claimed Thursday. . didn’t specify the scope of the project, a key metric in its possible success. And Microsoft said that any comparisons to a retailer of the scope of Amazon were overblown. “It is inaccurate to characterize Project Brazil as conceived to compete with Amazon or eBay,” the company said in a statement. “The project was a small-scale incubation effort to enable a more direct commerce model between customers and brands and merchants. The project was recently cancelled, but we remain committed to finding new and differentiated ways to enable a richer, more task-oriented approach to e-commerce and online advertising.”
, navigating Windows is easier than ever. Get the most out of your Ultrabook and Windows by learning these shortcuts to some of Windows' most useful functions and features. , you probably know well that tapping on a tile will open the related app immediately. But if you want to run that app with special options — similar to right-clicking on an app in Windows 7 — you can simply tap and hold the tile until the options menu pops up. No need to go hunting for the control panel when you want to make changes to your system. Just swipe from the right edge of the screen toward the middle to bring up the Windows 8 Charms menu, where you'll find the most common computer management options, including the Settings menu, which lets you tweak the way your computer works and looks. Want to get two apps on the screen at once so you can more easily multitask? Swipe in from the right or the left side of the screen, slowly. (If you want the new app to appear on the left, swipe from the left, and vice versa.) If you can't get a handle on the speed of this swipe, another shortcut to do this is swiping down from the top of the screen, then right or left, in an "L" shape.
Two U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bill that would prevent the Department of Justice from prosecuting people for violating terms of service for Web-based products, website notices or employment agreements under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). On Thursday, Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, and Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, , a bill aimed at removing some types of prosecutions under the CFAA. The bill is named after Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who for allegedly hacking into a Massachusetts Institute of Technology network and downloading millions of scholarly articles from the JSTOR subscription service. The bill would remove the charge of “exceeds authorized access” from the CFAA, instead creating a definition for “access without authorization.” Access without authorization would include bypassing technology and physical measures through deception or through gaining access to an authorized person’s credentials.
Oracle’s revenue was flat year-over-year in its fourth quarter at $10.9 billion, while profits rose 10 percent to $3.8 billion, as the company reported strong growth in sales for SaaS (software as a service) subscriptions and “engineered systems” such as Exadata. But overall hardware revenue continued to slide, falling 9 percent to $1.43 billion, according to Oracle’s announcement on Thursday. Since buying Sun Microsystems, Oracle has continually emphasized that it is focused on higher-margin systems like Exadata, and not interested in competing with other companies in the commodity server market. “Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, SPARC SuperCluster and our other engineered systems grew at a rate of 45 percent in Q4,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement. “We sold over 1,200 engineered systems in the quarter and over 3,000 during the year.”
The U.S. government is one of the largest customers of data analytics from tech firms, and the National Security Agency has recruited a top security officer from Facebook, according to a report in the . The NSA hired Facebook chief security officer Max Kelly when he left the company in 2010, according to published Thursday. Intelligence agencies are recruiting top employees from U.S. tech vendors in an effort to help the agencies better collect information about Web users, the story said. In addition, Skype is cooperating with the NSA through a program exploring the legal and technical issues involved in making customer calls available to intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the Times reported.
Microsoft announced an update to its Office Web apps, focusing on collaboration between coworkers, as well as bringing new features over from its Office software package. The idea is to “make it easier for users to start and finish projects on the Web,” said Amanda Lefebvre, senior program manager for Office Web Apps, in a recorded video that’s published to the Web. The features that Microsoft showed are still in development, and will be eventually rolled out to users, executives said. Microsoft has always struck a balance between leaving features only with its for-pay Office suites or offering them as part of its free Office Web apps as well. Add too few features to latter, and users will turn elsewhere for alternatives. But if Microsoft adds too many capabilities to its free Web apps version, customers may consider ditching the company’s standalone software or its Office 365 subscription service. Microsoft has also expanded its reach to other platforms, using the Web apps to penetrate markets like the iPad, while its dedicated software serves the Mac, the PC, Windows Phone, and now the iPhone, with the just-released . Microsoft pushed Outlook to the Web in 2000, and moved the rest of the core Office apps—Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote—to the Web in 2010. The thrust of the new releases is real-time co-authoring, or collaboration, a feature that Office’s rival, Google Apps, has touted for some time. (Microsoft added real-time collaboration to its Office software with the Office 2010 revision for Windows.)
