In der Debatte um die umstrittene Abhöraktionen des US-Geheimdienstes NSA hat Deutschlands Kanzleramtsminister Ronald Pofalla die deutschen Geheimdienste entlastet. Die NSA widersprach zudem in einer Stellungnahme an die deutschen Behörden, dass sie massenhaft Daten in Deutschland sammle.
Die irische Datenschutzbehörde (ODPC) hat auf zwei Anzeigen gegen die irischen Tochterunternehmen von Facebook und Apple reagiert, die Mitglieder der vom Wiener Juristen Max Schrems initiierten Studenteninitiative „Europe-v-facebook.org“ Ende Juni nach EU-Datenschutzrecht eingebracht haben.
Die 920 Millionen Euro aus dem Verkauf mehrerer Zeitungen soll der Springer-Verlag bereits für einen Zukauf verplant haben. Damit bringe sich der Verlag hinter der „Bild“-Zeitung in eine gute Ausgangspositionen im Bietergefecht um die Internetanzeigengruppe Scout24, sagten mehrere mit den Planungen der Transaktion vertraute Personen.
Die Staatsanwaltschaft des Kantons Appenzell Ausserrhoden hat ein Strafverfahren gegen einen Betreiber eines mutmasslichen Netzwerks für Rechtsradikale eröffnet. Laut der Zeitschrift "Beobachter" ist das soziale Netzwerk namens Fumano.com das "Facebook" für Neonazis.
Den Namen des neugeborenen Sohnes von Prinz William und seiner Frau Kate gab der Palast am Mittwochabend bekannt - George Alexander Louis. Den Domainnamen georgealexanderlouis.com hatte bereits einige Stunden zuvor der Schweizer Geschäftsmann Luc-André Biggs eintragen lassen.
Mit einem Kursplus von 16,7 Prozent gehörten die Aktien des Virtualisierungsspezialisten VMware zu den Hauptgewinnern an der New Yorker Börse. Nach verschiedenen Abgängen im Management hatten Marktteilnehmer und Investoren mit verhaltenen Geschäftszahlen gerechnet, zumal sich das wirtschaftliche Umfeld in Europa zuletzt weiter eintrübte.
Der Internetkonzern Google hat wie erwartet seinen neuen Nexus 7 Tablet PC vorgestellt. Der neue von Asustek gefertigte Tablet kommt mit einem 7-Zoll grossen Display mit einer Auflösung von 1.920 x 1.200 Pixeln daher.
Die Deutsche SAP investiert massiv in der Türkei. Für einen zweistelligen Millionenbetrag soll in Istanbul eine zweite Innovationsbasis eröffnet werden. Damit ist die SAP das erste grosse Softwareunternehmen mit einem solchen Zentrum für Innovation und Entwicklung in der Türkei.
Der US-Geheimdienst NSA war an dem inzwischen gescheiterten deutschen Drohnenprojekt Euro Hawk der Bundeswehr beteiligt. Das bestätigte das deutsche Verteidigungsministerium heute in Berlin. Allerdings sei es dabei nur um die Bereitstellung „selektiver Einzelkomponenten der Trägerplattform“ wie Kommunikations- und Verschlüsselungsgeräte sowie um „selektive Unterstützungsleistungen“ gegangen.
Die britische Telefongesellschaft BT Group kommt bei ihrem Umbau weiter gut voran. Der Ausbau des Geschäfts mit schnellen Internetzugängen wirkt sich weiter positiv aus, wie das Unternehmen am Donnerstag in London erklärte. Hier dominiert BT den britischen Markt und kann mit deutlichen Zuwächsen die Verluste im klassischen Festnetzgeschäft kompensieren.
. ) into a personalized portal, a page stocked with news feeds, e-mail notifications, social-network updates, and more. Indeed, OneFeed goes beyond Chrome's default new-tab options, which consist of thumbnails steering you to your most-visited sites or, if you scroll to the next "page," links to Chrome apps. Once installed, you still get the most-visited sites thumbnails, but with the option of dragging them together to create folders (similar to how you do on an iOS device). And there's already a folder of Chrome apps, which saves you have to flip pages to access them.
