From the hot metal press to desktop publishing and broadcasting via radio or television, the media has always been driven by technology. You could argue that technology created the media, enabling the dissemination of information with an ambition greater than any town crier could have mustered. the media organization best known for printing the "pink paper," is continuing the trend of using the latest technology to distribute information, while being challenged by other, younger, organizations using the same tools to publish their news and views to an ever-widening audience. as a 2012 report from media regulator Ofcom confirmed. all reported year-on-year decreases in headline circulation, which includes subscriptions, overseas distribution, and bulk sales," reads the report.
Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor who leaked information about the country's surveillance programs, left Hong Kong Sunday to a third country. Snowden left Hong Kong on his own accord for a third country through "a lawful and normal channel," despite an earlier request from the U.S. to Hong Kong for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against him, the Hong Kong government said in a statement Sunday. The Hong Kong authorities did not name the country Snowden was headed to. Snowden is on a commercial flight to Russia, but Moscow will not be his final destination, the South China Morning Post last month after leaving his job as a contractor at an NSA facility in Hawaii. WikiLeaks said in a Twitter .
Stanford University has launched an online privacy initiative meant to complement Do Not Track, an effort aimed at preventing sites from recording people's Web browsing without permission. announced last week, is expected to improve browser reliability in determining whether a cookie planted by a site is meant only for tracking. Microsoft sparked a huge uproar among online advertisers last year when it decided to indiscriminately in Internet Explorer 10, which ships with Windows 8. The idea behind Do Not Track, of not having their movements on the Web logged by a website or ad network. Most tracking on the Web is done through cookies, small files that sites plant in visitors' browsers, so advertisers can show targeted ads for products and services.
Gartner is giving the thumbs up to crediting the operating system refresh with overcoming the major downsides of Windows 8. for desktops and laptops, not just touchscreen devices, Gartner analysts say. While the operating system originally released last fall is heavily touch-centric, the announced changes that come with Windows 8.1 should be enough to make the new version enterprise ready, say Gartner analysts Michael A. Silver and Stephen Kleynhans. "Based on the information currently available, we believe Windows 8.1 features could quiet most of its detractors," they say in a Those improvements include the capability to boot directly to the desktop rather than the Windows 8 Start screen and restoration of a Start button on the desktop. Ready access to the desktop should make it easier for users to find a familiar interface, and Gartner says that means they will be able to interact with their current apps as they do with Windows 7. "Microsoft has not released many other details, but Gartner expects only minor changes to the Windows desktop, which would ensure high levels of compatibility with legacy Win32 desktop applications," the analysts say.
Texas has become the first state in the nation to require law enforcement to obtain a warrant to read people's email, and privacy advocates are hoping the move will help quicken the passage of a similar proposal in Congress. Texas Gov. Rick Perry . The proposal was introduced in the Legislature by 29-year-old Republican Rep. Jonathan Stickland, a conservative with Tea Party backing. Liberals also supported the measure. While the Lone Star state is the first, it is unlikely to be the last to pass such a law. The California Legislature is considering a bill barring warrantless email surveillance and snooping on messages and profile information stored on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Privacy advocates are hoping that states passing such laws will to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which requires a warrant only for unopened email. Opened messages, as well as email left unopened for more than 180 days, do not require federal law enforcement to get a warrant.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked Google for information related to its according to reports published on Saturday. The FTC wants to look into possible antitrust issues stemming from the deal, the from Google about the probe. Neither Google nor the FTC immediately responded to a request for comment. Earlier this month, Google announced a crowdsourced mapping application developer based in Israel, saying it wanted to add more real-time navigation tools to its Maps product.
