Rewrite the rules of desktop typing. Logitech's K780 is the type-on-everything keyboard with full-size keys and a convenient number pad. Enjoy quiet, comfortable typing, on your Windows PC or Mac, and switch typing to your phone or tablet at the touch of a button. An integrated rubber stand holds your mobile devices within reach and always at the perfect typing angle. A generous two-year battery life virtually eliminates the need to switch out batteries. The K780 typically lists for $79.99, but right now is discounted 25% to $59.99. See this deal now on Amazon.

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If you're a committed photographer, you probably use a powerful tool such as Adobe's Lightroom or Photoshop to work with your pictures. But not everyone needs apps like this, which have steep learning curves, and not everyone shoots enough photos to spend the time and money for this type of tool.

Most people who take pictures just want to do some simple editing, and you can use Apple's Photos app on both macOS and iOS. But between those two alternatives, the $4 Enlight is a powerful editing tool for iOS that anyone can use. Its tap-and-drag interface gives you access to a number of filters, presets, and tools, and you don't need to spend a lot of time learning how it works.

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Apple's announcements this week of refreshed iMac desktops, including a new $5,000 iMac Pro workstation promised to ship before year's end, and performance improvements to the MacBook Pro notebook line, were powerful rejoinders to critics who last year questioned the company's commitment to the commercial segment of its customer base, analysts said.

"We haven't seen everything yet, but based on what they talked about, my guess is that this will address 99% of the needs of professionals," said Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research, in an interview.

Dawson was referring to the two-hour keynote that opened Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday, when company executives, including CEO Tim Cook, laid out the usual -- upgrades to both iOS and macOS -- but also spent time touting hardware, something the company hadn't done at the event since 2013.

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Google is all about helping you find what you want as fast as possible. But if there’s one place where tracking down the right information can be painfully slow, it’s your Android smartphone.

Messaging apps, the browser history, text messages, and articles to read are often siloed into their own little fiefdoms. If Google’s mission really is to organize all the world’s information, this is a place that could use some help.

Google’s In Apps search is an incredibly useful tool, but it’s a little buried. This functions similarly to Spotlight on iOS, which those who have dabbled with the Dark Side may be familiar with. Getting the most out of it, however, takes a little know-how. And if you want quicker access, there’s a trick to add it to your home screen. Here’s how it works.

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You could say Kris Lahiri, VP operations and chief security officer at enterprise file sharing platform provider Egnyte, was a bit of a skeptic when he first considered adding crowd-sourced penetration testing to the firm’s application security regimen. Indeed, the idea of giving permission for a bunch of unknown eyes to scour over their systems to see what they uncover is enough to make many security professionals hesitant.

Egnyte, Inc.

With all the talk of U.S. trade deficits, one tech sector is beginning to shine. Fueled by interest in digital transformation, American IT services firms are running a significant surplus, exporting software and digital services to foreign companies seeking to overhaul their business processes.

While the U.S. imported more manufactured technology goods in 2016 than it exported, it ran a trade surplus of $32 billion in technology services, according to recent analysis from technology trade association CompTIA.

"Technology services, including software development services, have accounted for a growing share of industry revenues and new job growth,” says Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s senior vice president of research and market intelligence. That’s a testament to both the expertise and brand strength of U.S. IT service providers and the increased demand for digital business transformation around the globe.

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Momentum continues to build for the WebAssembly binary format. WebKit, Apple’s open source browser engine used in Safari, now has a full implementation of WebAssembly.

The implementation supports WebAssembly on Intel x86-64 and ARM64 processors. Calling WebAsembly a “no-nonsense sidekick to JavaScript,” Apple’s Saam Barati and two colleagues, JF Bastien and Keith Miller, described WebAssembly as a low-level binary format designed to be a suitable compilation target for languages such as C++. “The WebAssembly code that the browser sees will already have undergone high-level, language-specific optimizations. This is great because it means implementations don’t have to know about how C++ or other languages are optimized,” Barati said.

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If there is one subset of machine learning that spurs the most excitement, that seems most like the intelligence in artificial intelligence, it’s deep learning. Deep learning frameworks—aka deep neural networks—power complex pattern-recognition systems that provide everything from automated language translation to image identification.

Deep learning holds enormous promise for analyzing unstructured data. There are just three problems: It’s hard to do, it requires large amounts of data, and it uses lots of processing power. Naturally, great minds are at work to overcome these challenges.  