Google caught the world by surprise yesterday with the . The tiny media streaming dongle is aimed at consumers and presents a serious challenge for Apple TV, but it’s also a great tool for small and medium businesses. By now, you’re probably aware of the basic details regarding the Chromecast. It’s a small device that plugs in to an HDMI port on a TV or monitor, and it’s able to stream content from services like Youtube and Netflix, as well as music and movies from Google Play, over a wireless network connection. The device can be controlled remotely from an Android or iOS mobile device, or through the Chrome browser on a Windows PC or Mac. That’s all fine and dandy for consumers—although between Apple TV, Roku, game consoles like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii U, or connected TVs and DVD/Blu-ray players, almost everyone can already stream Netflix and other content one way or another. But the Chromecast also has a secret weapon that makes it just as valuable for business use: it can stream any content that can be viewed in the Chrome browser. Businesses that are more Google-centric will get more value from this feature than others because Gmail, Google Docs, and other Google services essentially run from within the Chrome browser. Businesses that don’t depend on Google can still use it, though. Microsoft files like Word documents and PowerPoint presentations can be saved in HTML format and viewed through Chrome.
Oracle is continuing to crack down on companies it claims are providing support services for its products in an illegal fashion. Last week, Oracle sued IT services providers Terix and Maintech, alleging they have “engaged in a deliberate scheme to misappropriate and distribute copyrighted, proprietary Oracle software code” in the course of providing support for customers using Oracle’s Solaris OS. Terix and Maintech officials have “falsely told unwitting end users they are authorized to access and distribute Solaris Updates to the end users and/or that the end users are entitled to perpetual support on [Solaris], including to receive Solaris Updates, based on their original purchase on the hardware on which the operating system was installed,” adds Oracle’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. But Oracle, “and Sun before it, have long required customers to purchase an annual support agreement to receive that support,” according to the complaint.
Five men from Russia and Ukraine have been indicted in New Jersey for charges they conspired with each other in a worldwide hacking scheme targeting major corporate networks that compromised more than 160 credit card numbers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. The men allegedly attacked the networks of several companies, including Nasdaq, 7-Eleven, JCP, Dow Jones and Hannaford, the DOJ said. Companies reported $300 million in losses from the attacks, the DOJ said in a press release. Charged in an indictment unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey were Vladimir Drinkman, 32, of Syktyykar and Moscow, Russia; Alexandr Kalinin, 26, of St. Petersburg, Russia; Roman Kotov, 32, of Moscow; Mikhail Rytikov, 26, of Odessa, Ukraine; and Dmitriy Smilianets, 29, of Moscow. Drinkman and Kalinin allegedly specialized in penetrating network security and gaining access to the corporate victims’ systems, while Kotov allegedly specialized in mining the compromised networks to steal data, the DOJ said. The defendants hid their activities using anonymous Web-hosting services provided by Rytikov, while Smilianets allegedly sold the information stolen by the other conspirators and distributed the proceeds of the scheme to the participants.
For U.S. cloud providers, already working to beat back a wave of overseas policies they say tilt the playing field in favor of home-grown competitors, the revelations of the National Security Agency’s PRISM electronic surveillance program have only made conditions in foreign markets tougher. The media accounts of the program based on leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden have created a perception that the U.S. government has unlimited and direct access to data stored on the servers of companies like Google and Microsoft, experts said on Wednesday at a policy talk here at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a D.C. think tank. “The PRISM disclosures are damaging, and I think I’m prepared to speculate extremely damaging to commercial firms that have offered cloud and related kinds of services, and that do or would benefit from efficient cross-border data flows,” says Philip Verveer, the former U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. Already, domestic cloud providers have been hampered in their overseas expansion, particularly in Europe, by a deficit of trust among businesses and consumers who worry about how their data will be handled when it resides in the cloud. The long-held suspicion that the U.S. government will be able to freely access foreign users’ data under the PATRIOT Act has been fueled by foreign cloud companies and some state officials, who have pressed for cloud protectionist policies that would limit the flow of data outside the country, effectively requiring foreign providers to operate data centers locally.