The Federal Trade Commission will launch an investigation of the business practices of so-called patent trolls in an effort to understand whether those companies are harming competition and consumers, the agency’s chairwoman said. As part of a growing focus of the U.S. government on patent abuses, the FTC will study patent assertion entities (PAEs), companies with the primary business model of buying and licensing patents, in an effort to understand the costs and benefits of PAE activity, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said Thursday. The agency will also watch PAEs closely for possible anticompetitive lawsuits and will take antitrust enforcement action against PAEs if warranted, Ramirez said. One PAE business model that’s emerging is patent privateering, in which an operating company transfers its patents to a PAE, and the PAE files a patent infringement lawsuit against a competitor of the first company, she said. PAE patent demands can raise antitrust issues “especially if the PAE is effectively acting as a clandestine surrogate for competitors,” Ramirez said at a patent debate hosted by the American Antitrust Institute and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA). Critics say “this emerging strategy allows operating companies to exploit the lack of transparency in patent ownership to win a tactical advantage in the marketplace that could not be gained with a direct attack,” she added.
Oracle’s recent upgrade to its online forums has divided the portal’s many users, with some saying the update brings welcome changes but others claiming it is bug-riddled and inferior to its predecessor. After the revamped Oracle Technology Network Community site launched earlier this month, an official from members, and the thread has drawn nearly 300 replies since then. One early responder called the new site a “great effort” and “amazing and nice.” But supporting the adage that one person’s treasure is another’s trash, another poster called the site “clumsy and more complicated,” with “a lot of unnecessary enhancement which is quite similar to social networking.”
This week, processor manufacturer is already an industry leader known for powering many of the most popular smartphones on the market, including the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, LG Optimus Pro, Nokia Lumia, and others. The Snapdragon 200 class of processors is designed for efficient performance in lower-spec smartphones compared to the devices that run on the more advanced 400, 600, and S4 chips. Six new dual- and quad-core chips are being added to the Snapdragon 200 lineup that will reportedly target emerging markets. They now support 4G LTE as well as HSPA+ and TD-SCDMA, essential technologies for smartphones in China. The new chips operating system. Parallel to that announcement, Qualcomm did a , which was announced at CES in January. Qualcomm has indicated that the Snapdragon 800 will be as much as a 75% improvement in speed over the S4, which powers high-end devices like the Nokia Lumia 620 and LG Optimus G. The consensus of Tuesday’s demonstration was that the Snapdragon 800 will likely live up to its hype. Built for premium devices, the 800 series has a quad-core CPU, Adreno 330 GPU, and integrated 4G LTE. Also this week, in a joint announcement from Qualcomm and LG, it was confirmed that LG’s yet-to-be-released . LG expects their hotly anticipated device to “redefine the smartphone experience through stunning performance, rich graphics and outstanding battery efficiency.” We’ll have to wait at least a couple more months to find out if they’re right, as the G2 is slated for UK Q3 release.
show that creating beautiful, natural-looking art using a computer is possible, and doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. ArtRage joins these accessible tools with its own touch-friendly interface and an attractive $50 price tag.
As people replace their hard drives with smaller SSDs, many will choose to move large music collections to external drives. And they'll want their media player, whatever it is, to know what's on that drive. I covered this topic , but Windows has changed a lot since then. If you're using Windows XP or Vista, I suggest you go back to that article. The following is for Windows 7 and 8 users.
