Die US-amerikansiche Security-Spezialistin Palo Alto erweitert die Funktionalität ihrer Malware-Abwehrlösung Wildfire: Die Sandbox-basierte Malware-Analyse kann nun auch Android-Apps im APK-Dateiformat (Android Application Package) untersuchen und den dort enthaltenen Schadcode identifizieren.
Der frühere US-Geheimdienstmitarbeiter Edward Snowden hat einer Moskauer Zeitung zufolge schon vor seiner Flucht nach Russland engen Kontakt mit den Behörden des Riesenreichs gehabt. Russland hatte bislang behauptet, Snowden sei völlig überraschend und zufällig in Moskau eingetroffen.
In China ist es gestern Früh nach Hackerattacken zu grossflächigen Ausfällen des Internets gekommen. Wie das China Internet Network Information Center berichtet, kamen die Angriffe in Form von DDoS-Attacken in zwei Wellen in den frühen Nachtstunden.
Die Anbieterin von Informations- und Kommunikationslösungen Huawei Switzerland hat heute in Anwesenheit des Gemeindepräsidenten von Köniz, von Politikern und Mitgliedern der lokalen Behörden, Industrieverbänden und Kunden seine neuen Büroräume an seinem Hauptsitz in Bern offiziell eingeweiht.
Die Glattbrugger ABO Storage Distribution hat mit dem 52-jährigen Betriebsökonomen Daniel Wüest einen zusätzlichen Partner Account Manager für den Bereich "Cloud Services" in die Verkaufs- und Marketing-Mannschaft geholt.
Grundsätzlich habe Microsofts Big Boss Steve Ballmer viele Möglichkeiten gehabt, falsche Entscheidungen zu treffen. Dennoch bedauere er das Hin und Her bei der Entwicklung von Longhorn, das später zu Windows Vista werden sollte, in der Rückschau auf seine bisherige Amtszeit am meisten.
Wegen technischer Probleme hat die Derivate-Börse Eurex den Handel am Montagmorgen vorübergehend gestoppt. "Die Aussetzung wurde durch eine fehlerhafte Zeit-Synchronisierung im System verursacht", teilte die Tochter der Deutschen Börse mit.
Der US-amerikanische IT-Riese Hewlett-Packard (HP) hat einen neuen Cloud-Service vorgestellt, der rund um die In-Memory-Datenbank Hana von SAP aufgebaut ist. Der neue HP-Service mit dem Namen "HP As-a-Service Solution for SAP Hana" soll später weltweit zur Verfügung stehen, nachdem der Service zunächst in Australien und Neuseeland angeboten wird.
Die Schweizer Niederlassung des IT-Dienstleisters Atos und das deutsche Beratungshaus Movilitas Consulting wollen künftig im Schweizer Markt für mobile Integration von SAP-Anwendungen eng zusammenzuarbeiten. Dazu haben die beiden Unternehmen jetzt eine strategische Partnerschaft unterzeichnet.
Während Nokia global gesehen mit seinen Lumia-Smartphones langsam auf Touren kommt, fällt der finnische Konzern am westeuropäischen Markt weiter zurück. Das belegen Zahlen von IDC, wie das Wall Street Journal berichtet. Demnach hat das Unternehmen im zweiten Quartal 2013 insgesamt 1,8 Millionen Geräte auf diesem Markt absetzen können.
The social network on Monday began a limited roll-out of shared photo albums, which let friends upload snapshots to a collection.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger used his opening keynote speech at the company’s annual VMworld conference to emphasize plans to virtualize networks with the aim of achieving the success in virtualizing servers. Networking “is the most important topic we will discuss today,” Gelsinger said to the audience of VMware administrators at the Moscone Center in San Francisco in a speech that was webcast. “We’re moving to a world where the network is just like the compute, where we will be able to spin up network services just like we can spin up [virtual machine] services.” At the conference, the company NSX, its new hypervisor for network virtualization.
