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Will Apple Inc unveil a Spotify killer at WWDC? Here’s what to expect from the big event

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 06/05/2015 - 15:47

Apple’s top brass will take to a San Francisco stage on Monday to show off the company’s plans for the coming year, and maybe even introduce a new product or two. Here’s what to expect from the Worldwide Developers Conference this year:

Music to your ears: Apple’s biggest announcement is expected to be the launch of its new music service, which reports indicate will cost $10 per month and compete with both Spotify — which lets users call up songs on-demand — and streaming radio services such as Pandora.

Apple completely changed the face of music with the 1998 introduction of iTunes, which more or less killed the CD. Now, however, streaming makes up an estimated 27 per cent of the U.S. music industries revenue, up from 21 per cent in 2013. Music downloads still make up the majority of revenue, but are on a downward trajectory — giving Apple a lot of motivation to get into the streaming world.

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesApple CEO Tim Cook. The company's biggest announcement at WWDC is expected to be the launch of its new music service.

Apple may seem like a latecomer here, but carries the advantage of being able to bake its music service into the iPhone, iPod and Mac. If Apple comes up with something that “just works” and is competitive on price, which reports indicate it will be, then it may not be late to the party after all.

What about TV?: For months, there’s been speculation that Apple was going to release both a new package for television service and a new music service at this year’s WWDC. But recent reports indicate that the TV service is no longer planned to be part of the announcement.

As The Washington Post recently reported, Apple found it too hard to agree with broadcasters and other content providers on the terms it would need to offer a slim bundle of channels to its customers for a monthly rate. Kang reports that the service is expected to be announced in the coming months, but likely not in time for viewers to pick it up for the beginning of the fall TV season.

Get smart: The first devices running Apple’s HomeKit have already hit the market, a year after the company first announced its push into the smart home market at 2014’s WWDC. An Apple document indicates that the company wants the Apple TV to be the hub of the smart home — others’ devices will talk to the TV, which in turn can be controlled by iOS devices such as the iPhone or iPad.

The document also says that users will be able to group accessories and control them by using Siri, Apple’s voice assistant. “Depending on the app you use for your HomeKit-enabled accessories, you might be able to group accessories together in homes, rooms, or scenes,” the document says. “This is useful if you want to control a group of accessories with a single Siri command.”

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On watch for the Watch: Apple’s kept pretty tight reins on its latest gadget, the Apple Watch, but the New York Times reports that the company will release a new tool kit for developers to give them a little more room to play with the device. To date, the Watch’s apps have been fairly restrained, often carefully curated versions of existing iPhone apps. A new developer’s kit could throw the gates open — or at least hold the door politely — for more innovation on the Watch.

Meanwhile, it’s also about to get much easier to buy Apple’s watch. The company said Thursday that that it will sell the device in its stores within the next two weeks. In a press release, the company also said that all orders placed through May will be filled within two weeks with the exception of one model: the 42 mm Space Black Stainless Steel model with the Space Black Link Bracelet.

Software updates: Other than the music service, updates to iOS and Mac OS X will probably be the company’s main product announcements. (Hardware is not normally on the WWDC agenda. This tends to be mostly a software show — its audience is, after all, ostensibly developers and not consumers.)

Apple introduced a lot of change to both operating systems last year — HomeKit, HealthKit, more on Apple Pay, all of Yosemite etc. — and so many are expecting this to be a year devoted more to polishing and refining both systems. 9 to 5 Mac’s Mark Gurman reports in a very comprehensive post that the main changes are expected to be a refreshed user interface and font for both systems, as well as security and stability improvements and support for Apple’s expected music service.

Another thing of note from Gurman’s report? Possible support for split-screen apps on the iPad, which means you would better be able to multitask.

The little station that could: How these employees saved Victoria’s CHEK News after buying it for $2

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 06/05/2015 - 14:05

For Tess van Straaten, life was looking good in the spring of 2009.

After 14 years building her career away from her hometown of Victoria, B.C., she was finally back. She had landed her dream job anchoring the weekend newscast for CHEK, the local station she had grown up watching.

A couple of weeks after starting the job, a reporter from the local newspaper got in touch for an interview.

“The reporter asked, ‘Aren’t you worried about the station closing down?'” van Straaten said. “I had no idea what she was talking about. What do you mean they’re going to close the station down? They can’t close the station down.”