LinkedIn’s domain name was temporarily redirected to a third-party server Thursday, which resulted in a service outage and potentially put user accounts at risk of compromise. Uptime monitoring service Pingdom recorded that . During the outage, LinkedIn’s customer service team that the problem was caused by a DNS (Domain Name System) issue, but did not specify why it occurred. Bryan Berg, co-founder of the App.net social feed service, and said that LinkedIn’s traffic was directed to the network of a company called Confluence Networks. Because LinkedIn does not use SSL by default, users who tried to access the site during the incident might have exposed their session cookies in plain text to another server, he said.
or just listen to the occasional modern hit. Ah, but what if you want to sing along? Or just figure out what the heck that line is in a song's chorus? (Surely it's not, "Should I give up, or should I just keep chasing penguins"?) is a browser add-on that automatically looks up and displays song lyrics. And it works with not only YouTube, but also Grooveshark and Spotify. The extension is available for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari. Once installed, just head to YouTube and look up a song.
Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has been sentenced to two years in prison by a District Court in Sweden for multiple data intrusions, attempted aggravated fraud and aggravated fraud. The verdict against Svartholm Warg and his co-defendants was handed down by Nacka District Court on Thursday. Lawyers for the defendants and the prosecutor have three weeks to appeal the verdict. The data intrusion charge is related to the hacking of a mainframe belonging to Logica, now CGI, an IT firm that provided tax services to the Swedish government, and a mainframe of Nordea bank. The fraud charges stem from a number of attempted money transfers from accounts at Nordea, of which one was successful. Two of the attempts that were part of the case were dismissed. The receiving bank couldn’t find a record of one transfer attempt, and the other transfer was interrupted, according to prosecutor Henrik Olin. Svartholm Warg and his co-defendant in the hacking case have never disputed that the intrusions actually happened the way the prosecutor has alleged—that the hacks were carried out from their computers. However, they have denied any involvement, saying in their defense that their computers must have been remote controlled or that other people used the computers to carry out the actions, according to the court.
Despite the promise of portability from service providers, the reality of the cloud for big customers is a similar type of lock-in as they experience with on-premise apps vendors such as Oracle and SAP, two CIOs said Tuesday. “You’re kind of locked in—it’s out with the old boss and in with the new,” said Ralph Loura, CIO of Clorox, in a discussion about “what keeps CIOs up at night” at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. Companies that buy storage and compute services in small increments might not be tied to one provider, but most big companies sign big, multi-year contracts with cloud suppliers that effectively tie them to one platform, he said. They also train workers for that platform and build applications and interfaces in a “semi-bespoke model” that further ties them down. “I think we’re all trying not to get fooled again with this model, and that’s one of the things that keeps me up at night,” he said.
Web content filtering company Netsweeper has supplied its products to Pakistan, even as some top IT companies have refused to supply gear for a controversial filtering project, a Canadian research group has disclosed. The released Thursday by Citizen Lab, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, finds that Pakistan is actively filtering content, with Netsweeper filtering devices actively used to censor content on an ISP-wide level in Pakistan. The Canadian company has supplied its filtering products to the Pakistan Telecommunication Company, which is Pakistan’s largest telecommunications company and also operates the Pakistan Internet Exchange Point. The operator did not immediately return calls for comment. “The fact that Pakistan has deployed the Netsweeper filtering technology at the national Internet Exchange level is a significant development giving the potential of extending Internet censorship to lower-level ISPs in the country,” the report said.
France’s data protection authority has given Google three months to change the way it handles users’ private data, or face legal sanctions. The order, made on June 10 and published Thursday, is the result of a formal investigation begun by the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) in April, after the company repeatedly rejected requests to reverse changes it made to its privacy policy in March 2012. In its June 10 decision, CNIL ordered Google to clearly explain to users the ways in which data collected about them will be used; to keep data for no longer than is necessary for the purposes it has declared to users; not to combine data from different sources without legal authority; to fairly process data collected from “passive” users of Google’s services through DoubleClick and Analytics cookies or Google +1 buttons on the pages they visit; and to obtain informed consent from users before storing cookies in their mobile phone, PC or other terminal. If it does not comply, Google could face a fine of a maximum of €150,000 (or €300,000 for a second offense), and could in certain circumstances be ordered to refrain from processing personal data in certain ways for a period of three months.