What’s now brewing in this space isn’t just a clash of supremacy between competing deep learning frameworks, such as Google’s TensorFlow versus projects like Baidu’s Paddle. Rivalry between multiple software frameworks is a given in most any part of IT.

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You know how easy it's become to use your own smartphone or tablet to do company work? Remember how it wasn't always that easy -- or something even allowed by many companies in the early Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) days?

You can thank mobile device management (MDM) software, which grew out of the BYOD trend and morphed into a veritable cottage industry of developers, apps and systems all designed to help companies handle workers using their own devices in the office. The goal, of course, is to make it easy for workers to be productive while also ensuring that corporate data and sensitive information remains protected.

Computerworld senior writer Lucas Mearian explains what companies are up against in that effort, explaining to Executive Editor Ken Mingis in this week's episode how the EMM/MDM industry has changed in recent years.

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I deleted Google from my life, and I can show you how to do it, too.

After being a devoted Googler for many years, I realized putting all my data on one platform had its downsides. A couple of factors in particular drove me to make a clean break.

Deleting Google for privacy and security

The appeal of escaping Google comes down to privacy. Google collects an alarming amount of data about you. It’s safe to say that if you’re not a paying customer then you’re the product being sold, and that’s Google’s business model. 

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So you plopped down a pile of cash to buy a 4K TV, maybe even one that delivers high dynamic range. Awesome. Once you’ve wowed your friends and family with those lush demo files the manufacturer provided, you’re going to want to splash some 4K movies across that screen. A 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player is just the ticket. Update, June 6, 2017: A new firmware update is available that enables the Oppo Digital UDP-203 to process Dolby Vision high dynamic range video.

Most players also stream 4K HDR video from a handful of video-streaming services—including Netflix, Amazon Video, and Vudu—if you have the bandwidth, that is. If your ISP can’t deliver super-fast download speeds, you won’t be able to stream 4K.

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The SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.0 Flash Drive features a sizable 128GB of storage, and read speeds of up to 260MB/s lets you easily transfer a full-length movie in seconds. The sophisticated design and durable aluminum metal casing help to protect against every day wear and tear on the outside, while the included SanDisk SecureAccess software provides 128-bit AES file encryption and password protection on the inside for your private files. The SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.0 Flash Drive is backed with a lifetime limited warranty. It currently averages 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 550 people (80% rate the full 5 stars: see reviews here), and its typical list price has been reduced a generous 54% to just $64.99. See this deal on Amazon.

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Extreme Network’s recent string of acquisitions – including it’s recent $100 million auction-buy of Avaya’s networking business, it’s purchase of Brocade’s Ethernet IP networking assets and its purchase of wireless vendor Zebra Technologies last year – should cause enterprise end users to potentially rethink their network infrastructure buying decisions when it comes time for their next hardware refresh, according to Forrester analyst Andre Kindness.

Kindness says in the immediate short term, there are not likely to be any major changes to offerings from these vendors; all current Avaya and Brocade networking gear will still be supported. But given Extreme’s acquisition spree, it’s expected there will be some consolidation and blending of products over the medium and long-term. “As with anything, it will take some time to reconcile the moves and figure out the new direction,” says Kindness.

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GitHub has added data access tools and advanced project management to GitHub Enterprise, the on-premises version of the company’s code-sharing platform.

Here are the notable features in GitHub Enterprise 2.10, which can be installed on a user’s own hardware or on a cloud service such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure:

• The GraphQL API to help developers to build their own tools with greater access to data via the same API used to build GitHub itself. 
• Project boards give users are provided a history of project activities, including notifications as to which team member was behind each action.
• For project reviews, a filter prioritizes pull requests, such as a request for items still awaiting review, an approved pull request, or requests that are ready to be merged. Users also can specify who is permitted to dismiss reviews on a protected branch.
• Version 2.0.0 of Git LFS (Large File Storage), which offers an early version of file locking, to prevent multiple updates at the same time.
• Administrators can configure API rate limiting, which can prevent overuse of resources, from the management console.
• To organize repositories, administrators can manually add tags to repositories for search and discovery. Topics can be designated for adding relevant data and group repositories by languages used, project functions, or teams responsible for maintaining a repository.

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes features an original story crossing all the Marvel families. Players take control of Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Hulk, Captain America, Wolverine and many more Marvel characters as they try to stop Loki and a host of other Marvel villains from assembling a Super weapon which they could use to control the Earth. Players will chase down Comic Bricks as they travel across a LEGO New York and visit key locations from the Marvel universe such as Stark Tower, Asteroid M, an abandoned Hydra Base and the X-Mansion. The list price on the PS4 and Xbox One versions has been reduced 14% to $17.22. See this deal on Amazon.

