Die neuen Kurznachrichtendienste versprechen, die Kommunikation zu vereinfachen, und machen doch alles komplizierter.
Wer Facebook, Twitter und Google nicht zu hundert Prozent vertraut, der sorgt durch eine Sicherung auf der eigenen Festplatte vor.
Facebook schaltet derzeit nach und nach seine neue Suchfunktion frei: den Social Graph. Was die neue Funktion alles aufspürt und wie Sie sich davor schützen.
Bike-Trial-Profi Danny MacAskill vollführt spektakuläre Kunststücke auf lebensgross gewordenen Kinderspielsachen. Oder ist er einfach zur Miniatur geworden?
Wie geht man mit geschäftlichen E-Mails um, die sich in den Ferien anstauen? Wie verbindlich sind automatisch gelöschte E-Mails? Ein Jurist und ein Kommunikationsexperte erklären.
Der finnische Konzern setzt beim Lumia 1020 auf die Fotografen unter den Handynutzern. Das neue Spitzenmodell ist mit einer 41-Megapixel-Kamera ausgestattet.
Die Swisscom versichert, dass persönliche Daten des Messengers in der Schweiz gespeichert werden. Einige Informationen werden jedoch anonym an ausländische Unternehmen übermittelt.
Nach der Version für den Browser hat Google jetzt auch die neue Handy-App veröffentlicht – und eine wichtige Funktion in die zweite Reihe verbannt.
In Paris zum besten Restaurant, in Florenz zur schönsten Kirche: Zwei Zürcher haben eine App entwickelt, mit der man seine selbst erstellten Stadttouren hochladen kann.
Am Strand liegen und den Arbeitsalltag einfach einmal vergessen: Das war gestern. Neue Zahlen zeigen, dass die Mehrheit der Schweizer Berufstätigen auch während der Ferien für den Chef erreichbar bleibt.
Jugendliche und Medien: Was nutzen sie täglich? Was ist in, was out? hat auf der Strasse nachgefragt.
Einer der ersten Macs aus dem Jahr 1976 kam in New York bei Christie's unter den Hammer. Das Modell ohne Bildschirm und Tastatur wurde von Apple-Mitbegründer Steve Wozniak eigenhändig zusammengebaut.
90 Prozent der Schweizer Jugendlichen besitzen inzwischen ein Smartphone. Am liebsten kommunizieren sie mit Messengerdiensten. Die Skepsis gegenüber Facebook hingegen nimmt zu.
Launch Center Pro ermöglicht es, programmübergreifende Abläufe einzurichten und Routineaufgaben zu beschleunigen.
Im Lehrplan 21 nehmen Informationstechnologie und Medien einen grossen Raum ein. ETH-Professor Juraj Hromkovic warnt davor, die Informatik in diesem Paket zu verstecken: Vielmehr brauche sie den Stellenwert eines eigenen Schulfachs.
Durch den Abhörskandal erleben Suchmaschinen einen Boom, die anonymes Surfen versprechen. Eine davon Duck Duck Go, die für iOS und Android erschienen ist.
Im Ausland kann das Handy ein Sicherheitsrisiko und eine Kostenfalle sein. Mit diesen Tipps wird es zum geschätzten Reisebegleiter.
Sie messen Blutdruck, liefern Laufdaten und mehr: Mit Mini-Computern in Brillen, Fitness-Armbändern und Schuhen erforschen sich die Nutzer. An den Daten der sogenannten «Wearables» erfreuen sich auch Firmen.
Auch wenn es keinen absoluten Schutz vor der Überwachung im Internet gibt. Wir zeigen, wie Sie sich mit ein paar Handgriffen Dokumente, Mails, Kurznachrichten und Co. zumindest weitgehend absichern können.
Das neue Smartphone-Flaggschiff von Nokia ist ab sofort in der Schweiz erhältlich und legt besonders Wert auf die Kamera. Warum man aber nichts überstürzen sollte.