Paranoia—in small doses—is an excellent preventive medicine. If you think your business is too small to be a target for hackers, identity thieves, and similarly unsavory characters, you’re dangerously underestimating the value of your business. IT security might seem to be a daunting prospect for a small business without an expert staff, a large budget, or expensive consultants, but you can take a number of easily implemented measures to lock down the personal computers your business relies on. Here are five simple security tips you should implement today. The first step is to implement full-disk encryption on each one of your company’s PCs. This step is crucial because system passwords alone offer no defense against hackers’ accessing the hard drive from another computer, or against someone’s attempts to clone its entire contents for off-site examination. In addition, recovering previously deleted files from an unencrypted storage device or disk image is a relatively trivial matter for an attacker or snoop. Selectively encrypting sensitive folders or files works, too, but full-disk encryption is the best means of ensuring that file is protected. Microsoft’s BitLocker is the gold standard for this task, thanks to its ease of use and the fact that it comes standard with the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows 7, and with the Ultimate and Professional versions of Windows 8.
The Internet is filled with websites that are inappropriate for , much less children. Kids get into trouble online all the time, even when they aren’t looking for it. Misspelling a website address, screwing up a search term, or clicking a risqué ad can lead to some awkward bedtime conversations. Online bullying, predatory adults, and illegal downloading of copyrighted content are other threats. Though we can’t make the Internet itself kid-safe, we can at least make its darker crevices harder to access. Setting up parental controls and content filtering on computers, tablets, smartphones, and other gadgets is easy. More important, these precautions empower your devices to protect kids from digital dangers when you aren’t around to supervise. The most effective precaution you can take to safeguard kids while they’re browsing is to set up Web filtering on your router with . You can enable Web filtering on most devices individually, but I recommend trying the free or premium service from OpenDNS because it can filter Internet access across all computers and devices connected to your router. OpenDNS offers three : FamilyShield, Home, and Home VIP. OpenDNS FamilyShield, the simplest option, offers preconfigured adult content filtering—just set it on your router and forget it. OpenDNS Home allows you to customize the filtering and security settings. You also need to create an account and install a program on at least one PC in your home. OpenDNS Home VIP, the high-end option, starts at $20 a year and provides additional features such as Internet usage stats and premium support.
Chip maker Qualcomm is introducing six new processors meant for entry-level phones in China and emerging markets. The processors are part of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 200 class, a chip line that offers support for lower-end specs compared to the company’s Snapdragon 400, 600 and 800 chip series, the company said Thursday. The six new processors lack support for 4G LTE, but are built for HSPA+ networks, and TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), a 3G standard used by China’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. The Qualcomm chips will be available to vendors in late 2013. The new processors are built using a 28-nanometer manufacturing process, and feature dual and quad-core CPUs. The chips also have support to handle two, or even three SIM cards, a feature that is popular with consumers in Asia.
With monthly active users, it’s easy to imagine that most of the data travelling over Facebook’s networks is delivering photos, status updates and “likes” to its end users, but that’s far from the case. The social network moves about 1,000 times as much data between the servers inside its data centers as it does from its servers out to end users, company executives said Wednesday. They talked about the challenges that this creates for Facebook and the network technologies it’s developing to overcome them. “Our traffic going from machine to machine far exceeds the traffic going from the machines out to our end users,” said Jay Parikh, vice president of Infrastructure Engineering at Facebook, in an on-stage interview at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco. That’s because of all the processing work Facebook does on the back end to figure out what information it needs to send to end users. The systems analyze data, rank results, and perform a myriad of other tasks to generate the pages Facebook delivers to users’ smartphones and Web browsers.
