Browser vendors continue to implement privacy in a halfhearted way, with Internet Explorer's default use of cookie "do not track" technology being the best of a weak job, a new assessment by NSS Labs has argued. Currently, the latest versions of all four . The cookie-tracking setting can be enabled in the other three, but only by locating an option in a menu setting. The authors are especially critical of which requires users to find and expand a nested Advanced Settings tab to enable the feature. Even Microsoft treats the do not track as a design afterthought, burying the settings where only the most curious non-expert users might chance upon it.
Windows 8's user share growth slowed significantly in July, hinting at further trouble for the struggling operating system, new statistics from an analytics company show. The operating system's user share grew by the smallest month-over-month amount since its launch in October 2012, said Web measurement vendor Net Applications. At the end of July, accounted for 5.9 percent of all systems running Windows, an increase of three-tenths of a percentage point compared to June. From November 2012 through July 2013, grew by an average of six-tenths of a point each month, with lows in February and April of five-tenths and a high in June of nine-tenths of a percentage point. July's increase was about a third of June's.
LAS VEGAS -- Malware writers are ramping up their use of commercial file hosting sites and cloud services to distribute malware programs, security researchers said at this week's Black Hat conference here. Traditionally, malware writers had distributed their malicious code from their own sites. But as security vendors get better at detecting and blacklisting those sites, hackers are increasingly distributing their malware products from legitimate host sites. The technique has been used a bit for more than two years, but now appears be gaining steam, researchers said. (See also Often, the owners of legitimate sites fail to properly scan the content they are hosting, which allows attackers to furtively post malicious code with relative ease, said Michael Sutton, vice president of research at ZScaler, a provider of cloud-based security services for enterprises.
Google surveyed 2000 web users to find the most common types of passwords they use. The results aren't really shocking, but strongly suggest it would be really easy to hack into an account for anyone you know. That, and lots of people own pets. Here are the most common things people base their passwords on, according to the Google Apps survey: Pass this along to someone you love.
, but the reality is that this is only one of many reasons that small businesses should not run a server from a consumer-grade Internet connection. that reads, “Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you to do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection.” includes this explanation: “The server policy has been established to account for the congestion management and network security needs of Google Fiber’s network architecture, particularly given that Google Fiber does not impose data caps on its users.” Bottom line: Google believes it has a right to ban someone from hosting a server on it’s Google Fiber network because of the potential impact it could have on the bandwidth for all of the rest of the customers. That seems reasonable.
Microsoft must after losing a trademark infringement case in a U.K. court. Analysts and legal experts said that Microsoft’s blunder would cost it dearly, and wondered how the American technology giant could have made such a mistake. “It’s unbelievable to me that Microsoft did not see this coming,” said Peter LaMotte, an analyst with Levick, a Washington, D.C.-based strategic communications consultancy. “They should have seen it coming. And this is not the first time that this has happened to them.” LaMotte, who before he joined Levick had helped numerous startups with their branding efforts, was referring to last year, when Microsoft backed away from the “Metro” name to describe the new Windows 8 and Windows RT user interface and the apps that run on those platforms.
True story. Last night, while on an Amtrak train from Chicago to Detroit, I was trying to pass the time by watching Netflix on my laptop. Just one problem: The connectivity wasn't great between cities, so there were a lot of pauses while the stream buffered. What I needed was a way to downshift Netflix, to make it buffer at a lower bit rate. Yes, that would lower the image quality at the same time, but at least it would be more likely to play smoothly. As it happens, you can indeed change Netflix's buffer rate on the fly, while you're using the desktop (i.e. browser-based) player. .
Microsoft this week released “Katana,” a server implementation that will allow developers to begin trying out Microsoft’s version of what could become HTTP 2.0: the future of the Web. itself and try it out. of navigating to a specific site on the Web: how the Web address is looked up, translated, and the back-and-forth as data is requested and delivered. hopes to change that, so that multiple page requests can be processed via a single connection to the server, easing the load on the server and the network connecting it.
