On this episode of Bottom Line I.T. for the week of Oct.31, Mike Maddox and Amy Mumby talk about What Facebook Did to American Democracy, the Hyperloop, Equifax Hackers and more!
Segment 1: What Facebook Did to American Democracy
In media circles, amongst many others, the 2016 election serves as a sharp turning point in our country. Facebook has been at times the focus of why the 2016 election is so drastically different from others. However, scholars have known of Facebook’s potential impact on elections for at least half a decade.
Segment 2: Richard Branson and Elon Musk team up to design the Hyperloop
Last week, Richard Branson donated a large undisclosed sum of money to Hyperloop One. In 2013, Musk announced plans for Hyperloop Alpha which seeks to provide safe, faster, and more convenient long-distance travel than trains and cars. Recent tests have full-sized pods traveling 190 mph, but the company is attempting to reach 600mph plus top speeds.
Segment 3: Can Robots Help Get More Girls Into Science and Tech?
12% of engineers are women, in computing it’s 26%. The numbers of women in STEM in the United States have long been abysmal, but the solution to this problem may be robots. Not robots arbitrarily forcing diversity at work, but robots getting more girls interested in STEM, specifically, robot kits. Before playing with a non-gendered robotics kit named Kibo, boys were more likely to say they wanted to be an engineer than girls did, but after playing with Kibo, girls and boys were equally as likely to express interest in becoming an engineer.
Segment 4: IoT Pushes Computing to the Network Edge
The Internet of Things, has grown to the point that it’s remaking enterprise networking, architecture and computing, CIO Journal’s Angus Loten reports. Central software platforms are being pushed to the edge, as a consequence of a growing number of firms turning to connected devices. The rapid adoption of IoT is accelerating edge computing, this includes devices such as gateway servers, microdata centers, cloudlets, fog fabric nodes, etc designed to boost the computing power of edge processing.
Segment 5: Equifax Hackers Stole Info on 693,665 UK Residents
Equifax Inc stated that an investigation into the information stolen in its epic data breach revealed that the intruders stole a file containing 15.2 million UK records. The numbers include data on U.K. consumers that Equifax had going as far back as 2011.
Segment 6 – Bottom Line Security: Tech firm laces networks with false servers to contain breaches
Illusive Networks plants honey pot servers in a network to detect incoming attacks faster than other methods. The CEO and founder of Illusive Networks said that his technology is a post breach mechanism. Real users do not see the fake network addresses, and are only seen by attackers searching for network data to progress their attack.