It's hard to keep track of new Google features. They can show up as Google trial balloon and surprise you one day. And then the next day over the past couple days—has been a carousel of images served up when making local search requests. If you've searched Google for something local recently there is a good chance you've seen what I'm talking about. Google's local carousel showcases images of nearby business or attractions related to your search query (see image above). The new layout has been rolling out to the public over the last couple days. Try searching for "coffee spots near me" or "museums near Chicago" and there is a good chance you'll see a strip of images of businesses or points of interests presented horizontally across the top of the Google search results page. A small Google Maps window will appear just below to the right of the carousel. Hover over an image in the carousel and a corresponding Google label lights up on the Google Map showing you where the business or attraction is located. The new layout is an update to Google's integration of local search results and Google Maps. It's also an expansion by Google beyond just mapping restaurants and hotels on Google Maps. According to the , Google's new carousel works with 54 different queries such as nightlife, hiking, soup, and dog parks.
Microsoft is for vulnerabilities found in Windows 8.1 that are paired with exploits, but it's pretty much up to Microsoft to decide who gets paid how much based on a set of subjective criteria. In order to pull down the full amount, a submission must be novel, generic, reasonable, reliable, impactful, work in user mode, and be effective on the latest Windows OS, according to of the new bounty program. Each of those criteria is subject to interpretation. It will be up to Microsoft to convince potential participants in the program that their submissions will be treated fairly, says Ross Barrett, senior manager of security engineering for Rapid7. "A lot of people don't trust them," Barrett says. Microsoft could find an attack technique good but not novel, and then patch the vulnerability without paying. "That's paranoid, maybe, but that kind of paranoia tends to be par for the course in this industry," he says.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has threatened Google with legal action unless all data gathered by Google Street View cars is The ICO first in 2010 after it was discovered that the firm had gathered details such as email addresses and passwords of thousands of members of the public via its Street View cars. Google said the aim of the project was to improve the geographic location database for its mobile applications by mapping Wi-Fi networks, but received a massive backlash after it was discovered that personal details had also been taken without the awareness of individuals. Following the reopening of the investigation last year, Google informed the ICO of the containing Street View data. In the latest development, the ICO has now warned Google that it could face legal action if all further data collated is deleted within a limited timeframe.
Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked information about U.S. government mass surveillance programs, has been charged by the U.S. with espionage, the Washington Post reported Friday. Federal prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Snowden (above) and are seeking to have him arrested in Hong Kong, according to the Post, which cited unnamed U.S. officials. He is charged with espionage, theft, and conversion of government property, . By bringing the charges, the U.S. has begun a process by which it can try to have Snowden extradited to the U.S. to face trial. Snowden can fight the effort in the Hong Kong courts, however, in a process that could last several months, the Post said. Snowden sparked a furor this month after he leaked details about two U.S. surveillance programs to the Washington Post and the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. One program, called Prism, gives the National Security Agency access to customer data collected by large Internet firms, and the other provides access to U.S. phone call records.
suggest that the U.S. agency’s British counterpart intercepts petabytes worth of communication data daily from fiber-optic cables. The operation codenamed “Tempora” by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been going on for at least 18 months and involves the use of “intercept probes” attached directly to transatlantic fiber-optic cables landing on British shores from telephone exchanges and Internet servers in North America. Commercial companies, described in the documents only as “intercept partners,” were secretly used to attach the intercepts on behalf of the GCHQ. The companies, whose identities have been concealed in the documents, were apparently obliged by law to cooperate with the GCHQ and in some cases paid for their effort. The intercepts have allowed GCHQ to scoop up and filter huge volumes of data, including email content, records of phone calls, Facebook entries and Internet browsing histories. “For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fiber-optic cables that ring the world,” the Guardian noted.
Congress should press for privacy protections and more information about surveillance programs at the National Security Agency, some technology and civil liberties activists said Friday. After recent news leaks about two broad surveillance programs at the NSA, it’s clear that congressional and court oversight of the agency is lacking, representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told congressional staffers during a briefing on the NSA programs. Oversight of the surveillance programs by the Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees has been “pretty feeble,” Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said at a surveillance forum hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee. The limited number of lawmakers and the judges that are supposed to check the NSA programs appear to have fallen victim to a form of a governmental phenomenon called “,” when a body that is supposed to regulate an industry begins to “serve its interests,” Sanchez said.
