Apple's "Walled Garden" was built to protect consumers from malicious applications, but it can also protect the company from competition, as Microsoft and Facebook discovered recently. Late last week, Apple refused to allow Microsoft to offer its xCloud streaming gaming app for iOS and iPadOS at the Apple App Store. At the same time, it approved a scaled-down version of Facebook's gaming app, sans streaming gaming, into the store.

Last week we ran a survey asking people which of the CEOs that were questioned by Congress last month is the most trustworthy. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg took the dubious prize for last place. Tim Cook of Apple was voted the most trustworthy. There shouldn't be any competition; Facebook has the tools and information access to assure it is beloved. Yet Apple, which doesn't have anywhere near that level of reach nor engagement, has a far better image. Let's talk about ironic incompetence.

Salesforce continues to offer new products in an expanding demonstration of its platform's relevance to business and society at large. Sustainability Cloud is best understood as a carbon accounting solution that enables organizations to more quickly audit their carbon emissions and take action in that area. This covers a lot.

Once upon a time, it seemed no organization had its finger on the pulse of technology more than research consulting firm Gartner. Global corporations, technology companies, and the investment community have trusted Gartner for insights and analysis across a range of market sectors. But today, that leading position has eroded, and the merits of one of the company's most widely known and used tools, the "Magic Quadrant," has lost its relevance.

Like a lot of you, last week I watched the congressional testimony from the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google -- and there were a lot of apparent things that were problematic. One is that there are folks in Congress that likely shouldn't be in Congress, and another is that each company has some serious issues they haven't dealt with.

U.S. government agencies will remain active in the information technology market, despite the impact of COVID-19 on agency operations. In fact, there is evidence that the occurrence of the virus has spurred agencies to improve IT resources. For example, the General Services Administration in early July launched a new contracting vehicle offering a potential US$50 billion in federal acquisition of IT products and services.

Counterfeit hardware, especially in corporate settings, is a recurring problem that often goes unnoticed. Having such gear online poses serious financial, operational, and security risks. Cybersecurity company F-Secure has released an investigative report detailing counterfeit Cisco Catalyst 2960-X series switches. The report highlights challenges facing organizations that discover counterfeit devices in their IT infrastructure.

I've been covering video conferencing since before we called it video conferencing. It has been an exciting and somewhat painful technology to watch because it seemed like everyone in the segment fundamentally didn't understand that if you don't have interoperability and didn't focus on ease of use, it wouldn't work. Let's talk this week about why Microsoft Teams is trending to be the new standard for video collaboration.

IBM is chasing two of the three technology areas that I think will change the world as we know it over the next two decades. The three technology changes that I'm watching are robotics, AI computing, and quantum computing. IBM's focus has been on AI and quantum computing. I got an update on their AI efforts last week, and they have moved the ball a lot over the last few months.

The success of The Linux Foundation's first virtual summit may well have set the standard for new levels of open source participation. Summit masters closed the virtual doors of the four-day joint gathering on July 2. The event hosted the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2020 and ended with more than 4,000 registrants from 109 countries.

Artificial intelligence will play a major role as we try to move to a post-pandemic world, especially as it pertains to tracking people's health and wellbeing in public areas. Employers will tap technology solutions to help them face challenges such as adhering to new rules and regulations, monitoring compliance, and ensuring employee confidence and morale remains positive.

Digital technologies can help shift health and public safety agencies from a "detect and respond" approach to a "predict and prevent" stratagem. They can also set the stage for a more connected and data-led approach through robust cybersecurity architectures, efficient remote workforces, and secure connectivity services.

Oracle's new offerings, really packaging of existing recent high-performance products for the enterprise market, enable companies to continue running their data and datacenters on premise while still benefitting from gains made by its autonomous database like eliminating most forms of routine maintenance and operations activities.

Tricentis and three survey project collaborators recently published findings that provide new insights on global trends in open-source testing. The study focused on the open-source tool testing industry, not how or if companies and software developers test their code. The results revealed that a lack of technical skills is the major roadblock to open-source tool adoption.

