” The story goes on to chronicle some of the other dystopian features of connected home malware – the hacked “Dropcam Total Home Immersion” account that […]

This Week In Security: Ebay’s School of Hard Knocks

It’s the end of another busy week in the security world. As we’re wont to do at The Security Ledger, we had DUO Security Evangelist Mark Stanislav in to the deluxe Security Ledger Studios to talk about the events of the week. On the agenda this week: the continued fallout from the hack of online auction giant eBay. The company ran into a thicket of criticism this week for the breach and its botched response. Despite knowing about the security breach for weeks, eBay seemed unprepared for the fallout once the news became public. Beyond its statements to the press, the company hadn’t taken steps to streamline the (inevitable) flood of customers who wanted to update their password. In fact, more than a day after the news broke, eBay still hadn’t made mention of it on their home page. What lessons can we learn from the breach at online auction […]