Dude, you got your Evernote in my digital camera! . Now you'll be able to sync photos directly from the camera, without having to use a computer as an intermediary. obsessed. Samsung is also bundling three months' worth of Evernote Premium with the camera, giving you loads of extra storage space.
have put the technology within reach of small business budgets. Here are some suggestions for how you can leverage the power of virtualization in your small business. It happens often enough: The developer of a niche software that you’re using goes out of business, or the software is no longer supported. The original installation files are nowhere to be found, and you aren’t sure of the configuration settings anyway. . This allows you to continue using the unsupported software on any desktop or laptop with sufficient RAM and a decent processor, albeit in a virtualized environment.
A Samsung eight-core chip used in some Galaxy S4 smartphone models is now available for hackers to play with on a developer board from South Korea-based Hardkernel. Hardkernel’s Odroid XU board has incorporated Samsung’s eight-core Exynos 5 Octa 5410 chip, which is based on ARM’s latest processor designs. Samsung recently announced a new eight-core chip, the Exynos 5 Octa 5420, which packs faster graphics and application processing than the 5410. The 5420 has not yet been shipped yet, however. The Odroid board is priced at $149 through Aug. 31, after which it will be offered for $169. Samsung for many months has said that a board with an eight-core chip would be released, and has shown prototype developer boards at conferences. The board has an Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX544MP3 graphics processor, 2GB of low-power DDR3 DRAM, two USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ports. Other features include Wi-Fi, ethernet and optional Bluetooth. Google’s Android 4.2 operating system is preloaded, and support for other Linux distributions like Ubuntu is expected soon.
An advertising industry oversight group has reported Oracle to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission after the vendor allegedly failed to comply with previous rulings. The National Advertising Division, which is controlled by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, investigated three Oracle advertising campaigns last year after complaints from IBM. Each of the campaigns contained “an overbroad and unsupported comparison between one Oracle product and one IBM product,” the group said in a statement late Thursday. claiming that its Exadata database machine was vastly more powerful than IBM’s Power Systems hardware, but said at the time it believed the NAD’s ruling was too broad. “Now, IBM has brought NAD’s attention to a fourth Oracle advertising campaign, featuring the claim that Oracle’s Sparc T5 has ‘2.6x Better Performance’ as compared to IBM’s Power7+ AIX server,” the NAD said. “The advertising in question features the same stark, overbroad IBM-versus-Oracle comparison that NAD recommended against in the three previous cases.”
Google's unrelenting march into Microsoft's turf continues. , basically—the company has announced that when Windows users install the desktop version of Google Drive, it will automatically dump shortcuts for Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Drive on your desktop, along with one for your Drive-based online storage. . While default shortcut dumps are evil incarnate and should be cast back into the depths from which they spawned, Google's move is actually pretty savvy. Not only do the shortcuts reinforce the fact that Drive is a full productivity suite rather than a simple cloud storage box, but like the Chrome app launcher, they also keep Google's service in your face. Plus, the shortcuts further muddle the increasingly blurry line between the desktop and the open web.
Facebook announced a new program this week that lets websites post public Facebook posts to their sites. And that could be a boon for businesses, says industry analysts. “This could be very attractive to Facebook’s business users,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “With this, they might be able to capture positive customer comments and append them to their webpages or other marketing material. Since the post retains the Facebook formatting, I think it conveys a greater sense that the statement is genuine and unsolicited.” that it was launching the embedded posts program. The embedded post will show any pictures or video attached to it, as well as the number of likes, shares, and comments that the post has, according to the social network. Only public posts from Facebook Pages and profiles can be embedded.