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The Internet of Things is going to be inescapable, pervasive, and riddled with insecurity, but it’s at least going to be interesting, according to a raft of prominent technologists surveyed by the Pew Research Center.

Unsurprisingly, IoT security was the name of the game, the experts agreed, but it’s the effect of the present insecurity in IoT and the possible future effects that have them fascinated. The security breaches that have happened already were clearly on the minds of the respondents. Not only has IoT contributed to general online chaos via the Mirai botnet and other incidents, the trend of integrating connected devices ever more deeply into vital infrastructure reveals the potential for even more destructive attacks.

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It's your alarm in the bedroom and your assistant in the kitchen. It gives you news and weather in the living room, and maybe music and sports updates in the basement or garage. Multiple Echo devices work seamlessly around your house. Just ask, and Echo uses spacial perception to determine which device should respond. It makes sense to have Echo in multiple rooms, and when you buy multiple devices right now you'll be rewarded with a discount. If you buy three Echo Dots @ $49.99 per Dot, You'll get a $20 discount. If you buy two of the all new Echo Show devices @ $229.99 per Show, Amazon will give you a generous $100 discount if you use the code SHOW2PACK. Echo Show gives you all the benefits of Alexa, but features a screen for presenting information, videos, weather, or even video calls to other Echo device users. Go in with a friend or family member on this one.

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They have the resources, the expertise and, though they may not realize it, the need -- but it turns out that enterprises are often the ones that don't yet have IPv6.

That's the finding of the Internet Society its latest report on IPv6 deployment, published five years after the organization began a worldwide push to deploy the new addressing protocol and almost 20 years after the protocol was defined.

Around 13 percent of the top one million websites is inviting IPv6 traffic today, it said, citing a Hurricane Electric analysis of data provided by Amazon.com. That figure rises to around 22 percent for the top 1,000 websites.

In 37 countries, IPv6 is used for over 5 percent of internet traffic, according to Google, which bases its estimate on traffic hitting its load-balancers.

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Six weeks ago, Microsoft decreed that Windows 10 would be refreshed twice a year, in September and March, to make its release schedule more predictable, and thus, more tolerable to enterprises.

Almost unnoticed was that the Redmond, Wash., company announced a virtually identical scheme for corporate subscribers to Office 365. Office 365 ProPlus -- the application suite provided to customers under plans like the $20-per-user-per-month Enterprise E3 and the $35-per-user-per-month Enterprise E5 -- would be upgraded every six months, just like Windows 10.

Calling it an "alignment with Windows 10," Microsoft outlined how it plans to deliver and support ProPlus, starting in September. We've distilled Microsoft's description to the most important questions and, of course, answers.

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In April, United Airlines hit a huge pocket of public relations turbulence after a passenger was forcibly removed from one of its partners’ airplanes. The incident raised questions about blindly following procedures, passenger rights, and United’s executive leadership.

Here’s another question it raised: Could artificial intelligence (AI) have prevented the embarrassing drama from even happening?

[ Find out which which deep learning network is best for your organization. | Get the latest insights with our CIO Daily newsletter. ]

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The long, awkward silence is always the first sign that a previously over-confident hacker realizes he's suddenly become the victim. It happens every time.

The malicious hacker had been firing his “ion cannon” at my network address trying to overwhelm my home computer and internet connection. I had sent him an email the day before letting him know that I knew who he was, what he did for a living (he was a budding wedding photographer), his name (Rick), and that he was newly married to a beautiful girl. That’s enough to frighten off most hackers, but sometimes, like Rick, they persist.

On his private, Tor-protected instant messaging channel, Rick was telling his buddies that he was getting ready to launch an even bigger distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against me. He had been using a child-like hacker tool, but now he was thinking of paying a professional hacking service to attack me.

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Boosted by its ties to Android mobile application development, Kotlin is a rising star in the Tiobe language popularity index.

The statically typed language developed by JetBrains initially for the Java Virtual Machine, reached the top 50 in the index this month for the first time, ranking 43rd, although it has a rating of just 0.346 percent. Still, this places Kotlin ahead of other more-established languages such as Groovy and Erlang. Kotlin was ranked 80th just last month.

Software quality services vendor Tiobe’s index assesses language popularity based on a formula that examines searches in popular search engines such as Google, Wikipedia, Bing, and Yahoo, looking at the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors related to a language.

