Analysts at the National Security Agency can gain access to the content of U.S. targets’ phone calls and email messages without court orders, NSA leaker Edward Snowden said, contradicting denials from U.S. government sources. U.S. surveillance agencies have weak policy protections in place to protect U.S. residents, but “policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens,” Snowden, the former NSA contractor, said in a . The technology filter designed to protect U.S. communications is “constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the ‘widest allowable aperture,’ and can be stripped out at any time,” Snowden wrote in the chat. “Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border.”
In 2012, Microsoft's Rick Rashid blew an Asian audience away with a live translation of his speech into Mandarin. On Monday, Bing added some of that technology to Bing Voice Search, to cut down the processing response time of voice input into Windows Phone by half, while improving accuracy at the same time. Microsoft said that it is rolling out updates to Windows Phone customers to greatly improve the accuracy of SMS messages that are transcribed using the service, as well as searches performed using voice. The accuracy of those transcriptions has been improved by 15 percent, Microsoft said, while the response time has been halved—from about a second to just about half that. The service also does a a better job of cutting out ambient noise. "Better results and better latency," Michael Tjalve, a member of the Bing Speech team, said in a video describing the improvements. "So you get better results from the speech recognizer, and you get it faster."
British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) reportedly intercepted the electronic communications of foreign politicians during G20 meetings that took place in London in 2009. The agency used a series of techniques to intercept email, steal online login credentials and monitor the phone calls of foreign delegates who attended the meetings, U.K. newspaper Monday. The G20 represents the top 20 economies of the world. The newspaper claims that evidence of GCHQ’s surveillance activity at the meetings was present in documents and PowerPoint presentations classified as top secret that were uncovered by Edward Snowden, a former intelligence contractor who about the U.S. National Security Agency’s call metadata and electronic communication collection programs. According to information from one document, GCHQ and U.K. intelligence service MI6 set up Internet cafes at the G20 meetings in order to extract key logging information and credentials from foreign delegates, giving the agencies “sustained intelligence options” against the targets even after the events ended.
Interacting with your computer gets a massive upgrade in the Windows 8 world, and it doesn't involve your mouse and keyboard. Here's the complete guide to everything you need to know about using gestures with Windows 8. Windows 8 features a wholly new way to navigate the operating system. While your keyboard and mouse aren't going away, now you can use intuitive gestures to complete common computing tasks with ease. ) or a traditional laptop without a touchscreen. In the case of the former, your gestures take the form of taps, slides, and swipes you make while touching the display directly. For non-touchscreen devices, you do the same thing, but on the touchpad instead. For longtime Windows users, gestures might initially feel a bit strange. But once you start interacting directly with the screen instead of relying solely on your keyboard and mouse, you'll find that gestures quickly become completely natural. In fact, they make Windows so easy to use you'll soon wonder how you got along in Windows without them.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled Hassle-Free PC post to bring you the Hassle-Free Phone edition. , maybe talk to friends and hit some stores for hands-on demos. But ultimately your best bet is to compare them directly, to see their specs, strengths, and weaknesses side by side. , a nifty site that compares any two smartphones in exhaustive detail. Let's use the two aforementioned models as an example. All you do is type the names of the two phones you want to compare. PhoneRocket then gives you a quick summary of each one followed by a "winner" based on various ratings and criteria.
If, like many, you use as a sophisticated to-do list, the latest update to the essential software and service is about to dramatically increase its usefulness. Reminders give Evernote a full suite of alarm and notification features, ideal for turning static notes into dynamic action items. The company calls Reminders its "most requested feature of all time." Evernote hasn't exactly reinvented the wheel when it comes to its implementation of Reminders. You simply add an optional Reminder to any note by tapping the alarm clock icon that now appears on screen when you're creating or viewing a note. Reminders do not necessarily have to come with a time and date attached (otherwise they simply appear in the new Reminders area, which I'll discuss in more detail below), but you'll probably want to assign specific deadlines to most of your Reminders. Tap or click the calendar icon to give your Reminder a deadline or other specific timing. This will also give it a pop-up alert when the Reminder comes due.