It’s the will of the employees

Van Straaten was right – in the end, the station’s embattled former owner Canwest Global Communications Corp didn’t close the station down. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Soon after that interview, Canwest issued layoff notices to CHEK employees and gave notice of plans to shut the lights off on Aug. 31, in order to satisfy bondholders as the now-defunct Canadian media giant fought to avoid financial collapse.

But five-and-a-half years later, CHEK is still chugging along, with more local programming, less funding and no major media conglomerate with other sources of revenue to fall back on. The station may not be printing money – all news director Rob Germain would say about the state of CHEK’s finances is that there’s “no imminent threat of shutting down” – but the fact it’s around at all is an achievement, given the uncertain future for local television across the country.

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CHEK’s employees saved the station by buying it. With the help of then-28-year-old entrepreneur Levi Sampson, who had played a major role engineering a similar employee buyout of a mill in Nanaimo, they pooled their money, found other investors and convinced Canwest and its bondholders to hand over the station for a toonie, plus $2.5 million to cover operating losses while CHEK rebuilt its programming schedule from scratch.

“It’s the will of the employees,” Sampson said. “How badly they wanted to save that station, how they truly believed they could make a go of it as an independent station in this country.”

When it became apparent no buyers were coming forward and Canwest wasn’t looking very hard to find one, Germain asked Sampson for some advice. CHEK had covered the employee-led purchase of Nanaimo’s Harmac pulp mill the year before and was wondering if Sampson could help the station do something similar.

Sampson met with CHEK’s employees, who were immediately enthusiastic about the idea. With about two dozen employees at the time, all but seven committed to a buy-in price of $15,000 for each full-time worker, adding up to a 25 per cent stake for employees.

Chad Hipolito For National PostIsland owned and operated CHEK News reporter, Tess van Straaten.

Fans of the station flooded Canwest’s offices with phone calls and letters of support for the sale. Canwest was dealing with its own crisis, however, and not everyone had patience for the campaign. The company rejected the group’s first offer.

The employee-led team got some behind-the-scenes help making its next move from an unlikely source: Canwest’s then-chief executive Leonard Asper. While members of the community were blasting the media giant for being heartless, Asper was quietly helping CHEK employees hire a lawyer and prepare an offer that would be more acceptable to bondholders.

“You have a tornado going on in the company, a bunch of creditors trying to enforce their ability to take away the company… you have a corporate office that’s very distracted trying to manage all these different interests,” Asper said in an interview Friday. ” It’s just a very clinical, non-personal view. It’s capitalism in its rawest form at work. There’s no human element to it.”

Eventually, the bondholders came around and accepted the bid, saving the station at the very last minute. Asper remembers it as a bright spot during a dark time.

Chad Hipolito For National PostCHEK News Director and Digital Manager Rob Germain.

“I feel great about it. It was great to see the right thing happen to people,” he said. “We were able to stem the tide and stop this machine from just destroying everything in its wake. It was one of the proudest moments a lot of us had.”

Today, CHEK faces the same challenges as the rest of the industry. According to data released by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Canadians of all ages watched less traditional television in 2013 than they did the previous year, with Internet television viewing increasing 46% over the same period.

Fewer viewers means fewer advertising dollars. Private stations suffered a 7.2 per cent revenue drop in 2014 to $1.8 billion from $1.94 billion the previous year, largely because advertisers spent $117.1 million less on local television, according to the CRTC.

If the company does well, we do well

Vertically integrated telecommunications companies like BCE Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc. don’t lose out entirely when viewers switch from cable to the Internet because they sell those viewers broadband as well. That’s not the case for a station like CHEK, which relies on advertising for revenue.

Justin Nielson, a senior research analyst at SNL Kagan who covers the television industry, said being small and local can work in an independent station’s favour. Viewers in small markets have fewer options for getting local news, which means a regional station can command a larger share of available advertising dollars.

“You could see those operations, small, local, regional broadcasters, being still competitive and profitable,” he said. “They’ve built an audience over time, they still have a very reputable name in terms of local news and they’re able to program accordingly.”

Van Straaten said being a shareholder in addition to an employee makes her and her coworkers more willing to go the extra mile for the business. The station’s staff took an across-the-board pay cut to help CHEK survive after the CRTC eliminated a fund for local television, allowing them to keep the station afloat without resorting to layoffs.