Once-mighty America Online appears to be working on a new RSS reader product, with about a week to go before Google pulls the plug on its own Reader. “All your favorite websites, in one place,” the product’s proclaims. The reader is currently in private beta; people can either request an invitation online or enter a code to use the service. AOL Reader will launch and become available to everyone on Monday, a spokeswoman said. On the AOL Twitter feed, No other information about the product could be gleaned from the AOL site or obtained from the company.
Rackspace is now offering hosted versions of the MongoDB data store, using MongoDB management technologies it acquired from its purchase of ObjectRocket in February. It also has contracted with 10gen, the company shepherding the open source MongoDB, to provide advanced support for the service. ObjectRocket created a platform specifically for running MongoDB in hosted, or cloud, services, said Matt Asay, 10gen’s vice president of corporate strategy. The new service will be “one really good way to pave the path to a successful MongoDB experience,” he said. Although both provide directions for installing and running MongoDB on their clouds, Rackspace is hoping that the ObjectRocket’s technologies will provide a more streamlined process of deploying and managing the data store. The ObjectRocket platform takes care of a lot of configuration and tuning issues that could flummox an administrator trying to run MongoDB in the cloud for the first time, such as choosing the optimum amount of RAM to allocate, Asay said. It also provides controls for automatically scaling a single server copy to a multi-node cluster deployment, and has tuned the underlying software stack to work specifically with MongoDB.
Businesses that rely on Facebook to get the word out to customers likely have a love/hate relationship with its integrated analytics system. On one hand, the "Insights" system seems to offer a vast amount of information. On the other hand, it's not easy to make sense of al lthat information, and the system doen't always tell the whole story. , "It should be clearer to businesses how to use this information to drive the results they care about." The upgrades cover a number of key components in the Insights system. These include three main changes: Upgrades to the Insights system have already begun to be released to a small number of users, who will be notified of their selection via the Insights tool itself. Later this summer the system will be rolled out to the rest of us.
For the better part of a year, Oracle has touted the “pluggable database” feature in its upcoming 12c database release as a significant architectural shift that will usher in major performance and efficiency improvements and also make cloud-based applications more secure. But customers who want to take advantage of the pluggable database concept when 12c is released won’t get it in return for their regular maintenance fees. Instead, Oracle plans to offer it as a “separately priced option,” CEO Larry Ellison on the company’s fourth-quarter and year-end earnings call. The feature allows multiple databases to run inside of a single 12c database instance and constitutes Oracle’s take on multitenancy, which is a key ingredient of cloud-based applications. In the past, multitenancy has referred to a practice followed by SaaS (software as a service) vendors such as Salesforce.com, where many customers share the same application instance, but with their data kept separate. Oracle believes that application-level multitenancy is inferior and less secure than 12c’s approach, which pushes multitenancy to the database tier, Ellison said on the conference call.
Intle appears to be shifting its focus towards the Android operating system, and breaking away from years of optimizing its top line of Core PC processors—including recently launched Haswell processors—chiefly for Windows. on Intel’s website hints that Android development will continue beyond Broadwell and into future Core chips. The listing for an “Android System Software Program Manager” includes responsibilities for “planning and delivery for full system—across architecture, development, integration and validation.” Intel already backs Android for its low-power Atom tablet and smartphone processors, but the company has not yet talked publicly about Android for Core processors. Core processors have more advanced instruction sets and graphics capabilities than Atom processors, and those would need to be optimized for Android.
red flag. Fake antivirus and ransomware attacks—a staple of PC-based malware in recent years—are making their way to mobile platforms. Fake AV displays a false malware detection in an effort to con you into paying for software to remove the infection, while ransomware locks up your system (or mobile device) and prevents you from using it at all until the ransom is paid. , this particular threat has elements of both fake AV and ransomware attacks. The alert is designed to look like a malware scan has detected an infection, but it also locks the Android device and prevents you from doing anything else until you pay the fee to download the “protection” app. Once the malicious app is installed, the real fun begins. The malware has compatibility issues with many Android devices, and attempts to prevent other apps from being launched. It alters the settings of the Android OS itself, and in some cases requires a hard reset to restore normal functionality.
