Roundup: Best of TechRadar Pro: OS X 10.10 Yosemite, HyperCat, machine learning and net neutrality

What is HyperCat? Exploring the interoperable 'Internet of Things' specificationHyperCat is a new open specification developed by a consortium of 40 UK-based companies, educational establishments and local authorities that's designed to spur on the development of the Internet of Things (IoT).Backed by £6.4 million of Technology Strategy Board funding, it works by creating an online catalog tagged with metadata that can be read by other IoT devices. This allows for interoperability, meaning streetlights could theoretically automatically communicate with parking sensors instead of only other streetlights (for example).To find out more, TechRadar Pro spoke to Justin Anderson, CEO and co-founder at IoT vendor Flexeye, one of the companies involved in HyperCat's development. Continue reading...HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 reviewThe long-time baby of HP's ProLiant server family has finally been given a Gen8 makeover, with a smart new look and all-new internals to bring it up to current standards. Intel rather than AMD silicon becomes the order of the day here, with a choice of processor accompanied by up to 16GB of ECC-protected RAM, on-board RAID, a couple of Gigabit network ports and USB 3.0 support. It even gets an integrated HP Lights Out (iLO) management controller, further enhancing the appeal of this popular SME platform. Continue reading...Apple OS X 10.10: first impressions of YosemiteThe first Yosemite beta has only just emerged, and so it's clearly not ready for prime-time. However, although some of the new features demoed at WWDC 2014 are absent or broken, enough are baked to the point you can get a feel for how OS X is going to be later this year. Here are our first impressions on some of the highlights, after a day of exploring Yosemite. Continue reading...Machine learning in the cloud: beyond Kinect and CortanaMachine learning is behind more and more of the technology we use every day - and it's not just voice recognition in Kinect and Cortana or Microsoft's futuristic language translation in Skype.Every time you get directions from your GPS or make a credit card transaction or search for a product online, machine learning is predicting the best route, working out whether you're likely to be using a stolen credit card and suggesting what else you might like to buy. So far you've had to be a company with the resources of Amazon or Yahoo to take advantage of machine learning. With its new Machine Learning (ML) Studio service running on Azure, Microsoft is hoping to open it up to anyone who understands statistics – and make it easy to use the predictions from the machine learning models you come up with in the apps where they will be most useful. Continue reading...Are DDoS attacks becoming more sophisticated?If you've taken the time to read the various security articles over the last few months, you'll quickly realise that the relatively nascent Bitcoin is well acquainted with DDoS. Initially, this was to undermine and influence Bitcoin currency, but now it is actually being used to steal Bitcoin funds in the millions of dollars. Of course, the very nature of a ""virtual currency"" is going to be attractive to cyber criminals who see it as an easy target; after all, they only have to steal digital information from a computer. Continue reading...Saving the internet: are new laws about to end net neutrality?Internet regulation has once again entered the spotlight this year, with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) proposing its new Open Internet rule that threatens to impose quite the opposite of what its name suggests.The regulations look set to benefit the web's richest players, with ISPs allowed to offer greater exposure to the highest spenders, creating a bleak outlook for the smaller content providers and those who fight for 'net neutrality'.To get the low-down in the FCC proposals, the opposition, and what all this means for the internet, we fired some questions at James McGough, director of the Broadband World Series for Informa. Continue reading...

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