“Every time I go in the break room, I’m turning the lights off when nobody’s there,” van Straaten said. “If the company does well, we do well. We’re all more invested in making the company a success.”

 

Citrix brings the cloud to your desktop

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 06/05/2015 - 12:56

When you think about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the cloud is rarely top-of-mind. All sorts of issues, from latency to security, make people look askance. However, at its annual conference, Synergy, Citrix announced an interesting solution: Citrix Workspace Cloud (CWC).

The culmination of a strategy born five years ago, CWC provides a cloud-based control plane (which is based on Microsoft Azure), but allows the rest of the components to reside anywhere. That means sensitive desktops can live safely in the data centre if need be. During his conference keynote, CEO Mark Templeton described it as a platform of services for high speed prototyping, delivery, and management of complete workspaces. Delivered as a service, he said CWC “contemplates being global out of the box.”

“The control plane design is a way forward to make infrastructure services more consumable,” he went on. “We try to give choices, and accept that some customers won’t put their data into a cloud they don’t own.”

Jesse Lipson, vice president and general manager, Workflow and Workspace Cloud, showed conference attendees how workloads and data (known as resources) stored anywhere could be connected to CWC through workspace cloud connectors. Resources can be as varied as VDAs, storage zones, and Active Directory, located on premises, at a host, or in the cloud.

“Creation of workspaces is so easy that even a GM like me can demo it for you,” he joked, while creating a workspace in a few clicks by adding predefined resources and services, defining the user population who’d receive it, and finally publishing the new workspace. He also demonstrated how moves, adds, and changes to existing workspaces can now be accomplished in real time; all the user needs to do is refresh the screen to see the changes.

Templeton noted that CWC can be a way to control shadow IT, since it gives departments the tools to design and manage their own workspaces, while IT does the design and architecture.

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Lipson also demonstrated another component, Lifecycle Management, a service that automates the design, deployment, and management of Citrix products such as XenDesktop, XenApp, XenMobile, NetScaler and Citrix WorkSpace Suite, as well as third party products. It provides monitoring, redundancy, auto-scaling and disaster recovery of application services. Cloud-based control enables access to the Citrix Lifecycle Management console from anywhere, from any device, for provisioning application services, managing users, monitoring and scaling. Lifecycle Management also lets administrators automate common tasks, including version upgrades.

Using Blueprints, which Lipson described as recipes that describe how to accomplish a series of actions to, for example, create a new workspace, or build a XenApp production environment, or deploy a SQL Server. Partners can also create and share their own Blueprints, as can customers.

“This architecture is great as an advanced tool for Citrix Workspace Cloud, but it’s not tightly coupled to the Workspace Cloud, or really to Citrix technologies at all,” Lipson noted. “It’s really just a powerful blueprinting, deployment management engine. And then we have scripts, which automate manual tasks.”

Pricing and packaging for CWC will be announced closer to the product release in Q3 of this year. Meanwhile, a free test drive is available for those who wish to try out the technology.

 

It looks like Apple Pay is failing to catch on with a lot of retailers

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 06/05/2015 - 09:53

CHICAGO — In a January earnings call with investors, Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook made a confident prediction: “2015 will be the year of Apple Pay,” he said.

Since then, the company has aggressively courted retailers – and claimed significant success. “We’ve spoken to all of the top 100 merchants in the U.S., and about half will accept Apple Pay this year, with many more the following year,” a company spokesperson recently told Reuters.

But interviews with analysts, merchants and others suggest that Apple’s forecast may be too optimistic and that many retailers remain skeptical about the payment system.

The service is one of Apple’s biggest bets, a chance to tie customers more tightly to its phones and its new smart watch, as well as to take a tiny bite from every retail transaction.

To assess Apple’s progress, Reuters worked from the National Retail Federation’s list of the top 100 U.S. retailers, surveying the 98 that had brick-and-mortar outlets (two of the top 100 sell only online). Eighty-five supplied detailed responses, and 11 others supplied information only about whether or not they accept Apple Pay. Two did not respond.

While some of the country’s top merchants said they use and like the mobile payment system, fewer than a quarter of the retailers said they currently accept Apple Pay, and nearly two-thirds of the chains said categorically they would not be accepting it this year. Only four companies said they have plans to join the program in the next year.

