Month: October 2016

Enlarge / Skype Teams, as the product was originally called. (credit: Skype Teams)

Microsoft is holding an event in New York City on November 2 next week. It's an Office event, but beyond that, the company hasn't officially said what it's about.

Microsoft is also building a competitor to Slack, the Web-based IRC-like messaging app that has become the darling of millennial-infested newsrooms and software startups around the globe. It looked like it was originally to be called Skype Teams, but now the branding has switched, to simply being Microsoft Teams. Which isn't a bad name in and of itself, but if Microsoft wanted to use the Skype branding for all its communications products (it already renamed Lync to be Skype for Business) then the original name did make sense.

Putting two and two together, it's believed that the event next week will where Microsoft makes Teams official and properly unveils it to the world.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Last week, Microsoft announced a speech recognition breakthrough: a transcription system that can match humans, with a word error rate of 5.9 percent for conversational speech. This new system is built on an open source toolkit that Microsoft already developed. A major new update to the toolkit, now called the Cognitive Toolkit, was released today in beta.

Formerly called the Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK), the MIT-licensed, GitHub-hosted project gives researchers some of the building blocks, such as neural networks, to develop their own machine learning systems. These machine learning applications can run on both CPUs and GPUs, and the toolkit has support for compute clusters. This scalability has already made CNTK strongly competitive with other popular frameworks, including Google's TensorFlow.

The Computational Network Toolkit was originally built for speech applications, but has since grown to accommodate other machine learning use cases. The Bing team uses it to make inferences about search terms. For example, a search for "how do you make an apple pie?" is a search for recipes, even though it doesn't include the word "recipe." The new version of the toolkit adds features, such as support for Python scripting, and new algorithms to further expand its reach to these more diverse applications.

(credit: fcpages.com)

A surprisingly large number of critical infrastructure participants—including chemical manufacturers, nuclear and electric plants, defense contractors, building operators and chip makers—rely on unsecured wireless pagers to automate their industrial control systems. According to a new report, this practice opens them to malicious hacks and espionage.

Earlier this year, researchers from security firm Trend Micro collected more than 54 million pages over a four-month span using low-cost hardware. In some cases, the messages alerted recipients to unsafe conditions affecting mission-critical infrastructure as they were detected. A heating, venting, and air-conditioning system, for instance, used an e-mail-to-pager gateway to alert a hospital to a potentially dangerous level of sewage water. Meanwhile, a supervisory and control data acquisition system belonging to one of the world's biggest chemical companies sent a page containing a complete "stack dump" of one of its devices.

Other unencrypted alerts sent by or to "several nuclear plants scattered among different states" included:

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Google Fiber is laying off about nine percent of its staff as well as "pausing" or ending fiber operations in 10 cities where it hadn't yet fully committed to building.

Google Fiber chief Craig Barratt will step down from his post and remain only as an adviser. He won't be replaced immediately. This is not the end of Google Fiber, however: the Alphabet-owned ISP already offers fiber Internet service in eight metro areas and is still committed to building in another four. Google Fiber also recently purchased a wireless ISP called Webpass, which offers high-speed wireless Internet in six metro areas and seems set on expanding wireless service going forward.

Barratt revealed most of the news in a blog post that Google Fiber published with the title "Advancing our amazing bet." The post doesn't specify the number of layoffs, but a source familiar with the company's plans confirmed that it will be nine percent of the Alphabet "Access" division that operates Google Fiber. The source did not say exactly how many employees that percentage represents.