A company that specializes in Google apps is developing a series of enterprise applications for Google Glass that should be available late this year or early 2014. “We’re in the early stages of developing for Google Glass,” said Dan McNelis, co-founder of , a company that provides services for Google applications. Google Glass is the wearable device that the search giant announced in 2012. Since then the system has been in beta with developers and will likely be released to the public in late 2013 or early 2014. McNelis said Dito is developing both “Glassware” or the apps on top of Google’s API (application programming interface), and figuring out specific use cases to develop custom apps for Glass.
Microsoft and cellphone maker Nokia were in advanced talks about an acquisition of the Finnish company's device business, but the discussions have broken down, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Such a deal might have improved both companies' ability to compete in a world dominated by smartphones offered by Apple, which makes both hardware and software, and by Google, which relies largely on third parties for devices that run its Android OS. reported Wednesday. The discussions were held in London and the companies were close to an oral agreement about a combination, the report said. The deal hit snags regarding price and the market position of Nokia, which trails far behind both Apple and Samsung, the Journal said.
A good YouTube app makes it impossible to stop watching videos when what you should be doing is writing that program's review. And this is exactly what happened to me as I attempted to sit down and write about Minitube, a YouTube desktop app that's going to change the way you consume your dose of daily videos. At €9 ($12 on 6/19/13), it's not cheap…but if you spend much time on YouTube, Minitube is well worth the price.
, a wide range of new mobile computer designs has recently hit the market. Offering a vast amount of flexibility, these new designs offer considerable freedom, letting you choose the Ultrabook™ that works best for you. Here's a guide to the various types of Ultrabook designs you'll find available today. Standard / Laptop Style Don't fret if you just want the basics and don't want to reinvent the wheel: Ultrabook systems with a standard clamshell design are widely available. These systems look and operate just like any laptop computer, except they’re often much thinner and lighter. Also, many now come equipped with touchscreens, so you can use the keyboard and touchpad to navigate Windows, or draw on the screen with your fingertip. At first these Ultrabook systems appear to be pretty standard, except they're equipped with new hinges that allow the screen to rotate around a full 360 degrees. In other words, you can push the screen back so that it lies flat against the table, and keep going another 180 degrees so that the screen is facing outward from the bottom of the laptop. Next just flip the Ultrabook over so that the keyboard is on the bottom of the machine and the screen is facing you. Presto, you've turned your laptop into a keyboard-free, slate-style tablet.
Intel has joined the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), a consortium founded by Qualcomm and Samsung, as the chip maker looks to bring wireless charging to tablets and laptops. Another member of A4WP is Integrated Device Technology, which is developing wireless charging chipsets for laptops, tablets and hybrids running on Intel chips. Intel hopes to make wirelessly charging a smartphone and tablet as easy as putting the device close to a laptop. Intel has dubbed its wireless power offering as Wireless Charging Technology (WCT). “Although we are not yet giving out timeframes for consumer products with WCT enabled, IDT has stated they will be delivering their full chipset solution for reference design work in early 2013,” Intel representative Dan Snyder said in a in August last year. A4WP in January this year released wireless charging specifications based on near-field magnetic resonance technology, in which users can recharge multiple mobile devices without placing them in direct contact with charging pads.
Microsoft Wednesday announced several new apps that have arrived or will arrive within the Windows Store, including the Vevo app for music videos and an updated version of Where’s My Water? But if you’re still hoping for a Facebook app for Windows 8, keep waiting. Really, ever since Windows 8 was released last October, many have wondered when Microsoft—or Facebook—would release an app supporting the over 1 billion users who use the Facebook service. While many apps—such as Pandora, for example— still haven’t made the transition over to the Windows 8 platform, Facebook seems like a significant omission.
Intellectual Ventures, a large patent-licensing firm, has filed a second patent-infringement lawsuit against Motorola Mobility while its first patent lawsuit is still pending in a Delaware count. The patent-licensing firm filed its . Intellectual Ventures “has been unable to reach an agreement with Motorola” in the Delaware case, the company said in a statement. The company also filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against banking firm Capital One in Virginia, Intellectual Ventures aid.