The top reasons retailers cited for not accepting Apple Pay were insufficient customer demand, a lack of access to data generated in Apple Pay transactions and the cost of technology to facilitate the payments. Some merchants said they were holding out because they plan to participate in a new mobile payment system to be launched by a coalition of retailers later this year.

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Reliable statistics on mobile wallet payments are difficult to obtain. Neither the companies offering payment systems nor credit card issuers will disclose detailed data about usage. But analysts agree that they are used for only a tiny percentage of U.S. retail transactions.

An online survey conducted by Verifone and Wakefield Research released in January 2015 found that mobile wallets accounted for about 4 per cent of the overall payments market for in-store retail transactions in the U.S.

How that market is divided up among the major players is not entirely clear. An ITG Investment Research study conducted in November, soon after Apple Pay was launched, found that the service accounted for 1 per cent of digital payment dollars, while Google Wallet accounted for 4 per cent.

Since then, analysts agree, Apple Pay’s market share has grown dramatically. “In the last six months or so there has been more acceptance of Apple Pay,” said Steve Weinstein, senior internet analyst for ITG. “Google Wallet has kind of stalled out.”

In January, Apple’s Cook, citing internal data, said Apple Pay accounted for two out of three dollars spent in “contactless payments,” but the company did not provide data to back up those numbers.

They have called and tried to persuade us even after we communicated our decision to them

Still, it is clear Apple Pay has made considerable progress in signing up vendors, with more than 700,000 sites as of March 9, the last time Apple updated its numbers, including self-service terminals such as vending machines, laundromats and parking meters.

Interviews with retailers suggest that the company has relied on aggressive marketing to recruit participants. “They have been pushing hard and it’s been that way for months,” said the representative of one large retailer that has no plans to accept Apple Pay. “They have called and tried to persuade us even after we communicated our decision to them.” The company hasn’t adopted Apple Pay, he said, because not even a “small percentage” of its customers have asked for it.

SPEED, CONVENIENCE AND SECURITY

Many companies that accept Apple Pay report that they and their customers are happy with it. Whole Foods spokesman Michael Silverman said that Apple Pay transactions accounted for 2 per cent of its sales dollars as of March and that it expects use to rise.

“Our shoppers are really enjoying the speed, convenience and security of Apple Pay,” he said.
But for other retailers and consumers, Apple has yet to answer the question “what is in it for us if we use Apple Pay?” said Alberto Jimenez, program director for mobile payments at IBM, which provides technology to mobile wallet makers and retailers. Jimenez would not say whether Apple is among their customers.

The program doesn’t offer loyalty rewards to customers, as companies such as Starbucks do with their mobile applications, nor does it provide customer information to retailers about Apple Pay users.

For 28 of the retailers surveyed by Reuters, lack of access to data about customers and their buying habits is a key reason they don’t accept Apple Pay. “One of the biggest concerns is data control,” said Mario De Armas, senior director, international payments at the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

When a credit card is swiped through a terminal, the retailer gets the name and card number, which when combined with publicly available demographic data like address, phone and email, helps retail chains send well-targeted promotions to customers.

Wal-Mart and 18 of the other top retailers are part of a coalition challenging Apple Pay with a mobile wallet called CurrentC, which is scheduled to launch in mid-2015.

Retailers participating in CurrentC won’t be allowed to accept any other mobile wallet until 2016, according to a senior official at MCX, the company launching CurrentC. For that reason alone, 19 of the NRF’s top 100 retailers will not be able to accept Apple Pay before the end of the year, although three of them said they plan to accept Apple Pay by early 2016.

Another reason cited for not accepting Apple Pay by retailers surveyed by Reuters was the cost of terminals and computer upgrades required to accept a mobile wallet.

“What is the return on investment?” asked Maureen Elworthy, director of treasury at Ahold USA, which runs supermarket chains like Stop&Shop, during a panel on Apple Pay at an industry conference. “The is negative,” she said.

She told Reuters that Ahold USA does not plan to accept any wallets because they see it as an investment cost without immediate returns.

The cost to merchants of accepting a mobile wallet is highly variable depending on what technology they already have in place.

Retailers face an October deadline to upgrade their credit card terminals to accept cards with microchips, and the new terminals will typically also support contactless payments such as Apple Pay.