IBM is searching for a buyer for its Intel-based SystemX and BladeCenter server hardware units. The move is a part of a larger trend in technology, and should be viewed as proverbial “writing on the wall”, but it’s way too premature to say server hardware is dead. Virtual servers and cloud services have taken the wind out of the sails of server hardware. The boom times of companies buying racks and racks of hardware to fill data centers have been replaced by smarter tools and more powerful hardware capable of running an entire IT infrastructure from one box. like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. IBM has reportedly engaged in talks with a number of potential buyers, but the leading contender to buy the SystemX and BladeCenter business is Lenovo. Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC business a decade ago, so the two already have a solid history together. The question Lenovo needs to consider is whether or not it’s possible to squeeze profit from server hardware.
If you're a laptop user who's skipped the SSD experience because of the breed's lack of capacity, your drive has arrived—or it will in the first week of August. Samsung's new 840 EVO family of drives will be available in capacities up to a whopping 1TB. And these drives are aggressively priced: $110 for 120GB version, $190 for the 250GB, $370 for the 500GB, $530 for the 750GB, and a mere $650 for the 1TB. Mere is a relative concept, of course, but 65 cents per GB is a new low for retail SSDs. The larger part of the secret behind the 840 EVO's increased capacity is 3-bit MLC (Mulit-Level Cell) NAND which by it's very nature (it stores 3 bits of information) offers a third more capacity than the 2-bit MLC NAND used in most current generation drives. Also helping fit more stuff into less space is the 19nm manufacturing process used to produce the NAND. Samsung for some reason is calling this 10nm-class, or 1x NAND, but they assured us that it's 19nm. Samsung also promises that the 840 EVO will outperform most of the current SSD crop, but the Samsung 840 Pro will remain the company's flagship solid-state drive. To that end, Samsung is treating part of the NAND as 1-bit SLC (Single-Level Cell), which gives it that technology's superior speed and endurance. It's then employed as cache for the rest of the NAND. The technology is called TurboWrite and it's part of the repertoire of the new MEX (up from the 840's MDX) controller used on the EVO. Samsung is also providing a operating system-level driver called Rapid that leverages what Samsung calls today's PC's over-provisioning of memory. In other words, it steals some of your system's RAM and uses it as cache. Beyond that, it uses smarts to adapt to usage patterns over time, rendering the cache more effective.
Not unexpectedly, Microsoft announced the developer version of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 on Thursday, bringing Microsoft's last-generation OS onto its latest browser platform. as part of Windows 8.1. . Microsoft has also provided a new set of F12 tools to analyze the performance of Web sites. The tools track the CPU and memory usage as a user moves around a Web site, with graphs and metrics to identify memory leaks and sections of the site that may consume more resources than expected.
, but I didn't discuss portability. How do you take your passwords with you when you step away from your computer? version of your password manager. A portable program is one that can run on a PC without installation, and thus can be launched from a flash drive.
Malware writers are increasingly considering the Tor anonymity network as an option for hiding the real location of their command-and-control (C&C) servers, according to researchers from security firm ESET. The ESET researchers recently came across two botnet-type malware programs that use (C&C) servers operating as Tor “hidden services.” The Tor Hidden Service protocol allows users to set up services—usually Web servers—that can only be accessed from within the Tor network through a random-looking hostname that ends in the .onion pseudo domain extension. This protocol was designed to hide the real Internet Protocol (IP) address of a “hidden service” from its clients as well as hide the clients’ IP addresses from the service, making it almost impossible for either party to determine the other’s location or identity.
PayPal is opening up its bug bounty program to individuals aged 14 and older, a move intended to reward younger researchers who are technically ineligible to hold full-fledged PayPal accounts. PayPal’s program, which is a year old this month, only applied to those 18 years and older. Under the old rule, participants in the program were required to hold valid accounts, which excluded minors, said Gus Anagnos, PayPal’s director of information security. In May, 17-year-old Robert Kugler, a student in Germany, said he’d been denied a reward for finding a vulnerability. PayPal said the bug had already been found by two other researchers, which would have made Kugler ineligible for bounty. In an apparent miscommunication, Kugler said he was initially told he was too young rather than the bug had already been discovered. Nonetheless, PayPal said it would look to bring younger people into its program, which pays upwards of $10,000 for remote code execution bugs on its websites.