China has regained the crown for the fastest supercomputer on the planet, according to the semiannual Top500 list, which claims that the Milky Way-2 supercomputer has doubled the performance of the previous leader, the American "Titan" supercomputer, in just six months. Milky Way-2, also known as "Tianhe-2," clusters together more than 32,000 Intel Xeon microprocessors as well as more than 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi chips, the server equivalent of a graphics coprocessor. All told, the two groups of chips can crunch the equivalent of 33.86 petaflops of performance, about double that of Titan, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A "flop" is a floating point operation, one of the basic metrics of a computer performance; a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations. Taken as an abstract measurement, Milky Way-2's high-water-mark isn't that significant. But high performance computers are used for a variety of simulations, including long-term predictive models of earthquakes, how a prototype automobile will perform, predicting the impact of climate change, to trying to assess the destructive power of a nuclear weapon. Generally speaking, the additional performance of a supercomputer means more finely detailed calculations, such as modeling individual particles of air as they pass over a windshield. In this sense, HPCs are the Formula One versions of the more prosaic and power-efficient servers driving cloud services at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. While they're generally owned by governments and research organizations, corporations are also beginning to invest, such as French oil conglomerate Total's investment in a 2.3 petaflop supercomputer to deduce the best locations to drill for oil.
Revelations over the U.S. National Security Agency’s have much of the general public in uproar, but in terms of the controversy’s impact to enterprise IT, some CIOs have measured, albeit watchful reactions. “I don’t see it as a problem for us,” said Mike Zill, CIO of medical-products manufacturer CareFusion. “I don’t see the government doing something to systematically damage our company or any company.” That said, CareFusion already has multiple “highly secure” systems in the company for protecting highly sensitive information, but those systems don’t cover all of CareFusion’s data and employees, Zill said. “The question is, do we push that to everybody? It’s a question of the economics and the risk-to-reward [quotient].” Only certain industries may need to worry, according to another IT professional.
In a recent , 1,500 IT leaders and 2,400 IT pros were polled on the importance of onboarding. When IT leaders were asked about onboarding's importance, the majority agreed that it's necessary but that many aren't doing it well. 62 percent of IT leaders say an onboarding program is extremely valuable in terms of a new employee. 53 percent agreed that it created better cohesion among their teams. 47 percent agreed that contributed to the long term success within the company.
Europe's top privacy watchdog and the digital agenda commissioner both said Monday that more transparency and trust is needed between the European Union and the U.S. following reports of by the U.S. National Security Agency. Cybersecurity is not an excuse for the unlimited monitoring and analysis of the personal information of individuals, said Peter Hustinx, the European data protection supervisor. "If the E.U. wants to cooperate with other countries, including the U.S.A., on cyber security, it must necessarily be on the basis of mutual trust and respect for fundamental rights, a foundation which currently appears compromised," said Hustinx in a statement, released along with his formal Opinion on the Cyber Security Strategy. His formal opinion must be considered by the European Commission in drawing up legislation. He went on to criticize the E.U.'s Cyber Security Strategy, which was put forward by the European Commission in February. Hustinx said the strategy is not clear on how data protection principles will be applied in practice and that it fails to take due account of the proposed Data Protection Regulation and the eTrust Regulation.
The safest passwords are long, seemingly random strings of letters, numbers, and punctuation--and you need a different one for each Web site and application. Unless you have a photographic memory, you need a program where you can securely store your passwords. That way, you only need to remember the one password that will give you access to all the others. You need a password manager, which is essentially an encrypted password database. There's no reason why a good password manager it can't work for Web sites and applications.
Security monitoring—the type involving traditional security information and event management (SIEM)—can be done in some public cloud environments, according to Gartner. And businesses using public cloud services, it's time to think about doing it. Security monitoring of assets that the enterprise has placed in cloud is still not a common practice, but it really should be, said Gartner analyst Anton Chuvakin during his presentation last week at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, Maryland. There is always a "loss of control" when turning corporate data assets over to the cloud, Chuvakin says, but "you can compensate by increasing the visibility that comes with collection of logs and network traffic." Most security monitoring today is done on-premises within the enterprise network using SIEM, intrusion-prevention systems (IPS) and data-loss prevention tools. In he said, it's possible to collect logs and copy them back to the on-premises SIEM.The benefits are that familiar tools are in use and you can obtain a unified view of both the cloud and the traditional environment, he said. On the other hand, there might be bandwidth restraints that make this hard or that the SIEM tools present "conflicts and incompatibilities" in the cloud environment. Chuvakin said enterprise security managers have to ask the question whether their SIEM tool is "cloud-ready" to collect data, which may be presented in unfamiliar form as instances and dynamic provisioning. Some SIEM tools are able to make use of specific software-as-a-service APIs as well to collect logs from public cloud services. Tools from IBM and HP ArcSight, for example, can now monitor Salesforce, Chuvakin noted.