Intel said Wednesday that is has joined the board of directors of the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), a consortium developing technology for wirelessly charging electronic devices. However, Intel said last year that Ultrabooks capable of wireless charging would arrive in 2013—a promise the company has yet to make good on. Virtually all of the major chipmakers have now joined A4WP, a spokesman for the group said, including Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Samsung, among others. A4WP uses near-field magnetic resonance technology to charge a nearby device, like a cell phone, if both the power source and the target device support the technology. “Intel believes the A4WP specification, particularly the use of near-field magnetic resonance technology, can provide a compelling consumer experience and enable new usage models that make device charging almost automatic,” said Navin Shenoy, vice president, PC client group and general manager, mobile client platform division at Intel, in a statement. “In joining A4WP, we look forward to working alongside other member companies and contributing to standards that help fuel an ecosystem of innovative solutions capable of simultaneously charging a range of devices, from low-power accessories to smartphones, tablets, and Ultrabooks.” At its Intel Developer Forum last year, the company said that it would add wireless charging capabilities to its Ultrabook platform sometime this year.
A telephone records surveillance program run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency raises serious privacy concerns and should be reined in, some U.S. senators said Wednesday. Some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed for changes to the surveillance program that allows the two agencies to broadly collect telephone call records from U.S. carriers, with some lawmakers calling for the records to remain with carriers until the agencies have a suspicion of a telephone number’s ties to terrorist activity. “I remain concerned that, as a country, we’ve yet to strike the right balance between intelligence gathering into the FBI and the civil liberties and privacy rights of Americans,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, during a hearing on oversight of the FBI. “The American people deserve to know how broad investigative laws ... are being interpreted and used to conduct electronic surveillance.” FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the recently exposed phone records collection program, saying it was a critical piece of antiterrorism investigations. The phone records collection program authorized by the Patriot Act has been a key tool in disrupting 10 to 12 terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001, he told lawmakers. NSA officials said Tuesday that the two surveillance programs have helped disrupt more than 50 terrorist plots since then.
A couple of new features are coming to Bing Ads location extensions, which launched launched in March of last year. The features will start rolling out over the coming weeks. Starting today, new detailed reporting is available along with added functionality for setting up location extensions. A...
As part of its response to a potential subpoena by the Mississippi attorney general and accusations from The National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) earlier this month that Google facilitates the sale of drugs without a prescription, among other illegal transactions, Google legal...
Forrester, in its annual report on how consumers found websites during the past year, discovered that 54% of respondents found websites through natural search results in 2012, up from 50% in 2011. Social networks were the second-most preferred discovery resource, with 32% using them in 2012, up...
This white paper discusses: 5 analytics competencies best-in-class marketers possess How the best marketers harness data to increase profits Download now »
Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood will subpoena Google records and emails to determine if Google facilitated the sale of drugs without a prescription and other illegal products, including counterfeit copies of movies, games and music. “Google is aiding and abetting criminal activity and...
Google is leveraging the knowledge graph brilliantly, while others have their own version of knowledge graph search. As the knowledge graph changes the SERPs, Google is pushing adoption of semantic technology, gradually replacing its traditional SERPs based on links. The search giant’s...
Last week I attended the SMX Advanced session, “Maps & Metros: Surviving And Thriving In Local Search,” moderated by Matt McGee with speakers Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling and Mike Ramsey. It’s extremely challenging right now to recommend new “advanced” SEO methods...
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: New Updates To Bing Ads Intelligence, Excel Add-In For Keyword Research And Analysis Microsoft has released an update to Bing Ads Intelligence, the free Excel...
Microsoft has released an update to Bing Ads Intelligence, the free Excel add-in for keyword research and keyword performance analysis on the Yahoo! Bing Network. From the new ribbon at the top of the page (shown above), the Keyword Suggestions tool provides keyword and bid research in one place....