Trending cyber attacks such as may be typically overlooked by small and midsize businesses, but the CEO of security firm Lumension warns that they are actually in the line of fire. Around the world, ransomware has been proved to be effective in midsized business environments and below, mainly due to the lack of tools available to deal with said Pat Clawson, chairman and CEO of Lumension, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. "Most corporations have the means to deal with that outright from a technology and people perspective," he said. "However, if it is a ten person business environment, it is going to cost them a lot of money to get the issue resolved." Clawson admits that it is not uncommon for these smaller businesses to even consider paying the ransom with the hope all of the stolen data returns.
Microsoft slashed prices on its by as much as 30 percent, with the entry-level 32GB model selling for $349 starting July 14. The 64GB Surface RT was also discounted by $150, and now sells for $449, or 25 percent off its former price. When Microsoft launched the tablet, it sold the 32GB device for $499 and the 64GB configuration for $599. Microsoft started selling the Surface RT at the lower prices July 14, as did some of its U.S. retail partners, including Best Buy and Staples. On its website, Staples noted that the discounted prices are valid until July 20, and only while supplies last.
Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) jumped into second place among Microsoft's browsers last month, pushing past IE9 through an enforced upgrade. IE10's user share climbed from 16.5 percent to a record 24 percent of all copies of Internet Explorer in June, according to Web measurement firm Net Applications. Among Microsoft's five supported browsers, IE10 was the second-most-used, leapfrogging the two-year-old IE9, which shed user share to end June with 20.9 percent of all copies of Internet Explorer. The 12-year-old IE6 was fourth with 10.9 percent, while 2009's IE8 remained in first with 40.4 percent. IE10's climb has accelerated: June's user share increase was the largest since the browser's in February. As in previous months, June's jump was fueled by the automatic update from IE9 to IE10 on Windows 7 that kicked in last winter.
As senior officials from China and the United States wrap up a from tech companies and other U.S. businesses. "From defense contractors to manufacturing, no American company has been immune from the scourge of Chinese intellectual property theft," says Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pennsylvania), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight subcommittee. Among the witnesses on hand was Slade Gorton, a former senator from Washington who serves on the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, a group that has been studying the economic impact of the problem, with a particular focus on China. Gorton cited the commission's estimate that cyber espionage and other forms of IP theft from foreign countries account for annual losses of $300 billion for U.S. companies. The group attributes between 50 percent and 80 percent of those losses to China.
The Chinese cyberspies behind the widely publicized espionage campaign against have added Dropbox and WordPress to their bag of spear-phishing tricks. The gang, known in security circles as the DNSCalc gang, has been using the Dropbox file-sharing service for roughly the last 12 months as a mechanism for spreading malware, said Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer for Cyber Squared. While the tactic is not unique, it remains under the radar of most companies. "I wouldn't say it's new," Barger said on Thursday. "It's just something that folks aren't really looking at or paying attention to." The gang is among 20 Chinese groups identified this year by security firm Mandiant that against specific targets to steal information. In this case, the DNSCalc gang was going after intelligence on individuals or governments connected to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN is a non-governmental group that represents the economic interests of ten Southeast Asian countries.
And a couple more: The $89 Korean-made (left) packs in a Exynos4412 Prime ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor, much faster than the Pi's ARM-powered Broadcom SoC. Another board that's used widely in automation projects is the The emphasis here isn't on power or speed, though: The Arduino Uno ($55 for the bare board, $60 for a retail box version), shown here, sports an 8-bit RISC processor running at a mere 80MHz (an Intel Core i7 runs around 3GHz).
Hiring of technology professionals has been on the upswing in the first half of this year, with new IT hires accounting for about 10 percent of all the job growth in the U.S. in June, according to two independent assessments. Total tech employment reached 4.47 million in June, an increase of 22,600 jobs from the prior month, or a .51 percent gain, according to TechServe Alliance, an IT services industry group which tracks employment data month-to-month. The total excludes tech manufacturing employment. Similarly, Foote Partners, which researches IT employment trends, reported a gain of 18,200 new tech jobs last month. These gains are coming at the same time that some tech employers are cutting jobs.