You could call it a revolution. You could call it a capitulation. Either way, when Google quietly started making a few available through its Web Store last week, it marked a new and necessary chapter in Chrome app history. The Chrome OS platform has always had its die-hard fanbase, but it has also suffered significant limitations, including a lack of offline functionality and local storage, and a of apps in the Web Store. Enter packaged apps, which run on top of the Chrome OS, act more or less like traditional software, and are developed in common Web languages like HTML5 and CSS. Packaged apps don’t run within your browser window and don’t require an always-on Internet connection. As such, they’re well positioned to help users get more comfortable with the Chrome ecosysem. UberConference, a teleconferencing app, is one of the first packaged apps to hit Google’s Web Store, and if it shows anything, it’s that the portability of packaged apps will make it easier for developers to focus resources on product features rather than on the nuts and bolts of platform compatibility. That’s good news for users, as well as for overworked software engineers.
If Google Now is the chirpy personal assistant, always volunteering information before being asked, Microsoft’s future in intelligent virtual assistants will be more in tune with a butler, quietly hovering and making suggestions where necessary. In fact, don’t expect Microsoft to develop a competitor to either Google Now or Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s director of Bing search, Stefan Weitz, told PCWorld in an interview. Instead, individual products within Microsoft will be able to tap into the vast collection of data that Microsoft has amassed through its partnerships with Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and many more—far, far beyond what Google, which has favored an independent approach, can achieve, Weitz said. No, Microsoft Bob isn’t coming back with snazzy new hipster glasses updated for 2013. But a Big Data version of the Bob concept—personal assistance precisely when you need it—is definitely coming to Microsoft’s repertoire. At the center of it all is Bing, the company’s public-facing search engine. Behind the scenes, Microsoft has been busy developing what it calls its Satori engine, named for the first step on the . Satori’s goal, Microsoft says, is to build the “world’s largest repository of knowledge” for Bing to tap into, always there to provide assistance when asked. Behind the scenes, Satori will collect and collate user information, organizing it within Bing, and using individual applications as the portals for delivery to users.
French telecommunications operator Orange reported a sharp fall in net profit for the first half, with as revenue declined year on year too. The company, known until July as France Télécom, reported first-half profit of €1.21 billion ($1.57 billion as of June 30, the last day of the period reported), down 36.7 percent from €1.91 billion a year earlier. Revenue for the half-year totalled €20.6 billion, down 5.7 percent from €21.8 billion a year earlier. On a comparable basis, excluding acquisitions and divestments, the decline was just 4.5 percent, Orange said, while the decline would have been just 2.2 percent without the effects of price regulation. . The attractions of Free’s €20 unlimited voice and data plan are starting to fade, though, and Orange reported net mobile contract sales were at their highest since Free’s launch. Orange’s French mobile customer base grew 1.5 percent year on year, it said.
Amazon Web Services has filed a complaint in a U.S. court after the Government Accountability Office sustained in part a protest by IBM against the award of a contract by the CIA for a cloud computing project. IBM had challenged the evaluation of proposals and the selection decision in the award of the CIA contract for commercial cloud services to AWS in Seattle, Washington. The bid protest complaint filed by AWS on Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims is under seal as some of the information contained in it is under a protective order from the GAO. “We believe strongly that the CIA got it right the first time. Providing true cloud computing services to the intelligence community requires a transformative approach with superior technology,” AWS said in an emailed statement.
The U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday narrowly rejected an effort to stop the National Security Agency from collecting millions of U.S. residents’ telephone records. from U.S. carriers and cut off funding for the phone records collection program as currently designed. , considered as part of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, would have allowed the NSA to continue collecting phone records of suspects, but only when relevant to an antiterrorism investigation. The NSA is part of the Defense Department. House members who supported the amendment voted to “oppose the suspicionless collection of every American’s phone records,” said Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican and chief sponsor of the amendment.