To prevent illegal logging in the Amazon, Gemalto and Cargo Tracck have developed a discreet tracking device that uses Gemalto's tiny and powerful Cinterion BGS2 M2M module to enable cellular communications between trees and Brazil's law enforcement agencies. Smaller than a deck of cards for inconspicuous deployment, the tracking device is camouflaged in a resin case that is made to blend in with tree trunks and installed in remote active harvesting areas deep in the jungle. With a sophisticated power management system that vastly improves power efficiency, the M2M modules in the tracking device can remain active in the field for about a year without being recharged. The devices are also rugged enough to operate reliably in rainforest heat and moisture, while being powerful enough to track trees through remote and dense forests.
A recently published report on potential scenarios of cyber-conflict, The Global Cyber-Game, says it is inevitable that the Internet will be "militarized"—used to serve the needs of military conflict between nations—and that ICT will increasingly be both and a target of such conflict. Published as the result of a lengthy study by the UK's Defense Academy—the educational and academic liaison unit of the Ministry of Defense—the report calls for the Internet to be significantly "hardened" from a security perspective, in order to avoid adverse effects for all its users. There is also a strong warning to governments that in their eagerness to use information technology as a weapon of war against other nations, they should avoid creating malware that will "proliferate" and cause wider harm. Transparency is a likely part of any scenario of digitally mediated conflict or competition, the academy says. During the current period of "rising alarm" over possible cyber-warfare, "information transparency is likely to be a persistent reality," it says. "All strategy and policy should be made as if it will become public."
Facebook has opened its first data center outside the U.S., using 100 percent renewable energy and operating on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. Up to now many of for not using renewable energy, but the one in Sweden—located where the River Lule meets the Gulf of Bothnia—may go some way in turning things around. The data center at Lule is now handling live data traffic from around the world, with all the servers and other equipment powered by locally generated hydro-electric energy. "Not only is it 100 percent renewable, but the supply is also so reliable that we have been able to reduce the number of backup generators required at the site by more than 70 percent," according to a Facebook statement.
even got started. These were more than the traditional shots pitting IBM solutions against HP products, and HP likely won't know how hard Big Blue hit it until its reps talk to IT folks who attended both events. EMC and Dell joined IBM in hosting events prior to HP. Each presented a similar story, one driven by marketing, showcasing financial customer benefits and largely playing down products, particularly hardware. But IBM's timing and approach appeared particularly well-planned, much like a campaigning politician who anticipates a mistake an opponent had repeatedly made. This is pertinent-HP CEO Meg Whitman has a political background-but such skills were not evident in Las Vegas.
While the curious are looking to get their hands on a pair of Google's Glass, companies also may be looking to weave the computerized eyeglasses into their businesses. development for Mercury Intermedia in Brentwood, Tenn. "It's important for someone working offsite to have information about the location they're going to and to be able to get information about the task they're going to perform." for the first time. of the device in the hands of several thousand developers and early adopters.
Microsoft will probably price its own 8-inch Surface tablet running Windows RT at $349, just 6 percent higher than Apple's iPad Mini but nowhere near the basement $199 of Android rivals, an analyst said last week. Sameer Singh, an analyst who covers tablets and smartphones at his Tech-Thoughts website, pegged the price of using a bill of materials (BOM) estimate largely based on industry-wide commodity component costs. Using the same techniques last year—akin to the "virtual" tear-downs that other research firms have conducted before a rumored product is actually released—Singh accurately predicted the eventual retail prices of Microsoft's Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets. His sight-unseen BOM for an 8-inch, 16GB Surface RT tablet totaled $203.40, which included a $13 charge for manufacturing.