A Bitcoin trade group met with representatives of several U.S government agencies Monday as regulators debate whether the online currency should comply with currency rules. Bitcoin critics have raised questions about the ability to anonymously use the online currency and launder money through the service. The agenda of Monday’s meeting, with the Bitcoin Foundation and agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., was to help regulators and law enforcement officers better understand Bitcoin and distributed finance, said Patrick Murck, general counsel of the foundation. The foundation wants to help the agencies “make better decisions and develop new methodologies for identifying and interceding illicit activity,” Murck said in an email. “Bitcoin and distributed finance is here to stay and our preferred path forward is a cooperative one, where we all can help ease each other’s transition into an inclusive and distributed global financial system.” Representatives of the FBI and FDIC declined to comment on the meeting. A Department of Treasury spokeswoman didn’t return an email seeking comment.
As of this past May, 70 percent of U.S. residents ages 18 and older access the Internet via high-speed broadband, although the rate of broadband adoption has been sluggish, according to released Monday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. Just 3 percent of U.S. residents access the Internet via dialup, which is unchanged since August 2011, Pew found. But while the number of people zipping along the “information superhighway” may be high at 70 percent, the percentage does not constitute a major shift in online behavior. Compared to the 66 percent of adults who said they had home broadband in April 2012, Monday’s results show only “a small but statistically significant rise,” the report said.
Microsoft’s Xbox One has a problem: you, and your family. One of the problems that Microsoft had to solve when developing the Xbox One game console was a simple one: how to tell apart the player using the interactive gaming console from his friends, the lamp, the couch, and the coffee table. To solve that issue, Microsoft developed its own light sensor that can figure out what it’s seeing by a variety of calculations. —during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference Monday at Stanford University. But company executives discussed the so-called “speeds and feeds” of the main Xbox One processor in detail, as well as the problems that the new Kinect team had to overcome. Physically, the system-on-a-chip at the heart of the Xbox One is 363 square millimeters. But the real whopper is the amount of logic integrated within it: 5 billion transistors. Although Wikipedia isn’t necessarily the final arbiter, the Xbox One is possibly the largest chip manufactured to date, with a comparable number to Intel’s 64-core Xeon Phi coprocessor for supercomputers, and easily topping Intel’s 8-core “Poulsen” Itanium that the chip maker launched in 2012.
We are all of us creatures of habit, and those habits can easily extend to our Web browsers, where we're so focused on our usual daily routines, we often overlook certain capabilities that can save us time or improve our productivity. In Google Chrome, for example, there are three features so neatly tucked away that I suspect many users have never noticed them. Luckily for you, I have:
Apple's wise cracking digital assistant has a few choice words about Google Glass.
to pay for ads encouraging people to use AdBlock and block Internet ads. Whoa. if the campaign raises $150,000. If the crowdfunding really takes off, AdBlock has the white whale of advertising in its sights: At $4.2 million in donations (ha!), Gundlach says he'll buy an AdBlock TV commercial during the 2014 Super Bowl.
The hunt for Microsoft’s next CEO is already underway, and as of possible replacements, I’m struck with an overwhelming sense of dread. Nokia’s Stephen Elop, seriously? He has the taint of crappy Windows Phone sales all over him. And Steven Sinofsky, former president of Microsoft’s Windows Division? He’s a brilliant thinker, but how can the man whose name is most closely tied to Windows 8 be a serious candidate for the job? If Microsoft has any chance of thriving in the new mobile world order, it will need to hire a —and they understand user experience in the mobile age. But how do I really feel? Find out more in the video above.
Microsoft and Motorola are expected to begin arguments on Monday in the second part of a court case regarding patent licensing fees. The jury trial in Seattle, one of a number of patent-related battles between major tech companies, will determine if Motorola breached its contract to provide certain technology to Microsoft on fair and reasonable terms. Trouble between the two companies began in 2010 when Motorola asked Microsoft to start paying royalties for Motorola technology contributed to the H.264 video compression standard and 802.11 wireless networking standard. The former has become the de facto standard for streaming video while the latter underlies the Wi-Fi technology used in most gadgets today. When tech companies contribute a patented technology to a standard, it typically does so on the understanding it will license the patent on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, which is abbreviated to “FRAND” in the industry.