Warren Spector is a name known well by dedicated PC gamers. The man helped make innovative games like games. With Disney shuttering his Junction Point Studios, Spector is taking a vacation for the first time in his life. But he’s keeping busy with speaking engagements and going back to school, designing a game development program for the University of Texas Austin. Now free of public relations restrictions, Spector opens up to us about game development and his own future in this exclusive interview. For 30 years I’ve been arguing for the need to take a more structured approach to training the next generation of developers; it’s important to teach them what makes games work. Now, it’s much easier to convince people that games education has a place in the colleges and the universities in the country.
I don't know about you, but whenever I visit YouTube these days, I want to scold it like a child: "Clean up your room!" Because, seriously, what a mess. Between the ads, the sidebar, the tools, the related videos, and especially the comments, YouTube has become a cluttered eyesore. . Specifically, it cleans the page of everything but a large video window. Now you can focus on what you wanted: the video. Cleanr is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, If you're a Chrome user, you'll need to follow the brief tutorial video on the install page; because this isn't a Google-approved extension (wonder why?), you have to install it manually with a little dragging and dropping.
Windows 8 tablets aren’t in good shape: for its desktop functionality, and many people aren’t willing to pay premium prices for the ability to run Office—and not much else—on what amounts to be keyboard-less PCs. Indeed, with Windows 8 and Windows RT making up just , the Korean tech giant might have just thrown Microsoft the life-preserver it needs to help keep Windows tablets in the game. Here are three ways Samsung can lend Microsoft a helping hand. After announcing another handful of Android smartphones (all with the name “Galaxy S4” and whatever noun Samsung decided to tack onto the end), the company surprised those in attendance by unveiling two new slates running Windows 8: . The Ativ Q is the more noteworthy of the two for its ability to seamlessly switch between Windows and Android, giving it access to a whole mess of software normally unavailable on Windows 8 devices.
A U.K. regulatory group is giving Google 35 days to delete what remains of the data collected by its Street View cars in the U.K., and is using the threat of legal action to compel the company to comply. The , which was served to Google in the form of an enforcement notice from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the U.K. government’s data and privacy regulator, follows a reopening of an investigation into Google’s Street View project. In 2010, that investigation revealed “,” when Google Street View cars collected payload data through the company’s Wi-Fi mapping efforts in the U.K., by scraping personal data including emails, URLs and passwords. Google agreed to delete the payload data following that investigation, but when reaching this week’s decision, “the ICO also considered the discovery of additional disks containing payload data, which were located by Google while the reopened ICO investigation was in progress,” the group said Thursday in a statement.
Microsoft’s push to make its Bing search engine more social will take it in a new direction—actually letting a select group of users curate results. Microsoft’s “experiment,” known as Bing Boards, will allow a small group of food and lifestyle bloggers, experts, and social influencers to cultivate their own selection of search results on a given topic. The Board will be a visual collection of images, videos and links that tell the story from the blogger’s point of view, Microsoft said. These results won’t replace the search result that Bing normally returns, but will sit alongside them within the middle column of Bing’s search results, Chen Fang, program manager of Bing Experiences, said in a . When one searches Bing, the results show up in the middle of the page on a 4:3 screen, or on the left hand of a widescreen monitor. The Bing Board appears as a larger image to the right of the main search results. When clicked on, the Board opens up to a larger image, with additional links and images inside.
Half the battle with campy comedy is picking the right subject for a roast in the hot seat. Poking fun is just part of good satire. The other half is a fondness for the subject that transcends the jokes. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon replaces the generic jungle-island backdrops from previous entries in the series with a neon-lit 1980s dystopia that lovingly references every cliché of the era to hilarious effect. I looked at the PC version, but it's available for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 as well.