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CIOs often lament the IT talent shortage, and unless you’re able to lure young techies with stock options, perks and too-good-to-pass-up pay, you may find yourself leading a department stuck in its legacy ways. One solution is to train your veteran IT staff to evolve with the times by tapping a hidden teacher pool: millennial “digital natives.”

Aflac CIO Julia Davis has made great strides on this front by creating a reverse mentoring program that pairs veteran IT staff with “apprentices,” most of whom are recent college graduates. The initiative is enabling her 470 employees, whose average age numbers 48, to benefit from a corporate mind-meld intended to modernize and transform IT service delivery, Davis told CIO.com in a recent interview.

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With more than 35 years of health IT experience, UC Irvine Health CIO Chuck Podesta has witnessed the dramatic evolution of IT as well as the impact that technology has had in transforming medical operations and patient care.

That said, Podesta believes the healthcare industry still lags in certain areas, particularly in its adoption of cloud computing and its efforts to develop effective, efficient partnerships with vendors. As a frequent speaker at national conferences, Podesta offers strategies to bring health IT to its next level while at the same time developing strategies that advance the effectiveness of his own organization's technology. Here, he shares some of his insights and ideas:

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Over the next five years, the demand for IT workers will get a big boost from an unlikely source: manufacturers looking for networking pros who can help them run the industrial internet of things (IIoT).

Manufacturers in the US, Germany, Japan and China are on the cutting edge of something called Industry 4.0, which is digital transformation applied to manufacturing – bringing with it all the change, opportunities and challenges that represents. And it includes IoT devices that contribute to the manufacturing process.

+Related: What is Industry 4.0?

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At its Discover conference this week, HPE is pulling back the curtains on firmware security and advances in software-defined IT aimed to reduce costs and increase system flexibility for its users and help it stay ahead of competitors in next-generation infrastructure.

There is plenty of competition in the market for converged and hyperconverged data center systems, but at the moment HPE has the lead in composable infrastructure, a term gaining currency in the system management world.

Composable infrastructure allows data center managers to deploy infrastructure resources using software commands, notes Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights and Strategy.

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The LabelWriter 450 Turbo rapidly handles all of your labelling and filing needs and nimbly prints postage. Printing 4-line address labels at an impressive 71 labels per minute, the LabelWriter 450 Turbo label printer saves you a lot of time. It connects directly to your PC or Mac, making it easy to print customized graphics, barcodes, address labels and more. You can even print directly from popular programs including Microsoft Word and the Mac Address Book. Plus, thermal printing technology eliminates the cost of ink and toner while the label printer’s sleek, compact design makes it a great addition to every workplace. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 1,350 people on Amazon (read reviews) where its typical list price of $69.95 has been reduced 37% to $44.15. See this deal on Amazon.

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At its heart, Industry 4.0 is digital transformation applied to manufacturing – bringing with it all the change, opportunities and challenges that represents.

Industry 4.0 connects the supply chain and the ERP system directly to the production line to form an integrated, automated and, potentially, autonomous manufacturing processes that make better use of capital, raw materials, and human resources.

At the moment, Industry 4.0 is a bit of a fuzzy concept because it goes well beyond just connecting machines to other machines or automating another step in a production line with a robot, said Ned Hill, an economist at The Ohio State University who focuses on manufacturing and economic development.

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Since its release 21 months ago, Windows 10 has forced companies to rethink how enterprise mobile management (EMM) is handled in their corporate environments.

Unlike its predecessors, Windows 10 comes with EMM tools, allowing enterprises to deploy and configure PCs and other Windows devices using so called "modern management" approaches that include mobile device management (MDM) API hooks and controls.

Many of the basic application and system provisioning functions required for business laptops and PCs running Windows 10 can now be done through the OS's EMM control consoles, said Phil Hochmuth, IDC's Program Director of Enterprise Mobility.

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Poor iPhone 7, only halfway through its first year and already totally overshadowed by whatever is coming next. After all, 2017 marks the iPhone’s 10th birthday, so Apple is reportedly gearing up to make its anniversary edition extra special.

We’ll keep track of the latest rumors and how plausible they are, and we’ll put them in one spot (this one!) so you can pop on over whenever you want to read the latest.

If you passed on the iPhone 7 to wait for the iPhone 8—or the iPhone 7s or whatever name Apple decides to use—it sounds like the next phone could be the design refresh you were waiting for. Just don’t expect the headphone jack to return.

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