At the kick-off of its annual VMworld user conference, being held this week in San Francisco, VMware will fill in more layers of its software stack for running its envisioned software defined data center (SDDC). “IT should be able to provision a production environment in minutes,” said Peter Wei, a VMware senior director of product marketing. “People want things very quickly, so you have to abstract the [IT infrastructure]. Otherwise it is not possible.” Over the past few years, VMware has been expanding its core focus from virtualizing servers to a much broader task of virtualizing all the operations in a data center, using an architecture it calls SDDC. With SDDC, all of an organization’s infrastructure is virtualized, allowing data center administrators, in theory, to easily automate operations. This year’s VMworld conference about the products and protocols that could make SDDC a reality.
Salesforce.com’s next CRM (customer relationship management) software release will contain a slew of new features, with many focused on the Chatter collaboration and messaging tool as well as customer service, according to a set of . Many new features associated with Chatter concern usability and access to the system. For example, now iOS device users will be able to launch Chatter Mobile from their Salesforce.com email. This is an important update “as most folks are still email-dependent,” said analyst Ray Wang , CEO of Constellation Research. Another major new feature, albeit available only as a pilot, is called Salesforce Files. It allows users to “securely sync files between Chatter and your desktop and some mobile devices,” according to the notes. “This is the competitor to Box,” and something customers should look at, Wang said.
Users who didn't take advantage of access to iWork for iCloud last week may have to wait a bit longer. Due to the high level of demand, Apple is currently not allowing any more users.
Yahoo on Monday began doling out new usernames in an ongoing effort to clear the decks of old accounts.
Some people just like real keyboards, but they've had limited choices when it came to top-shelf smartphones. A series of leaked images of the new Droid 5 may give them hope.
The developer of the AllCast Android app claims that Google is intentionally nerfing the streaming abilities of its media dongle in order to placate Hollywood.
In the case of Motorola's unique Moto X, it's what's outside that counts.
A new generation of Surface slates may be headed our way, if a new report by advertising firm AdDuplex is any indication, and Microsoft's self-made tablets may be bringing a friend along with them: A Windows RT device crafted by Nokia. . . is released.
Like a lot of people, I have a very low opinion of Windows 8's user interface. And one of the things I like least about it is the lack of a Start menu. That's hardly a unique opinion. (And yes, the image above is a fake. I know of no program that can put the Windows 7 Start menu over the Windows 8 Start screen.)
It was 22 years ago on Sunday that Linus Torvalds announced in a newsgroup posting that he was creating a free operating system, a message he echoed in his announcement Sunday of the latest Linux kernel release candidate. on August 26, 1991, asking people to send in feature requests. On Sunday, Torvalds announced the Linux 3.11-rc7 kernel release in similar fashion. on Google+.
China’s Internet on early Sunday morning suffered a major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that briefly disrupted and slowed access to sites in the .cn domain. The DDoS attack was the largest in history against the domain servers for China’s .cn ccTLD (country code top level domain), according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which administers the domain. The first attack started Sunday around midnight Beijing time, and was then succeeded by a larger attack at 4 a.m, the CNNIC said in an . A number of sites were affected, but Internet service to the sites had been gradually restored by 10 a.m. Sunday It’s unclear where the attack originated from or if it was still continuing. A CNNIC spokeswoman said on Monday it would update the public once more information was gathered. Chinese regulators have already launched unspecified measures to protect the domain system, while CNNIC has apologized for the disruption.
According to multiple reports, Microsoft has finalized Windows 8.1, reaching what is known as "release to manufacturing" or RTM status. . . Users can still still download the Windows 8.1 consumer preview in the meantime; however, they won't be able to download the final bits until Oct. 17, when the preview is generally released. And if they do download the preview in advance of the final release, users will have to re-install their apps, though not their data. With less than two months to go before general availability, consumers may want to carefully consider whether upgrading is worth it. , to boot.)
stimulate demand for the Surface RT—if you give them away for practically nothing. suggest that the Surface RT has picked up significant steam since April, which was the last time the advertising firm pulled back the veil on Windows 8/RT usage stats from its network. in AdDuplex's Windows 8 usage, but the device's slice of the overall usage pie had been steadily shrinking over the firm's last few reports. That's changed: The Surface RT's usage share jumped grew from 6.2 percent in April to 9.5 percent in August, meaning nearly one out of every ten devices touching AdDuplex's advertising network is now a Surface RT. The Surface Pro also got in on the growth spurt, jumping from the 23rd most-used Windows 8 device in April to the seventh most-used in August.