For most organizations, COVID-19 has been a literal transformative agent. Our organizations have almost overnight gone from environments where teleworking was an exception, to where it's the norm. As any student of human nature will tell you, people tend to view "the new" with reservation. There's a temptation when things are new to assume the worst about them. For security pros, this means we often view new things as riskier than things we're familiar with.

With much of the workforce conducting business from home to escape the pandemic, scammers have revved up their trickery to scare victims into falling for credential harvesting schemes. Two new reports lay bare the new twists digital scammers are putting on old approaches to get you to unwittingly give up login credentials.

Open Source Software is becoming much more commonplace within organizations, bringing a different set of risks and perceived challenges compared to closed source or proprietary software. The Information Security Forum has released a report to help security professionals recognize the benefits and perceived challenges of using Open Source Software.

Apple's 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference will probably be known for two things: it was the first time the forum was staged virtually, and it's when Apple announced it would start making Macs based its own processor designs. "Now it's time for a huge leap forward for the Mac, because today is the day we're announcing that the Mac is transitioning to our own Apple silicon," Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the virtual keynote presentation.

Cisco Live was last week, and this was their first large scale virtual event. What made this event very different from the other games was the amount of effort they put into socially responsible projects. Many of the customer projects they highlighted are dealing with a variety of world problems, be they related to the pandemic or not.

Two separate teams of academic researchers have published papers describing flaws in Intel's Software Guard Extensions. SGX enhances application security by letting developers partition sensitive information into enclaves with hardware-assisted enhanced security protection. The aim is to protect application code and data from disclosure or modification.

Apple plans to announce a new processor for its Mac computer line at its virtual World Wide Developers Conference later this month, according to a report. The company will begin using an ARM chip based on Apple's A14 processor, which will be featured in the next iPhone. The computers will continue to use macOS and not Apple's mobile operating system, iOS.

The Linux Foundation is priming the pump to help software engineers get cloud technology-certified through a self-paced bootcamp and discount pricing. LF last week announced the availability of the Cloud Engineer Bootcamp, its first-ever training bootcamp. This new offering enables individuals to go from complete IT beginner to certified cloud engineer in only six months.

When entering into website development contracts, the more you know, the more likely you will be able to avoid common pitfalls. It is your website, but ownership of the intellectual property on the site is not always apparent or obvious. When you engage an information technology vendor to build a new website you probably expect that you will own the IP in the end product.

Some 50 editors working for Microsoft's news operation have learned their contracts won't be renewed and their jobs will be performed by artificial intelligence software, according to reports. The contractors hired through staffing agencies Aquent, IFG and MAQ Consulting were notified May 27 that their services would not be needed beyond June 30. MSN will use AI to do the jobs of the editors.

Building a successful global business is a never-ending juggling act. With what can seem like an unlimited number of moving parts, compromises feel inevitable. Efficiency is traded for simplicity. Optimal long-term solutions are traded for quick and dirty fixes. These tradeoffs can be especially problematic for e-commerce businesses. Inefficiencies aren't just theoretical problems.

When entering into website development contracts, the more you know the more likely you will be able to avoid contract disasters that could prevent your website from launching on time or working properly. There are many stories about failed software development projects, not just in connection with website development contracts, but with all information technology projects.

Switzerland has launched a pilot program for SwissCovid, a contact tracing app based on Apple and Google's jointly developed APIs. The APIs will work with iOS 13.5 and devices running Android 6.0 or higher. The pilot involves several thousand workers at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, ETH Zurich, the Swiss Army, and staff at some hospitals and cantonal administrations.

Developers are the driver of innovation in the world we live in today, said Scott Guthrie, EVP of the Microsoft Cloud+AI Group, in his presentation during the company's virtual Build 2020 conference. "With Azure we built an end-to-end cloud that enables developers to focus on building applications and not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure the applications run on."

Microsoft and Intel researchers have found a way to combine artificial intelligence and image analysis to create a highly effective means to combat malicious software infections. The researchers call their approach "STAMINA" -- static malware-as-image network analysis -- and say it's proven to be highly effective in detecting malware with a low rate of false positives.

Outdated or abandoned open source components are persistent in practically all commercial software, putting enterprise and consumer applications at risk from security issues, license compliance violations, and operational threats, concludes the Synopsys 2020 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis Report. The report highlights trends and patterns in open source usage within commercial applications.