Both Facebook and Microsoft said late Friday that they had been given permission from the U.S. government to disclose how many times the two companies had been asked to turn over user information to the Feds as part of a national security order. However, the data comes with so many caveats that little information can be gleaned from it. For their part, Google and Twitter opted out of similar disclosures, precisely for those reasons. For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6000 and 7000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities, the company said in a blog post. For its part, Facebook said that it had received 9,000 requests of the same nature during the same period. Both Facebook and Microsoft have been named in as the source of the information.
Reader Tammy wrote in with this hassle: "Whenever I try to print a page from the Internet, the size of the print and the photos is extremely small and difficult to read. I do not have this problem with Word documents." Tammy says she uses Windows 8, but neglected to specify which browser--so I'm going to assume Internet Explorer. Let me be the first to note that Internet Explorer can be terrible when it comes to printing. On my Windows 8 system, for example, I went to any number of pages on Microsoft's MSN (the default site for IE), then loaded Print Preview. The result every single time: several pages of little more than links, with none of the actual text of the story I was viewing.
Tweeting has become so popular that the Oxford English Dictionary broke one of its own rules to add "tweet" to its lexicon this month. "Tweet" is listed as both a noun and a verb that's used in social networking. The addition stands out because it breaks an Oxford English Dictionary rule that a word needs to be in use for ten years to be considered for inclusion. Since the Twitter social network just turned seven in March, the word aficionados broke their own rule by three years. The word was given special consideration because it so quickly became widely-used in the English language.
Shipments of new Symbian smartphones from Nokia are rapidly dying, less than three years after the last time it topped the list of the world's most-used mobile platforms. The rapid and stark decline of Symbian serves as a warning about what can happen to top smartphone operating systems, even iOS and Android, in a volatile market, analysts said. In another decade, pray tell, where will the iPhone stand? Despite Symbian's recent place among the ranks of the tech greats, there won't be many tears shed for its demise, or many fond remembrances. There won't be a short epitaph on a tombstone somewhere in Espoo, Finland, Nokia's hometown.
Go ahead and ask CSOs from the nation's largest banks about the myriad distributed denial-of-service attacks they've experienced in recent months. They're not going to tell you anything. Security execs have never been comfortable talking about these attacks because they don't want to draw more attention to their companies. They worry that offering even the basic details of their defensive strategy will inspire attackers to find the holes. But many companies are finding themselves under attack for the first time, and their security chiefs need answers if they're going to fight back. So despite knowing CSOs are reluctant to talk, we tried to get answers anyway. We offered several CSOs anonymity to tell their stories, a tactic that always worked before. Not this time.
The consumer electronics market is being flooded with devices that have incredible high-resolution screens. phones have them. has one, as do the Archos 97 Titanium HD, Onda V972, Freelander PD80, Ainol NOVO9 Spark, Cube U9GT5 and others. MacBook Pro with Retina display, Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A, Asus Zenbook UX32VD, Dell XPS 12, Dell XPS 13, Samsung Series 9, Sony Vaio Duo 11 and others.
Inkjets, which are losing some of their cachet among consumers, are finding new jobs in small offices and workgroups. We’ve tested enough business models over the past couple of years to prove that in the sub-$500 space. A good place to start is with HP's $400 OfficeJet Pro 276dw. It is expensive to buy, but it's also an excellent inkjet multifunction whose enhanced manageability features lets it play nice even in the corporate environment. The 276dw also installs easily, produces nice output quickly, and ink costs are low. The 276dw is a dark-chocolatey shade of brown, which, while a bit old-school, works well with the printer's soft edges and corners. It sports a large, 4.3-inch touchscreen control panel with a well thought-out menu structure that makes it easy to operate. Software includes HP scan, remote email printing, and a complete onboard management console accessible via your Web browser. Management features include email alerts, a firewall, proxy support, etc. You can reach the management interface via the control panel or your browser. The 276dw sports Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and USB, so you may attach it to your network in any fashion and location that you want. Installation was a breeze: There were no firewall hassles, or other such configuration issues that we commonly see, though there are quite a few dialogs to wade through. Push-scanning to our test PC from the 276dw's control panel was available almost immediately. Quite often it takes printers an inordinate amount of time to get their networking act together.
