Künftig sollen Firmen und Behörden einfacher elektronisch unterschreiben können. Einer entsprechenden Revision des schweizerischen Bundesgesetzes über die elektronische Signatur steht nichts im Weg. In der soeben abgelaufenen Vernehmlassung begrüssen alle interessierten Kreise die Pläne des Bundes.

Der koreanische Elektronikhersteller Samsung hat im ewigen Patentstreit mit Apple vor einem US-Berufungsgericht zur Abwechslung wieder einmal einen Teilerfolg erzielt. Die Bundesrichter hoben eine einstweilige Verfügung gegen Samsung auf, mit der der Verkauf des Smartphones Galaxy Nexus vorerst untersagt wurde.

Nach Orange verzichtet auch Sunrise auf eine Klage gegen die Mobilfunkauktion. Man wolle sich jetzt auf den Netzausbau konzentrieren, erklärte der zweitgrösste Telekomkonzern der Schweiz kurz vor Ablauf der Beschwerdefrist, die am Freitag um Mitternacht endete.

Die Chefsuche beim angeschlagenen Internetkonzern Yahoo verdichtet sich auf zwei Kandidaten: den aktuellen Übergangs-CEO Ross Levinsohn und den Vorstandsvorsitzenden des Videoportals Hulu, Jason Kilar.

Die sich ändernden regulatorischen Vorschriften im Finanzsektor zwingen die Banken verstärkt zu Investitionen in die IT. Was wiederm gute Aussichten für die in diesem Bereich tätigen IT-Anbieter bedeutet.

Die Internetkonzerne Facebook und Yahoo haben einem Bericht von Marketwatch zufolge ihre Patenstreitigkeiten beigelegt. Zugleich soll ein Ausbau der Zusammenarbeit in Bezug auf Online-Inhalte und Werbung beschlossen worden sein.

Die auf Datenintegrationssoftware fokussierte Informatica mit Hauptsitz in Redwood City (Kalifornien) hat gestern Abend nach Börsenschluss eine Gewinnwarnung veröffentlicht und den Ausblick deutlich gesenkt. Der Kurs der Aktie der US-Firma stürzte daraufhin gleich um 30 Prozent ab.

Nach zahlreichen Beschwerden über den plötzlichen Absturz von Apps klagen Software-Entwickler über eine mangelnde Zusammenarbeit mit Apple. Das Unternehmen habe auf Anfragen lediglich Standard-Antworten verschickt, kritisierten mehrere Entwickler nach einem Bericht des Technik-Blogs „Techcrunch".

Die reissende Nachfrage nach seinen Galaxy-Smartphones hat dem südkoreanischen Elektronikkonzern Samsung erneut einen Rekordgewinn beschert. Der operative Gewinn sei binnen Jahresfrist um 79 Prozent auf 5,9 Milliarden Dollar (6,7 Billionen Won) gestiegen, teilte mit.

Die Wettbewerbskommission (Weko) ermittelt gegen Swisscom wegen Verdachts auf Verstösse gegen das Wettbewerbsrecht. Konkurrentin Sunrise hatte vor drei Jahren bei der Weko Anzeige erstattet, weil die Swisscom ihr einen Grossauftrag der Post weggeschnappt hatte.

westlake writes "CNET reports that Apple is turning its back on the EPA supported EPEAT hardware certification program. One of the problems EPEAT sees are barriers to recycling. Batteries and screens glued into place — that sort of thing. There is a price for Apple in this: CIO Journal notes that the U.S. government requires that 95 percent of its electronics bear the EPEAT seal of approval; large companies such as Ford and Kaiser Permanente require their CIOs to buy from EPEAT-certified firms; and many of the largest universities in the U.S. prefer to buy EPEAT-friendly gear."

Snirt writes "A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for 'dinghy'), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In one of the many BitTorrent download cases brought by pornographic film makers, the plaintiff — faced with a motion to quash brought by a "John Doe" defendant — has filed its opposition papers. Interestingly, these included a declaration by its 'forensic investigator' (PDF), employed by a German company, IPP, Limited, in which he makes claims about what his technology detects, and about how BitTorrent works, and attaches, as an exhibit, a 'functional description' of his IPTracker software (PDF)."

walterbyrd writes "The latest in the ridiculous saga of the patent dispute between Apple and Samsung, which has resulted in Samsung phones and tablets being banned from sale in the U.S. is that Samsung, with the help of Google, has been pushing out an over-the-air software update to make its phones worse. Yes, the OTA update is designed to take away a feature, in an effort to convince the judge that the phones no longer violate Apple's patents. The feature in question? The ability to do a single search that covers both the local device and the internet."

An anonymous reader writes "In the event of my untimely demise, my wife and family will need access to all of my private data (email, phone, laptop password, SSN, etc) and financial accounts and passwords (banks, 401(k), mortgage, insurance, etc). What's the best way to securely store all that data knowing the data is somewhat volatile (e.g. password changes) and also that someone else who is not technically savvy will need to access the most up to date version of it? Suggestions include a printed copy in a safe deposit box, an encrypted file, a secure server in the cloud, or maybe a commercial product."