But mobile payments also require back-end systems that can be costly, especially for a large retail chain accepting multiple types of mobile payment systems, said Rick Dakin, chief executive of Coalfire, a security systems and IT infrastructure firm.

Apple declined to comment on the cost to retailers of accepting Apple Pay but referred Reuters to Ian Drysdale, Executive Vice-President at payment processor Elavon, which works with Apple.

Drysdale downplayed the cost issue.

“As long as the retailer is upgrading to the new payment terminals, which are enabled with contactless payment technology, there is very little additional cost to accept Apple Pay,” he said.

Ultimately the success of Apple Pay may rest with iPhone users like Scott Braeckel, an iPhone 6 owner who has used Apple Pay – but only once.

Braeckel said he liked the Apple Pay experience, but he generally pays with a credit card, even at places like McDonald’s, which accepts the mobile wallet.

A survey released in March by shopper insight firm InfoScout and PYMNTS.com of more than 1,000 iPhone6 users found that while 15 per cent of them had tried the payment system, only 6 per cent said they continued to use it.

“It was an interesting curiosity but hasn’t moved into daily use for me because frankly, I don’t really shop at places it’s taken,” Braeckel said. “The places I mostly shop, which are my grocery store and pharmacy, don’t accept it.”

Reporting by Nandita Bose in Chicago and San Francisco; Editing by Peter Henderson and Sue Horton

© Thomson Reuters 2015

10 reasons I know I’m becoming an old gamer

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 06/05/2015 - 08:19

I recently celebrated my 41st birthday, but I don’t feel particularly old.

I still get breathlessly excited at the thought of a new Star Wars movie. I love Lego like a seven-year-old with aspirations to be an architect. And it goes with out saying that I’m still a pretty big fan of video games.

However, as time goes on I’m encountering more and more signs both mental and physical that I’m no longer the young, hard-charging, resilient gamer I once was.

I figured if ever I were to get some sympathy on this score it might be by writing about my woes for a newspaper audience – a demographic the likely age of which ought to put at least a few people in my camp.

And so I present the following: A list of 10 reasons I know I’m slowly becoming an old gamer.

1. I like to play on normal or (gasp!) easy difficulty.

Turns out I no longer play most games to prove how good I am at them. All I really want is to beat up some bad guys who don’t repeatedly kill me in the process and experience a nice little story. The only time I really feel a competitive spark is when I’m playing online and can tell by the squeaky voice in my ear that I’m up against some nimble-fingered adolescent so young he probably shouldn’t even be wearing big boy pants, much less playing a violent shooter.

2. Retro means something really different to me than it does to younger players.

When I walk into stores like GameStop I see college-age gamers wearing ironic Pokemon t-shirts talking about “retro” games that I played on Xbox 360 in my 30s. My daughter thinks of the Wii the same way I think of my old ColecoVision. To her, playing a game like Super Mario Galaxy 2 is really kicking it old school.

3. I have arthritis in my trigger finger.

Seriously. I’m not even kidding about this one. The top joint of my right index finger swells and gets stiff and sore when I’m reviewing shooters. I actually saw my doctor about it this spring. She basically just said, “Yeah, that’s arthritis all right. Take some ibuprofen. And for heaven’s sake, take a break from playing games.”

Chad SapiehaThe author's first game injury, a scar earned around the age of nine or ten when he was playing Centipede using a roller controller.

4. Speaking of video game injuries, I have a scar on my palm – from playing Centipede in the arcade circa 1983.

My skin got caught between the control ball and the edge of the cabinet during a particularly aggressive attempt to roll to the left. I didn’t get stitches, but the thing bled like a chest wound on M*A*S*H. I suffered plenty of other controller injuries in that era (Intellivision controllers were basically death traps for hands) but this is the only one that’s left its mark well into adulthood.

5. I wear headphones at night to keep from waking the family.

Because if I want to enjoy surround sound explosions I’ll end up paying for it the next day with a grumpy wife. What’s more, I one hundred per cent understand her point of view. I would feel exactly the same if someone woke me up during the night with loud explosions and gunfire. Grown-up love and true empathy can be a real bummer for a gaming hobby.