Microsoft has completed its purchase of InCycle’s InRelease business unit, , and is now deploying the software to offer DevOps capabilities to its Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server users. The company has released an InRelease how the software will be folded into Microsoft’s line of development software. “The real interest in DevOps is about figuring out how to streamline the delivery of the software from the developer’s desktop to the production environment,” said Brian Harry, Microsoft technical fellow in charge of Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft’s application lifecycle management product. The emerging practice of seeks to shorten development time of software by having software developers work more closely with system administrators and other IT operations staff. The InRelease acquisition is providing Microsoft with a set of tools it can offer its customers to facilitate DevOps workflows.
With a shareholder vote scheduled for July 18, the battle over Dell’s $24.4 billion plan to go private intensified Friday as investor Carl Icahn and his affiliates issued an enhanced offer for the company. Icahn and his partner, Southeastern Asset Management, issued a letter to Dell shareholders offering a warrant to buy a share in the company at $20 over the next seven years for every four shares that they sell now. Icahn’s plan calls for part of the company to continue to be publicly traded. The new offer is in addition to the previous proposal to buy shares at $14 each. Making the calculation that shares will rise over $20 once the suggested proposal and new management is in place, Icahn said in the letter that the entire deal is potentially worth $15.50 to $18 a share for current shareholders. In the letter, Icahn said that he and Southeastern are “completely committed to bringing in management that we expect to be far superior to Michael Dell who we believe has had an abysmal record during the last three years. We believe there would be several excellent candidates for this position who would be very interested in running this company once a clear mandate has been established.”
In another example of the consumerization of IT, people have embraced cloud storage and file sharing services like Dropbox both at home and at work, and CIOs better take notice about this trend, according to a Forrester Research report. “There is huge business value in these types of services,” said Rob Koplowitz, co-author of the study “File Sync and Share Platforms, Q3 2013. “They solve a bunch of business problems.” Dropbox and similar services, with their intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, make it easy and convenient for people to sync files across multiple personal and enterprise devices, including tablets and smartphones, and share these often large files with colleagues, clients and partners, he said. The problem for enterprise IT leaders is that this is yet another technology product that employees are using outside of their companies’ controlled IT environment.
Chinese government officials agreed to crack down on software and other piracy and to take steps to ensure that state-owned organizations use legal software. The commitments, reached during negotiations with U.S. government representatives this week as part of the countries’ Strategic and Economic Dialogue, will grow U.S. exports and help create U.S. jobs, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said. The agreements “promise real results for American innovators, creative industries and workers, from more vigorous protection and enforcement of trade secrets to strengthened software legalization efforts at state-owned enterprises and improved enforcement of intellectual property rights,” he said in a statement. China agreed to implement software management systems to promote the use of legal software by state-owned enterprises, and the country’s negotiators promised to take action against Internet piracy and trade secret theft, said the BSA, a software trade group.
Reader Chris needs to reinstall Windows 7 Home Basic on his laptop. Just one problem: he lost his recovery discs. A more common problem is when you need to reinstall Windows and you never had recovery discs to begin with. Few manufacturers provide them anymore, and many new PCs don't have optical drives even if they did. . The latter deletes a key file inside the former, thus allowing you to install any version of Windows. Let me explain that a bit further. Windows 7 and 8 installation discs are version-specific; they're designed to match up with your product key. That's why you can't use, say, a Windows 7 Home Premium product key to install Windows 7 Professional, even if you have a disc for the latter.
According to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, the future of Microsoft involves such things as "living" documents, the Microsoft equivalent of "Google Now," a blurring of email and chat, and the ability to add a gaming layer to everyday activities. It's an ambitious vision, and Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer laid it all out in a , it's worth focusing on what the company has in store for the longer-term future of its product groups, too. Ballmer made much of the fact that Microsoft is reorganizing around devices and services and moving away from being a purely software-driven business. But Microsoft was founded on identifying and meeting key needs that it can address, such as productivity, collaboration, and fun. What Ballmer's document appears to do is essentially remix those concepts, combining them in much the same way painters mix primary colors together, to develop new and profitable combinations of technologies. Ballmer addresses five key areas: the future of documents, anticipatory data, the future of social, gaming, and the "shell" of the Windows interface.