The RSS race is slowly calming down as we come to terms with the death of Google Reader. With big names such as
I wanted to love the HP SlateBook x2. I imagined the Android tablet-slash-laptop replacing my daily driver, a , and I saw myself taking advantage of its lengthy battery life to get through an entire day’s worth of work without having to worry about where I left my charger. Now that Android has a better library of productivity apps that work on a larger screen, I should be able to do everything I want to. Then I actually used the damn thing. Whereas HP’s previous Android offering, the , disappointed only as a tablet, the SlateBook is a tablet/laptop hybrid that has problems no matter which way you use it: This device is clunky, awkward, and extremely buggy. The SlateBook is surprisingly heavy for its diminutive size. Although the tablet alone weighs less than the , the tablet and dock together weigh as much as a standard Ultrabook. When not docked, the SlateBook resembles pretty much every other Android tablet: The 10.1-inch, 1920-by-1200-pixel display is clear enough that you can read text without straining your eyes, and the tablet as a whole seems designed for use in landscape mode rather than portrait. Having a widescreen aspect ratio makes the SlateBook great for movies and games, but comic books and magazines will appear squeezed in portrait mode on the tall and skinny screen.
From mundane 2D devices, integrated cameras in laptops and tablets in the future will change into powerful 3D tools that can sense movement, track emotion, and even monitor reading habits of children, according to Intel. Intel is developing a “depth sensing” camera, which is an enhanced version of a 3D camera that can go deeper inside images to “bridge the gap between the real and virtual world,” said Anil Nanduri , director of perceptual products & solutions at Intel. The webcam enhancements will help the computer understand a human better, bring new levels of interactivity to 3D games, and make webconferencing fun by blanking out the background and adding a green screen, Nanduri said. “You’ll add the ability to sense your excitement, emotion—whether you are happy or smiling. The algorithms and technologies are there, but they are getting more refined, and as they get more robust, you’ll see them,” Nanduri said.
The U.S. National Security Agency reportedly cracked the encryption used by the video teleconferencing system at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. based on information from secret NSA documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA technicians were able to crack the encryption used by the U.N.’s internal video teleconferencing (VTC) system allowing VTC traffic to be decrypted. “This traffic is getting us internal UN VTCs (yay!),” one of the internal NSA documents said, according to Der Spiegel. In less than three weeks, the number of U.N. communications that the NSA managed to intercept and decrypt rose from 12 to over 450.
No talk of classroom technology would be complete without mentioning the splendiferous Khan Academy. A labor of love by Harvard Business School/MIT graduate Salman Khan, Khan Academy taps into advances in video technology and broadband Internet to bring a remarkably robust library of more than 4500 educational videos straight to your browser. Each clip is between 3 and 10 minutes long, targeting education levels from kindergarten on up to college-level physics and humanities courses. Progress trackers and practice exercises ensure that the knowledge sticks—and that you’re watching the vids in the best possible order. And people are using those resources: According to the site, more than a quarter-billion e-lessons have been served over the years.
You can’t run a business—even a small one—without technology. You need computers, smartphones, file storage, a website, and a whole host of other tech assets. So how do you afford it all with a budget that’s tighter than a hipster’s jeans? Sure, some costs simply can’t be avoided, but you can get the tools you need without maxing your credit line. One of the easiest ways is to swap out expensive commercial software for open-source alternatives. The open-source community offers an array of programs that deliver professional-grade features without the big-business price tag. To point you in the right direction, we rounded up free alternatives for the most common software used by small and medium businesses. If you replace your current commercial software products with these open-source equivalents, you can save nearly $2,000 per user. We can hear you breathing easier already. With its word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software, Microsoft Office is the heart and soul of productivity for most businesses. But Office Home & Business 2013 will set you back $220 per user, and an Office 365 subscription runs $150 per user per year.