6. Most video game protagonists are younger than me. A lot younger. Some by as much as 20 or 30 years.

It’s most evident in Japanese role-playing games, which basically feature groups of teens adventuring to save the world. And if their large casts of characters include a token oldie he’s often depicted as being in his 40s (because that’s basically like being dead) and is probably extremely world weary and grouchy as all get out. Just like every 40-something I know.

RazorsoftWhat photo-realistic games looked like in 1990.

7. I remember being convinced that a game released 25 years ago was pretty much photo-realistic.

When I played TechnoCop on Sega Genesis in 1990 I told all my friends that it was pretty much like I was controlling a movie. And when I think back about it now I still think of its awesome body disintegration effect as being super gory, like something out of RoboCop. Now I complain about the foliage in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt looking too much like a painting. Go figure.

8. Setting up online matches with folks my age is a major undertaking.

Work schedules, family routines, and endless adult responsibilities can make arranging social gaming with friends and relatives a serious chore. It’s not like we can just jump online and reliably find each other anytime after 4:00 p.m. on a school day. We’ve all got hectic lives and minimal spare time, which we value like gold. (Also, I realize I like to use the word “folks” sometimes. Pretty sure that alienates from everyone, not just gamers, under the age of 30.)

9. The game developers I interview all seem to have silver-streaked hair.

This may only be evident to a person with a job like mine, but I’ve noticed lately that many of the creative people I interview who are in charge of major franchises are in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s. That wasn’t the case when I started doing this job nearly 20 years ago. I’ve also watched the mean age of reporters at game junkets slowly grow over that same time. Plenty of salt-and-pepper beards with notebooks out there.

10. To me, Donkey Kong is a kidnapping SOB.

To most people born after 1985 Donkey Kong is just another happy Nintendo hero. Say the name to me and I think of the evil, barrel-tossing, hostage taker that cost me fists full of quarters circa 1981 in the original Donkey Kong arcade game. Nintendo has attempted to explain away modern Donkey Kong’s origins by saying the one we see in Donkey Kong Country, Mario Kart, and Super Smash Bros. is actually the grandson of the original Donkey Kong, who is now referred to as Cranky Kong. I say that’s a bunch of malarkey. Donkey Kong is Donkey Kong, and he’s not a simian to be trusted.

Take it from an old, world weary, grouchy gamer like me.

Michael Calce, aka ‘Mafiaboy,’ says hackers have companies ‘on the defence 24-7’

National Post Tech Desk - Thu, 06/04/2015 - 12:13

Michael Calce, better known as Mafiaboy for his infamous cyber attack at age 15 that shut down websites including Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo, says the best companies can hope for against a growing army of hackers is to prevent and, if that’s not possible, to mitigate the damage.

“This is really a hacker’s world right now. We’re on the defence 24-7,” says Calce, who took his punishment 15 years ago and is now, at age 30, a “white hat” hacker who uses his knowledge to help businesses avoid becoming victims of “black hat” hackers like his younger self.

“I don’t want you to be paranoid – but you probably should be,” he told the crowd at cyber security conference in Toronto on Thursday. “It’s time to start thinking you’re a target, rather than that you’re not a target.”

Calce made it clear during his talk at the Investment Industry Association of Canada conference that he has some practical advice that only comes with a fee for his services, but he said cyber breaches like the recent one at JPMorgan have reduced the need to go looking for business.

Now, companies, including some banks in North America, are coming to him.

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The JPMorgan hack “definitely raised a lot of questions, and banks are starting to buzz a little bit,” Calce said.

He did have some free, if tough to follow advice, including advising that employee use of free wifi and hotspots in hotels and on commuter trains leaves companies vulnerable. In a test, he says his team was able to gain access to a company’s network through the laptop of an employee as his train was passing by the highway they were on.

Another place where companies are vulnerable is through their increasing use of the cloud to store data. Calce predicts there will be a “major” cloud attack on a corporation sometime in the next year, which he said would give the hacker access to any device associated with the company or companies that are the source of the attack.

“I hate cloud. I think you’re putting all your eggs in one basket,” he said, adding that company IT departments are trained to follow rules, while hackers “are dangerous and succeed by thinking outside the box.”

Calce, who got the name Mafiaboy when he adopted a handle used by his brother for legitimate computer activities, also warned that many companies are actually being attacked from within, either intentionally or unintentionally.

“There’s a lot of internal hacking, [and in some cases] someone in the IT department is actually the one hacking here,” he said.

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