When Microsoft added support for the revamped Start page into Windows 8.1, that eliminated the need for dedicated third-party Start menus, right? Wrong, say developers like Stardock, Classic Shell, and others. said that they've thrown in the towel. , an "apparating system" that was designed to facilitate the interaction of mobile-style apps with the Windows OS, also offers a "classic" Start menu.) These products fill a need: to ease the transition to Windows 8 and its unfamiliar Start page. In many ways, Windows 8 is just Windows 7 with a tablet interface layered on top of it, but—sorry!—no Start button. Users upset by the jarringly different Start page had no refuge from it other than third-party alternatives.
Your business makes a number of impressions on customers, but few business owners give much thought to how happy those customers are while they're waiting in line. . Great amounts of science have been poured into how to make waiting in line less miserable. (See the first link for a few tips, like Disney's use of winding lines to conceal their actual length and habitually overestimating wait times so guests are happily surprised when they get to the front of the queue faster than expected.) Such trickery may help ease some of our suffering, but most businesses don't have the luxury of wrapping a line around an interactive Winnie the Pooh exhibit to amuse customers while they wait. Instead, they regretfully funnel customers into a world of misery, where they're surprisingly likely to abandon their purchase and walk out if the line is long. If they do stick around, satisfaction levels plummet and those shoppers may never return to the store again. Fortunately, high-tech solutions are forthcoming.
Let's go grab some burgers. Or maybe Thai food sounds good? If everything else is closed I'm sure we can go for some tacos. It's just important that we get some dinner and have a really good time—and you can certainly try in Save the Date.
. But whether the Surface RT’s cheaper pricing is part of a larger, more permanent price cut or just a temporary drop for one model appears to be up for debate. which said Microsoft plans to cut the prices for the 32GB and 64GB Surface RT. Except it doesn’t, really. Based on The Verge report, you will reportedly be able to pick-up the 32GB Surface RT for $350 or $450 for the 64GB model. If you want a Touch Cover accessory to go with either slate, add another $100 as you do now. But the Staples weekly ad makes no mention of a price cut for the 64GB model, even though the retailer sells that version of the Microsoft slate. When approached by PCWorld, Microsoft said it doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.
A Japanese ministry is conducting an internal investigation after a Google Groups account used for international treaty negotiations was left on its default, publicly viewable settings. An official at Japan’s Ministry of the Environment created the group to share mails and documents related to Japan’s negotiations during the Minamata Convention, a meeting held in Geneva in January to create international standards to limit international mercury use. But the official used the default privacy setting, leaving the exchanges open to searches and views in the months since. The information has now been removed. “The majority of the information that was accessible was not secret, but we’re conducting an investigation into the details now,” said Michihiru Oi, a ministry official. Oi said the ministry has its own system for creating groups and sharing documents, but it doesn’t always function well outside of Japan, sometimes leading to “poor connections” and a “bad working environment.”
Twitter has handed French prosecutors information enabling the identification of some of those responsible for posts last year apparently contravening French laws on hate speech, according to the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF), which had filed suits against the company to compel it to release the data. One lawsuit, filed in November, went all the way to the Court of Appeal, which on June 12 rejected Twitter’s attempt to shield the identities of those responsible for posts made last year with the hashtag #unbonjuif (a good Jew). The UEJF and four other French anti-racism organizations asked Twitter to reveal the identities of the posters and to make it easy for its users to flag messages potentially contravening hate speech laws. .
Microsoft has already received several vulnerability reports that qualify for monetary rewards as part of the company’s bug bounty program launched in June for the preview version of Internet Explorer 11. The recipient of the first IE 11 bounty will be Ivan Fratric, a security researcher who earned second place and $50,000 last year in Microsoft’s BlueHat Prize contest for the development of defensive technologies. Fratric’s entry into the contest was a system called ROPGuard, which can detect and prevent return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks. According to his LinkedIn profile, Fratric worked as a researcher at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing until October 2012, when he joined Google as an information security engineer. . “I personally notified the very first bounty recipient via email today that his submission for the Internet Explorer 11 Preview Bug Bounty is confirmed and validated,” she said, adding that this means “he’s getting paid.”