If you’ve been eyeballing an Ultrabook™ but think your budget won’t accommodate one, fear not: There are plenty of ultra-thin, ultra-light, ultra-speedy systems that won’t break the bank. In fact, for $800 or less, you can replace your aging, under-powered laptop with one of these state-of-the-art machines. Why opt for an Ultrabook? They’re ideal for business travelers, offering not only slim, lightweight designs, but also lightning-fast boot speeds and enough battery life to survive a coast-to-coast flight. Here’s a look at four of the best models you can get for under $800. Can’t decide between a laptop and a tablet? Who says you have to? True to its name, the business-friendly to improve performance. If there’s a downside here, it’s that the 12.5-inch touchscreen is a little smaller than ideal laptop size, while the entire system feels a little heavy when used as a tablet.
. As consumers look to cheap tablets for their basic computing needs, PC makers are putting more effort into creating luxury machines to compete with Apple's MacBooks. The idea is that if you're only going to buy one PC for serious productivity, it might as well be a dream machine—and a big part of that ideal is manifest in the ultra-high-resolution displays we're starting to see on the streets. , announced on Thursday, is just the latest example. How do all these luxury laptops compare? We've created a chart, pitting the ATIV Book 9 Plus against Acer's Aspire S7, Asus' Zenbook Infinity, Toshiba's KiraBook, Google's Chromebook Pixel and Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
The National Security Agency (NSA) can retain communications of U.S. citizens or residents potentially indefinitely if those communications are encrypted, according to a newly leaked secret government document. . The documents state that the NSA is not allowed to intentionally target persons known to be located in the U.S., but under which the agency is allowed to retain, or share with other U.S. agencies, communications of U.S. persons that were acquired inadvertently. These include cases when the data is likely to contain foreign intelligence, information on criminal activity or is encrypted. According to the document describing data collection “minimization procedures,” foreign communications between a U.S. person and a party located outside of the U.S. that was collected during data acquisitions authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) can be retained for “cryptanalytic, traffic analysis, or signal exploitation purposes.”
Against a backdrop of market tumult, enterprise software companies this week reported mixed quarterly results. Though Red Hat reported a robust quarter, Oracle revenue flatlined and Tibco’s sales and profit declined year over year. Meanwhile, shares of tech companies plunged Thursday along with the rest of the market, as investors took in the news that the U.S. Federal Reserve may taper off some initiatives to support markets as it sees the economy improve. For example, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke for the first time suggested a timeline for winding down purchases of mortgage bonds and treasuries, possibly next year. Though the Fed still plans to keep interest rates low, stocks plunged Thursday. The broad Standard and Poor’s 500 index declined 2.5 percent, its worst drop since November 2011. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended down 353.87 points, or 2.3 percent, with all of its 30 components in negative territory, including its five tech stocks: Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and Intel.
MapR Technologies and VMware have collaborated to make it easier for enterprises to virtualize big data applications and get better support at the same time. The companies have collaborated to certify for VMware's vSphere platform the MapR distribution of the open-source Apache Hadoop software framework for the distributed processing of large data sets. The certification enables enterprises to more easily deploy and run the MapR distribution for Hadoop on vSphere, and more importantly receive commercial support. For enterprises that don't want to run their big data implementation in a public cloud, virtualizing the applications allows IT departments to utilize hardware more efficiently and gain more control over their resources, according to VMware. VMware's push to make its virtualization platform big data-friendly took an important step last year when it introduced Serengeti, an open-source project that helps enterprises deploy, manage and scale Apache Hadoop in virtual and cloud environments. The latest release features support for MapR as well the Apache HBase data store.
Capgemini is introducing a hybrid cloud orchestration service focused on Microsoft products, although enterprises will be able to manage any load with the offering, including applications running on Linux, the company said. The core of the service is Microsoft software, including Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Windows Azure, wrapped with billing, service management, dashboards and governance tools integrated by Capgemini, said Ron Tolido, the company’s CTO for continental Europe. Two aspects of the cloud service are visible to the customer, he said. First, there’s a set of dashboards that give financial oversight to the CFO, insight into operations to the CIO, and availability data to the CTO.