Many enterprises are now planning to move a significant portion of their infrastructure to the cloud, says Dave LeClair, senior director of strategy at Stratus Technologies, a specialist in high availability solutions. A recently released survey conducted by Stratus, North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research found that 75 percent of firms are now reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform, and the worldwide addressable market for cloud computing will reach $158.8 billion by 2013, an increase of 126.5 percent from 2011. ”Enthusiasm for the cloud continues to grow, moving beyond historical concerns such as security,” LeClair says. “But, what is also clear from this year’s results is for cloud adoption to continue accelerating beyond its current pace, companies are going to be looking to vendors to enable always-on infrastructures that support their more critical business applications in this new environment. Companies need to take a hard look at which applications they are putting in the cloud, then, consider what’s involved in managing this shift from a resource, skillset, cost and complexity standpoint, LeClair says. We know first-hand these considerations are not a one-size-fits-all answer and rewriting applications for the cloud will not be the solution in many cases.”
Sprint and AT&T both unveiled new 4G coverage zones today. The realm of 4G wireless networking continues to grow with each passing week, and for business users it has matured from a luxury to a necessity. , bringing AT&T 4G service to a total of 336 markets across the United States. It wasn’t that long ago that wireless providers first started rolling out the next-generation 4G networks. In just a couple of years, though, 4G/LTE networks have become the standard—at least in larger metropolitan areas—and for business users trying to get things done from mobile devices, 4G makes all the difference. even though it’s not.
Videoconferencing is advertised as a tool to reduce travel expenses, but for the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the business, apparently that wasn’t enough. Polycom President and CEO Andrew Miller has resigned after the audit committee of the company’s board found irregularities in his expense-report submissions. He quit Friday, and Polycom announced his departure in its second-quarter earnings announcement Tuesday. Kevin Parker, a managing principal at Bridge Growth Partners and a Polycom board member since 2005, has been named interim CEO. Miller took responsibility for the expense-report irregularities, which didn’t involve any other employees, Polycom said. They weren’t big enough to have a material impact on the company’s current or previous financial results, according to the company. It gave no other details about the reports. Miller also gave up his seat on Polycom’s board. Miller joined the company in 2009 as executive vice president of global field operations and became CEO in 2010. Previously, he had been global president of IPC Information Systems, a financial trading communications company, and CEO of the Norwegian video system maker Tandberg, which has since been acquired by Cisco Systems.
, a way to get your LinkedIn posts and announcements directly into the LinkedIn news feeds of people who aren’t already following you. , but Sponsored Updates are a little different. Rather than shunting your messaging off to the sidebar, these promotional posts will appear directly in your news feed on your LinkedIn homepage, making them much more difficult to ignore. (LinkedIn ads are typically buried at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar and don’t even appear unless you start scrolling down the page.) . It rolls out to the rest of the world—anyone with a LinkedIn Company Page—at the end of this month. to be contacted by the company if they’re interested in getting started with Sponsored Updates (or simply wait a week).
Michael Dell and Silver Lake’s decision to raise the offer to take Dell private is a concession that rival Carl Icahn and affiliated parties may have an upper hand in the wrangling to take over the company, observers of the deal said. Founder Dell and Silver Lake on Wednesday offered shareholders $13.75, an increase from the original offer of $13.65 proposed in February, which was met with opposition from Icahn and other institutional investors, who believed the company was being undervalued. Icahn has led the fight against Dell, playing a major role in getting the company founder and CEO to increase his offer, observers said. Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management made several counteroffers to the Dell-Silver Lake proposal, and Icahn claimed the most recent counteroffer could be potentially worth $15.50 to $18 a share for current shareholders. A vote to approve the new Dell-Silver Lake proposal is scheduled for Aug. 2. Dell on Wednesday delayed the second shareholder vote on the Dell-Silver Lake proposal. Dell perhaps failed to gain enough shareholder backing to approve the deal, observers said.