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston talked a big game this week when he announced new ways for apps to save and load user data. as a way to “replace the hard drive.” Dropbox Platform is supposed to provide easier ways to store your files in the cloud, with simple buttons that developers can add to their apps. It can also let apps save their own data across platforms, so your work in an Android app can carry over to iOS, and vice versa. “Today,” Houston said, “the hard drive goes away.” Houston’s grand proclamations certainly made for some great headlines. But as Dropbox does its best to eliminate the storage woes of the post-PC era, it may also create new headaches when it comes to storing more of our lives in the cloud.
Imagine a world with no tweets, no emails, no notifications pushed to your phone. A world without Candy Crush or indeed, even Facebook; a land without the Internet. The thought may sound like heaven to minimalists, but in recent months, dictators around the world have been all too willing to transform the idea into a hellacious reality, flipping a switch and completely disconnecting whole nations from the Web: Syria. Egypt. Libya. All have been plunged into darkness during periods of civil unrest. But is there any way the United States could be disconnected from the Internet? Could an act of terror, war, or simple governmental dictatorship snatch away our social feeds and online gaming? Curious, I reached out to several experts to examine all the potential doomsday scenarios. They say the Internet is a series of tubes. One obvious way to disconnect the United States from the rest of the Net would be to cut, blow up, or otherwise destroy those tubes, right?
Infosys posted strong revenue growth in the second quarter as demand picked up in key markets including the U.S. However, the Indian outsourcer’s net profit grew only 0.5 percent year on year as the company increased salaries for staff in India and elsewhere. Profit was also affected by currency fluctuations, particularly the depreciation of the Australian dollar, and low staff utilization, said Ashok Vemuri, Infosys’ head of Americas, on Friday. Revenue was close to $2 billion in the quarter, up by 13.6 percent year-on-year. Net profit for the quarter was $418 million.
The latest simulator for the upcoming Firefox mobile OS is aimed to please developers planning to sell applications. , a technology evangelist for Mozilla. The simulator is a test environment for the forthcoming Firefox OS, a Linux-based OS for mobile devices designed with tight integration with the Internet using open web standards such HTML5. The first devices came on the market earlier this month in Spain from operator Telefonica, with Deutsche Telekom in Poland due to release devices soon. Firefox OS is a new challenger in a market dominated by Android and iOS phones and is seeking to compete with high performance, lower-cost phones.
Verizon Wireless became the first U.S. carrier to join the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, but it is not clear whether it will eventually promote phones running the open-source Ubuntu OS on its network. Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, announced in June the formation of a Carrier Advisory Group that would shape Ubuntu for the mobile industry. Other members of the CAG include Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, Smartfren, China Unicom and SK Telecom. Thursday.
Insurance provider WellPoint has agreed to pay a $1.7 million fine for exposing more than 600,000 personal records online due to weak database security, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) said Thursday. WellPoint, based in Indianapolis, is one the largest health insurers in the U.S., with more than 100 million customers covered by it and its subsidiaries. In 2009, WellPoint reported to the federal agency that an online database holding personal and health information for 612,402 individuals was left accessible over the Internet between October 2009 and March 2010. The data included names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, phone numbers and health information.
Steve Ballmer’s grand to reinvent Microsoft has garnered mixed reviews from industry analysts, ranging from enthusiastic endorsements to frowning skepticism. Some predict the reorganization will accomplish its goal of making Microsoft more efficient and innovative, and thus better able to compete against rivals like Apple, Oracle, IBM and Google. Others are concerned that internal accountability will drop and the company will become less responsive to customer needs and market inflections. At the heart of the restructuring, , is the dissolution of the company’s five business units—the Business Division, which housed Office; Server & Tools, which included SQL Server and System Center; the Windows Division; Online Services, which included Bing; and Entertainment and Devices, whose main product was the Xbox console.
Microsoft’s reorganization is the biggest shot yet fired against the company’s core partners, the computer makers who have made the software developer a technology giant, analysts said today. “There were clear lines of demarcation where Microsoft’s efforts ended and OEMs’ started, but this could challenge OEMs down the road,” said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an interview Thursday. Moorhead was referring to the announced earlier today by CEO Steve Ballmer—specifically the creation of a hardware group within the company.