1sockchuck writes "While Facebook and Apple are investing in huge data cathedrals, AOL has decided to go in a different direction: a distributed network of rack-sized server huts that live outdoors. AOL is taking the concept for its unmanned data center and shrinking it into a 'micro data center.' AOL envisions a distributed network of these units, allowing it to quickly roll out new IT capacity for hyperlocal news sites and create its own content distribution network."

Billly Gates writes "Tom's Hardware did another benchmark showdown, since several releases of both Firefox and Chrome came out since their last one. Did Mozilla clean up its act and listen to its users? The test results are listed here. Firefox 13.01 uses the least amount of RAM with 40 tabs opened, while Chrome uses the highest (surprisingly). Overall, Firefox scored medium for memory efficiency, which measures RAM released after tabs are closed. Also surprising: IE 9 is still king of the lowest RAM usage for just one tab. Bear in mind that these tests were benchmarked in Windows 7. Windows XP and Linux users will have different results, due to differences in memory management. It is too bad IE 10, which is almost finished, wasn't available to benchmark." Safari and Opera are also along for the fight.

theodp writes "Forget about his self-driving cars. CNN reports that Sebastian Thrun's Udacity — where you and 159,999 fellow classmates can take a free, Stanford-caliber online course together at the same time — just might be the future of higher education. Interestingly, of all the students taking Thrun's AI class globally and at Stanford, the top 410 students were online; the 411th top performer was a Stanford student. 'We just found over 400 people in the world who outperformed the top Stanford student,' Thrun said."

another random user writes "A group of Anonymous-affiliated hackers claims to have gained access to the servers in charge of filtering Internet traffic in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the hackers, they have identified a number of domain categories that are currently being blocked. These include websites that host adult content, VPN providers and any other site that could help users bypass censorship mechanisms, social media networks and dating sites, and ones that promote religious views other than Islam. The most 'shocking' discovery, as described by the hackers, is the fact that many websites that offer Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services are also on the list. 'A large part of UAE's population is made of migrant workers and the telecom industry made a lot of profit by overcharging them for international phone calls. But with the raise of VOIP and internet communication they were afraid that this would take away their profits and thus went ahead to block VOIP,' they explained."

An anonymous reader writes with this extract: "Threatpost reports that a judge on the United States Court of Appeals this week ruled that People's United Bank's processes and systems for protecting customer accounts from fraud were not "commercially reasonable." The ruling in People's United Bank (formerly Ocean Bank of Maine) versus Patco Construction Company reverses a lower court's ruling in a case that stems from six allegedly fraudulent transactions that occurred over the period of a week in May, 2009 and drained close to $589,000 dollars from Patco's accounts. Patco alleged that People's United Bank did an inadequate job of protecting them against fraud, ignoring repeated 'high risk' warnings from the bank's fraud detection system. Now the Appeals Court appears to agree. The ruling could have broad implications in the U.S., where businesses that are the victim of account takeovers and fraudulent transactions are suing banks to recover lost funds."

itwbennett writes "British Airways wants to be the airline where everybody knows your name. The idea behind the 'Know Me' program is that by using Google Images to ID passengers, they'll be able to recreate the 'feeling of recognition you get in a favourite restaurant,' Jo Boswell, head of customer analysis at BA told the London Evening Standard. But the more privacy minded among us know that the airline could end up seeing a lot more than your face."

mikejuk writes "The data that is available in social networks is often used to detect the opinion of the crowd — but can it reveal the state of mind of the individual. New research suggests that some simple but non-obvious characteristics of social network use are related to suicide. Data mining is usually about determining things of economic advantage, but in this case, suicide we have a personal loss and an economic one. A new paper by a group of Japanese researchers Naoki Masuda, Issei Kurahashi and Hiroko Onari claims to have found ways of detecting suicidal tendencies — or at least the tendency to think about suicide, so-called 'suicide ideation.' The study used the Japanese social network mixi, which has over 27 million members and allows users to join any of over 4.5 million topic groups — some focusing on the subject of suicide. This provided a study and control group to compare. The most interesting finding is that while users in the suicide group had lots of friends, they didn't have as many transitive relationships i.e. where A friends B friends C friends A. This suggests that it isn't lack of friends but a lack of tight social groupings that is a factor. The same technique could be used to investigate similar problems such as depression and alcohol abuse."

An anonymous reader writes "ARM Holdings has made available Linux kernel support for AArch64, the ARMv8 64-bit architecture. No 64-bit ARMv8 hardware is yet shipping until later this year, but ARM has prepared the 36 patches amounting to 23,000 lines of architecture code for mainline integration."

New submitter smugfunt writes "A number of incidents at schools in Afghanistan, especially girls' schools, have been attributed to poisoning by the Taliban. The World Health Organization has investigated 32 of them but found no poison. "Mass Psychological Illness is the most probable cause," they conclude, the Telegraph reports. The Taliban has consistently denied poisoning schools and have even consented to allow the education of girls in a deal with the government which allows significant Taliban control over the curriculum."

slew writes "Scientist at Griffith University have shown the first absorption image of a single atom isolated in a vacuum. A single atomic ion was confined in an RF Paul trap and the absorption imaged at near wavelength resolution with a phase Fresnel lens. They predict this absorption imaging technique should prove useful in quantum information processing and using the minimum amount of illumination for bio-imaging of light-sensitive samples. Here's a pointer to the paper."