. If you want something that's more of a melding of Windows 8 and a start menu, Start Menu Reviver might be what you seek. When you first install Start Menu Reviver, it defaults to its large size. It's handy for touchscreens, but on a monitor or laptop screen, it looks like an Ease of Access feature for the eyesight-challenged. You can select a size that is more in keeping with the aspect ratios employed throughout the desktop. Start Menu Reviver sits on the task bar approximately where you'd expect to find it, but a little to the right. As with other Start Menus for Windows 8, you can change the icon to suit your taste. In a column on the left of Start Menu Reviver resides a list of common Windows programs (desktop and modern UI) such as Task Manager (modern UI version), Network (desktop), Run (desktop), and the user name (which actually takes you to User Account Control rather than the user folder the way that most Start menus do). To the right are My Computer, Internet Explorer (desktop), a link for the modern UI, and a bunch of other tiles representing both legacy and modern UI apps. You can freely arrange—and even resize—the tiles, just as with the Modern UI. Start Menu Reviver has the usual search box at the bottom. However, this is where I first noticed that there's no tabbing between fields or sections as there is in a normal Start Menu. It can be considerably faster navigating when you can use both the mouse and the keyboard. Not everyone is touch-oriented yet.
The Special Committee overseeing Dell’s buyout proposal has reached an agreement with company founder Michael Dell and his associates, Silver Lake Partners, on a proposed purchase in which shareholders will get US$13.75 per share and a special dividend of $0.13. After multiple delays, the shareholder vote tally on the revised merger agreement is now set for Sept. 12 at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. As part of the new proposal, shareholders will also get the regular third-quarter dividend of $0.08 per share. With the new agreement, the PC company’s Special Committee and Dell-Silver Lake are now on the same page on the revised offer of $13.75 per share made last week as well as the guidelines to put the proposal to a shareholder vote.
, extending functionality for power users and adding the ability to follow specific people or lists from the Start Screen. Available now in the Windows Store, the biggest addition to Twitter for Windows 8 is the ability to add multiple accounts. Most Twitter fans won’t have any use for the feature, but power users will welcome the upgrade, as will anyone who needs to maintain separate personal and professional accounts. To sign-in with multiple accounts, you just swipe down from the top or bottom of your tablet, or right-click on a PC. In the drop-down bar that appears, tap the user icon in the top right corner. This will switch the icon to a plus sign and a second tap brings up an account credentials entry window, allowing you to add another account. You can also sign-up for a new account from this page, but in my tests, adding a new account hung every time I tried to choose a Twitter username. Switching between accounts is as simple as swiping down or right-clicking again, and then tapping on the account you want to use.
The Windows 8 Secure Boot mechanism can be bypassed on PCs from certain manufacturers because of oversights in how those vendors implemented the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification, according to a team of security researchers. The researchers Andrew Furtak, Oleksandr Bazhaniuk and Yuriy Bulygin demonstrated Wednesday at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas two attacks that bypassed Secure Boot in order to install a UEFI bootkit—boot rootkit—on affected computers. Secure Boot is a feature of the UEFI specification that only allows software components with trusted digital signatures to be loaded during the boot sequence. It was designed specifically to prevent malware like bootkits from compromising the boot process. According to the researchers, the exploits demonstrated at Black Hat are possible not because of vulnerabilities in Secure Boot itself, but because of UEFI implementation errors made by platform vendors.
Let’s face it: The cards were stacked against the Surface tablet with Windows RT from the, well, Start. Microsoft originally asked customers to shell out iPad-levels of cash for a brand-new user interface running on a somewhat anemic processor, then failed to convince third-party developers to launch apps for the new platform. Today, the Surface RT is arguably little more than a Web browser paired with Microsoft’s own apps. Well, that’s the conventional wisdom, at least. But is it completely, categorically true? —people who loved it and people who hated it—and ask them whether their opinions of the tablet have improved or diminished over time. You can find disappointment, certainly. But others have found that the Surface RT has settled into a niche within their computing lifestyle, with certain features meshing nicely with their own needs and uses.