at the U.S. National Security Agency has generated heated debate in the U.S. and across the world about privacy. The NSA is collecting metadata on U.S. residents’ phone calls made on Verizon’s network and Internet records from nine Web companies, including Facebook, Google and Microsoft, according to reports in the Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers. But intelligence agencies in other countries have similar goals, according to reports, and in some cases there are few details about what data these governments are collecting. by former contractor Edward Snowden have led to questions in the U.K. about the data that intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is collecting. Facing questions about GCHQ’s access to Internet data collected through the NSA’s PRISM program, Prime Minister David Cameron defended U.K. intelligence services and said they comply with the law. . “We cannot give a running commentary on the intelligence services. I am satisfied that the intelligence services, who do a fantastically important job to keep us safe, operate within the law and within a legal framework and they also operate within a proper framework of scrutiny by the intelligence and security committee.”
Google Analytics announced a redesign of the administration panel. Not only does the new design have a more consistent look and feel, but it should also go a long way to helping users visualize the settings for an account, property and profile.
Facebook announced hashtags last week, giving validation to everyone who used the original Twitter function to drive home their point in a Facebook status update. What was once unnecessary is now helpful in discovering new content in Facebook.
Good news for webmasters who have been struggling to identify links and pages that have been trigger warnings in Google Webmaster Tools. Google will now include example URLs in their emails warning webmasters about manual spam actions.
SEO reporting has little to do with ranking reports. Ensuring strong analytical measurements is key to gain trust with your clients/company executives, because that transparency shows what is truly working, rather than managing based on "feelings."
Text reminders, polls and surveys, sweepstakes, push notifications, social integration, and loyalty and membership programs are six mobile tactics to help you stay connected with your customers to generate and maintain customer love.
Small business owners who want to succeed in SEO should embrace diversity, moderation and consistency to avoid the extremes. The trick is to do real SEO that will last. And they must ignore silver bullets as they represent fairy tale thinking.
Technology is changing the way users are searching and interacting with technology. Bing Ads Evangelist John Gagnon shares some unique patterns, strategies and techniques that can help you interpret big data to make smarter marketing decisions.
Local link building is often overlooked within link building campaigns. Here's how to optimize links for local search by building great national industry links using geo-specific anchor text, and building great links from local authorities.
The mobile age is transforming the "inbox." Here's why your email marketing is a strong foundation for social and mobile marketing success, and how you can immediately optimize for and navigate the social and mobile currents.
The information is basic, and is the same information that business users have had for some time. But for smaller businesses and marketers, having this information at a glance is helpful without having to resort to a third party tool.
Best-selling author and marketer Jeffrey Hayzlett says Businesses need clock changers. People who are change agents. People who don’t mind making mistakes in order to offer solutions, instead of just complaining about problems.
Google is straying from being solely a place to search – and evolving into an area you can explore. How do SEO professionals understand and dominate this new side of discovery to drive traffic, engagement, branding and customer loyalty?
Applying PPC data has been key in accurately estimating the impact of missing iOS 6 organic traffic data. Unfortunately, Google now is returning trackable referral information for PPC only, skewing the ability to accurately apply this information.
A new Bing Ads analysis provides insights into sub-verticals like banking, auto insurance, credit cards and health insurance. Here are a few key takeaways for how to create engaging ad titles and descriptions that boost your click-through rate.
Google has reached an agreement to acquire navigation app maker Waze in a deal believed to be valued upwards of $1 billion, beating out rivals Facebook and Apple, which were also rumored to be mulling a bid for the startup.
Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts has announced that a new ranking update, one that targets spammy queries is now live. Separately, Google is warning that if you have a bad mobile website, your search rankings will soon be hurting.
Mastering keyword match types is critical to PPC advertising success. There are several different match types: broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match, exact match, and negative match. Here's how each can work for or against you.
Listen up! The key to social media success for brands is ... listening. Are you missing out on opportunities to increase revenue and sales? Here are some real cases that illustrate why you should be listening to your audience on social media.
Remember years ago when the first noises were being made about protecting your data online, a lot of naysayers would respond "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to be afraid of"? Keep tellin' yourself that, pilgrim!
New research demonstrates that social video recommendations significantly impact traditional brand metrics. Enjoyment of a video correlates positively with all tested brand metrics in the sales funnel, including favorability and purchase intent.