A recent study that greatly reduces an often-cited estimate on the economic impact of cybercrime and cyberespionage should not give companies a reason to spend less on security, experts say. The , released on Monday, found that Internet-based crime and spying cost the U.S. economy as much as $100 billion a year, not the $1 trillion originally estimated by the Intel-owned security vendor. The study was done in conjunction with the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies. The analytical approach used in the latest findings is closer to reality than the previous methodology based on notoriously imprecise corporate surveys. McAfee acknowledges that the earlier figure, included in President Barack Obama’s 2009 cybersecurity speech, was inflated. ”There were some methodological challenges with the [original] study and we felt that the right thing to do was to work with the top think tank in the world focused on security and come up with a better study to set the record straight,” Tom Gann, vice president of government relations at McAfee, said on Tuesday.
. The partnership will be make it easier for developers to deploy and manage cloud applications, and will be great for businesses looking to take advantage of the cloud. describes it as an open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that gives developers the freedom to choose the cloud services, developer frameworks, and application services that meet their needs. According to the Cloud Foundry About page, “Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications.” IBM may not have the clout it once carried before the rise of Microsoft, but Big Blue is still a powerful name in IT, and recently it has been a driving force behind open source cloud projects. IBM has been a leading supporter of OpenStack, an open source cloud infrastructure initiative. By working with Pivotal to foster development of the Cloud Foundry platform, IBM is now expanding its support for both open source, and the cloud. focused on application development software, shared some thoughts on the Cloud Foundry news. “Given this announcement, I expect to see IBM invest in this project and help drive its governance forward to really achieve critical mass. Cloud Foundry has already garnered significant support from many players and has built up an ecosystem, but putting IBM's imprimatur and resources behind it will be felt in the industry.”
Adding to a growing portfolio of enterprise software it offers as hosted services, Microsoft plans to add Java to its Windows Azure cloud service. “Having support for a Java platform on Azure is something our customers have been asking for,” said Rabellino announced the Azure addition at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, being held this week in Portland, Oregon. “Customers will be able to run their Java workload in a fully supported environment,” he said. Microsoft will offer the Java Standard Edition (Java SE) by the end of the year both as a stand-alone PaaS (platform as a service) and as component of a Windows Server IaaS (infrastructure as a service), both on the Windows Azure service.
Edward Snowden, who leaked documents revealing U.S. National Security Agency surveillance programs, has received a document that allows him to leave Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, according to news reports. The document allows Snowden to leave the transit zone of the airport, according to a report by Russian state-owned news agency Ria Novosti on Wednesday. He can do so provided that the border service does not object, the report said. Snowden is expected to meet his lawyer at the airport later today, according to an unnamed official cited by Reuters. temporary asylum in Russia earlier in July in an effort to avoid prosecution by the U.S. government, which has indicted him on charges related to the leaks. Snowden is believed to have been staying at the Moscow airport since arriving there on June 23 on a flight from Hong Kong.
Michael Dell has raised his offer to take Dell private by $0.10 per share, to about $24.7 billion, after the company was forced to delay a vote because stockholders seemed inclined to reject the bid. The new bid of $13.75 per share from Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners prompted the company to adjourn the special stockholder meeting for a second time while a special committee of the board of directors evaluates the new bid. The meeting will be reconvened at 9 a.m. Central Time on August 2, the special committee said Wednesday. However, the new bid comes with strings attached: The company must modify the voting requirements for its acceptance, Denali Holding, the acquisition vehicle Michael Dell and Silver Lake are using for their bid, wrote in a letter to the board’s special committee.
The White House is opposed to an amendment to a defense spending bill that would limit spending on mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. proposed by Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan, would limit spending only to orders by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that collect phone and other data only of a person who is the subject of an investigation. Former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, disclosed through newspaper reports in June that the NSA was collecting phone metadata from Verizon customers in the U.S. as part of its surveillance which was said to include data collected from Internet companies as well. that it has to retain the bulk data required by its counterterrorism tools, as it need not be retained by telecommunications service providers.