Ken Brill, founder of the Uptime Institute and a forward thinker in data center design and operations, died this week at the age of 68, the Institute said on Thursday. The cause was cancer, a spokesman said. Brill was known for his work creating the Uptime Institute’s data center tiering system, which provides a way to rate and compare the reliability of computing facilities. It’s used by many large companies for their data center planning and selection. He was also a big proponent of data center energy efficiency, which has become a vital concern as computing services become more powerful and widespread. In particular, Brill pushed for better communication between IT staff and the engineering teams that run data centers, which he believed was the only way to get the most from operations.
Carl Icahn filed a lawsuit against Dell and its board of directors Thursday as he continued to take steps to prevent the company’s founder and investment company Silver Lake from taking the company private. The lawsuit, filed in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, seeks to prevent Dell from setting a new date for the meeting at which shareholders will vote on the Michael Dell-Silver Lake proposal to buy out the company. The vote is scheduled for Friday at 9 a.m. CDT. It has already been delayed twice. The suit also demands that if Dell’s board of directors sets a new date for the special meeting, the company’s annual meeting should “be held on the same date and time, and with the same record date,” according to a with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In February, Michael Dell and Silver Lake offered $24.4 billion, or $13.65 per share, for the company. That original offer was met with opposition from some top shareholders, with Icahn being one of the more vocal opponents. Last week, Dell and Silver Lake raised their offer to $13.75, under the condition that new shareholder voting rules be implemented so that only “yes” or “no” votes would be counted, with abstentions and nonvotes being left out.
Two U.S. senators have introduced legislation that would permanently extend a current moratorium on Internet access taxes in the country. The Internet Tax Freedom Forever Act, introduced Thursday, would also extend the U.S. ban on other taxes specific to the Internet. The legislation does not ban taxes, such as sales taxes, that can be levied on the Internet if they can also be levied on offline activities. The legislation, introduced by Senators Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, would extend a temporary Internet-only tax ban that Congress passed in 1998 and extended three times. The moratorium, which Wyden originally pushed for, is scheduled to expire Nov. 1, 2014. promoted Internet access across the country, Wyden said in a statement. Under the tax moratorium, “the Internet became a platform to facilitate global commerce, sparking nothing short of an economic revolution,” he said. “It facilitated the development and growth of the digital economy and has created new industries and the good-paying jobs that come along with them.”
The state of Pennsylvania will not renew its services contract with IBM regarding the development of a modernized unemployment compensation system, after the project reportedly has gone 42 months behind schedule and $60 million over budget. In August, state officials commissioned a study from Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, seeking “to determine the best course of action moving forward,” according to a statement released this week by Department of Labor and Industry Secretary Julia Hearthway’s office. “The bottom line is that the problems we’ve identified cannot be solved and we will not renew our contract with IBM,” Hearthway said in the statement. “The level of risk, combined with the critical nature of the system, demands that the Department of Labor & Industry has a system that produces timely decisions reliably and accurately.” IBM landed the contract in June 2006. The project was originally budgeted at $106.9 million but the state has so far “dedicated funds approaching $170M,” according to the Carnegie Mellon study.
Windows 8 keeps clawing its way up the market share charts, but not at the expense of Windows 7 or Windows XP. . Once again, Vista’s market share declined last month, this time by about 0.38 percent, to a total of 4.24 percent. . Both Windows 7 and XP remain the most widely-used operating systems by far, with 44.49 percent and 37.19 percent of the market, respectively, according to Netmarketshare. In other words, any market share that Windows 8 gained last month appears to be at the expense of Windows Vista.
and ask yourself all the right questions. ubiquitous access, simplify management and administration, and enable businesses to operate more efficiently all while cutting costs. It sounds Utopian. It’s not all sunshine and roses, though. Moving servers or data storage to the cloud definitely has some pitfalls. For starters, you have to go through the effort of getting data moved to the cloud in the first place. That introduces an issue of vendor lock-in—meaning once your servers and data are hosted with one cloud provider, it’s extremeley difficult to move them to a different provider in the future. Choosing a cloud provider is a marriage of sorts, and you’d better be confident that it’s a relationship you and your business can live with for the foreseeable future.
